CLAYTON - For decades, Sherry Altman's family spoke little of Aunt Irene. They had put away the newspaper clippings, hushed the old stories and ignored the legend of Irene McCann, the hard-edged gangster in high heels.

"Most everybody in the family didn't want to talk to her, but I always asked," Altman said with a giggle. As a child, she would tease the stories of infamous Irene from her grandmother and great-grandmother as they shelled peas and picked corn in Alabama.

Sherry was just like her great-aunt Irene, her great-grandmother would sometimes say.

"I said, 'Is that good or bad?'" Altman said last week. "She didn't answer."

A few months ago, Altman discovered a trove of family history that finally laid the legend bare. Her mother had died, leaving dozens of sealed boxes for Sherry and her daughter to search.

"I have everything from both sides of my family," said Altman, who lives with her 18-year-old daughter in Clayton. "When I started cleaning up everything from my mother dying, I started running into all of Irene's stuff."

There's the photo of Irene, beaming, in the prison courtyard, circa 1931. Next to it, spread across Altman's kitchen table last week, were yellowing letters, some on the letterhead of the Missouri State Penitentiary, and newspaper articles -- "Irene has lived hard, and dangerously," a crime columnist wrote.

Standing upright, a bullet supposedly fired during the jailhouse murder that sent McCann and her husband to prison.

For Altman, the artifacts, scattered and hidden across the family for years, at last told a cohesive tale.

Rick Mattix, a crime historian, recognized McCann from his research on Bonnie Parker, of Bonnie and Clyde, and other criminals of the era. Mattix puts out a quarterly journal, On the Spot, about early 1900s crime and justice.

"Every gangster had his ma," Mattix said. But, he added, "there were a few of the really tough [women], like Irene McCann and Edna Murray, Bonnie Parker."

McCann's name isn't widely known, but "she had a hell of a story behind her," Mattix said, and family stories say she associated with the likes of John Dillinger and other famous gangsters.

At age 17, McCann ran away from her husband of three years and eventually hooked up with Albert McCann, a new beau and a partner in crime.

They traveled across Okalahoma, Kansas and Missouri, sticking up filling stations and drugstores -- "enough to keep us in the money," a 20-year-old Irene McCann told a United Press reporter in an interview at a Missouri prison farm.

The crime spree didn't last long. In 1931, Albert and Irene visited a jail in Carthage, Mo., aiming to free Raymond Jackson, according to the clipped and photocopied articles.

Somehow, they got in a tussle with jailer O. E. Bray. A bullet ended the guard's life, and the couple fled.

Then the story gets muddy. One article, apparently written after the fact, says that both Irene and Albert McCann claimed to have shot the jailer, with Albert ultimately getting the death sentence. But a report from another newspaper said Irene McCann claimed her guilt only after the trial.

"I guess I wasn't big enough to tell the truth at the trial," she told a reporter, hoping to save Albert from the noose. If she didn't, "Albert will walk right up there and let them hang him before he will say a word," said McCann, who got a 10-year sentence.

She claimed that she had fired her pistol while Albert McCann and the jailer fought. A wild shot hit Albert in the leg, but two shots struck the jailer. Albert McCann's sister held on to the bullet from his leg, Irene McCann said in the newspaper report. Perhaps it's the slug that Altman found in a wooden box, accompanied by hairpins, a ribbon and a note saying it was from the murder.

As the couple fled the crime, the high heel on one of McCann's shoes broke. She and Albert were caught a month later when a police officer noticed her damaged shoe, according to the Moberly Monitor-Index, a newspaper.

Family legend had it that Aunt Irene had been arrested when she returned to a robbery scene to find the broken heel of her shoe, Altman said. The lore wasn't far from the truth, it seems.

A few months after the trial, Irene McCann faked appendicitis and escaped from a hospital, leaving a note that she was "going out to get the evidence which will free" Albert, because there was "no one else to help" him.

She was caught the next day. A month later, in December 1932, she escaped prison alongside Edna Murray by filing through their cell bars.

While Murray, a wife of "Diamond Joe" Sullivan, enjoyed years of freedom, McCann turned herself in about 13 months later. Both she and Albert, who had his sentence reduced to 50 years, died in prison, Altman said.

"I kind of would have liked to have met her and understood what was going on," Altman said. "Her handwriting's beautiful."

In a letter to her sister, McCann wrote: "I have not lived my life the right way. I would give anything in the world to be out there with you."

The yellowed papers make Aunt Irene tangible again, an unforgotten story from an era of criminal legends.