by David Stout
“Back up and don’t look at me,” the man said as he pressed a gun barrel against Kelley’s body. “Just drive where I tell you.”
Fighting to keep his composure, Kelley drove on Oleta Drive, then turned onto a smaller road as he thought he’d been told. But he had misunderstood, and the concrete yielded to gravel.
“What in the hell are you doing?” the abductor said. “Can’t you drive this automobile?”
Kelley put the car in reverse and returned to the paved road.
Kelley was six feet two inches tall and a muscular two hundred pounds. He was not easily intimidated; he had seen combat as a captain in the Army Medical Corps during the Great War, and he had once gotten into a fistfight with a man over a parking space. Still, he had to fight to keep calm as his captor steered him over bumpy roads.
Kelley was wearing his favorite diamond ring. Surreptitiously, he slipped it off and tucked it between a cushion and the car seat. His wallet might be emptied, but he wouldn’t lose his ring!
“What the hell are you doing?” the gunman said. “Keep your hands on the wheel.”
Kelley also tried to remove his tie pin.
“I said, keep your hands on the wheel!” his captor said. He ordered Kelley to turn this way and that—to the east and then north, he thought—then announced, “We’re going to hold you for ransom.”
Which was just what Kelley had concluded.
“Stop,” the gunman ordered at last. “Now get out.”
Kelley did as he’d been ordered. Standing on trembling legs in the dark amid the wind and rain, he was almost relieved when a blindfold was placed over his eyes and he heard other voices. His captors pushed him into another car and drove off. From the vehicle’s lurches and occasional stops, Kelley knew that he was being taken on a circuitous route. Finally, the car stopped, and he was pulled out. It was quiet all around; he sensed he was in a country setting. After a brief walk in the rain, with his captors steering him, he heard a door being opened. Then he was told to walk ahead.
The door had a rickety sound, not at all sturdy. I’m in some kind of shack, Kelley thought. Then he was led up a set of stairs, his minders taking care not to let him fall. Once upstairs, he was spun around and told to sit. He did, landing on a cot.
So quiet outside, he thought. I’m in a shack on a farm. God knows where.
He heard the abductors whispering. Now and then, the voices rose above whispers. Three voices…no, four. One man had an oddly pleasant, almost musical voice. Another had a decidedly foreign accent.
Kelley thought how worried his wife must be. Time began to blur. He wasn’t really comfortable on the cot, but he felt exhaustion overtaking him. He began to sleep, off and on. No one had told him he couldn’t sleep.
He heard an airplane—a Ford trimotor, he could tell from the sound. And then it was morning again. He could tell it was morning even with a hood over his head.
“You’re going to write a letter,” one of the men told him. “You’re going to tell your family that you’re all right—which you will be, as long as you do as you’re told.”
The hood was removed, and Kelley was given pen, ink, and paper. The men holding him stood behind him. He heard metallic clicking noises; he recognized the sound of weapons being cocked and uncocked. Trying to make an impression on me, he thought.
He didn’t turn his head to get a look at the men. He just wrote a terse note to his wife, assuring her he was well and would see her soon—though he didn’t know if he would.
One of the men took the pen and paper away, and then a plate was put on the cot. Meat, overcooked by the looks of it. Bread too. Kelley given a bottle of milk. He noted that the bottle was imprinted with the words “St. Charles Dairy Co.” St. Charles, a city in the county of the same name, is a suburb northwest of St. Louis.
“Eat,” a man said. “Then we’re going for a ride. Don’t worry. You’ll get a chance to use the bathroom.”
Again, Kelley heard the sound of a Ford trimotor overhead. He thought one of his captors said something about “the mail ship.”
Kelley strained to hear every voice, every sound, on the chance he’d pick up a clue that might be useful later. He thought he heard someone mumble the name “Goldie.”
A little later, Kelley had the sensation of a big rubber band being slipped over his head. Then he felt pressure around his eyes, and suddenly, he couldn’t see. Goggles, he thought. I’m wearing goggles with black tape on them.
Not too roughly, Kelley was pulled to his feet and led back down the stairs. Then he was outside, in the fresh air. He heard a car door open, then his abductors pushed him inside the vehicle. Kelley could tell he was in the rear seat. He heard a driver get in, then someone entered the front passenger door. The engine started.
“Lie down,” one of the men commanded.
Kelley knew from the sway of the vehicle that it was making frequent turns. At first, he felt the car going over bumps. The bumps subsided. After a while, the car was on a smooth straightaway. Kelley waited to feel the next turn. Instead, the car kept going straight.
We’re on a long bridge, he thought. They’re taking me across the Mississippi to Illinois.
Kathleen Kelley became distraught when her husband did not return late Monday night. Nor did he call. It simply wasn’t like him. She phoned several relatives and friends, including William Orthwein, and they rushed to the Kelleys’ house to offer succor.
The police were notified. Several detectives were assigned to the disappearance, which was not officially a kidnapping early on. But the discovery of the doctor’s car, abandoned several miles from the address he had been lured to by Holmes, removed any doubt. There were oil stains and bits of gravel on the floors of the front passenger side and the rear seat.
The police quickly arranged to tap the Kelleys’ telephone on the assumption that whoever had taken the doctor might call with a ransom demand.
As the night wore on without word, Kathleen was near collapse. Finally, she heeded the pleas of her family and took to her bed.
As the St. Louis newspapers noted, there had been a number of other kidnappings in the region during the previous several months. Most had involved people who elicited little sympathy.
Two big-time bookmakers, William Rutstein and Herman Kohn, who worked together and ran at least five gambling dens, were among the targets. Alas for the would-be kidnappers, Rutstein and Kohn were no dunces with firearms. They shot it out with their assailants, killing one and routing the others.
And even as the fate of Dr. Isaac Kelley was unknown, it was disclosed that some people of means had been coerced by telephone or mail into paying what could be called “preventive ransoms,” meaning they paid to avoid being kidnapped in the first place.
Dr. Kelley’s new place of captivity was no more comfortable than the first.
“Why don’t you fellows let me read?” he suggested. “Just let me have a magazine or newspaper.” His captors give him a newspaper in which he read about his own kidnapping. They gave him some detective magazines—not his usual reading fare. Then he was given a biography of Al Capone.
His captors also made him write a second letter to his wife, declaring that he would not be released until a ransom of $150,000 was paid.
Most of the time, he could not see, either because a hood was draped over his head or goggles were in place. His emotional state swung from anxiety to boredom. Occasionally, he heard the rumble of a train not far away.
The food did not improve. He slept fitfully. He was beginning to feel the lack of a shower and change of linen, and his socks were clammy. His feet were cold, too, as his captors often removed his shoes. To prevent him from fleeing, Kelley assumed.
He told himself that the police must be doing all they could to find him.
Ace reporter John T. Rogers of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had been covering the Kelley kidnapping. He had been working long hours, shuttling between the newspaper office, the police station, and the Kelley home, most
ly waiting for something to happen.15
Around 1:30 on the morning of Tuesday, April 28, Rogers arrived home after another tiring day. His wife said a man who wouldn’t identify himself had called several times, saying he wanted to speak to the reporter.
The phone rang again. This time, Rogers picked up.
“Have you got your clothes on?” a man asked.
“Yes,” said Rogers, who wanted dearly to get out of his clothes and dive into bed.
The caller said Rogers should go to North Grant Boulevard and Finney Avenue, park, and blink his headlights because “a friend of yours wants to see you.”
Rogers was jump-started out of fatigue by adrenaline and his reporter’s instincts, which seldom failed him. Fifty years old in April 1931, Rogers had written extensively about major crimes, including murders committed by the Ku Klux Klan. In 1927, he won a Pulitzer Prize for leading the Post-Dispatch’s inquiry into a corrupt federal judge and forcing the judge’s resignation.
Rogers got back into his car, hurried to the designated spot, blinked his lights, and waited. Before long, the passenger side door was yanked open, and a man got in. “Don’t get nervous,” the man said.
Don’t get nervous? The newcomer had a pistol in each hand!
“Is this going to lead anywhere?” the shaken reporter managed to say.
“Yes.”
Rogers was ordered to drive to a bridge and cross the Mississippi to East St. Louis, Illinois. Once across the river, he was directed onto a dark road, which led north into a rural section of St. Clair County. Soon, the car went by an abandoned service station.
“Turn around,” the gun-toting passenger commanded. He told Rogers to drive into the gas station lot as he would if the station were still open for business, then go right back onto the road. Rogers did as he was ordered.
Kelley sensed that his time in captivity was ending. His keepers were behaving differently, their whispers telling him they must be trying to figure out how to let him go without being caught.
And there was a moment when he saw one of his captors standing in a doorway, lovingly caressing a Thompson submachine gun. “If you do any talking, you’ll be smeared with this,” the kidnapper said.
Possibly because he’d experienced combat in the Great War, Kelley was able to think more clearly than other men would have in the same circumstances. Why would his keepers warn him not to talk too much? Because they’re going to free me, he reasoned.
Sure enough, late on the night of Monday, April 27, exactly a week after he’d been taken, Kelley was hustled outside and pushed into a car, the taped goggles over his eyes. As the car sped off, he detected the sound of another vehicle close by.
Kelley felt the car turning this way and that, describing a route he wouldn’t be able to reconstruct. He heard no big-city noises. We’re still out in the country somewhere, he thought.
Suddenly, the car came to an abrupt stop. The rear door opened, and Kelley was pulled out.
“Just wait here,” a man said.
Then he was alone in the chill of the night. The surface beneath his feet was hard, and a faint odor of gasoline and oil was in the air. He could hear two car engines idling.
When Rogers had driven about a hundred yards past the abandoned gas station, his armed passenger ordered him to pull off the road and stop. Rogers waited in the dark. After a few minutes, two sets of headlights approached. The man with Rogers reached over and flicked the switch to blink the headlights. The approaching headlights blinked in reply as the cars went by.
“Make a U-turn and follow those cars,” the man ordered. As Rogers did so, he saw that the two cars had stopped next to the station. He was ordered to stop behind them.
“There’s your friend,” the passenger said. “He’s waiting for you.”
“What friend?” the bewildered reporter asked.
“Dr. Kelley,” the man said as he got out and ran to one of the waiting vehicles.
As the two cars sped off, Rogers spotted a man standing in the station lot. Slowly, Rogers drove toward him. As the man was illuminated in the headlights, Rogers saw him take off a pair of goggles.
“Is this Dr. Kelley?” Rogers asked as he got out of his car.
“Yes!”
After Rogers introduced himself and shook Kelley’s hand, the doctor said, “My God, this was an experience! I’m glad to be back in the hands of my friends.”
At which point, the newly freed Kelley got into Rogers’s car. Then, in a development that seems astonishing today, Kelley was driven not to his own home to be reunited with his family but to the home of the reporter. There, in the middle of the night, Kelley told his story to the exhausted but exhilarated Rogers in minute detail. A photographer took a picture of Kelley wearing the goggles the kidnappers had put on him.
Finally, as dawn was approaching, Rogers drove Kelley home, where he was reunited with his wife and had a shower, a change of clothes, and a nap.
Rogers had a big exclusive, and he had revenge over his archrival Brundidge for his exclusive on Charles Abernathy.
“My experience convinced me that the kidnappers were experts and had planned my abduction for weeks,” Dr. Kelley said. When asked why he thought he had been singled out, he replied, “I have no idea.”16
Oh, but he did. Surely, the motive was money. If the kidnappers were such experts, a reporter suggested, they must have obtained a ransom, right?
“That’s a tough question,” Kelley replied.
A tough question? Well, the reporter pressed, was a ransom paid or not?
“I can’t answer that positively,” Kelley said. “I was informed that no ransom was paid.”
William D. Orthwein, the lawyer and cousin of Buppie Orthwein, said he could answer positively. “I can tell you frankly and honestly that not a dime has been paid,” he told newsmen.17
The police believed that Kelley had been held initially in a rural area of St. Charles County, Missouri. They deduced that much from the label on the milk bottle Kelley had been given and his recollection of the airplane overhead, most likely flying a mail route between St. Louis and Kansas City, Missouri. And so what? The police could hardly check every farmhouse, every barn, every shack in St. Charles County.
Questions persisted. Denials notwithstanding, had a ransom been paid? No, William Orthwein and the Kelley family continued to insist. If not, why was Kelley not held until a ransom was paid? Why didn’t the kidnappers just telephone the Kelley residence and make arrangements? Perhaps they suspected—correctly—that the Kelley phone was tapped.
“Kidnapping certainly has become one of our leading occupations,” Kelley remarked the day of his release. “I wonder who’s next on the list.”18
The kidnapping of Dr. Isaac Kelley was shelved, at least for the time being, but not before persuading Missouri politicians that it was time—no, well past time—for the federal government to get involved in stamping out the scourge of people-snatching for ransom.
Questions surrounding the Kelley case would be left unanswered for three years until a former justice of the peace who owned a tavern and pool hall and was having money troubles sold a sensational account to the Post-Dispatch.
The story he told involved a woman of high society, two doctors (one her husband and the other her lover), and a shady lawyer. As the drama played out, in court and in the newspapers, many in the city’s social elite were humiliated, perhaps to the pleasure of the less well-to-do.
But that’s a story for later.
*The kidnapping of Fred J. Blumer was never solved. He died of a heart ailment on May 19, 1956, his seventy-seventh birthday.
CHAPTER FOUR
A DRESSMAKER WITH A VISION
Kansas City, Missouri
Wednesday, December 16, 1931
Nell Donnelly had a dream: “I want to make women look pretty when they are washing dishes.”
How absurd! How impractical! Didn’t she know a woman’s proper place? No, actually. Nell Donnelly was not just a skil
led seamstress; she was a force not to be denied. So she started her own dressmaking company. By her early forties, she was rich.
She was born Ellen Quinlan, the twelfth of thirteen children of a couple from County Cork, Ireland, on March 6, 1889, and grew up in Parsons, Kansas, after the family came to America in search of better things. She was just sixteen when she married Paul Donnelly, a representative for a shoe company, and moved with him to Kansas City.
To be sure, she was a skilled seamstress, but working with needle and thread or sitting at a pedal-powered sewing machine was not enough for her. Nell Donnelly had a vision and a will that would not be denied.
She envisioned house dresses with added ruffles and other frills that would appeal to the typical housewife of that time: a stay-at-home mother whose family couldn’t afford much extravagance. The ruffles and frills would make her dresses a bit more expensive than the plain cotton dresses women were used to wearing while doing chores. But a woman wouldn’t have to have a truly rich husband to buy the dresses designed by Donnelly, and she felt sure there was a market out there.
Was there ever! By 1930, the Donnelly Garment Company, which she started with her husband’s help in Kansas City early in the twentieth century, employed a thousand people and sold stylish yet affordable house dresses across the country under the Nelly Don label.
On Wednesday, December 16, 1931, as Donnelly was arriving home in her chauffeur-driven Lincoln convertible, four gunmen hijacked the car in the driveway. Then they drove Donnelly and her young chauffeur, George Blair, about twenty miles west and imprisoned them in a farmhouse.
The next day, a lawyer for the Donnellys, James E. Taylor, got a letter addressed to Paul Donnelly and demanding $75,000 for Nell’s freedom. Taylor knew just whom to call: his law partner, James A. Reed, a neighbor and friend of Nell Donnelly. Reed, who was in court in Jefferson City at the time, immediately raced to Kansas City to take charge.