The Kidnap Years:

by David Stout

  Fiedler knew he had a story to tell, a story to sell. He recalled that John Rogers, the indefatigable reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, had had a role in the release of Dr. Kelley. So Fiedler contacted the newspaper and promised an exclusive that would make many ears among the city’s elite burn with embarrassment.

  Perhaps John Rogers thought he had seen and heard just about everything. He was wrong, as he discovered when balding, blimp-like Adolph Fiedler waddled into the newsroom of the Post-Dispatch and announced that he knew who had pulled off the kidnapping of Isaac Kelley.

  The Post-Dispatch offered Fiedler $1,000 to start with, plus $50 a week as sort of a retainer. No reputable news organization would agree to such a story-for-money deal today, but back then, competition among newspapers was intense, and ethics were flexible.

  “How do I know who kidnaped Dr. Kelley?”* Fiedler began his fantastic story.130 “Because the men who did the job hung around my place…because I had their confidence, and because I sat in at their conferences and heard the telephone calls that took Dr. Kelley out of his home. The kidnapers knew me and talked freely to me, but I took no part in the job myself.”

  Fiedler had no trouble naming the kidnappers. Three were professional criminals who had been slain in a gang fight about a year after the kidnapping, according to Fiedler. They were Tommy “the Rock” Hayes, leader of the Cuckoo Gang of professional criminals, and two of his associates, “Willie G.” Wilbert and Harry “Pretty Boy” Lechler.

  Others involved in the Kelley kidnapping were still around, according to Fiedler. He identified them as Felix “Hoosier” McDonald, who was then in prison on an unrelated robbery charge; Bart Davit; Angelo John “the Dago” Rosegrant; Tommy Wilders, associated with a St. Louis gang; and John C. Johnson, “a Negro farmer,” as he was described at the time, on whose Saint Charles County property McDonald and Davit operated a still. It was there, according to Fiedler, that Kelley spent his first night in captivity.

  Most intriguingly, according to Fiedler, the inspiration and ringleader of the kidnapping was a woman described in the initial story as “Mrs. N———.” Why her name was not spelled out at first is not clear, but it was soon revealed that she was Nellie Tipton Muench. She was the daughter of the Reverend William Ross Tipton, a prominent Baptist minister in Columbia, Missouri, and the wife of Dr. Ludwig Muench, a well-known physician who was also an accomplished cellist. Dr. and Mrs. Muench lived in the same fashionable neighborhood as Dr. Isaac Kelley and his wife and traveled in some of the same social circles.

  There was one other thing: Muench was a sister of Justice Ernest Moss Tipton of the Missouri Supreme Court. So given her family and social status, was it conceivable that she had masterminded a kidnapping, that she was “the high priestess” of the entire enterprise, as Fiedler put it?

  Muench ran a dress salon with a clientele that included wealthy and influential men buying gifts for their mistresses. On at least one occasion, she visited the Kelleys’ home to alter a dress she had sold to Isaac Kelley’s wife, Kathleen. While tugging and stitching, Muench asked her if the doctor ever made any professional visits at night. Occasionally, Kathleen Kelley said.

  At the time, Muench’s dress shop was in debt. Since she had had at least one prior brush with the law (in 1919, she was arrested for stealing jewelry from a guest at a St. Louis hotel), the idea of committing a crime was not inconceivable to her.

  There was early talk about kidnapping a member of the Busch family, but it was decided that snatching someone from the clan that headed the beer empire would bring too much heat. After all, the sensational kidnapping of young Adolphus “Buppie” Orthwein on New Year’s Eve 1930 was still fresh in the civic memory.

  To judge by the wealth of detail that he supplied to John Rogers, Fiedler listened acutely as Muench and her accomplices brazenly discussed how to go about grabbing Dr. Kelley. Muench and at least some of the other plotters infiltrated a birthday party given at a hotel for Kathleen Kelley in early April 1931, barely two weeks before the kidnapping, to size up their prey. In fact, William D. Orthwein, one of Buppie’s cousins, was married to Kathleen Kelley’s sister, and he later testified that Muench and a man he recognized as Rosegrant were dancing nearby and drifted near the birthday party gathering as if showing a special interest.

  “Don’t worry,” Muench told her confederates at some point. “I’ll figure out how to get the doctor out of his house at night.” Eventually, she learned the name of a prominent Chicago doctor with whom Kelley was acquainted. Whichever kidnapper called Kelley the night he was to be kidnapped was to use the name of the Chicago physician to gain Kelley’s trust.

  Unfortunately, neither McDonald nor Davit, who were to pull off the actual abduction, bothered to write down the name of the Chicago doctor. So on the stormy night when they planned to grab Kelley, they first stopped at Fiedler’s hangout, where one of them telephoned Muench and sheepishly asked her to say the name again. Ballinger, she reminded him.

  Then McDonald, calling himself “Holmes,” called the Kelley residence and pleaded for the doctor to come and minister to his sick nephew. When the doctor balked at first, McDonald waited a while and called him again, this time persuading him to embark on what he thought was an errand of mercy.

  Then McDonald and Davit “examined their pistols and asked me to wish them luck,” Fiedler recalled. And off they went to snatch the doctor.

  In Fiedler’s recollections, the kidnapping was a failure. Not only were the abductors unable to collect a ransom, but by April 29, when he saw McDonald and Davit, “they were tired of cooking” for their prisoner and wanted to give him back.

  State prosecutors obtained indictments against Rosegrant, Johnson, McDonald, Wilders, and Muench in March 1934, although Wilders remained a fugitive. The defendants successfully petitioned to have separate trials, and prosecutors elected to try Rosegrant first. They announced that they would seek the death penalty.**

  Rosegrant went on trial in late September 1934. A key witness against him was supposed to have been Johnson, the farmer in whose home Kelley was held initially. Johnson had pleaded guilty months before and agreed to testify against the other defendants in hopes of a lighter sentence. Alas, his own sentence was death—not imposed by the state but by assassins armed with machine guns and presumably bent upon obtaining his silence. They gunned him down on May 12, 1934, as he was sitting outside the garage of a sheriff’s deputy to whose home he had been sent for safekeeping.***

  Upon hearing of the slaying, Fiedler decided to go into hiding. “It might be a good idea for me to put a few miles between myself and St. Louis,” he reportedly told a friend.131 Soon, he was placed in the county jail where, presumably, he would be even safer than he would have been at the home of a deputy.

  Fiedler probably made a wise decision. Initially, the St. Louis police thought they had promising clues to the slaying, as witnesses had noted the license plate number of the car carrying the assassins. But just two days after Johnson was shot to death, it was discovered that the plates had “mysteriously disappeared from the State Auto License Bureau” weeks before, and there was no record of their having been issued to anyone.132

  During the trial, Dr. Kelley identified Rosegrant as one of his captors and McDonald as one of his abductors. He also testified that he recognized Johnson’s house as the location where he had been held for about thirty hours.

  Rosegrant was convicted on October 4 and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Soon afterward, prosecutor Charles Arthur Anderson was trailed by a carload of mobsters who ran him off the road and into a ditch. The crackup left Anderson with a badly broken leg that required weeks of hospital treatment.

  But the prosecutor was not easily intimidated. With the testimony of Fiedler and Kelley, he managed to win the conviction of Felix McDonald early in 1935. Already a convicted robber in a separate case, McDonald was sentenced to sixty years for the Kelley kidnapping. As for Bart Davit, he was sentenced to life in prison in October 193
5 for killing a grocer during a 1932 holdup, so he was never brought to trial for the kidnapping.

  This left Nellie Muench, whose trial in October 1935 was held in Mexico, Missouri, 120 miles west of St. Louis, because of the publicity in the latter city. At first, she seemed to be a sympathetic defendant, since she was not only an attractive woman but…a new mother! Yes, after twenty-three years of a childless marriage, she held a baby boy in her arms.

  Muench took the stand to deny all the accusations against her. Her denials were enough to persuade the jurors, who acquitted her on October 5, 1935. The overjoyed defendant walked proudly out of the courtroom, proclaiming herself ready to embrace motherhood and grateful for God’s gift in the form of a child. “I was not guilty,” she said. “The jury vindicated me. I never had a doubt. That’s all.”133

  Actually, it wasn’t quite all. It was soon revealed that there was someone who loved the baby boy even more than Muench: the infant’s real mother, an unwed servant girl named Anna Ware, who had come to St. Louis from Pennsylvania to give birth. Days after Muench was acquitted, Ware sued to recover the child she had at first given up.

  The ensuing hearing on Ware’s petition contained elements of sadness and low humor. Dr. Marsh Pitzman, a wealthy bachelor and colleague of Nellie’s physician husband, had certified that Nellie Muench had indeed delivered the baby she claimed as her own, an assertion supported by Dr. Ludwig Muench.

  It was soon disclosed that Nellie Muench had made an earlier attempt to pose as a mother, working with her lawyer, Wilfred Jones, to obtain the baby boy of an unwed Minneapolis waitress who gave birth in a St. Louis hospital. But soon after arriving in the Muench home, the infant became ill and was taken by Jones and a friend of Nellie’s named Helen Berroyer to a hospital, where he died on July 16.

  The presiding officer at the hearing, the distinguished lawyer Rush Limbaugh Sr. (grandfather of the present-day conservative commentator), was incensed by the sordid series of events. The entire fake-motherhood scheme was “a deliberate and consummate deception,” he concluded on December 5, 1935, going on to call it “a sham and shallow pretense” concocted to gain sympathy from the jury at the kidnapping trial, and just maybe for other “ulterior reasons.”134

  Soon, Muench was back in court, along with her husband, Jones, and Berroyer. All were charged with conspiring to obtain Anna Ware’s baby without court approval. For eight days, the trial offered the jury—“a panel of open-mouthed farmers,” as the Washington Post put it—an entertaining glimpse at the seamier side of city society.

  The entertainment ended on the ninth day, April 16, 1936, when the judge declared a mistrial after learning that one of the jurors had been offered a bribe of $100 to deadlock the jury. The retrial was scheduled for August. This time, the proceedings went smoothly, and the defendants were convicted and fined. In addition to a $450 fine, Nellie Muench was assessed a $25 contempt-of-court penalty for an outburst at one of the witnesses.

  Case closed? Not yet. Soon, it emerged that Muench had not only convinced Dr. Pitzman that she had really given birth but had told him that he was the father—and that she would reveal that fact unless he paid her to keep quiet. Or she might just commit suicide on the doctor’s front porch. Pitzman had, in fact, been her lover. To buy her silence, he gave her several thousand dollars.

  Now, Muench and her codefendants faced federal mail-fraud charges, since blackmail letters had been sent to Pitzman. The defendants were convicted on December 20, 1936. The sentences were imposed the day after Christmas, with Nellie Muench drawing a ten-year prison term and $5,000 fine; her husband, Ludwig, eight years and $5,000 (despite Nellie’s insistence that he was blameless); Jones a ten-year term; and Berroyer five years.

  It had all begun with the kidnapping of a wealthy doctor in April 1931. Much later, a grotesquely obese former justice of the peace, in whose presence people felt free to plan crimes, had come forward with a story, not out of a sense of civic duty but because he was short of money. A prosecution witness had been slain while under protection at the home of a sheriff’s deputy. Mysteriously, the information on the license plates of the assassins’ car had vanished from a clerk’s office. A prosecutor had been run off the road and nearly killed. And a juror had been offered a bribe.

  It was all enough to make one wonder how far Missouri had come from the days of the Wild West.

  Rather uncharitably, newspapers noted that Nellie Muench had to surrender the mink coat she had worn to court and exchange it for a plain calico dress that she would wear when helping to scrub the toilets and jail floors before she was shipped off to prison.

  While Muench was imprisoned, her husband divorced her. She was released in 1944 and died in a Kansas City rooming house in 1982 at the age of ninety-one.****

  *The newspaper’s style was to render the noun and verb “kidnaper” and “kidnaped.”

  **Since the kidnapping had taken place more than a year before enactment of the Lindbergh Law, that federal statute did not apply to the case. But Missouri lawmakers had made kidnapping a capital crime under state law in response to the plague of abductions in their state.

  ***An account in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the next day told much about the casual racism that was the accepted order of the day, in St. Louis and elsewhere. A front page photo of the victim identified him by race, and the main article noted that he was a “Negro farmer.” The headline was “Machine Gunner Murders Negro Who Implicated Three in Kidnaping of Dr. Kelley.”

  ****In recounting the denouement of the Isaac Kelley kidnapping case, I relied not only on contemporary accounts in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch but on Barry Cushman, “Headline Kidnappings and the Origins of the Lindbergh Law,” Saint Louis University Law School Journal, 2011, https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/268Saint Louis University.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  EVIL RESURFACES

  New York City

  Wednesday, May 30, 1934

  Scores of warships steamed into New York Harbor for a Memorial Day display of American naval might, a once-in-a-lifetime thrill for hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children. The fleet included battleships and aircraft carriers, whose planes (“the sky talons of the American fighting eagle,” as the Daily Mirror put it) swooped and darted to the delight of the throngs below. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had been assistant secretary of the navy a decade before, beamed with pride.

  The fleet would be anchored around New York for eighteen days. Its officers were celebrities, feted by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and other politicians, while thousands of enlisted sailors swarmed into Times Square and Coney Island in search of good times in the big city. The friendly invasion got saturation coverage in the newspapers.

  On Monday, June 4, the Daily Mirror ran a big photo spread of the festivities. A prominent photograph showed two smiling young sailors in the company of a pair of pretty teenage girls. A Brooklyn woman saw the face of one girl, a brunette, and was startled. The woman had followed the case of Grace Budd, the lovely young girl who had vanished in 1928 after a seemingly friendly old man said he wanted to take her to a birthday party.

  The woman snipped out the photo, drew an arrow pointing to the brunette, and wrote, “This is the girl, Grace Budd.” Then she mailed it to the Budds, whose address, 135 West Twenty-Fourth Street in Manhattan, had been in the papers occasionally. Still living in borderline poverty, the Budds had moved to a smaller apartment since Grace’s disappearance.135

  Delia Budd looked at the photograph and thought it looked like an older Grace. Several relatives and friends agreed. So the next day, Delia and her husband, Albert, took the photo to the police to show Detective Lieutenant William F. King of the missing persons bureau.

  The detective understood the parents’ desperate need to hold on to hope, but he was highly skeptical. Was it really possible that the pretty brunette was Grace Budd? If the girl in the photo was her, how to explain why she had not reached out to her parents? Was she being held a
gainst her will, with no chance to escape or to cry for help? Did she have amnesia?

  Nevertheless, King did not discourage reporters from reviving the Budd case. Revisiting an unsolved crime, especially around its anniversary, was a staple of journalism then, as it is today. The anniversary of Grace’s vanishing was on June 3. So the New York papers pounced on the chance to reprise the case, displaying the photo of the pretty girl and hinting that she just might be Grace Budd.

  Not many days after the photo was published, a sixteen-year-old Bronx girl named Florence Swinney walked into a police station and identified herself as the brunette in the picture. She and a friend had been photographed with two nice sailors they had met in the city. End of story. End of a flicker of hope for Albert and Delia Budd.

  But as sorry as he was for Grace’s parents, Detective King was not displeased. The latest spate of stories had revived the public’s interest in the Budd case. Some good might come of that, especially if that interest were rekindled at the right moment. King knew how to do that, but how would he know when? Instinct.

  “I checked on the Grace Budd mystery,” the enormously popular newspaper columnist Walter Winchell declared in the Daily Mirror in November 1934. “She was eight when she was kidnapped about six years ago. And it is safe to tell you that the Dep’t of Missing Persons will break the case, or they expect to, in four weeks. They are holding a ‘cokie’ now at Randall’s Island, who is said to know most about the crime. Grace is supposed to have been done away with in lime, but another legend is that her skeleton is buried in a local spot. More anon.”136

  Winchell’s grammar and syntax ran off the rails, as usual, but so what? Winchell got Grace Budd’s age wrong: she was ten, not eight, when she vanished in 1928. Again, so what? The error was minor by Winchell’s standards, and the columnist wasn’t paid for his graceful language. He was paid for dishing out juicy gossip, some of which even turned out to be true eventually.