The Kidnap Years: Read online

  ALSO BY DAVID STOUT

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  Copyright © 2020 by David Stout

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Stout, David, author.

  Title: The kidnap years : the astonishing true history of the forgotten kidnapping epidemic that shook Depression-era America / David Stout.

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019032997 | (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Kidnapping—United States—History—20th century. | Crime—United States—History—20th century.

  Classification: LCC HV6598 .S76 2020 | DDC 364.15/4097309043—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032997

  For Rita, my rock and my light

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1.The Organization Man

  2.Fathers and Sons

  3.The Doctor

  4.A Dressmaker with a Vision

  5.Beloved Innocent

  6.The Boy in the Wall

  7.The Younger Twin

  8.Sane or Insane?

  9.A Case Like No Other

  10.A Friendly Farmer

  11.Another Doctor Taken

  12.Hope and Heartbreak

  13.Chasing the Money

  14.The Profiler

  15.Two Victims

  16.The Man Who Loved Trees

  17.Strictly Business

  18.Criminal and Family Man

  19.In the Mile High City

  20.A Brewer Is Taken

  21.Doting Mother, Devoted Sons

  22.A Sheriff Taken Prisoner

  23.From Hot Springs to Slaughter

  24.Mary’s Ordeal

  25.“Jake the Barber”

  26.Roger “the Terrible”

  27.A Prince of Albany

  28.A Banker with a Heart

  29.The Oil Tycoon

  30.A Momentous Month

  31.The People’s Fury Unleashed

  32.Touhy’s Torment Continues

  33.Brewer, Banker, Victim

  34.A Gambler Folds His Hand

  35.What Might Have Been

  36.A Sordid Denouement

  37.Evil Resurfaces

  38.In Gun-Blazing Pursuit

  39.Vigilance at the Gas Pump

  40.Closing the Ring

  41.In the World’s Spotlight

  42.Heir to a Timber Empire

  43.Devil at the Door

  44.Ambushed on the Road

  45.A Man of God Is Taken

  46.The Luckless One

  47.Tubbo and Touhy (Act II)

  Epilogue

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with the Author

  Bibliography and List of Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Endnotes

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  One winter day a long time ago, a handsome woman in her early forties was found dead in a snowbank off a highway in northwestern Pennsylvania. She had been strangled. The homicide was big news around Erie, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. The killer, it was soon revealed, was a man the victim had begun dating after her marriage turned to ashes. For weeks, the crime was grist for newspaper headlines and chatter in barbershops and saloons. It was even featured in the true-crime pulp magazines of the era.

  The victim was my mother’s sister.

  I recall the coffin being wheeled out of a candle-scented church as a choir sang farewell and my aunt’s relatives stood grim-faced, some with tears on their cheeks. I was in college at the time, old enough to understand that I had been granted wisdom not bestowed on everyone. I understood that a murder spreads an indelible stain, dividing the lives of people close to it into Before and After.

  So began my interest in crime. It is an interest that has only deepened with the passage of years. It has compelled me to read scholarly tomes as well as lurid accounts of sensational cases. It has drawn me to courtrooms and prisons and to the death house in Texas, where I witnessed the execution of a pathetic, dirt-poor man who had raped and killed his ex-wife and her niece in a drunken rage.

  My preoccupation with crime was known to my editors during my newspaper career. Thus, on January 12, 1974, an arctic cold Saturday in Buffalo, my bosses at the Buffalo Evening News sent me to the Federal Building for a somber announcement by the resident FBI agent. The fourteen-year-old son of a wealthy doctor in Jamestown, New York, sixty miles southwest of Buffalo, had been kidnapped the previous Tuesday. Three teenagers had been arrested Friday, and most of the ransom money had been recovered in the home of one of them.

  But the boy was still missing.

  The FBI agent told reporters that the bureau had entered the case because the victim had been missing for more than twenty-four hours. Ergo, there was a presumption under the Lindbergh Law that he might have been taken across state lines, so the feds were authorized to assist the local cops.

  I knew about the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the infant son of legendary aviator Charles A. Lindbergh. So I assumed that horrible crime inspired the law.

  Not exactly.

  I was surprised to learn that, despite acquiring its informal name from the Lindbergh crime, the Federal Kidnapping Act of 1932 was a reaction to a string of abductions that began before the Lindbergh baby was even born and continued while he was still squirming happily in his crib.*

  There were so many kidnappings in Depression-era America that newspapers listed the less sensational cases in small type, the way real estate transactions or baseball trades were rendered. There were so ma
ny kidnappings that some public officials wondered aloud if they were witnessing an epidemic.

  In fact, they were.

  From New Jersey to California, in big cities and hamlets, men and women sat by a telephone (if the household had one) or waited for a postman’s knock, praying that whoever had stolen a loved one would give instructions for the victim’s deliverance. There was usually a demand for money, sometimes for a fantastic sum, other times for a small amount that might even be negotiated down. It was possible to put a dollar sign on the value of a life.

  A family’s ordeal might last for hours and end happily. Or it might go on for days, with the relatives knowing that as time passed, hope ebbed. For some people, the ring of the phone or the knock on the door brought heartbreak and bottomless sorrow—the very emotions visited upon the family in Jamestown, New York, in 1974.

  There was never much mystery behind the Jamestown case. The instructions for delivering the ransom were simple and unimaginative, giving investigators plenty of time to stake out the drop site and photograph whoever picked up the money. The ransom demand was a mere $15,000, a fraction of what the doctor’s family could have paid.

  The amateurish nature of the scheme had caused investigators to suspect early on that the crime was the work of local teenage dim bulbs. Sure enough, teachers at the area high school easily identified the youth who had been photographed picking up the money. He was a supervisor at a teen center where the doctor’s son had said he was going just before he vanished. The voice on a tape-recorded call to the doctor’s home was recognized as that of a nineteen-year-old high school dropout who hung out at the teen center.

  When two eighteen-year-olds were arrested, they admitted they’d done something wrong under the guidance of the nineteen-year-old, but they swore they hadn’t signed on for anything that might bring harm to the boy.

  Ominously, the nineteen-year-old, in whose home the ransom money was found, kept quiet about the boy’s whereabouts. Searchers combed the snowy woods around Jamestown on Saturday and Sunday until the boy’s body was found lashed to a tree. He had been beaten to death, probably with a metal pipe or a hammer judging by the wounds to his head.

  Since the kidnapping and slaying had obviously occurred within New York State, the FBI bowed out, leaving the state prosecutors and courts to mete out justice. The two eighteen-year-olds got off with light punishment. But it was the nineteen-year-old who got the biggest break of all. When he went to trial on kidnapping and murder charges, his lawyer argued that there was insufficient evidence to convict him of murder. After all, no one had seen the suspect with the victim from the time he vanished until his body was found in the woods.

  The jurors pronounced themselves hopelessly deadlocked, so a deal was worked out under which the nineteen-year-old pleaded guilty just to kidnapping, which meant a sentence of eight to twenty-five years instead of the twenty-five-to-life term he could have gotten for the murder count alone.

  Had I been on the jury, I would have tried to cut through the fog. “Let’s use our common sense,” I would have said. “Of course he killed the kid. If he didn’t, who the hell did?”

  But the truth doesn’t always count for much in a courtroom, as some lawyers try to inject reasonable doubt into cases in which there is none.**

  Viewing a time in history from the vantage point of the present is a bit like being in an airplane and gazing at the ground from two miles up. It is too easy to miss the trees while looking at the forest. Most of the kidnappings from long ago are little remembered today, but they defined the times as much as bank robberies and speakeasies and panhandling.

  They spurred new laws and new law-enforcement techniques, like criminal profiling. They brought out the best qualities in some lawmen, like endless persistence and ingenuity, and the worst in others: carelessness, cruelty, even brutality.

  Indirectly, the kidnappings also helped to expose the corruption, the moral rot, that infected city hall and police headquarters in some communities in the 1930s, as shown by the fact that some victims were rescued by gangsters while complacent or corrupt police officers watched from the sidelines. Eventually, public disgust helped to spur reforms as people belatedly realized that the mobsters among them were not just colorful rogues but robbers, parasites, pimps, even killers—the kind of people who made kidnapping profitable.

  Some people who survived kidnappings were able to treat their times in captivity as excellent adventures (once they had bathed and changed clothes). But most were emotionally scarred, even if they did not realize it at first. Others were damaged for life.

  As the false glitz of the 1920s yielded to the crushing poverty of the 1930s, kidnappings became so frequent in the United States that newspapers could scarcely keep up with them, as evidenced by a front-page article in the New York Times on Tuesday, July 25, 1933. The article reported1 the arrest of several Chicago gangsters for the kidnapping of a St. Paul, Minnesota, beer mogul who had been freed after a ransom payment. The article noted that lawmen expected to link the gang to another Midwest kidnapping. And it alluded to an attempted kidnapping on Long Island.

  The article was continued on page 4, a “jump page” in newspaper parlance. There was also an article on page 4 about the kidnappings of an Oklahoma oil tycoon and the son of a politician in Albany, New York. There was a report about a Philadelphia real estate broker who was shot dead in a bungled kidnapping attempt. Finally, there was a list, rather like a scoreboard, of some recent cases in which victims were rescued and suspects were apprehended:

  Mrs. E. L. (Zeke) Caress, Los Angeles; Dec. 20, 1930, three in prison for life, twenty-two, and ten years.

  Sidney Mann, New York; Oct. 13, 1931; three in prison for life, fifty, and twenty years.

  Mrs. Nell Quinlan Donnelly, Kansas City; Dec. 16, 1931; two in prison for life; one for thirty-five years.

  Fred de Filippi and Adhemar Huughe, Illinois; winter, 1931; two in prison for forty-two years; one for twenty; two others for two years.

  Benjamin P. Bower, Denver; Jan. 8, 1932; three in prison for six and one-half years.

  James DeJute, Niles, Ohio; March 2, 1932; two in prison for life.

  Haskell Bohn, St. Paul; June 30, 1932; suspect awaiting trial.

  Jackie Russell, Brooklyn; Sept. 30, 1932; two in prison for four to twenty-five years.

  Mr. and Mrs. Max Gecht, Chicago; Dec. 10, 1932, two in prison for life.

  Ernest Schoening, Pleasantville, N.J.; Dec. 27, 1932; five in prison for five to twenty years.

  Charles Boettcher Jr., Denver; Feb. 12, 1933; two in prison for twenty-six and sixteen years.

  John Factor, Chicago; April 12, 1933; two suspects held.

  Peggy McMath, Harwichport, Mass.; May 2, 1933; kidnapper in prison for twenty-four years.

  Mary McElroy, Kansas City; May 27, 1933; two held; two more sought.

  John King Ottley, Atlanta, Ga.; July 5, 1933; guard arrested.

  August Luer, Alton, Ill.; July 10, 1933; four men and two women under arrest, after confession by one of the men.2

  What spawned the kidnapping epidemic? Prohibition, which was ostensibly intended to eradicate domestic violence, workplace injuries, and other social ills associated with drunkenness, has been blamed not just for creating a vast new liquor-supply business for organized crime but for fostering, even glamorizing, a general spirit of lawlessness. But it can also be argued that the approaching end of Prohibition contributed to the spate of kidnappings. After all, what was an honest bootlegger or rumrunner to do when his trade became obsolete?***

  Or perhaps something much deeper was going on. For all the talk about economic inequality in twenty-first century America, the chasm between rich and poor was far wider in the 1930s. A man was lucky to have a job, any job, while less fortunate men were standing in bread lines and housewives were serving ketchup sandwiches for dinner and boiling bones to make thin soup.

  And if a person was born to wealth, he or she might be hated by those on the bottom rung of society. Al
most surely, some kidnapping victims suffered because they had what their abductors could never have: money and self-esteem. And freedom from worry, perhaps that above all. Nowadays, people know that recessions come and go, that prosperity will return as surely as the seasons will change. But in the Great Depression, that kind of optimism, that certainty, was inconceivable to many people.

  Travel back in time via newspaper microfilm to the 1930s, and you sense the fear and sorrow and violence of those years. In the depths of the Depression, bank robbers roamed the country. They were new Robin Hoods to some Americans, especially those who lost their savings when banks failed or were terrified of losing their homes or farms to foreclosure.

  To read the news from that time is to sense that the very fabric of American society was being torn apart. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous line, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” delivered at his first inauguration in 1933, offered a flicker of hope to a people in need of hope. It just wasn’t true.

  “Every day, the children seemed to grow more pale and thin,” an impoverished Chicago city street sweeper said a few weeks after FDR took office. “I was working only four days a week and had received no pay for months.”****

  The street sweeper was explaining to the police why he fed his starving family meat from a dead pig he had found in an alley behind a restaurant. He sampled the meat, and it didn’t seem to harm him. So his wife and their ten children also ate. Soon, two of his children died of food poisoning. Within days, two more of the children were dead. When the street sweeper told his story, he was said to be gravely ill, as were his wife and some of their remaining children. I wanted to know if the mother and father and their children survived, but I could not find out. Not long after the initial reports, the newspapers in Chicago and elsewhere seemed to tire of the family’s ordeal. Or perhaps the journalists simply lost track; the family was Italian, and the name was spelled at least two ways in the coverage.

  Besides, the Great Depression offered countless stories of suffering and death. No need to dwell on the troubles of a lowly street sweeper and his family, not when some broken men were committing suicide and others were abandoning their families and hopping freight trains to nowhere.