Hall also guessed that, after the payment of the ransom became public, the serial numbers of the currency would be published. If all the bills came from the same Federal Reserve bank, that would make it too easy for the authorities to keep track of the serial numbers of any ransom money being spent. Hall resolved that the ransom therefore had to be collected from all twelve Federal Reserve banks to confound law enforcement agencies.
Finally, Hall bought Bobby’s shroud, a blue plastic sheet to wrap around his victim before he placed the boy in his grave, at a Western Auto Supply in St. Joseph. He also guessed that the ransom might be treated with a chemical or powder to identify him as the kidnapper by staining his hands or clothing. To circumvent that possibility, he bought two additional blue plastic sheets, which he planned to wrap around the duffel bag filled with money, and so make his escape undetected.
One evening, just prior to the kidnapping, Hall and Heady went to a bar in Riverside, a Kansas City suburb, and Hall got quite drunk. As they drove home, with Hall at the wheel, they had a minor traffic accident. Though a fender on Heady’s car was dented, the other car did not stop, and no report of the accident was made. But Heady insisted on driving home the rest of the way. En route to St. Joseph, Hall rolled down the window of the station wagon and fired a shot from his revolver into the night sky.
Just before the kidnapping, the pair also drove to downtown Kansas City, where Hall bought a copy of The Daily Oklahoman, an Oklahoma City newspaper, at Ruback’s, a newsstand near the Muehlebach Hotel. Hall knew that Mr. Greenlease owned an interest in an Oklahoma City automobile dealership, and wanted to make use of a Greenlease-O’Neill Oldsmobile advertisement when he mailed the first ransom letter to the Greenlease home. That tactic, he hoped, would deceive the authorities into thinking that the kidnappers were based in Oklahoma. After finding the newspaper advertisement, he clipped it, and later cut out the name “Greenlease” and pasted it on an envelope.
Around 4 P.M. on Saturday, September 26, two days before the kidnapping, he also bought a long-handled True Temper shovel from the Hatfield Hardware Company in St. Joseph. Grace Hatfield, who waited on him, asked what kind of shovel he was looking for.
“It don’t make any difference what kind of shovel,” he told her. “I’m only going to use it once anyway.”
On Sunday, the day before the kidnapping, Hall stole a pair of Missouri license plates in St. Joseph and put them on Heady’s station wagon. He also used his long-handled shovel to dig the grave near the back porch. Badly out of shape, he perspired profusely and stopped frequently to go inside to rest and have a drink. Finally, he finished. The grave measured three feet deep by five feet long.
Before the day was over, and after the grave had been dug, Hall also composed the first ransom letter. While Heady printed it out, Hall repeatedly corrected her spelling. Once they were finished, he placed the note in the envelope on which he had pasted the name “Greenlease,” and put that envelope into a large prepaid envelope addressed to “Robert C. Greenlease, 2600 Verowa Rd., Kansas City, Mo.”
Despite all of his careful planning, and even having driven past the Greenlease house as part of his surveillance, Hall managed to put the wrong address on his ransom demand. The Greenleases lived at 2920 Verona Road, and their home was located in Mission Hills, Kansas, not in Kansas City, Missouri.
Robert Cosgrove Greenlease, Bobby’s father, was born in 1882 on a farm in Saline County in west-central Missouri. In 1894, when Robert was twelve, the family moved to Kansas City. Around the turn of the century, the horse and buggy was being replaced by automobiles; and in 1903, when he was nearly twenty-one, Greenlease and a partner set up a small shop and began manufacturing and selling a three-cylinder car called the Kansas City Hummer with “a copper water jacket” and no top. Handmade like all cars in those pre–assembly line days, it sold for $3,300. After building four automobiles, the two young men abandoned the enterprise. Greenlease set up an auto repair garage, but soon got back into the retail business, trying to sell the legendary Thomas Flyer, a car that had crossed Siberia to win a New York–to–Paris race.
In 1908, Greenlease obtained a franchise to sell Cadillac automobiles. Soon afterward, General Motors bought the company and business prospered. He also sold Oldsmobiles, and in time became the largest distributor of Cadillacs in the Southwest in a territory ranging from the Texas panhandle to Colorado. In addition, he was a partner in dealerships in Topeka, Kansas; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and other cities. Under a contract negotiated with Cadillac Motors before it was absorbed by General Motors, he also earned a commission on every Cadillac sold by other dealers in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and parts of Iowa and Nebraska. By the 1950s he was said to be one of the ten wealthiest men in Kansas City, and he was also allegedly one of the largest stockholders in General Motors. (Hall later claimed that he had checked with Dun & Bradstreet and found that Robert Greenlease was worth $24 million, or the equivalent of more than $350 million today.)
Greenlease and his first wife had no children but adopted a boy, Paul Robert Greenlease. In 1939 the couple divorced. When he reached high school age, Paul was sent to the Kemper Military School in Boonville, a military academy that specialized in educating children with disciplinary problems.
Also in 1939, just months after his divorce, the fifty-eight-year-old Robert Greenlease married Virginia Pollock, a woman exactly half his age. Virginia Greenlease was a Kansas City native and a graduate of the Research School of Nursing. In 1941 she gave birth to a daughter, Virginia Sue, and in 1947 a son, Robert Cosgrove Greenlease, Jr. The boy’s father was sixty-five when his son was born. Virginia was thirty-eight.
Little Bobby was doted on. He had his own miniature motorized Cadillac, two dogs, and a green parrot. The family lived in a sumptuous Tudor-style mansion in Mission Hills. Among the servants were a housekeeper, a gardener/handyman, a Swedish maid, and Bobby’s governess. In the summer of 1953, only months before the kidnapping, the family toured Europe, taking the governess with them.
Virginia Sue Greenlease was enrolled in a fashionable girls school in Sunset Hill, and Bobby attended the French Institute of Notre Dame de Sion, an exclusive elementary school in Kansas City run by the Sisters of Sion, a French order of nuns.
After Mère Marthanna called the Greenlease home Monday morning, September 28, to inquire about Mrs. Greenlease’s condition, Virginia Greenlease immediately hung up and called her husband, and he in turn called the police, asking that Chief Bernard C. Brannon meet him at 29th Street and the McGee trafficway. He then informed Brannon of what had happened and asked the police chief to accompany him home.
Two detectives, Harry Nesbitt and Richard Bennett, soon arrived at the Greenlease home to interview Bobby’s parents.
Early in the afternoon, Virginia Greenlease collapsed under the strain and was given a sedative. Her husband showed emotion only once. When he met a close friend of the family at the front door, she embraced him and said, “Oh, Bob. It just can’t be true, can it?”
“Yes, it is,” he replied. But his jaw trembled, tears filled his eyes, and he was unable to continue.
Virginia Sue, like her mother, cried almost continuously during the afternoon after she was brought home from school. Much of the time, she simply followed her father around the house, tears in her eyes.
At first, the police delayed making any announcement in the hope that Bobby might be found. But at 3 P.M. the police officially announced that there had been a kidnapping. Many of the Greenleases’ friends called or went directly to their home, offering any assistance that might be needed. Chief Brannon promised to take personal charge of the case. The police were also working closely with Wesley Grapp, the assistant special agent in charge of the local office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In a reference to the Lindbergh Law, Grapp told reporters that he was waiting to see if any developments indicated a violation of a federal statute. The Lindbergh Law declared that transportation of a kidnapped person across a state line or into a foreign
country was a federal offense. In Missouri, kidnapping for ransom was punishable by imprisonment or death.
At 6 P.M., Robert and Virginia Sue Greenlease sat in the living room to watch a news report on television about the kidnapping. They were joined by Stewart M. Johnson, general manager of the Greenlease firm; Elsie Utlaut, the children’s governess; and Britt Selander, a maid. During the newscast, Willard Creech, the taxi driver who had delivered Heady and Bobby to the Katz Drug Store parking lot, told an interviewer that the woman had asked about Bobby’s black parrot.
“The parrot isn’t black,” Virginia Sue interjected. “Green.”
During the remainder of the evening, Johnson and Norbert S. O’Neill, partner with Greenlease in Greenlease-O’Neill Oldsmobile, took telephone messages.
2.
The Vigil
On the drive back to Kansas City, Hall took a new highway that Heady did not recognize, and eventually crossed into North Kansas City by way of the airport bridge. They then stopped for a second time at Lynn’s Tavern, where earlier that morning they had fortified their nerves with several shots of whiskey. Pulling into a rear parking lot, Hall switched the license plates once again, reattaching the originals. While he was changing plates, Heady entered the bar and had two drinks, and also took at least one out to Hall, who was inspecting the car to make sure no blood was dripping from the back end. Since Hall’s clothes were splattered with blood, he did not want to go into the bar. They then drove directly to St. Joseph.
Once home, Hall pulled into the basement garage. Heady entered through the front door of the house and unlocked the door at the top of the basement steps so that Hall could bring the body through the kitchen, onto the back porch, and into the yard. Before burying Bobby, Hall removed the Jerusalem medal from the boy’s shirt. He made several trips back and forth, getting the lime and tools ready, while Heady steadied herself with another two or three drinks.
The last time that Heady glimpsed the body, it was lying in the grave. Hall had already thrown the lime over Bobby’s remains and begun to fill in the dirt. When he was half-finished, he went down to the garage and washed out the back of the station wagon with a hose. Eager to post the ransom letter before the last mail pickup of the day, he informed Heady that he had to hurry into Kansas City, and instructed her to finish burying Bobby. Using a hose, a shovel, and an ax, she continued to add dirt until it was within about a half-foot of ground level.
She was still fussing about the grave when Hall called collect from a drugstore at 31st Street and Main in Kansas City to tell her that everything was proceeding according to plan, and urged her not to worry. He had dropped the letter to the Greenleases in a mailbox on the corner of 39th Street and Broadway. He then returned to St. Joseph, stopping along the way for a few drinks. Back home, he resumed cleaning the basement with turpentine, gasoline, water, and other materials, using a broom to scrub away the bloodstains. He also threw the empty shells from his .38 caliber revolver into a wastebasket, and later tossed its contents into an incinerator.
Hall also took his suit to Hodson Cleaners, explaining to the clerk that the bloodstains were the result of an accident. He put his bloodied shirt into the washing machine at Heady’s home.
In the evening, the two kidnappers stayed home, drinking heavily and watching television. A flood tide of whiskey had transported them across a profound human divide. They had no compass, moral or otherwise, to guide them now, and their only certainty was that a murdered child lay buried in their backyard.
Just nine hours after Bobby was taken from his school, Hall’s incorrectly addressed ransom letter, postmarked 6 P.M. on September 28 and sent Special Delivery, arrived at the Greenlease home. The police had alerted the Postal Service to be on the lookout for any mail addressed to the family. The badly misspelled letter read:
Your boy has been kiddnapped get $600,000 in $20s—$10s—Fed. Res. Notes from all twelve districts we realize it takes a few days to get that amount. Boy will be in good hands—when you have money ready put ad in K.C. Star. M—will meet you this week in Chicago—signed Mr. G.
Do not call police or try to use chemicals on bills or take numbers. Do not try to use any radio to catch us or boy dies. If you try to trap us your wife and your other child and yourself will be killed you will be watched all of the time. You will be told later how to contact us with money. When you get this note let us know by driving up an down main St. between 29 & 39 for twenty minutes with white rag on car aeriel.
The ransom note continued on the other side:
If do exactly as we say an try no tricks, your boy will be back safe withen 24 hrs afer we check money.
Deliver money in army duefel bag. Be ready to deliver at once on contact.
M.
$400,000 in 20s
$200,000 in 10s.
Hall had chosen to sign his ransom demand with the letter “M,” but it held no special significance. As he later noted, “I could just as well have used any other letter of the alphabet.”
On Tuesday morning, September 29, Hall continued to clean up the basement. Heady, suffering from a severe hangover, did not join him. As he continued to mentally replay all that had happened, a badly hungover Hall finally realized that he had mailed the first ransom demand to the wrong address. With Heady’s help, he then drafted a second ransom letter, reiterating the demands set forth in the first, and enclosing the Jerusalem medal that he had taken from Bobby’s body. The pair then proceeded to the McIninch Florist Shop on a parkway outside St. Joseph and bought a dozen chrysanthemum plants. Returning home, they planted the flowers in the newly turned earth, and watered them.
Later that day, Hall and Heady drove to Kansas City, stopping as usual at Lynn’s for a few drinks prior to mailing the second letter—this time with the correct address—at the main post office downtown. It was postmarked 9:30 P.M. Hall also called the Greenlease home to ask two questions: “Did you get my note?” “Are you preparing the money?” Greenlease business associate Stewart Johnson assured him that the answer to both was in the affirmative. When Hall complained that he had not seen a car drive along the designated route with a white rag on its aerial, Johnson insisted that the trip had nevertheless been made. Since the Greenlease family was already receiving a number of crank calls, the two men also agreed that henceforth all conversations between the family and Hall would follow a strict formula. Hall would be asked to identify himself, and he would reply, “M. Ribbon,” a reference to the ribbon on Bobby’s Jerusalem medal.
Returning home late in the evening, Hall and Heady again both got very drunk.
Again thanks to an alert Postal Service, the second letter was delivered to the Greenlease home early Wednesday morning. The hastily composed abbreviated note read:
You must not of got our first letter. Show this to no one. Get $600,000 in 10$ and 20$ federal reserve notes from all distrisst 400,000 in 20s—200,000—10s you will not take numbers or treat bills in any way. When you have money put ad in star personal will meet you in Chicago Sunday G. Call police off and obey instructions Boy is ok but homesick. Don’t try to stop us or pick up or boy dies you will hear from us later. Put money in army duffle bag.
Since this letter contained Bobby’s Jerusalem medal, the Greenlease family was now convinced they were dealing with the real kidnappers.
Visibly distraught, Robert Greenlease appeared in front of his house to speak to the small army of reporters camped outside. “We think they are trying to make contact,” he said, sobbing. “All I want is my boy back.”
The Greenlease family now decided to form a three-man telephone committee to serve on a twenty-four-hour basis. Comprising the group were Bobby’s stepbrother Paul Greenlease, Johnson, and Norbert O’Neill. The group agreed that Johnson would not personally answer the phone because the kidnappers might confuse him with Henry W. Johnson, a former Kansas City police chief who currently served as superintendent of traffic. Robert L. Ledterman, also a close friend and business associate, served as family
spokesman.
Immediately after receiving the second ransom letter, Robert Greenlease consulted with Ledterman, O’Neill, Johnson, and his family, and decided to comply with its demands. Ledterman contacted Arthur B. Eisenhower, brother of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and president of the Commerce Trust Company in Kansas City. Eisenhower called H. Gavin Leedy, president of the Kansas City branch of the Federal Reserve Bank, who ordered that the $600,000 ransom be amassed in the strictest secrecy from all twelve Federal Reserve banks. Eighty clerks worked throughout the night to assemble the forty thousand separate pieces of currency. The money remained sacked in the bank from the morning of Wednesday, September 30, until 5 P.M. Saturday, October 3, when Ledterman and Robert T. Moore, an Oklahoma City automobile dealer and Greenlease associate, collected it.
Ledterman also placed a classified advertisement in The Kansas City Star, indicating as directed that the ransom money had been assembled.
The Star first reported the story with a brief item in its afternoon edition on Monday, September 28, the very day of the kidnapping, noting only that an unidentified woman had taken Bobby Greenlease from the French Institute of Notre Dame de Sion.
Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease Page 4