The Kidnap Years: Page 4

  The headlights pierced the darkness as the Lincoln limo carrying Buppie reached the outskirts of his parents’ property and approached Lindbergh Boulevard, which had once been known as Denny Road. The name had been changed in honor of the famed aviator, who lived for a time in the city and named his famous monoplane the Spirit of St. Louis.

  Buppie was in the front passenger seat. He was holding a gift for his grandfather: a new matchbox with a horse’s head painted on the cover. The chauffeur was navigating the limo up a steep incline, getting ready to turn onto Lindbergh Boulevard, when a black man emerged from the trees. He ran to the rear of the limo and jumped onto the bumper.

  Buppie was afraid. “Roy? Roy!”

  The limo stopped. The man jumped off the bumper, opened the passenger side door, and pointed a revolver at the stunned chauffeur.

  “Here, here’s everything,” Yowell said, fishing several dollars from a pocket and handing it over.

  “You can take this too,” Buppie said, offering the gunman the new matchbox.

  The gunman ignored the boy’s offer. “Get out!” he ordered the chauffeur.

  Yowell did as commanded, and Buppie started to exit the limo also.

  “You stay in!” the gunman said, getting behind the wheel and speeding off. He went only a short distance, then turned the limo around and, with the lights off, drove past the Orthwein property. A few hundred yards later, he stopped the limo, pulled the boy out, and led him to a car parked nearby.

  “Get in and lie down on the back seat,” the man said. As he drove away, he asked, “Are you Percy Orthwein’s son?”

  “Yes.”

  “Be quiet or I’ll burn you.”

  Burn me?

  Yowell ran back to the house and told Buppie’s parents what had happened. Buppie’s mother collapsed in hysteria. A doctor was summoned. Upon learning of the kidnapping, August Busch Sr. grabbed a pistol and drove to the home of his daughter Clara.

  As one year was passing into history and another was dawning, there was chaos in the Orthwein home. Friends of the family who heard of the kidnapping abandoned their New Year’s Eve plans and sped to the house in their party finery to offer consolation. Percy Orthwein and Yowell searched Lindbergh Boulevard, quickly finding the abandoned limousine.

  The boy’s uncle August Jr., who was thirty-one and known as “Gussie,” brought two bloodhounds to the scene. They sniffed in vain as the chauffeur was driven by August Busch Sr. to St. Louis police headquarters.

  Throughout the night, as friends of the Orthwein family came and went and reporters hovered like vultures, there was no word on the fate of Buppie. As the sun rose, radio stations broadcast the news of the kidnapping along with a plea from the boy’s parents: return our son, and you will get a generous award, no questions asked.

  The kidnapping stunned the people of St. Louis, where the Busches were social lions.

  Percy Orthwein hadn’t slept. He wondered if the dawn of a new day, the new year of 1931, would forever divide his life into Before and After.

  It seemed an eternity ago that he and Clara were getting ready for a New Year’s Eve party and Buppie was on his way to dinner with his grandfather.

  Orthwein forced himself to think coldly. Surely, Buppie was worth more alive than dead.

  Orthwein didn’t know many Negroes. In St. Louis as in so many other communities, they had their own neighborhoods, their own schools, their own churches. No doubt, they loved their children, just as white folks loved theirs. Just because Buppie had been taken by a Negro didn’t mean…

  Around noon, the phone rang. Orthwein rushed to answer it. “Hello?”

  “As father to father, I want to give you back your boy,” a man said.

  The caller was a Negro; Orthwein knew that from his voice, although like most white people in the segregated St. Louis of that era he had virtually no social contact with black people.

  “You are worried about your son, and I am worried about mine,” the caller went on, his voice almost breaking. “He is safe.” The caller suggested he and Orthwein meet at once at the St. Louis County sheriff’s office in Clayton.

  Orthwein immediately called Harry Troll, a prominent St. Louis attorney who represented the Busch and Orthwein families. Within minutes, Orthwein, Troll, and Gussie Busch were headed to Clayton. When they got to the sheriff’s office, they found only a deputy on duty. The party was bewildered.

  Things fell into place minutes later when a black man and a young woman entered. The man was Pearl Abernathy, a real estate dealer well known among black people in St. Louis. He was accompanied by his niece, Elfrida Bobb.

  Pearl Abernathy told a sad story. He had a son, Charles, who had followed him into the real estate business. Charles was just twenty-eight. He and his wife had seven children. He worried desperately over how to support his family since his real estate enterprise had gone broke.

  A crazy dream began to form in Charles’s mind. He knew that the Busch and Orthwein families would part with some money to get Buppie back. He hadn’t thought out all the details—how much money to demand, how to collect it without getting caught, how to return the boy. But he knew that kidnappings were becoming common. The people pulling them off couldn’t all be smarter than he was…

  Pearl Abernathy had grown increasingly worried about his son’s mental state, but he couldn’t babysit him all the time. So on the morning of December 31, when Pearl saw Charles and sensed the deep depression he was in, he gave him $40. It was both a gift, from father to son, and a payoff. Just leave me alone for a while, Charles. I have my own life.

  Charles’s wife had been worried too, afraid that her husband was becoming unhinged. When she saw a white boy in her house on New Year’s morning and her husband was gone, she was horrified. So she called Charles’s father, Pearl, and he in turn called the Orthwein home to say he could get the boy back unharmed.

  Orthwein and Troll listened to this sad tale, then demanded to know where Buppie was. They were told to wait a little while, then drive to Webster Groves, a suburb just to the west of St. Louis proper, and stop on Bacon Avenue near a nursing home that was a familiar landmark.

  Buppie had endured a terrifying night, not sure what was real and what was nightmare. Bound, he had been placed in an easy chair with a blanket over his head. The blanket smelled dirty, and it made his face too warm. Meanwhile, his feet were cold.

  He knew that his captor had driven him to a place not far from the Orthwein home, and he knew that the man was black. From the movements of the man, and the way the footsteps never seemed far away, Buppie sensed that he was in a little house. He heard a baby cry, heard a dog barking, heard a cat meowing, heard a door open—to let the cat out, Buppie thought.

  Slowly, the terror in Buppie’s heart faded. The man wanted money; that must be the reason he’d taken him. Nothing else made sense.

  The man hadn’t hurt him, and he wasn’t mean. The man fixed him scrambled eggs and took the blanket off long enough for Buppie to eat. The eggs weren’t very good, nothing like what he would have had for dinner at his grandfather’s!

  With the blanket off him for a little while, Buppie saw that it was daylight. Then the blanket went over him again, and he was in the dark. Time passed; he couldn’t tell how much. He didn’t hear people noises anymore. He dozed off now and then. When he was awake, the man brought him an orange. It tasted better than the eggs. He slept again…

  Footsteps! Not a dream!

  The blanket was lifted from his head. “You’re going home,” a woman said as she untied him. “You know the nursing home on Bacon Avenue? Run there. Stop in front of it and wait. Go on now!”*

  As the car approached the boy standing in front of the nursing home, Troll recognized him, though his face was almost black with dirt. “Percy, there’s your son!”

  Orthwein didn’t wait for the car to come to a full stop. He leaped out and ran to Buppie.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” Buppie said.

  A joyous reun
ion followed at Grant’s Farm. Household servants joined social elites in offering tearful prayers of thanks. Buppie was given a bath and good food and was sent to bed.

  “Not a cent” had changed hands to secure Buppie Orthwein’s freedom, Troll told a pack of reporters.13

  Percy and Clara Orthwein were charitable as well as rich. They had not just promised a reward for the safe return of their son. They had even offered to help find a job for the abductor if he was impoverished. Charles Abernathy certainly was.

  But the police were having none of it. Kidnapping was a crime, after all. For a short period, Pearl Abernathy was held as an accessory. And the police made it clear that they wanted Buppie’s parents to cooperate in the prosecution of Charles Abernathy. But first the police had to find him. Having failed at kidnapping as well as real estate, the hapless Charles had vanished.

  Enter ace reporter Harry T. Brundidge of the St. Louis Star, one of several newspapers that thrived in the city back then. By the time the thirties began, he had exposed trafficking in fraudulent medical credentials in the Midwest. He had worked as a deckhand on a ship sailing between Havana and New Orleans to expose liquor smuggling. He had interviewed Al Capone.

  Brundidge had sources on both sides of the law, and he quickly learned that Charles Abernathy was hiding in Kansas City, Missouri. Brundidge tracked him down a few days after the kidnapping, interviewed him, and obtained his confession. His newspaper ran the scoop on page 1. Soon afterward, Charles pleaded guilty to kidnapping and robbery and was sentenced to fifteen years in state prison.

  (There would also be heartbreak in the extended Busch family. On New Year’s Eve 1930, August Busch Sr. was sixty-five years old, having celebrated his birthday just two days before. But he was not a young sixty-five. The long days over the years had taken their toll, and he was suffering from heart disease and gout. On February 13, 1934, he would scribble a note saying, “Goodbye precious mommie and adorable children” before killing himself with a revolver he kept by his bedside.)

  Charles and Anne Lindbergh followed the Orthwein case from afar. They had spent the Christmas and New Year holidays at the Englewood, New Jersey, estate of Anne’s parents, Dwight and Elizabeth Morrow. A one-time partner at J. P. Morgan and one of the richest men in New Jersey, Morrow was a former ambassador to Mexico (appointed by his Amherst College classmate President Calvin Coolidge) and had just been elected to the U.S. Senate. Soon, he would be talked about as a possible Republican candidate for president.

  Then as now a leafy community, Englewood would be much busier later that year and forever after with the opening of the George Washington Bridge, spanning the nearby Hudson River and linking northern New Jersey with New York City.

  Lindbergh and his wife were building a house of their own on a 390-acre tract near Hopewell, New Jersey, about sixty miles south of Englewood. The home was expected to be finished in the autumn of 1931. In Hopewell, Lindbergh hoped, he and his wife would find the privacy they so craved. Lindbergh had come to despise reporters and photographers, who seemed to follow his every move.

  To be sure, the newspaper people could be annoying. But there was another factor at play, one the adoring public didn’t understand. Lindbergh had a cool and distant personality. It was so appropriate, really, that he was an aviator, for he was comfortable being aloof. He was at ease around airplanes and engines, not around people.

  Nor was Anne Lindbergh at home in the spotlight. Though from a prominent family and acquainted with some famous people, she was basically a shy person. No wonder the Lindberghs wanted privacy for themselves and their new son, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., who by delightful coincidence had been born on his mother’s twenty-fourth birthday, June 22, 1930.

  Surely, the new homestead near Hopewell would offer seclusion…and safety.

  *The author has inserted dialogue for dramatic effect as it was reported in several newspapers at the time of the kidnapping, and as it was rendered in a December 28, 2013, reprise of the case by Tim O’Neil in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE DOCTOR

  St. Louis

  Monday, April 20, 1931

  Lightning flared, and thunder rolled across the sky like barrels. Wind-driven rain mixed with hail lashed the windows of the three-story brick mansion on exclusive Portland Place, the home of Dr. Isaac Kelley. Forty-five years old, he was already recognized as the leading ear, nose, and throat specialist in St. Louis.

  It was a perfect time to be snug and warm indoors, reading by the fireplace. Dr. Kelley and his wife, Kathleen, had a large book collection, and on a night like this, reading might be safer than listening to the radio. Over the weekend, a young woman in St. Louis had suffered a severe shock while adjusting her radio during a storm.

  If he wanted to catch up with the news, Kelley had that evening’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch to go through. The Monday paper had a darkly amusing item about the funeral of mobster Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria, who had been shot to death several days before at his favorite dining place in Brooklyn.

  Masseria, forty-five, had traveled to Coney Island’s Nuova Villa Tammaro restaurant in his heavily armored car. The armor plating and inch-thick glass protected him from snipers and street ambushers but not from the perfidy of his own bodyguards, who excused themselves from the table just before several assassins walked in to end Masseria’s last meal. As Masseria lay in a puddle of chianti and his own blood, someone slipped an ace of spades between the fingers of his right hand. Was the so-called death card placed there by a rival gangster or by an insensitive tabloid photographer? No one could say.

  But there was more somber news: yet another kidnapping in the Midwest. Fred J. Blumer, president of a beverage company in Monroe, Wisconsin, had endured more than a week in captivity during which he had been handcuffed and blindfolded.

  On April 9, Blumer was grabbed in front of his home by three gunmen. Early on, the kidnappers contacted the secretary-treasurer of Blumer’s company and demanded a ransom of $150,000. But in negotiations with the Blumer family, the demand was lowered to a mere $6,000. On their way to pick up the $6,000 from Blumer’s brother, the kidnappers were intercepted near Winona, Illinois, by Chicago police, who had gleaned information on the kidnappers’ moves through wiretaps.

  After a gun battle, the kidnappers sped off without getting their money. Fred Blumer, who was fifty-one, was soon freed near Decatur, Illinois. Perhaps the kidnappers were amateurs who had panicked, or maybe they were members of an Iowa-based gang of bank robbers and beer runners, as a Chicago police lieutenant speculated, rather vaguely, in predicting quick arrests.* Regardless, the ordeal of Fred Blumer was enough to make people wonder how safe they were in their own homes and neighborhoods.

  The Kelleys’ phone rang around nine o’clock that Monday night. The man on the phone said his name was Holmes, that he and his nephew were visiting from Chicago, and that the nephew had developed a sudden and severe earache.

  Kathleen heard snippets of her husband’s end of the conversation, enough to know that someone was ill and that he was giving instructions. “Oh, yes, I know him,” her husband said. She presumed he was referring to another doctor.

  Kathleen was relieved when the conversation ended and her husband settled back into his easy chair. It was no night to venture outdoors! Besides, a recent sensational kidnapping had hit too close to home, quite literally. One of Kathleen’s sisters was married to William Orthwein, a lawyer who was a cousin of Buppie Orthwein.

  Isaac Kelley was Kathleen’s second husband, her first husband having died after only three years of marriage. The Kelleys had had two daughters together, and Kathleen had a son from her first marriage.

  Kathleen was the daughter of William Cullen McBride, a well-to-do oil executive. Her inherited wealth and her husband’s considerable income enabled the Kelleys to travel widely and belong to several exclusive clubs. Knowing that they were blessed, the Kelleys gave generously to charities.

  Aroun
d ten o’clock, Kelley told his wife the patient must not be as bad off as first thought, as an hour had passed since the initial call. “I’m glad I don’t have to go out on a night like this,” he said. Reflecting for a moment, he added, “There was something very queer about that phone call. They must be new to the area.”14

  Just then, the phone rang again. It was Holmes, calling back to say his nephew was worse. “I can bring him to your house,” the caller said.

  “No,” the doctor said. “Keep him comfortable. I’ll come to see you.”

  Kathleen heard her husband repeating the directions he was being given: “A filling station at the North and South road…two blocks east…a trestle…second house…”

  Watching her husband don his raincoat and derby and fetch his medical kit, Kathleen was uneasy. “Are you sure you have to do this?” she asked. But she already knew the answer; her husband was a doctor, after all, and always willing to respond to an emergency.

  The windshield wipers on the Lincoln coupe could barely keep up with the rain as Dr. Kelley drove to the address Holmes had given him and pulled into the driveway. At first, he wondered if there had been a mistake: the house near the intersection of Oleta and Crescent Drives was dark save for a single window where the form of a man was silhouetted by a light.

  For a moment, Kelley didn’t know what to do. Holmes had said he would watch for the doctor and greet him. Kelley sounded the car horn to alert people inside. And just then, he heard another car pull into the driveway behind his own.

  Trouble, he thought. Then the passenger side door was pulled open, and a man got inside.