Bobby Greenlease

Robert C. "Bobby" Greenlease Jr. (1947-1953) was the son of multi-millionaire automobile dealer Robert Cosgrove Greenlease, Sr., of Kansas City, Missouri. He was the victim of a kidnapping in September 1953 that led to the largest ransom payout in U.S. history at the time; however, Bobby Greenlease's abductors had no intention of returning him to his family. Before the ransom demand was even issued, the young boy was murdered by his abductors, Carl Austin Hall and Bonnie Emily Brown Heady.[1]

Background

Multi-millionaire Robert Greenlease made his fortune introducing General Motors vehicles to the Great Plains in the early 20th century. He owned dealerships from Texas to South Dakota. Greenlease was quite elderly when Bobby was born, and the Greenleases doted upon him. Bobby was said to be a trusting boy. According to author John Heidenry, whose book Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease tells the story of the abduction and the criminals who abducted him, kidnapper Bonnie Heady said that from the moment she showed up at his school claiming to be a relative taking him to his sick mother, that he just took her hand and went along with anything he was told to do.[2]

Abduction and murder

In September 1953, Carl Austin Hall and Bonnie Emily Brown Heady kidnapped six-year-old Bobby Greenlease from Notre Dame de Sion, an exclusive Kansas City Catholic school located in Kansas City, Missouri. The kidnappers were drug-addicted alcoholics then living together in Saint Joseph, Missouri. In the early 1930s, Hall had attended Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri with Paul Robert Greenlease, Bobby's adopted older brother, and Hall had planned for some time to victimize his old classmate's wealthy family.

Heady went to the school, persuaded a nun that she was Bobby's aunt (and told the false story that Bobby's mother had suffered a heart attack), and took him away. Hall and Heady then took Bobby across the state line to Johnson County, Kansas, where Hall shot him to death with a .38 Smith & Wesson Model 36 revolver.

After the murder, Hall and Heady then sent Bobby's father a message demanding a ransom of $600,000. Greenlease, desperately hoping to save his son, held off the police and FBI, and paid up. Hall and Heady collected the ransom and got away. It was the largest ransom paid up to that point in U.S. history.

However, Hall then became convinced that police would trace them to St. Joseph, and impulsively decided to drive to St. Louis, instead.

Arrest and execution

Once in St. Louis, Hall left Heady in the middle of the night in a rented room, then contacted old criminal associates in an attempt to divert police attention from them. One of the associates, a former prostitute named Sandra O'Day, was supposed to fly to Los Angeles and mail a letter Hall had written from there in order to divert police attention from St. Louis; however, O'Day caught a glimpse of the ransom money and decided to do some redirection of her own.[3] St. Louis police soon learned that Hall was flaunting a large sum of money, and they soon brought him in for questioning. Hall eventually implicated Heady; the police found Heady back at her own home outside Kansas City, and found a shallow grave in the backyard.[2]

The Lindbergh kidnapping-type case so scandalized the nation that it led to federal indictments, trials, and subsequent executions for both Hall and Heady, who died together in the Missouri gas chamber on December 18, 1953. Heady was one of only two women since 1865 to be executed by federal authorities. The other was Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg who was executed at Sing Sing Prison in New York State, oddly enough also in 1953. Since the Federal government did not have any execution facilities it would choose a state that had the death penalty to carry out the execution. Currently there are two woman on the Federal Death Row. There have been only three women executed by the federal government. On July 7, 1865, Mary Surratt became the first woman ever to be executed by the United States government. Missouri painter Thomas Hart Benton offered to serve as the courtroom artist for United Press International, and his drawings appeared in newspapers across the country.[4][5]

Only about half the ransom money was recovered. The fate of the missing money remained a subject of wide speculation that a cab driver who took Hall to the Coral Court Motel had tipped off mob boss Joe Costello,[6] that Hall tried unsuccessfully to bury the cash near the Meramec River (the FBI searched the area in vain), that suitcases in Hall's possession upon his arrest were not brought to the 11th District Precinct Station (with two arresting officers, Lieutenant Louis Ira Shoulders and Patrolman Elmer Dolan, subsequently federally indicted for perjury),[7] that the cash fell into the hands of mobsters or was hidden in the walls of the motel itself[8] (the 1995 demolition of the Coral Court turned up nothing).

References

  1. ↑ Cole, Suzanne P.; Engle, Tim; Winkler, Eric (April 23, 2012). "50 things every Kansas Citian should know". The Kansas City Star. Retrieved April 23, 2012.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 As described in an episode of Deadly Women entitled "Under His Control", originally aired in the United States on 2010-10-21 on Investigation Discovery cable channel.
  3. ↑ Heidenry, John (2009). Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-37679-0.
  4. ↑ "Tucson Daily Citizen from Tucson, Arizona · Page 1". Newspapers.com. Retrieved 11 January 2015.
  5. ↑ "Breckenridge American (Breckenridge, Tex.), Vol. 33, No. 247, Ed. 1 Wednesday, November 18, 1953". The Portal to Texas History. Retrieved 11 January 2015.
  6. ↑ John Heidenry (2009). Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 9780312376796.
  7. ↑ FBI — The Greenlease kidnapping,
  8. ↑ James Hirsch (July 23, 1988). "St. Louis' Little Sin". NY Times News Service.

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