The Kidnap Years:

by David Stout

  But Sankey preferred a fancy hotel room to a caboose, and he loved to gamble. With the coming of Prohibition in 1920, he established himself as a bootlegger, a career change made easier by his familiarity with Canada, where liquor could be bought legally. Soon, he was smuggling booze from Canada into the Upper Midwest of the United States.

  By the mid-1920s, he and his wife, Fern, his childhood sweetheart from Wilmot, had settled in the little town of Melville, Saskatchewan. He became a Canadian citizen. His bootlegging enterprise thrived as he crossed the border easily with his young daughter, Echo, accompanying him on occasion. (He had sensed that her presence alleviated the suspicions of customs agents.)

  By the late 1920s, Sankey had become a liquor supplier to members of the social elite of Denver. He was a trustworthy, gentlemanly bootlegger who sent Christmas cards to his customers. He was the kind of criminal with whom law-abiding people felt comfortable.

  He and his wife moved from Melville to Regina, the provincial capital of Saskatchewan. Sankey supported amateur hockey, loved to bowl, and was a friendly neighbor.

  But the dawn of the thirties threatened Sankey’s prosperity. The Depression was deepening, and fewer Americans had money to spend on contraband liquor. Big criminal syndicates took more control of the remaining bootlegging business. Sankey didn’t have platoons of gun-toting toughs to stand up to the syndicates. What could he do?

  In February 1931, two masked gunmen robbed the Royal Bank in Regina, taking some $13,000. The locals, well aware of his bootlegging history, speculated that Sankey may have been one of the robbers. But he was never implicated officially, just as he was never charged with several other bank robberies in the region that he was suspected of around that time.

  Weeks after the Regina bank heist, Verne and Fern Sankey returned to South Dakota. They rented a house in the little town of Kimball, in the south-central part of the state, where their daughter attended school. By this time, Verne and Fern had an infant son, Orville.

  Soon, Sankey bought a few hundred acres of land about twenty miles northwest of Kimball, near the tiny hamlet of Gann Valley. He built a small house on the land and raised cattle, turkeys, and vegetables.

  The Sankey spread was remote and hard to reach, even by the standards of that windswept, Dust Bowl era when paved roads were scarce far from the big cities. The Sankeys’ nearest neighbor was three miles away. But Sankey did not isolate himself. He kept in touch with his neighbors, went to church with them, attended socials and festivals. And he made friends with the local sheriff and prosecutor.

  Had Sankey, who had fled the farm in his youth, been drawn back to the joys of country living? Not really. In the summer of 1932, he and Fern relocated to a house in Minneapolis, the twin city of St. Paul. Around the Twin Cities, it was impossible not to be aware of the Bohns, who were a staple of local coverage.

  By this time, Sankey was ready to get into kidnapping. He was convinced he could do it more efficiently than the kidnappers he knew from the true-crime magazines he loved to read.

  Sankey kept in touch with friends he had made while working on the railroad in Canada. Among them were Ray Robinson and Gordon Alcorn, both Canadians, and Arthur Youngberg, a native of northern Minnesota. All were a decade or so younger than Sankey. Alcorn, especially, was drawn to Sankey, for whom he had been a railroad fireman while Sankey was an engineer. As the Depression worsened, Robinson, Youngberg, and Alcorn had trouble finding and keeping steady jobs.

  Robinson was a sometime guest at Sankey’s isolated farm. Sankey and Robinson began to talk about snatching someone for ransom. The talk was hypothetical at first, then much less so as the focus turned to the Bohn family.

  It would be revealed later that Haskell Bohn was not held captive in some remote country location but in the basement of the Minneapolis house where Sankey and his wife were staying. For months afterward, Sankey seemed to have gotten away with the caper. Bohn had been freed just before the seven-day waiting period, which would have authorized federal investigators to enter the case, had expired. Sankey figured the local cops didn’t have a clue who had kidnapped Bohn. He was right, at least for the moment, and he was looking for other targets.

  On to Denver!

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  IN THE MILE HIGH CITY

  Denver

  Early 1933

  Denver would not be the first location of many people seeking mild winter weather, but the city did offer relative relief from the razor cold of South Dakota and Saskatchewan. And Verne Sankey knew from his bootlegging days that some very rich people lived in the city and its suburbs.

  So Verne and Fern Sankey rented a house in Denver, and Sankey began gathering information. From public records, he gleaned data on the wealth of about thirty “candidates” for his next caper. He pared the list to several prospects, including the beer magnate Adolph Coors and Charles Boettcher II, a member of one of Colorado’s wealthiest families.

  For weeks, Sankey drove around Denver to canvass the homes of the possible targets. He was accompanied by his friend Gordon Alcorn from the railroad days.

  Finally, Sankey decided: the honor of being his next kidnapping victim should go to Charles Boettcher II.

  “Charlie” Boettcher, as he was known to all, was thirty-one years old in early 1933. He had graduated from Yale and was married to a beauty queen from Montana named Anna Lou Piggott. The Boettchers lived in a twenty-one-room mansion in an exclusive Denver neighborhood. By early 1933, the couple had a five-year-old daughter, and Anna was expecting another child in March.

  Charlie was an aviation enthusiast. Charles Lindbergh was a friend and had been a houseguest. The Boettchers worshipped the Protestant God and moved easily in Denver high society, Charlie more so than Anna.

  Although Charlie had been born to great wealth, he had succeeded on his own, forming a successful brokerage firm with a friend. In the midst of the Great Depression, Charlie and Anna Boettcher lived a life so full of riches and seemingly free of cares as to be inconceivable to millions of Americans.

  And yet Charlie Boettcher could never be entirely happy with who he was, what he was: the easygoing son of a man who needed to dominate everyone around him, Claude Boettcher.

  Claude’s father, Charles Boettcher Sr., was a man of amazing ability and iron determination. He had come from Germany in the nineteenth century and made a fortune selling hardware to miners. Then he had pioneered Colorado’s sugar beet and cement industries, two sectors of the economy that seemingly had little in common. But Charles Boettcher Sr. had a genius for business.

  A photograph of Charles Sr. in late middle age shows a handsome, confident-looking man with a slight smile beneath his mustache. One could imagine him in the uniform of a Prussian general. A photo of his son Claude seems to show a very different kind of man: stern eyes behind pince-nez and a humorless, disapproving face, as though someone had just broken wind at the dinner table.

  Yet appearances notwithstanding, father and son were enough alike that Claude was not overshadowed by a powerful father as some sons are. Claude was hard-driving like his father and aggressively expanded the reaches and riches of the family enterprises, investing in mining, railroads, banking, real estate, and utilities as Charles Sr. crossed into his senior years.

  It was the fate of the patriarch’s grandson, Charlie, to be left out. He lacked the vision and grit of his father and grandfather and so was denied a seat in the most holy and sacred inner lodge of the family, whose membership consisted of Charles Sr. and Claude.

  Or so young Charlie thought. The impression was reinforced when Claude bought a controlling interest in his son’s brokerage firm, a move Charlie did not resist. But how could he, given Claude’s emasculating generosity? After all, the twenty-one-room mansion where Charlie and Anna Lou lived had been built by Charlie’s father as a wedding present.

  Thus, Charlie played the role seemingly meant for him. He dressed well, partied enthusiastically, and gambled, sometimes too much. He drank, often
too much. He did not always reject the affection of other women. His vices put strains on his marriage. But Charlie and Anna Lou were not recluses. They went to a social event on the night of Sunday, February 12, 1933.

  It was near midnight when they arrived home after a pleasant evening that included a snack at a chili parlor. As they pulled into their driveway, two men with handkerchiefs on their faces emerged from the darkness near the garage.

  “Come here, Charlie, and throw up your hands,” a man said. “Do what you’re told, and everything will be all right.”

  “Don’t resist!” Anna Lou, still in the car, implored her husband.

  The man reached into the car and handed Anna Lou an envelope. “Mrs. Boettcher, open that envelope, please.”

  As she did, a smaller envelope fell out.

  “Now open that one,” the man said as he retrieved the bigger envelope. “Good night.”

  The stunned wife saw the two men hustle Charlie off into the dark. When she had ceased trembling, she opened the smaller envelope and found a typed note.

  The noted demanded $60,000 in old tens and twenties. The signal that the money was ready was to be an ad in the Denver Post. It was to read, “Ready to come home, Mabel.”

  “Do not notify the police,” the note warned. “You know what happened to little Charles Lindbergh through his father calling the police. He would be alive today if his father had followed instructions given him.”52 That wasn’t entirely accurate, of course, but the words were still chilling.

  At once, Anna Lou called Charlie’s father. She told him about the kidnappers’ warning. But Claude Boettcher was not a man to take orders from criminals. Of course, he called the police, and within minutes, officers were questioning Anna Lou. She was able to describe one of the kidnappers accurately: a man in his forties, around five feet seven inches tall, solidly built.

  The police thought the kidnapping was the work of well-rehearsed professionals. They had minimized the chances of leaving fingerprints with the double-envelope gimmick and by taking care not to touch the Boettchers’ car. No doubt, the men had put Charlie in another car and were long gone.

  It seemed to Charlie Boettcher that the ride went on forever. Many, many hours went by. For him, it was always night; his eyes were taped shut.

  The car slowed to a stop. Charlie, blindfolded and with his wrists tied behind his back, was pulled out. Then the car started up again but stopped just a short distance away. Charlie was bewildered until he heard the sound of gasoline being pumped into the car by an attendant.

  Charlie was put back in the car, and away they went. On and on, they drove. The car stopped a second time to refuel, with Charlie and one of the kidnappers stepping out as before. Then it was back on the road.

  Now and then, his captors spoke to him. Their words were a mix of encouragement and threats. “Do what we say, and you’ll be fine. Fight back, and things will be ‘unfortunate’ for you.”

  The car stopped yet again for fuel. Three stops for gas; that had to mean a lot of miles. But miles to where? Many, many hours. Charlie sensed that morning had come and gone and maybe the afternoon. Was it night again?

  At long last, the car slowed to a stop. The car doors opened, and he was pulled out. It was colder than it was in Denver. Charlie didn’t know it, but he was at Verne Sankey’s ranch in South Dakota, almost six hundred miles from Denver.

  Charlie was led through a door—into a house, he sensed.

  “Take this fellow downstairs and put him in the little room,” a man said.

  “They’ll have us all in jail,” another man replied. His voice was different; Charlie sensed he was not one of the men who had abducted him.

  “Don’t worry,” the first man said. “This is as safe as sitting in an armchair.”

  In Denver, Mayor George D. Begole immediately issued a proclamation urging law-abiding citizens everywhere to help in the apprehension of the kidnappers. Colorado Governor Edwin C. Johnson voiced similar sentiments. (Begole was a Republican and Johnson a Democrat, but the plight of Charlie Boettcher was a bipartisan concern.)

  Several thousand volunteers from the American Legion and civic clubs joined police officers in searching the Denver area for any sign of Charlie Boettcher or the men who had kidnapped him.

  Applications for pistol permits rose sharply, especially among the Denver elite. Some wealthy Denver residents looked for chauffeurs who were familiar with firearms as well as cars.

  On Valentine’s Day, forty-eight hours after Charlie Boettcher was seized, J. Edgar Hoover waded into the case, sending several FBI agents to Denver to…to…

  To do what, exactly?

  The seven-day waiting period for federal intervention was still in effect, but Hoover still sensed an opportunity to expand his agency’s power. As the comments of Denver Mayor Begole and Governor Johnson had indicated, the Boettcher family had friends in politics. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had routed President Hoover in the 1932 election, was to be inaugurated as president on March 4 and had let it be known that he was planning a nationwide anticrime campaign. J. Edgar Hoover envisioned a chance to solidify his position in the new administration and to carve a major role for the FBI.

  It turned out that the FBI was largely on the sidelines and did not turn up a single significant clue as the Boettcher kidnapping was being investigated. But this would not stop Hoover from shamelessly issuing statements later that described his bureau’s “vital role” in solving the case.53

  As will be seen, the case would be solved in part because someone drank too much and talked too much.

  “Ready to come home, Mabel,” read the ad placed in the Denver Post by Claude Boettcher as the kidnappers had demanded. Soon, Claude was exchanging letters with the kidnappers, with the Episcopal church the Boettchers attended acting as a go-between. Verne Sankey was making the exhausting commute from his South Dakota ranch to Denver to follow local developments.

  Tension soon arose between the Denver police and the Boettcher family, with the police brass warning against capitulating to the kidnappers. To do so, the police argued, would encourage other would-be kidnappers. But Claude loved his son (perhaps more than Charlie realized) and would do anything to get him back.

  Claude had friends in the highest realms of politics as well as finance and society. He had been a delegate to the 1928 Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri, at which Herbert Hoover had been nominated. Time magazine had pronounced him one of the country’s most influential men.

  In short, Sankey, who had said that kidnapping Charlie Boettcher would be like sitting in an armchair, had wildly underestimated the Boettcher family’s vast influence and the storm that kidnapping a member of the clan would set off.

  From the start, the Denver police chief, Albert T. Clark, said gangsters in Chicago or Kansas City, Missouri, were probably behind the kidnapping. The chief professed optimism that the kidnappers would soon be caught and that Charlie Boettcher would be unharmed.

  N. W. “Red” Mitchell, reputed to be linked to Kansas City bootleggers, was picked up. Mitchell had supposedly been spotted following Charlie and Anna Lou Boettcher from the chili parlor, and Chief Clark said Mitchell didn’t have a good alibi for that fateful Sunday night. Unfortunately, Anna Lou could not identify him as one of the men who had confronted her and her husband.

  No matter; there were plenty of suspects. Chief Clark said he wanted to talk to Louis “Diamond Jack” Alterie, often described in the press as a former Chicago gangster who had once been a lieutenant of Dean O’Banion, a one-time bootlegger and rival of Al Capone. (O’Banion was shot to death in 1924 in the flower shop he ran as a cover for his criminal activities.)

  Initially, Alterie seemed to be a promising suspect: he had been tried in Chicago the previous June on a charge of kidnapping a bookmaker for ransom. Alterie was acquitted of actual kidnapping, but a conspiracy-to-kidnap charge remained against him in Chicago, prompting him to relocate to Glenwood Springs in Western Colorado. There,
he ran what the press described as a dude ranch, surely an allusion to Glenwood Springs’ reputation since frontier days as a haven for gambling dens and brothels.

  Unfortunately, investigators had just missed their chance to interview Alterie. Having been convicted of assault in Glenwood Springs, he’d been given a choice by the law, one reminiscent of Colorado’s Wild West days: go to prison or get out of Colorado for good. The deadline was February 1. Alterie checked out of the state a day early without leaving a forwarding address.

  Meanwhile, the police in Chicago tried to help their Denver counterparts by hauling in several men with shady reputations, most intriguingly Mike “Bon Bon” Allegretti, a cousin of Al Capone. All were said to have traveled to Denver recently or to have talked on the phone with people in Denver, or both.

  None of those leads panned out, nor did the arrests of a score of other suspects who, if not exactly innocent in their daily lives, were innocent of the Boettcher kidnapping. Investigators were further confounded when Joe Roma, a part-time grocer and full-time bootlegger who had offered to help track the kidnappers, was shot to death while playing the mandolin in his Denver home. He left a steaming pot of spaghetti on the stove. (It was soon determined that Roma had met his demise because of a dispute over liquor trafficking.)

  In his basement prison, Charlie occasionally managed to dislodge his blindfold enough to peek out and note his surroundings: cement floor, part of it covered by linoleum, part by a carpet. Two chairs, a table, a coal oil lamp.