Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease

by John Heidenry

  5.

  The Shadow

  The New stead Avenue police station in the Central West End where Shoulders and Dolan brought Hall in for questioning was a sturdy, turn-of-the-century, three-story red-brick building bordered on either side by a popular neighborhood bar, Jimmy and Andy’s, and an alley. Hall had repeatedly glanced at his watch, while waiting for Hager to appear, and was quite adamant in later testimony that he, Shoulders, and Dolan had left the Town House apartment at 8:15 P.M. The two policemen, however, insisted that they left the apartment at 8:30.

  When Hall, escorted by Shoulders and Dolan, arrived at the station, he gave his name to the acting desk sergeant, Corporal Raymond Bergmeier, as John J. Byrne. Bergmeier was later to testify that, when Hall was booked at 8:57 P.M., he did not see Shoulders, Dolan, or Hall carry any suitcases into the station. After Hall was searched, his personal items were taken from him, including his wristwatch, a Papermate ballpoint pen, a cigarette lighter, and about $700 in cash. He was given a receipt and Shoulders escorted him to the holdover cells, telling the guard on duty, Lyle Mudd, to put him into a cell by himself.

  When he was alone, Hall called Mudd and said to him, “I want to make a phone call.”

  “I haven’t got the booking sheets back,” Mudd replied.

  “Where’s the big fellow that brought me in?” Hall asked. “I want to see him. I want to talk to him.”

  “Do you mean that?” Mudd asked.

  “You match me up with the gun, and you’ll get $2,000,” Hall told him. “I’ve got the money. I’ve got $20,000, and I’ll give you $2,000 to get me in touch with that fellow right away.” He added that he would also give $5,000 to Shoulders if he would agree to talk to him.

  “Who do I have to kill?” Mudd said, jokingly.

  “You get me in touch with him,” Hall said, “and you’ll get your dough.”

  “All right,” Mudd said. “I’ll do my best.”

  Hall was desperate to talk to Shoulders because he was still not absolutely sure why he was being charged, and was anxious to the point of nervous collapse about the money left behind in the hotel room. In his near-delirium, he also held out hope that perhaps he could bribe his way out of his hopeless predicament. Unable to ignore Hall’s persistent and increasingly frantic demands to talk to the detective who arrested him, Mudd finally told him, “I’ve given Shoulders three bells,” meaning that he had asked the police lieutenant to drop everything and come. “If that doesn’t get him, I don’t know what to do.”

  Shoulders, though, had other priorities than talking to the most wanted man in America. His movements and whereabouts, and those of Dolan, immediately after bringing Hall to the police station were to forever become the subject of intense speculation and scrutiny by the FBI, the St. Louis Police Department, and the press—and added yet another layer of greed, contempt for the rule of law, and indifference to the suffering of Bobby’s family in the Greenlease case.

  As time passed, Mudd did give Hall one clue to what was happening when he remarked, “We got a hell of a lot of money out front.”

  Lost in a hellish funk, Hall said nothing. For two hours, he remained alone in the holdover cell, while slowly going through severe alcohol and morphine withdrawal.

  Some years prior to Hall’s arrest, Shoulders and Costello had both been cabdrivers for the taxi company that the latter now owned. Over the years, they had shaken down any number of petty criminals, always splitting the proceeds fifty-fifty. Shoulders, known as “the Shadow,” was considered a courageous policeman, who had killed two men in the line of duty—though, according to some, the circumstances surrounding both deaths were questionable. He was also suspected of receiving payoffs from brothel owners and gambling dens.

  Often in the news, Shoulders first achieved local fame in 1937 after he pursued and fatally wounded Alvin Mott, an escaped Michigan convict who had killed a policeman. Shoulders gained his reputation as the Shadow for his practice of prowling through backyards and alleys in search of policy operators and other wrongdoers while making his rounds. He was promoted to lieutenant in 1942, and later boasted of refusing to take a bribe from Joseph Newell, a labor boss whose stepson was in trouble with the law. Shoulders and Newell were friends who visited each other’s homes. The stepson subsequently shot and killed Newell.

  As the case against Hall progressed, Shoulders’s shady reputation, combined with Hall’s own dubious record as a petty thief turned kidnapper, were to leave the FBI and the St. Louis Police Department in a quandary. Whom to believe about the events surrounding Hall’s arrest: the corrupt detective or—improbably—the psychopathic child murderer he arrested? More lies, cover-ups, and layers of intrigue were still to come that would only further complicate the FBI’s investigation. Caught in the middle of the most sensational crime St. Louis had ever known was Elmer Dolan, a young patrolman with an impeccable record.

  In the fabricated version of events told by Shoulders and Dolan, they not only delivered Hall to the station, but they also brought with them at the same time the green footlocker, the small black metal suitcase, and the briefcase that they assumed were stuffed with the entire ransom amount. Shoulders later declared that, as they were leaving the hotel room, he carried the small black metal suitcase to the door. He then motioned for Hager, who had come forward, to take it downstairs and place it in the police car. Dolan, who was carrying the briefcase, guarded Hall, while Shoulders followed behind, lugging the green footlocker and locking the door. The two policemen and Hall then drove to the Newstead station, with Hager tailing them in his own car. When Shoulders, Dolan, and Hall arrived at the station house, Dolan allegedly reached into the rear of the car, picked up the briefcase and the black metal suitcase, and for the first time noticed the footlocker placed there by Hager on Shoulders’s instructions. Dolan then carried the black suitcase and briefcase up the steps of the station, just steps behind Shoulders and Hall, and deposited both on the floor of Shoulders’s office. While Hall was being booked, Shoulders stepped outside to retrieve the footlocker.

  Hager, meanwhile, allegedly was to wait in a courtyard in the rear of the station for nearly an hour until summoned by Shoulders into his office.

  Shoulders said that, after returning to his office with the footlocker, he opened the briefcase and discovered an insurance card with the name Carl A. Hall printed on it with his St. Joseph address. Putting the card in his pocket, he forced open the two suitcases, found that both were only partly full, and put both into his private locker, which he locked. Dolan claimed he witnessed Shoulders putting the luggage into his private locker.

  No witness observed either Dolan or Shoulders bringing a suitcase into the station house, however. Moreover, within the hour both Shoulders and Dolan separately left the precinct, claiming they had personal errands to run.

  In fact, what most law enforcement officials ultimately came to believe happened, but could not prove, was that Costello was the third man in the hotel corridor whom Hall had glimpsed as Dolan escorted him to the unmarked police car. Ex-convict and Costello employee John Hager’s enormous lie—that he had tipped Shoulders about the free-spending Hall, when he had actually called Costello—further obstructed the police investigation into the missing ransom.

  After they put Hall into a holdover cell, Shoulders and Dolan had actually raced back to the Town House. Witnesses observed three men, around 9 P.M., hurriedly carrying luggage from the hotel’s north entrance on Pershing Street to a parked car. Two of the men—probably Dolan and Hager—put the footlocker into one car and drove off, heading for Costello’s home in South St. Louis. The third man—who, like Shoulders, wore a dark suit and horn-rimmed glasses—drove off in a second car with the black metal suitcase, and briefly stopped to make an appearance at the Newstead station.

  About 9:30, Shoulders left the station again, without reporting his absence. He later testified that he wanted to go home to turn his private car over to his so-called landlady, June Marie George, since he would be work
ing on the case into the wee hours. While Shoulders was heading home, Dolan—who was in a radio car—heard a call put out for the lieutenant by Mudd, the jail guard. Mudd informed Dolan that Hall insisted on talking to Shoulders immediately. Dolan contacted Shoulders and then called the station back, saying, “We have found the money. Everything is under control. Forget about it.”

  Shoulders then joined Dolan, Hager, and Costello in the basement of the latter’s modest home on Gurney Court, a U-shaped side street that opened onto Tower Grove Park. The entire ransom, minus what Hall had spent, was stacked on a table, and Shoulders offered Dolan $50,000 in hush money.

  “I don’t want anything to do with that crap,” Dolan said.

  “You really don’t have anything to say about it,” Shoulders menacingly replied.

  Dolan, a married man and father of several young children, got the message.

  Across the park, Heady was still holed up in the apartment on Arsenal Street.

  When Shoulders, Dolan, and Hager left Costello’s house, the lieutenant instructed the two other men to return to Hall’s room at the Town House and search it. They did so, finding the Smith & Wesson, a bottle of whiskey, and some clothes, which Dolan brought to the Newstead station. Shoulders returned there directly. Hager later helped him to smuggle in Hall’s luggage by parking a car in the dark alley next to the station and passing the two pieces through a window. At 10:40 P.M., Shoulders put out a call for two special officers—detectives who were to be assigned a specific task. Soon afterward, almost two hours after he had booked Hall, the lieutenant confronted his prisoner, saying, “There’s a lot of money out there, isn’t there?”

  “Yes,” Hall said.

  “You’re wanted in that kidnapping, aren’t you?” Shoulders persisted.

  Hall tried to evade the accusation as best as he could. But Shoulders told him, “We can’t hold this up much longer from the FBI.”

  Knowing that it was useless to continue the masquerade, Hall said, “That’s right.”

  Shoulders left Hall for about ten minutes—perhaps to confer with Costello once again, by phone or in person, and confirm that the money they had taken from Hall was indeed part of the Greenlease ransom. When the detective returned, he again confronted Hall.

  “What’s the whole story?” he demanded. “Tell me, and I’ll get a promotion out of it.”

  While sitting in the cell, Hall had not only come to the abysmal conclusion that his dream of living the good life in La Jolla was over. He also had just enough presence of mind to realize that he would be charged with both kidnapping and murder once the body of Bobby Greenlease was found. In a desperate bid to save his life, he hurriedly concocted a story that he hoped just might get him a sentence of life imprisonment instead of the death penalty. Just as there had been a mysterious third man who was the accomplice of Shoulders and Dolan, Hall created a fictitious third party to the kidnapping. His name was Tom Marsh. Hall knew no one by that name; it simply came to him.

  In his fevered plotting, he created a profile of Marsh as a tattooed sex degenerate, predatory child molester, and drug addict who had been responsible for looking after Bobby once he was taken from the school. In this version of events, Hall—and Heady—had every intention of returning the boy to his parents once the ransom was collected. Hall even, in a moment of perverted gallantry, decided to try to save Heady by resurrecting the lie that he had used to recruit her in the first place—insisting that he had duped her into believing that Bobby was his son from an earlier marriage. Such was the story he told Shoulders.

  Shoulders again left Hall on his own. About fifteen minutes later, he returned and demanded to know the whereabouts of the woman who took Bobby from the school. Since it was likely that he already knew the address, Shoulders needed to make it appear that he was following proper procedure. After Hall gave up the address, Shoulders dispatched four special officers to arrest Heady. These included the two he had requested earlier that evening, Edward Bradley and Norman Naher. Two other special officers, William Carson and Lawrence King, joined them. After handcuffing Hall, the four officers left the station with the suspect to arrest Heady. Departing from the station around 11:30 P.M., they soon arrived at the Arsenal Street apartment, and altogether were gone about an hour and a half—much to Shoulders’s annoyance, because they interrogated Hall at the apartment and did not immediately return to the station. Heady was taken to the precinct and booked at approximately 1 A.M. on Wednesday, October 7.

  Heady, after Hall dumped her, had remained at the apartment except for a brief excursion at five on Tuesday evening, when she took a cab to the Old Shillelagh Bar, where she downed two shots and bought a fifth of whiskey. At a nearby store, she also bought milk and a newspaper, and then immediately returned to the apartment. She discovered the $2,500 Hall left for her only when rummaging in her purse to pay for her purchases, but decided not to use any of that money. Also in her purse was her .25 caliber revolver.

  At the time of her arrest, Heady had a large bruise on her forehead over her right eye and an abrasion on the bridge of her nose, where Hall had punched her. A woman who often went for days without eating, she was also suffering from acute alcoholism, and could remember very little about the kidnapping.

  St. Louis police also quickly recovered the Nash that Hall had purchased and immediately abandoned.

  While the special agents, accompanied by Hall, were proceeding to arrest Heady, Shoulders contacted St. Louis chief of police Jeremiah J. O’Connell at his home and informed him that he had apprehended the kidnapper of Bobby Greenlease. O’Connell immediately left for the station, and was joined a short time later by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. After Shoulders showed them the suitcases that he claimed Hall had with him at the time of his arrest, the money was counted, and it was ascertained that half the ransom money was missing. Costello and his cohorts had kept $303,720 for themselves. Only $296,280 was recovered.

  At two o’clock on Wednesday morning, Hall was taken to a room at the police station, vomiting and groaning. Up until this point, he had confessed only to kidnapping Bobby, but not to killing him. Sticking to the story that he hastily devised in the holding cell, he admitted that he knew Bobby’s older, adopted brother, Paul, from having attended military school with him. “I knew the family was wealthy and thought of kidnapping him for about two years and planned it on several occasions,” he said.

  Heady, he said in a signed statement, believed that Bobby “was my son and that my former wife did not want me to see him. I told her to tell the nun or the person who answered the door to say that Bobby’s mother was ill and that she had come for him.” After Heady returned with Bobby to the Katz parking lot, according to Hall, he dropped her off at Country Club Plaza, promising to return within an hour. He then drove the boy to Westport Road, where he turned him over to their partner Tom Marsh, who was to take him to Heady’s home in St. Joseph. Marsh, Hall said, was driving a gunmetal-gray 1950 Chevrolet.

  By happenstance, Heady overheard two police officers discussing Hall’s fictitious version of the kidnapping and slaying of Bobby Greenlease. She heard enough that she quickly blamed the murder on Marsh, and absolved herself of kidnapping and murder charges by insisting that Hall told her the boy was his son from a previous marriage.

  In a further elaboration of his story about the nonexistent Tom Marsh, Hall said that they had met in the bar of the Netherlands Hotel in Kansas City. Hall immediately discerned that Marsh was an ex-convict from his use of certain slang expressions used by prison inmates, and invited him to join in the kidnapping. During their planning, Hall further alleged, he gave Marsh the .38 caliber Smith & Wesson, which Marsh requested for his own protection in the event that he was stopped while looking after Bobby.

  During his interrogation by the FBI, Hall identified himself as an insurance agent. Several times during the interview, he slipped out of his chair. He was also perspiring heavily, and he vomited so often that someone said, “Get something for
him to puke in.” Hall continued to vomit into a wastebasket. The FBI was not sure whether Hall’s condition was the result of alcohol poisoning or the effects of the morphine wearing off. Most of Hall’s replies to questions put to him were yeses or inarticulate. Just before 3 A.M., he passed out.

  An ambulance took Hall to City Hospital, where Dr. Cecil Auner diagnosed him as suffering from acute alcoholism. Auner said that Hall was “semi-comatose [and] crying and mumbling for water.” He described Hall as being “very depressed” and unable to answer questions about his physical condition. Auner gave him caffeinated sodium benzoate as a stimulant.

  Hall finally recuperated enough to tell the doctor that he was a morphine addict, and had taken a quarter of a gram orally, but he added that he never took more than that amount at any one time. Even though Hall had asked Hager to bring him a syringe and needle, Auner found no needle marks or other evidence of drug addiction.

  After Hall revived somewhat, he was taken back to the station and the interrogation continued, though he was able to give little more than a mumbled and inarticulate account of his whereabouts for the past few days in St. Louis. Finally, he recovered enough to tell the FBI that Bobby should have been released in Pittsburg, Kansas, by Marsh, who had the responsibility of taking care of the child.

  Under relentless questioning, Hall finally admitted that Bobby was dead and had been buried in Heady’s backyard in St. Joseph. Yet his attempt at a cover-up continued. After picking up Heady at Country Club Plaza in her Plymouth station wagon, he now said, they drove to her home, where he discovered that Marsh had killed Bobby. He buried Bobby’s body in the backyard after removing the religious medal, which he subsequently sent to the Greenlease family in his note.