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

by John Heidenry

  “I talked with [Hall] four times on the telephone,” Virginia Greenlease said. “I told him we were willing and ready to pay the money. I asked always about Bobby. . . . I asked, When will we have Bobby?”

  Her eyes remained dry as she testified, and her voice never faltered as she answered the questions Scheufler put to her, but at times she was almost inaudible. Some spectators gasped when she recounted how Hall assured her that Bobby was alive.

  A table next to the witness stand contained the prosecution’s exhibits, including the shovel Hall used to dig Bobby’s grave. Also on the table were Hall’s Smith & Wesson, the bag containing the lime used to cover Bobby’s body, and the hat that Heady lost when her dog leaped and strained at the leash when Bobby was shot.

  When Virginia Greenlease finished testifying, Scheufler turned to the defense counsel and inquired matter-of-factly, “Any questions?”

  Appearing startled, Hull quickly answered, “No, no.”

  Dietrich, his voice trembling, added, “Of course not. I’m just sorry she had to come.”

  Hall, seemingly unnerved by Virginia Greenlease’s appearance, whispered to a deputy marshal that he wanted a recess. Judge Reeves granted a five-minute recess, and Hall, flanked by guards, left the room. Heady, brightening, leaned over to talk to Hull. Robert Greenlease remained at his customary post in the rear of the courtroom with his loyal friends, Ledterman and O’Neill.

  Others appearing on behalf of the prosecution during the trial included radio repairman Frank Maulding, who installed the shortwave converter in Hall’s car; the salesman at Sam’s Loan who sold Hall the Smith & Wesson; Grace Hatfield, who sold Hall a shovel at her hardware store; and the manager of the Sawyer Material Company who sold Hall a sack of lime.

  Mrs. Garnett Travis, who knew the Hall family, testified for the defense that Hall’s father was a very stern man and that she had never seen any physical display of affection between father and son. Speaking of Zella Hall, Carl’s mother, Mrs. Travis said, “I think she loved him like any mother loves a child,” but she added that Zella “seemed afraid that the younger generation was not very good, and it was hard to get them to do anything.”

  Another defense witness was Zella Hall’s old friend, Samuel Tucker, now eighty years old, who had hired Hall to work at the Pleasanton telephone company with his mother’s connivance to keep the young boy off the streets. Hall had been “a carefree boy with a smile on his face” when he signed up with the Marines, Tucker told the court. But after he returned from fighting in Okinawa and other theaters of war, Tucker related, Hall had turned into “a person who was cold and hard. He was not as warm, not as friendly.”

  Though Heady seemed almost disinterested in the proceedings when her own confession had been read the previous day, she was clearly wounded by Hall’s frequent references in his confession to her near-constant drunken stupor, beginning with the murder of Bobby until her arrest. The only time she showed genuine emotion, though, occurred when Pansy McDowall of La Cygne, Kansas, appeared on the witness stand. McDowall had taken young Carl into her house for a short time after the death of his father and Zella Hall had found herself unable to control the troubled young boy.

  “Carl was one of the most grateful and appreciative children I have ever seen in my life,” McDowall said. “He was elaborately formal, elaborately polite and courteous.” As she related young Hall’s sorrow over the death of his father, and his wish that he could be with his Tomama, Heady’s eyes glistened with tears and she used a handkerchief to wipe them away. When she glanced across the counsel table at Hall, she saw that his cheeks were flushed and that he seemed to be fighting back tears. He did not return her gaze.

  “Now just what kind of a mother was Carl Hall’s mother?” Dietrich asked.

  “She was busy—always busy with her club work and with social affairs,” Mrs. McDowall answered. “She was a fine woman, and she was intelligent and a woman with a good business head. But as a mother she was the most cold-blooded and hardest-hearted mother I have ever known.”

  During the trial, Hall resented the testimony by McDowall and other Pleasanton townsfolk that suggested his mother might be partly responsible for his going bad because she was so involved in social affairs.

  “No one could have a finer mother than I had,” he told the Reverend George L. Evans of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Kansas City, Kansas, who had gone to the prison to counsel him, “and the same goes for my father. I had wonderful parents. Their actions were in no way responsible for my going bad.”

  Hall’s almost childlike devotion to his mother—who had, after all, disinherited him—was in stark contrast to his heartless indifference to Virginia Greenlease’s almost unimaginable suffering after Bobby was abducted. If he was aware of the irony, he never spoke about it.

  In his closing arguments, Hull pointed out that Nellie Baker testified that Heady had lived a normal life for forty years. Drinking had been her downfall. After all, he noted, she had plenty of money and “was probably worth $50,000 or $60,000 and a farm, a home, an automobile” at the time of the kidnapping. Unfortunately, he added, she was “putty” in Hall’s hands. He had planned the kidnapping, bought the shovel, dug the grave, and killed Bobby. Certainly, said Hull, she deserved to be punished. But would taking her life benefit society in any way? “If I thought so,” he said, “I would not oppose it.” He left it to the consciences of the jurors to decide her fate, but declared that he was opposed to the death penalty, and that only a Supreme Being “could determine an adequate punishment for a person who has sinned.”

  Dietrich, in his closing arguments, concurred with Hull that “It would be a popular act to give this man death. The newspapers have tried him, they have condemned him to death; the radio has condemned him to death. There is a clamor throughout the world as to this man.” He revealed that, in a conference with Hall the previous week, the defendant had declared his remorse, and told him, “I am ready to go to the gas chamber.” Noting that the prosecutor had brought in “too many witnesses,” he added that Mr. and Mrs. Greenlease should have been spared the ordeal of testifying.

  Dietrich also reviewed Hall’s childhood—how he had been without a father from the age of twelve; that his mother had been a very busy woman; that he never learned the value of money. He reviewed the testimony of Samuel Tucker, the loyal family friend, who suggested that war had changed Hall from an upstanding citizen. “I don’t know what war does to a man,” Dietrich said. “Except here is a man, a fine citizen, who knew him, a man eighty years old. You saw Sam Tucker, and Sam tells you Hall came back hard, cynical, not the boy that he was before he went into the Marines.” He concluded by saying it was up to the jury to decide whether Hall deserved the death penalty or life imprisonment.

  Scheufler’s rebuttal was to the point: “What ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he told the jurors, quoting the biblical injunction. Both Hall and Heady, he declared, had come from better than average homes, and that made their crime even more horrible because they had more of an opportunity than most people to make something of themselves.

  Judge Reeves gave brief instructions to the jurors, and at 10:44 they retired to deliberate. In less than an hour, at 11:42, they solemnly returned. Since the defendants had entered guilty pleas, the only question was whether the jury would recommend a death sentence or life imprisonment. Few spectators were surprised at how quickly a verdict had been reached, and even fewer—if any—doubted what that verdict would be. Hall and Heady sat quietly. Reeves asked if a verdict had been reached, and the foreman rose, saying, “Yes, sir.” He handed a piece of paper to the clerk, who passed it to the judge. The judge had given the jury a sheet of paper in advance of deliberations. It asked:

  “Do you recommend that the death penalty be imposed?”

  The foreman simply had to write in the word “yes” or “no.”

  “Yes” was written in twice, once for Hall and once for Heady.

  When the clerk read out the verdict, several peopl
e in the courtroom applauded. Some even whistled. The bailiff pounded his gavel, demanding order. Each juror was polled. Reeves called both defendants before the bench, and they quietly approached, accompanied by their attorneys. Heady had smiled wanly on hearing the verdict; Hall appeared glum.

  “Do either of you have any statement why you should not be put to death?” Reeves asked.

  “No, sir,” Hall responded, loudly and clearly.

  Heady shook her head and said, simply, “Nothing.”

  Reeves ruled that Carl Austin Hall and Bonnie Brown Heady were to die in the gas chamber at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, Missouri, on December 18, 1953. Both Hall and Heady accepted the judge’s sentence stoically. They had long since resigned themselves to their fates, and neither shared their respective attorney’s hopes for a life sentence. As the jury’s verdict was given, Heady had even glanced quickly across the defense table and smiled defiantly at Hall.

  After the sentencing, deputy marshals escorted the condemned pair from the fourth-floor courtroom to the fifth-floor marshal’s office until the crowd of spectators dispersed. Both seemed almost nonchalant during the trip from the courthouse back to the Jackson County jail.

  Asked to comment on the sentence, Bobby’s father said only, “It’s too good for them, but it’s the best the law provides.”

  One of the jurors, it was later learned, had proposed life imprisonment for Heady. After further deliberation, the twelve jurors reached unanimous agreement that both prisoners should be executed. More than five hundred people applied for permission to witness the executions, though the room for spectators in the gas chamber could accommodate only fifty people, and at least thirty of those had to be official witnesses, attending physicians, and prison personnel. Anticipating the death sentences, Colonel Thomas E. Whitecotton, the state director of corrections, announced that the executions would be simultaneous, and revealed that he had written to Warden Harley O. Teets of San Quentin for advice on what Heady—the first woman to be executed at the Missouri State Penitentiary—should wear. Teets replied that Heady ought to be allowed to wear a dress instead of a bathing suit, as was done in the execution of two women in the San Quentin gas chamber. Gas chamber occupants were routinely given as little clothing as possible to wear—usually just shorts—to prevent gas from accumulating in the clothing. The thirty men who had been executed in the Missouri chamber had worn only black shorts, socks, and a black blindfold, and Whitecotton decided on the same garb for Hall.

  Bonnie Brown Heady would not be the first woman executed by the federal government. Mary Surratt had been hanged on July 7, 1863, for conspiring in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The execution came only eighty-three days after the president’s death. Earlier in 1953, a trial even more sensational than that of Hall and Heady had culminated on June 19, 1953, when the kidnappers were still in the planning stage of their plot to abduct Bobby Greenlease. On that day, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—who were near-contemporaries of Hall and Heady—were electrocuted at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, after being convicted of atomic espionage.

  Hall and Heady were to be executed in the Missouri State Penitentiary because of an agreement between the state and the federal government. The federal prison system had no means of imposing capital punishment.

  Just hours after Hall and Heady had been condemned to death, Hall received a visitor—an old childhood friend from Pleasanton. Mr. Dan Evans had attended the same grade school as Hall, though they were never close and had not seen each other after Hall went off to Kemper Military School. Mr. Evans, whose mother still lived in the small Kansas town where he had grown up, had taken a radically different path from Hall, graduating from the College of Emporia in Emporia, Kansas, and studying theology at a Chicago seminary before being ordained a Presbyterian minister. Currently, he was serving as minister at a church in Topeka, and he had come to see Hall at the request of Marshall Hoag and Dietrich.

  The two men met for an hour, from 11 A.M. until noon, in Hall’s cell.

  “He was grateful that someone from his hometown had come to talk with him,” Evans said of Hall, who indicated that he was resigned to being put to death. “He expressed the idea to me that he had committed something horrible, so that he should rightfully be punished by society for having done such a deed.”

  Hall also wondered why, although they had grown up in the same town, one had chosen to serve God while the other pursued a life that led to the murder of an innocent child.

  “He was inclined to place the blame on liquor for what he had done,” the minister said. “He said he started drinking and never seemed to be able to stop. He said he started taking drugs in addition to the liquor and that didn’t help.”

  Evans also observed that Hall’s parents had been emotionally distant and seldom displayed any outward signs of love and affection toward their only child.

  “It brought home to me,” Evans said, “that the time parents spend with their children should not be spared, and that many of them need to spend more time with their children.”

  The two men talked in detail about the kidnapping, though Evans noted that, “as a minister, I don’t think I should say too much about what he told me during that time.” Evans did note rather dryly, however, that “I am not sure whether he felt particularly remorseful about the whole thing.” Although they discussed religious matters, Hall’s visitor conceded that “I could not say he expressed the idea that he expected to get any solace out of religion.”

  During the meeting, Hall revealed that he wished to marry Heady. Just as the hour allotted for the visit was nearly over, the minister persuaded Hall to pray with him for forgiveness. But before the prayer could be completed, the jailer interrupted to say that time was up.

  The prayer session had been abruptly terminated because Hall and Heady had a noon date with Judge Reeves. Both prisoners were taken from their cells to stand before the magistrate, who heard from Dietrich that his client did not intend to appeal his sentence. In an earlier conversation with Hull, Reeves had also been informed that Heady did not plan to appeal, either.

  Reeves then signed the commitment papers authorizing Acting U.S. Marshal William Tatman to carry out the court’s sentence.

  “There will be no appeal in this case,” he announced. “The matter is all over so far as that’s concerned. There will be no foreseeable delay in the execution. The defendants want no appeal.”

  He also praised Dietrich for representing Hall without compensation, adding, “I wanted a man of unquestioned integrity and of highest legal ability and standing in his profession to act in the case.” He further explained that he had asked Dietrich to serve so that “all the world might know that this confessed murderer and kidnapper would have a fair trial before me and that every point would be raised to preserve the rights of the accused.”

  Dietrich later confirmed that Hall and Heady had asked permission to be married before their execution, while also noting that the Justice Department immediately denied the request. Hall had broached the matter both before and during the trial. “I promised Bonnie,” Dietrich quoted Hall as saying to him, “that we were to be married and she wants to. I want to go ahead with it.”

  After their appearance before Reeves, Hall and Heady were returned to their cells on the eleventh floor of the Jackson County Jail, still handcuffed to waist chains and guarded by marshals. As they shuffled down the corridor, almost side by side, Hall turned around and said something. Both smiled. Then they were put into their respective cells, and their chains were removed.

  A few minutes later, they asked for their midday meal. That morning they had skipped breakfast, except for coffee. Seemingly without a care in the world, they devoured a simple lunch of beef stew, bread and butter, and coffee.

  Not long afterward, Father George Evans visited Hall for the third time. Father Evans, who was not related to and was unacquainted with Dan Evans, went to see Hall at the condemned man’s invitation
. He had known Hall as a student at Kemper Military School, when he was an instructor there before entering the ministry. Father Evans’s first visit had been at Dietrich’s request. After their conference, the priest told reporters, “When I saw him previous to the trial on two occasions, his first statements were those of remorse. I saw him again this afternoon and, at his request, I talked to Mrs. Heady. This was the first time I had seen Mrs. Heady. She likewise expressed great contrition.” As tears welled in his eyes, he added, “There are varied and many problems that come to a parish priest.”

  8.

  Death Row

  Moving quickly after the sentencing of Hall and Heady, Marshal Tatman, accompanied by deputy marshals and his wife, who was serving as matron in charge of Heady, arranged to transfer the condemned pair immediately to the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, the state capital located between Kansas City and St. Louis. Their execution had been set for “as soon as possible after 12:01 A.M. on December 18,” a Friday, Tatman told reporters. Exactly one month earlier, at 2:10 P.M., Friday, November 20, the Tatmans and Hall and Heady, accompanied by deputy marshals, left the Jackson County Jail for the three-hour drive across the state’s midsection.

  Built on a promontory overlooking the Missouri River, the penitentiary consisted of six red-brick cell blocks, nine factories, and assorted other buildings, all enclosed by turreted limestone walls. The original building, dating to 1839, had been the mansion of James L. Minor, the Missouri secretary of state, and had subsequently been remodeled and extensively expanded.

  Upon their arrival at the penitentiary, Heady exchanged her fashionable black dress, black short coat, and hat for a pale green cotton prison dress.

  “It fits better than what I had in Kansas City,” she said brightly.

  Hall took off the brown gabardine suit he had worn during the three-day trial, and was given beltless khaki trousers and a matching shirt.