by David Stout
He subsisted on sandwiches, soup, milk, coffee, and water. And he listened intently for sounds that might be clues to his whereabouts, should he ever get back home. He listened for airplanes, train engines, train whistles. Nothing.
Ironically, the very isolation of the Sankey ranch was becoming a danger for the kidnappers. When neighbors dropped by now and then, they were country-friendly and informal, apt to barge in without knocking, then call out names: “Hi, Fern… Hi, Verne… Hi, Gordon…”
Suppose some of the neighbors suspected that someone was being held for ransom at the Sankey ranch. They’d think he must be rich and that the family might be offering a reward. In fact, Claude Boettcher was offering a reward of $25,000 for his son’s safe return.
Thus, another irony: although Charlie was the prisoner, Sankey wanted to be free of him as soon as possible—but not before being paid for his trouble. Yet getting the ransom money was proving to be a great deal of trouble. Claude was standing strong.
“I am going no place at no time to deliver money on their word to release my son later,” he said. “Public opinion may condemn me as a heartless man… But I feel if I paid that money before I got my boy, I would be signing his death warrant. Men who will kidnap will murder.”54
The father was not being callous; he had lost twenty pounds in the days following the kidnapping. He simply remembered the Lindbergh kidnapping a year before. Charles and Anne Lindbergh had complied with the ransom demand, and still their baby had been slain.
Further complicating things was an apparent disagreement between the Denver police and Claude, with the latter pressing for a free hand in negotiating with the people who held his son.
Because he was blindfolded, the days and nights blurred for Charlie. When his body ached for sleep, he thought it must be night. He’d been counting the days. He thought it was February 28, which meant he’d been yanked out of his old life more than two weeks before.
“Stand up,” a man said.
Charlie obeyed. Then he was pulled up the basement steps, out into the cold, and then he was in a car again. He dared to hope.
He sensed that there were two men in the car. “Keep that blindfold on,” one commanded.
The hours and miles went by. They must be taking me home, Charlie thought. The view inside his blindfold was gray instead of pitch black. The change meant it was daylight.
His blindfold came loose a little, enough for him to spot a train station as the car went by it. A sign read “Torrington, Wyoming.”
Torrington was a little town on the eastern side of Wyoming, north of Denver. So, Charlie figured, if he was being driven home, the car he was in was headed south. Which meant that when he’d been kidnapped, he’d been taken north. Pretty far north too. But then where?
At long last, the car stopped, and Charlie was pulled out. Walk, he was told. Count to 150 paces before you turn around.
He walked, realizing that he was more tired than he had ever been. The night was mild; he really didn’t need his overcoat. He heard the car speeding off. Not waiting to reach 150 paces, he wheeled around, took off his blindfold, saw the car melting into the blackness.
As his eyes adjusted, he realized he was in a quiet residential neighborhood. East Denver! Only a few miles from home! He walked a little more and saw that he was at Thirty-Fourth Street and York Avenue. There, on York, was a drugstore, only a block away.
It was just before 8:00 p.m. on March 1, 1933, coincidentally the first anniversary of the Lindbergh kidnapping. From the drugstore, Charlie phoned his father. Then he phoned a friend who lived not far away. Oddly, he did not call his wife.
The friend sent a car, and Charlie was driven to the friend’s home. Exhausted, Charlie collapsed onto a bed. He lay there for a couple of hours, crossing between sleep and half-awake.
Finally, the friend roused Charlie and told him his father was eager to see him. The friend drove Charlie to Claude Boettcher’s home, stopping in an alley so Charlie could hop a fence and enter his father’s house out of sight of reporters and photographers.
After what must have been an emotional reunion, Claude talked briefly to the New York Times by telephone. He confirmed that his son was safely home but refused to divulge more details. Then Claude opened the front door of his house and waved a pistol at the throng of press people. “Stand back!” he said. “I’m sick and tired of being pestered.”
Seemingly forgotten was Charlie’s pregnant wife, Anna Lou. More than three hours elapsed between Charlie’s release and his reunion with his wife and young daughter. It’s unclear whether this lapse arose from the domineering, super-male personalities of Charlie’s father and grandfather or pure neglect on Charlie’s part, perhaps linked to pure exhaustion. Regardless, it would become clear one day that the long ordeal and her husband’s actions immediately after his release had done terrible harm to their marriage…and to her.
While there had been tension between the Boettcher family and the Denver police, there had also been a secret agreement: as soon as Charlie was back home safe, a posse of police officers would swarm the ransom-delivery location and nab the kidnappers.
Which was what almost happened. By prearrangement, the Boettcher family chauffeur, a family friend, and two private detectives had driven to a point north of Denver where one of the men tossed a package containing the ransom into a dry creek bed. It was dark as Sankey and Alcorn approached the pickup point. Sankey saw the delivery car and was alarmed when its headlights blinked. A signal to the police, Sankey thought. He was right. Just after Sankey scrambled down to the creek bed, picked up the ransom, and returned to his car, he saw the headlights of other cars coming at him, and fast. Cop cars, he thought. Right again!
Bullets smashed through the windows of Sankey’s car, covering Sankey and Alcorn with pieces of glass. Sankey sped off, the souped-up V-8 engine in his car easily overmatching the horsepower of the police vehicles. And though Sankey didn’t know it, because of a communication lapse within the Denver police department, not all roads into and out of the city had been blocked off.
Sankey and Alcorn drove on lightly trafficked country roads with their lights off, ending up in Greeley, Colorado, in the middle of the night. The distance between Denver and Greeley is a mere sixty miles, an easy hour’s drive on Interstate 25 today. The circuitous route followed by Sankey and Alcorn required eight hours.
They had hoped to rest in Greeley, a quiet city of about thirteen thousand at the time (compared to just over one hundred thousand nowadays). But a car with shattered windows and no headlights was an attention-getter even for small-town cops. Sankey’s car was spotted by officers in a squad car, and when Sankey made several turns with the cop car always in his rearview mirror, he knew he was being followed.
Finally, Sankey and Alcorn found themselves cornered on a road next to a warehouse. At the most inopportune moment, Sankey’s car stalled. Alcorn got out and ran. Not Sankey. Using his car as a shield, he exchanged gunfire with the police. Then he realized to his horror that his car was rolling away from him; he had parked on a slope. He sprinted after the vehicle, scrambled in, and with deft moves of clutch and gas pedal, managed to restart the engine.
And away went Sankey, his car skidding and swerving, taking curves that made it teeter on two wheels until he was free of Greeley, out in the open country with darkness for company. He made it back to his ranch in South Dakota on March 2, to be reunited with Arthur Youngberg, his friend from the railroad days and a sometime accomplice in crime.
But where was Alcorn? As would be learned later, he walked a lot, across fields and dirt roads, after the gunfight in Greeley. Then he hopped a freight train to Cheyenne, Wyoming, then a bus to Nebraska after a rest in a cheap hotel, then on the road again. He arrived at the ranch two days after Sankey did.
There at the remote ranch, the three men thought they were safe. And they might have been, except for a veteran of the Great War named Carl Pearce.
Carl Pearce was a sad figure who had g
otten to know Verne Sankey in Denver, where Pearce sold insurance for a time. He was good at it, at least to start with, earning several thousand dollars a year. But while he was fine with numbers, his sales pitch was increasingly hampered by his drooping eyelids and the often uncontrollable shaking of his head and hands.
Pearce had suffered shell shock during combat in France. Psychiatric treatment and hospital stays were to little avail, and his condition worsened over time. More and more, his voice cracked when he was with people, which made him more nervous, which caused his voice to crack more frequently. And so on.
He couldn’t hold a job. His wife left him. He began to drink a little. Then he began to drink a lot. Not surprisingly, he became acquainted with bootleggers. He descended the social ladder by a rung or two. Ever short of money, he passed some bad checks. He was caught and went to jail for ninety days, emerging in the autumn of 1932, around the time Verne Sankey was evaluating candidates for a kidnapping.
Then Pearce’s life changed for the better. He met Ruth Kohler, a widow and the sister of Sankey’s wife, Fern. Pearce and Ruth fell in love. And when Pearce learned that Sankey was planning a kidnapping, he was happy to enlist in the plot for even a minor role.
As Sankey, Alcorn, and Youngberg were settling in at Sankey’s South Dakota ranch, discussing how to divvy up the ransom money, Pearce was celebrating in Denver. His tongue loosened by strong drink, he told some acquaintances that he had played a part in the kidnapping of Charlie Boettcher and would soon be $2,000 richer for having typed the ransom messages to the Boettcher family.
Unfortunately, Pearce had talked in front of the wrong people. A woman who heard of his boasts was the wife of one of Pearce’s bootlegger friends. She also happened to be a friend of a Denver cop. Soon, there was gossip aplenty, and Denver police and federal prosecutors in the Mile High City had gleaned enough information to haul people in for questioning.
On Sunday, March 5, Pearce, Fern Sankey, and her sister, Ruth Kohler, were interrogated. So was Ruth’s teenage daughter. A search of the Sankey home in Denver turned up some $1,400 in cash and handwritten drafts of the ransom messages. What’s more, the handwriting appeared to some investigators, at least at first glance, rather like the writing in the Lindbergh kidnapping notes.
Fern kept her mouth shut. Ruth denied taking part in the kidnapping but admitted that she had heard Verne Sankey and Pearce discussing the crime days before it was committed. The teenage girl was quickly cleared of any involvement.
Pearce folded when he heard that Ruth had implicated him. He gave his questioners the names of Gordon Alcorn and Arthur Youngberg and rough directions to Sankey’s ranch. With remarkable speed, considering the relatively poor communications of that time, lawmen from Denver, Wyoming, and South Dakota were conscripted for a raid.
Meanwhile, Sankey, who was not yet aware that lawmen had brought in his wife and the others, hid his bullet-punctured car in a ravine near his ranch house. Looking at the machine, perhaps he reflected on the fact that he had crossed a Rubicon of sorts. Having seized a member of a family with friends in the highest of places, he was no longer a minor-league kidnapper. Plus, he had traded gunfire with cops. If he were cornered again, the cops might exercise their own swift justice.
A small army of cops and sheriff’s deputies was inching toward Sankey’s ranch. “Inching” was the right word: a fierce blizzard had swept into the Dakota plains, forcing Sankey’s hunters to abandon cars and make their way to the ranch on snowshoes as they navigated drifts up to four feet high.
On the night of March 6, the exhausted lawmen approached the area of Sankey’s spread. To their pleasant surprise, they found Youngberg at the farm of one of Sankey’s neighbors, where he was helping to butcher a steer. He surrendered meekly.
But there was no one at Sankey’s ranch. Sankey and Alcorn had not felt as safe there as Youngberg had, so after burying some of the ransom money on the spread, they had persuaded Sankey’s brother to drive them to the Twin Cities area. Sankey and Alcorn had outrun the blizzard and the law.
The FBI men whom Hoover had sent to Denver were not invited to join the party that stormed Sankey’s ranch and arrested Youngberg. Nor were they involved in Denver arrests in connection with the case. But having boasted falsely, shamelessly, of the “vital role” the FBI had played, Hoover decided to exaggerate even more.
“The bureau’s reputation of ‘always getting its man,’ regardless of obstacles, began to be demonstrated Wednesday in the countrywide manhunt now underway for the two other suspects, Verne Sankey and Gordon Elkhorn,” a bureau press release boasted.55 The comical misspelling of Alcorn’s name was repeated in some news accounts. But the mistake was minor compared to the absurd assertion that the FBI had a reputation of “always getting its man.”
Hoover had shown that he was willing, sometimes eager, to claim credit that rightly belonged to local law enforcement. And shrewd cynic that he was, he understood that many journalists of the day were far too willing to believe people in power.
Arthur Youngberg slashed his throat and wrists in jail in what may have been only a half-hearted suicide attempt. In any event, he survived. Soon, he was taken by train to Denver, where Charlie Boettcher identified him as one of his jailers. His ordeal still fresh in his mind, Charlie lunged at Youngberg and had to be pulled off him.
On March 9, police announced the discovery of Sankey’s car in the creek bed near the ranch. Brought to the ranch, Charlie identified the basement as his place of detention.
By this time, Youngberg was telling all he knew about the Boettcher kidnapping. Sankey and Alcorn had made their way to Chicago, where they hid out separately. For some two weeks, lawmen stationed themselves at the Sankey ranch, hoping Sankey and Alcorn might return. They waited in vain.
One is tempted to feel some compassion for Verne Sankey, husband and father. His wife was in jail, and there was scant hope they could ever be together again, scant hope that there would ever again be a Sankey family. Perhaps, in his heart of hearts, he wished he had kept working on the railroads. Maybe he wondered what might have happened if he had become a truly legitimate businessman when his bootlegging and rum-running days were over.
And gambler that he was, he must have realized he had overplayed his hand by kidnapping Charlie Boettcher. Yet no one ever accused Sankey of lacking nerve. Would he dare to try his luck again?
CHAPTER TWENTY
A BREWER IS TAKEN
St. Paul, Minnesota
Thursday, June 15, 1933
William Hamm Jr. was one of the wealthiest men in St. Paul. He was president of the Hamm Brewing Company, founded by his grandfather Theodore Hamm, a German immigrant, in 1865. When Theodore Hamm died in 1903, his son William assumed control. And when William died in 1931, his son, William Jr., took charge.
Not unlike the Anheuser and Busch families in St. Louis, the Hamm family was part of city society’s top tier, its members closely identified with St. Paul’s growth and civic life.
And like the Anheuser-Busch company in St. Louis, the Hamm company had survived Prohibition by selling soft drinks and food products. With the end of the “noble experiment,” the Hamm brewery was poised to prosper mightily, as it had invested in new equipment and repairs to help Americans quench their collective thirst.
Every weekday afternoon at 12:45, William Hamm Jr. walked the short distance from the brewery to his twenty-room redbrick mansion to have lunch. At thirty-nine and still a bachelor, Hamm might not have needed such a big house, but he was used to living large.
This Thursday, June 15, found the Upper Midwest in the grip of a heat wave. The temperature was in the high nineties, freakishly hot for Minnesota. Hamm was on his way home for lunch when a black sedan carrying three men pulled up beside him.
“You’re Mr. Hamm, aren’t you?” one of the men said as he engaged the brewer in a vigorous handshake.
Before Hamm could answer or even ponder why the car had stopped next to him, the men had alighted, seized a
nd blindfolded him with a white hood, and shoved him into the car, forcing him to lie on the rear floor.
The brewery manager, William Dunn, was puzzled when Hamm didn’t return from lunch. Then he got a phone call. “We have kidnapped Mr. Hamm,” a voice said. “You will hear from us later.”
Hamm had caught only a glimpse of the kidnappers, but he thought he recognized Verne Sankey from wanted posters.
He felt something sticking in his ribs; he assumed it was a gun. Hamm guessed they had gone about thirty miles when the car stopped. He heard the engine of another car, heard men in that car talking to the men who had seized him.
His blindfold was pulled off. Several pieces of paper were waved in front of his face, then placed on the car floor. A pen was placed in his hand.
“Sign them,” a voice commanded. Hamm scrawled his signature. He expected the hood to be put over his head again. Instead, cotton-lined goggles were placed over his eyes. When the car stopped at long last, his goggles were removed. Because the summer solstice was approaching, there was still enough daylight for him to see a two-story house. The windows were boarded. A farmhouse, he thought. But where?
The next day, Friday, a taxi driver delivered a note to Dunn demanding $100,000 for Hamm’s safe return. If the money was not forthcoming, the note said, Hamm would be killed. At the bottom of the note was Hamm’s signature.
The taxi driver told police a man who had said his name was Gordon had given him $2 to deliver the message. Shown photographs of people known or suspected to be in the business of kidnapping, the cabbie picked out a photograph of Sankey.
There was speculation that Sankey had put together a new kidnapping organization to replace his friends from the railroading days, who had practically invited arrest with their carelessness. Carl Pearce had shot off his drunken mouth in front of the wrong people. And Ray Robinson, who had helped Sankey abduct Haskell Bohn, had stupidly deposited $10,000 in an account under his own name in a Winnipeg bank scarcely a week after Bohn was abducted.