The Kidnap Years: Read online

  “Take me home, please, to my father and mother,” the boy pleaded, breaking into tears.

  Home Jimmy went, in a police car with siren screaming, to a joyful reunion with his parents. Neighbors and hundreds of other well-wishers swarmed over the DeJutes’ property.

  Outside of seizing him in the first place, the abductors had treated him kindly, the boy said. “They were good to me and told me I could call them both ‘Mister.’” Most of the time, he was kept in a dark closet, the boy said. He was given soft-boiled eggs and was promised that he’d go free as soon as his father paid money.

  A special grand jury was to convene the following Monday to indict the culprits, identified as John Demarco, thirty, and Dowell Hargraves, twenty-seven. “Both are habitués of Youngstown pool rooms and speakeasies, with questionable records,” the Times reported.

  Hargraves waived his right to a trial by jury, perhaps fearing that ordinary people not well versed in the law would be eager to find him guilty, especially with the Lindbergh kidnapping the talk of the land. He put his fate in the hands of an Ohio state court judge, who promptly found him guilty of kidnapping and sentenced him to life in prison.

  Demarco, too, would be convicted and sentenced to life in prison, as would a third man, Anthony Lauri, thirty-seven, of Youngstown.

  In sentencing Hargraves on March 16, 1932, the judge said kidnapping was a crime that “strikes a blow at the tenderest and most sacred affections of human blood” and was becoming all too common.24

  And there was a chilling footnote to the DeJute case. According to a March 4 report in the New York Times, Jimmy’s father had received a note the day after his son’s abduction. The note demanded a ransom of $10,000; otherwise, the boy would be returned “in installments.” And just so there would be no misunderstanding, at the top of the note were the words “Remember Marion Parker.”**

  *Here, I am indebted to David Anthony DeJute, Anthony’s son, for sharing his father’s recollections.

  **“Kidnappers Demand $10,000 for Return of Ohio Boy,” New York Times, March 4, 1932.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE YOUNGER TWIN

  Los Angeles

  Thursday, December 15, 1927

  Marion and Marjorie Parker were identical twins, but they were by no means the same. By the time they turned twelve, on October 11, 1927, their distinctive personalities had emerged. Marion was more of a tomboy, and she was happier playing with toy trains than with dolls, which Marjorie preferred.

  And Marjorie was content helping her mother, Geraldine, around the house, while Marion liked to accompany her father, Perry, to the First National Trust and Savings Bank, where he was a mid-level officer.

  Their personality differences notwithstanding, the girls loved each other’s company, and both adored their brother, also named Perry, who was eight years older. (Marion had been given her first name, instead of the more common “Marian” for a girl, after her father’s middle name.)

  On this Thursday, which was chilly by Southern California standards, the girls were happy as they rode the streetcar to Mount Vernon Junior High School. Part of the day was to be devoted to Christmas parties in each classroom.

  Around noon, a wavy-haired young man walked into the school office, where he was met by Mary Holt, the teacher in charge of attendance and registration. “I need to see the Parker girl,” the man announced. “I work with Mr. Perry Parker at the bank. Mr. Parker has been in an accident and is calling for his daughter.”25

  Holt was confused. “We have two Parker girls at our school,” she said.

  “He wants the younger one,” the man replied.

  The younger one? In fact, Marjorie was the younger twin by a few minutes, but she was slightly larger than Marion. So the girls occasionally joked that Marion, not Marjorie, was the younger sister.

  “Do you mean Marion?” Holt asked the stranger.

  “Yes, ma’am, that is her name.” Sensing that Holt was uneasy, the visitor urged her to call the bank to confirm his account.

  Holt was a seasoned administrator, a stickler for rules and procedures, which was why she was acting school administrator on this Thursday when Principal Cora Freeman happened to be away for several hours. She was known to be protective of the children and cautious about strangers in the building. She would sometimes call the parents before releasing a child to someone else.

  Which is why what Mary Holt did—or did not do—next was so strange and heartbreaking.

  The young man had such a friendly, self-assured manner that Holt decided there was no need to check out his story, even though she should have found it implausible on its face. So she summoned Marion from the Christmas party.

  And here was another fateful what-if moment. Marion knew that her father was staying home from the bank on this day to celebrate his birthday with his wife. Yet she apparently did not ask details about the “accident” that had befallen him. Perhaps she was too stunned by the news to think clearly, or perhaps she was charmed by the cheerful stranger. Perhaps she felt comfortable with the man after meeting him in the company of a trusted authority figure, Mary Holt. For whatever reasons, Marion left the school with him.

  Later that afternoon, Principal Freeman returned. Holt told her Perry Parker had been in an accident and that a family friend had fetched Marion. Freeman was not alarmed; she was familiar with Holt’s habitual caution and had confidence in her judgment.

  Yet oddly—bafflingly, really—Freeman did not ask if Marjorie Parker had been notified of her father’s mishap or if anyone in authority had even talked to her. Nor, apparently, did the principal press for a clearer explanation on why the “family friend” had not picked up both twins.

  Marjorie Parker waited outside the school for her sister so they could catch a streetcar home together. That was their usual routine. When Marion did not emerge, Marjorie thought she must have stayed late to help a teacher clean up after a party. Marjorie, not wanting to miss the next streetcar, went home alone.

  Perry and Geraldine Parker were not alarmed when Marjorie appeared without her sister. The idea that Marion had stayed to help a teacher seemed quite in character. But after a while, Perry Parker decided he’d better drive over to the school to get Marion. He thought she might be nervous traveling home in the dark, which was fast descending.

  So Parker called the school, was put through to Mary Holt, and identified himself.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “I feel fine, Mrs. Holt. Thank you for asking. Is Marion still at school?”

  Why no, Holt said. Marion left hours before with “the man you sent to pick her up” because of the accident.

  Parker was flabbergasted. “I was not in any accident, and I did not send anyone to pick up Marion from school!”

  Parker hung up in dread and was about to call the police when the doorbell rang. A telegram had arrived: “Do absolutely nothing till you receive special delivery.”26

  A short time later, another telegram: “Marion secure. Use good judgment. Interference with my plans dangerous. George Fox.”

  George Fox? The Parkers did not recognize the name.

  Through the night, the parents agonized. By morning, they could wait no longer. They phoned the police. Detectives hurried to the house. They told the Parkers that several other young people had gone missing recently.

  As the detectives were taking statements from Perry and Geraldine Parker on Friday morning, a special delivery arrived. It had been mailed at six o’clock Thursday evening. It was addressed to “P. M. Parker” and demanded $1,500, in the form of seventy-five twenty-dollar gold certificates. The letter ordered Parker to “go about your daily business as usual” and not to call the police. It promised that further instructions would be coming. “Failure to comply with these requests means no one will ever see the girl again except the angels in heaven.” The letter was signed “Fate.”

  Even more chillingly, there was an accompanying note, written in Marion’s hand. “Dear Daddy
and Mother: I wish I could come home. I think I’ll die if I have to be like this much longer. Won’t someone tell me why this had to happen to me? Daddy please do what this man tells you or he’ll kill me if you don’t.”

  The police were puzzled by the demand for only $1,500. To be sure, that was a fair sum at the time, but a ransom demand was typically for a far larger amount. Perhaps the kidnapper (or kidnappers) knew that the Parkers, while comfortable enough, were far from wealthy.

  Somehow, Perry Parker held himself together as he went to work at the bank that Friday. As instructed, he got $1,500 from his personal account—and recorded the serial number for each bill. Meanwhile, the police went to Mount Vernon Junior High School to question Mary Holt. Emotionally shattered, she described the man who had spirited Marion away: twenty-five to thirty years old, about five feet eight inches tall, brown wavy hair, brownish-gray overcoat, and a dark gray hat. Spoke good English, seemed to be well educated.

  When Parker arrived home on Friday afternoon, there had been no further word from the kidnapper. Around eight o’clock, the phone rang. “Mr. Parker, do you have the money?” a man said.

  “Yes, I have it. Is Marion all right?”

  “I’ll call back in five minutes.”

  But a full half hour went by. Finally, the man called again and told Parker to drive alone to a certain section of Gramercy Street and wait there. Parker did as ordered. He waited in the dark for hours. Shortly before midnight, he drove home. There, he learned that the police had followed him, hoping to catch the kidnapper. Parker feared that the kidnapper had sensed this.

  He had. “Mr. Parker, I am ashamed of you!” the abductor wrote in another special delivery letter on Saturday. “You’ll never know how you disappointed your daughter… Pray to God for forgiveness for your mistake last night.” But at least the kidnapper, who signed the letter “Fate-Fox,” said he’d give new instructions by Saturday evening.27

  And there was another plaintive note from Marion, begging her father to follow the kidnapper’s instructions.

  Two more warning letters arrived that Saturday. The first was signed “Fox-Fate.” The second said: “Fox is my name. Very sly you know. Set no traps. I’ll watch for them. Get this straight! Remember that life hangs by a thread. I have a Gillette [razor] ready and able to handle the situation.” It was signed “Fate.”28

  By this time, the Parkers and the police wondered what kind of lunatic or monster they were dealing with. Just after seven in the evening, the kidnapper called and specified a circuitous route that Parker should take to a particular street corner. Parker left immediately with the money, the police having promised not to follow.

  This time, he did not have to wait long. In his rearview mirror, he saw another car approaching. The vehicle stopped with the passenger side alongside Parker’s car. The driver, whose face was partly covered by a bandanna, leaned out the window and pointed a sawed-off shotgun at Parker. “You see this gun?”

  “I see it.”

  The kidnapper demanded the money. But Parker, after all he and his family had been through, demanded to know where his daughter was.

  The abductor held up a blanket-wrapped form. For a moment, Parker saw the face of his daughter. The cheeks were bright. Were her eyes open…?

  “Marion?”

  “She’s sleeping,” the kidnapper said.

  Parker handed over the money.

  “Wait here just a minute,” the kidnapper said. With that, he slowly drove off. After a moment, Parker began to follow, trying to make out the license plate number. But the plate had been bent to obscure the digits.

  After a block or so, the car slowed, and Marion was pushed out, falling to the curb. Parker braked and rushed to his blanket-wrapped daughter, kneeling next to her. Her eyes were open!

  “Marion?”

  No response.

  Parker embraced his daughter, sensing instantly that the form was too small. With shaking hands, he unwrapped the blanket and screamed.

  Marion Parker was dead, a wire wrapped tightly around her neck. Her death-glazed eyes had been sewn open. Makeup had been applied to her face to make her appear alive. Her legs had been cut off and her arms severed at the elbows. Only part of her torso was there, wrapped in towels. Her intestines had been cut out and her body stuffed with rags.

  The father’s screams had prompted someone to call the police. Hardened detectives wept at the scene. Parker was driven home in a police car; another officer followed, driving Parker’s car.

  Parker told his wife, son, and surviving daughter that Marion was dead. For the moment, he kept the more horrifying details to himself.

  Around that time, the kidnapper stopped at a Los Angeles café for a bite to eat. He paid with one of the bills from the ransom and smirked at the pretty young cashier, saying, “You’d be surprised if you knew who I was.”29

  The next day, Sunday, December 18, six separate bundles containing parts of Marion’s body were found along roads in the Elysian Park section of Los Angeles. The car used by the kidnapper, a new gray Chrysler coupe, was found in a parking garage. It had been stolen in Kansas City a month before.

  The doctor who performed the autopsy said he could not be certain if Marion had been alive for any of the desecration inflicted on her body.

  Mary Holt was desolate, even though Principal Freeman said she herself might have let Marion go with the charming stranger had she been there. Or perhaps Freeman was just trying to comfort her colleague and friend. It was no use. Holt was inconsolable. She broke down while testifying at a coroner’s inquest the Monday after the slaying and had to be helped out of the room by her husband. Soon, she stopped working at the school. Her hair turned prematurely white. She would be haunted by her terrible mistake for the rest of her life.

  Thousands of police officers from San Diego to San Francisco and little towns in between were looking for the killer. Anyone remotely suspicious was questioned. The case was covered sensationally in papers from coast to coast.

  One of the towels used to wrap Marion’s body bore the label of the Bellevue Arms Apartments northwest of downtown Los Angeles. The manager recalled renting an apartment the previous month to a man who fit the description of the man who had taken Marion from her school. The man had given his name as Donald Evans and had asked for a quiet room in the rear. He had left a couple of days before. Perhaps because Evans’s apartment was vacant, the police did not immediately search it.

  Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Police Department had a fingerprint expert, Howard Barlow. Given the science of that time, his contribution seems all the more remarkable: he managed to lift prints from the stolen car the kidnapper had used. The smirking, arrogant criminal had neglected to wipe the car’s interior before abandoning it.

  The fingerprints in the car matched those on the ransom messages sent to the Parker house. They also matched prints from an old bank-forgery case that had been handled in juvenile court because of the tender age of the offender, William Edward Hickman. He was nineteen when police concluded that Donald Evans and Hickman were one and the same and that he was the kidnapper.

  The police returned to the Bellevue Arms Apartments to search the apartment that “Donald Evans” had vacated. Inside, they found bloodstains, copies of newspaper accounts of the kidnapping, and, in a wastebasket, half a hazelnut. Someone recalled that half a hazelnut had been found in the wrappings around Marion’s body. The two halves were found to fit perfectly.

  Some Gillette razor blades were found. And on a sugar bowl, there was a thumbprint that matched Hickman’s.

  Hickman had once been a messenger at the bank where Perry Parker worked. After being fired for forging checks worth several hundred dollars, Hickman had been given probation in juvenile court, but he could not get his bank job back. The police speculated he may have blamed Parker for that and wanted to hurt him—and make some money—by kidnapping his daughter, whom he had likely seen at the bank. (Parker had had nothing to do with his hiring or firing.)
r />   An increasingly frail Mary Holt was shown a photo of Hickman and identified him as the man who had taken Marion away.

  But some people in Kansas City, where he had grown up, refused to believe Hickman could be such a monster.

  “It can’t be so; my boy could not do a thing like that,” Hickman’s mother, Eva, said in Kansas City. “My boy is a good clean boy.”30 Some former teachers echoed those sentiments.

  Hickman was born on February 1, 1908, in Hartford, Arkansas, one of several children of William and Eva Hickman. The father was a philanderer, and his wife was mentally unstable, spending time in the State Lunatic Asylum (as the mental hospital was then called) in Little Rock. The marriage broke up, and in 1921, Eva Hickman moved to Kansas City.

  Young William (or Edward, as he often called himself) made friends easily. He was a good student at Central High School in Kansas City: class vice president, honor society member, student council member, yearbook editor, a fine public speaker, a star on the debate team, a member of a church Sunday school basketball team.

  Then he changed. When he had to settle for honorable mention in a couple of speaking contests, he seethed in anger. He abandoned his friends, quit extracurricular activities, neglected his schoolwork. He managed to graduate and enrolled at a junior college—where he lasted for nine days. Aimless, he worked at odd jobs.

  A different and sinister personality now resided in the body of William Edward Hickman. Or had that personality been dormant in him for years? The “new” Hickman had no conscience, no empathy, no real concept of shame or remorse. He was a psychopath.

  The new Hickman dreamed of going to Hollywood and becoming a movie star. In one of his odd jobs, at a public library in Kansas City, he befriended a similarly restless youth named Welby Hunt, who was three years younger. In November 1926, the pair robbed a candy store, getting away with about $70. They headed to California, where they would live with Hunt’s grandparents. Hickman still hoped to make it in the movies—the longest of long shots, since this was still the era of silent films. Hickman’s speaking skills would be useless.