Pretty Boy Floyd's death mask (FBI artifact)
Mask of Charles Arthur Floyd's face made after his death on 22 October 1934, held by the FBI, with the Bureau's short account of the Kansas City shooting and of Floyd's death in Ohio. A copy of the FBI's photograph is stored here.
- Date
- 1934-10-22
- Kind
- photograph
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Rights
- Text and photograph published by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of an object in its custody. A United States government work, public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105. The stored copy was captured from the FBI's page.
The FBI’s artifact page captions the photograph: “This mask of Pretty Boy Floyd’s face was made after his death on October 22, 1934.” It does not say who made the mask or where. The page lists the nicknames “Choc,” “Pretty Boy” and “Robin Hood” and calls Floyd a bank robber who “reportedly killed more than a half-dozen people”; those are the FBI’s words.
The page says that on June 17, 1933 Floyd, Vernon Miller and Adam Richetti went to the Kansas City station “to try to free a federal prisoner” and that four law enforcement officers were killed. It says Floyd and Richetti crashed their car in Ohio on October 20, 1934, that a local police chief arrested Richetti, and that two days later agents and local officers fired when Floyd “jumped from the car with a .45-caliber automatic pistol in his right hand.” It quotes him: “I’m done for; you’ve hit me twice.” “He died about 15 minutes later.”
This is the FBI’s narrative. The Missouri Supreme Court’s review of the evidence on the shooting is in State v. Richetti.
