Throughout the execution, Father Evans and Father Bull continued to read prayers for the repose of the souls of the two prisoners.
Hall was declared dead at 12:12 A.M., December 18, 1953, and Heady two minutes later. After death was certain, the blowers were turned on, forcing the gas out through the exhaust pipe, and ammonium hydroxide was pumped in as a neutralizer to the lethal fumes.
Dr. William V. McKnelly, and his assistant, Dr. G. Donald Shull, first pronounced Hall and Heady dead unofficially by looking at the corpses through the window. As soon as guards determined that it was safe to go into the chamber, the two physicians entered wearing gas masks and gloves. They checked for Hall’s and Heady’s heartbeats and reflexes and officially pronounced them dead.
Dr. Shull explained to the press that death was caused by inhalation of the gas fumes, causing a block in the exchange of oxygen from the arteries to body tissue. The tissue died from anoxia, with the central nervous system and the brain the first to be affected.
A quarter of an hour later, the bodies were removed, wrapped in plastic sheets—similar to the one, as several witnesses remarked, that Hall and Heady had wrapped Bobby’s lifeless body in when they buried him.
Norbert O’Neill, the friend and business associate of Robert C. Greenlease, Bobby’s father, was one of the witnesses, and had to avert his eyes when the cyanide was released into the chamber.
“But the thing that kept me going through the whole ordeal was the picture before my eyes of Bobby struggling with those two horrible creatures,” he later told a reporter.
Robert Ledterman, who had helped to deliver the ransom money, was not a witness. Earlier in the day, he had sent word to the authorities of his decision to decline the invitation.
Reporters asked Warden Eidson if prison officials had administered sedatives to Hall and Heady before they were led to the gas chamber.
“It may be done in some institutions,” he replied, “but definitely it is not done in ours.”
The three newsmen permitted to witness the execution were Larry Hall, chief of the Associated Press bureau in Jefferson City; Ward Colwell, chief of the southwestern division of United Press, Kansas City; and James Kilgallon, a writer for the International News Service. They briefed the other members of the press—nearly one hundred in all—in the prison garage near the administration building immediately after the execution.
Other witnesses included Bernard Brannon, Kansas City chief of police; Arvid Owsley, sheriff of Jackson County; and George D. Spence, a North Kansas City patrolman who was one of Hall’s guards in Kansas City. All had been invited by Tatman. Hall’s witnesses, in addition to Father Evans, Hoag, and Dietrich, included R. C. Travis of Odessa, Missouri, who several years previously had traveled to California with Hall; Robert Moore of Kansas City; and Gerald Livingston, another North Kansas City patrolman who had guarded Hall. Heady’s witness list contained only two names: Harold Hull and Father Bull, her legal and spiritual counselors.
Dietrich, who had visited his client the day before the execution, told reporters that Hall insisted that he had revealed everything he knew about the missing ransom money. “ ‘Nobody got the money away from me until I was arrested,’ ” he quoted Hall as saying.
Dietrich also said that a prison matron posted outside Heady’s cell told him that the prisoner “inspires me with her courage—with the apparent belief she has that she will go serenely to pay the price.”
Father Evans, who was with the couple until the last, also confirmed for reporters that Hall and Heady were both “absolutely and completely reconciled. They were equally calm.”
“She was upset because she couldn’t look her best,” Father Bull added. “She was disturbed because she couldn’t wear fine clothes, because she had no fingernail polish, and because her hair was not the way she would have liked to have it.”
Marshall Hoag, the lawyer from Pleasanton, Kansas, who had come to claim Hall’s body, and who witnessed the execution, told reporters, “I never saw such resignation. It was wonderful. Wonderful to really accept Christ like that.”
Sammy Reese, now the sole occupant on death row, went back to sleep an hour after the execution. His sentence was later commuted to two consecutive life terms.
At midnight, a traffic jam had formed outside the prison as curiosity seekers gathered to watch. Highway patrolmen and auxiliary police spent fifteen minutes dispersing the crowd. An hour later, two hearses removed the bodies to the Buescher Funeral Home, about three blocks away. By now the streets in Jefferson City were virtually empty.
Prison officials also inspected Hall’s and Heady’s cells in B building. As Reese dozed, they entered cell number 25, where Hall had spent his last hours. Several paperbacks lay on the green-and-black-striped mattress, including I, the Jury and The Big Kill, two murder mysteries by Mickey Spillane, a favorite author of Heady (she and Hall had exchanged several books); Sartoris, by William Faulkner; Excuse It, Please! by Cornelia Otis Skinner; and, under the mattress, God Goes to Murderer’s Row, sent to Hall by a St. Louis woman who admonished him in an accompanying note to read it. The author was M. Raymond, OCSO, a Trappist monk. The dust jacket copy read in part: “The hound of Heaven stalks the death house in pursuit of the soul of a modern Dismas in this true story of a doomed criminal who found God in the solitude of a prison.” Also under the mattress were a black leather-bound copy of the New Testament and a ream of ruled notebook paper, which Tatman quickly picked up and flipped through.
“There’s nothing in here,” he announced. “Just blank papers.”
“The tiny room, with painted yellow walls, like the others, and harshly lighted,” still seemed almost occupied, noted one of the visitors, reporter James Scott of the Star. “A tooth brush, a comb, and two pencils were on the wash basin. A fresh tube of toothpaste was beside them.”
Heady’s cell, by contrast, revealed a hitherto unknown talent for art. On the wall next to her cot, she had drawn a two-foot figure of a baseball player wearing an old-fashioned uniform with striped socks. “The player had a magnificent mustache and bristling hair,” Scott recorded. “His right hand grasped a heavy baseball bat, which touched an imaginary ground-line, and his left hand held a baseball over his head, ready to throw.”
Facing the ballplayer, three feet away, was a two-inch profile of a dark-haired woman.
The crude mural seemed to suggest a visual parable about the relationship of Hall and Heady—he the all-powerful athlete, and she the small, insignificant object that mighty Casey had launched into space in his quest to hit a home run.
Colonel Hugh H. Waggoner, superintendent of the state highway patrol, had taken a portable radio into the death chamber as a security precaution. Radio contact was maintained with the prison yard, the deputy warden’s office, and the contingent of patrol officers. As the execution moved toward its consummation, Waggoner advised his various posts of the progress. When he sent word that Hall and Heady were dead, several newsmen who had stationed themselves in patrol cars to hear the first reports dashed the fifty yards to the nearest phones to be the first to tell their editors that the notorious kidnappers were dead.
Warden Eidson later remarked that he thought everything went off smoothly. The executions were the eighth and ninth that he had conducted in the four and a half years he had held his position.
“It’s a job I hate to do,” he said, “but I wouldn’t ask anyone else to do it for me.”
Mrs. Tatman noted that she had planned to say something to Heady after she was strapped in, but “everything was going so smoothly I was afraid to for fear I would say something wrong.”
She also said that she had not noticed any change in Heady’s demeanor or attitude on the last day of her life.
“She told me that she knew I didn’t like my job,” Mrs. Tatman said, “but I had to do it. She thanked me. She also told me that she knew she had made a mistake and would have to pay for it.”
Mrs. Tatman said that, considered as an individual and
not as someone who had committed a murder, Heady seemed like a nice person. “She was very interesting to talk with and seemed to be an intelligent woman.”
It was also revealed that both Hall and Heady had written letters of apology to the Greenlease family. The full text of Heady’s letter to the boy’s parents read:
Mr. and Mrs. Greenlease,
I doubt if this letter will do much good, but there isn’t anything we could do or say that would atone for our mistake. I do hope it helps a little.
I would give anything if I could go back to that Sunday in September and erase everything that has happened since. It all seems like a nightmare to me.
We have always known that we would have to pay, but that doesn’t return Bobby, but if it gives you satisfaction, then we won’t be giving our lives in vain.
I don’t say I don’t enjoy money, as everyone does, but that was not my motive. I could have been very very happy with Carl living in my house as I had been, but he had been used to more money. My case was loving not wisely, but too well. I wanted so much for him to be happy.
I never realized that Bobby would be such a sweet child until it was too late.
I am not trying in any way to make any excuse for my actions. As I don’t have any, but I think anyone will find if you drink from one to two fifths of whisky a day for a year and a half that your brain doesn’t function properly. Since I have been in jail is the first time I’ve been able to reason clearly for some time.
I would like for the sisters to know I am sorry too, as their’s is a wonderful faith.
I hope as time goes on it will help heal your hurt and that you find peace.
Yours resp.
Bonnie Heady
Heady was apparently referring in her letter to Sunday, September 27, when she and Hall supposedly finalized their plan to abduct Bobby Greenlease from school.
Hall’s letter, written while the trial was in progress, was addressed to Robert Greenlease. He asked Dietrich to deliver it; but the lawyer felt that it was more prudent to wait until after the execution to make it public. “It was purely a letter is all it amounted to,” Dietrich explained. In fact, though, Hall asked for forgiveness in the letter, and declared that he did not know where the missing ransom was. Robert Greenlease apparently believed him, and told reporters, “I no longer wonder if he buried it before his arrest.” He also agreed with Father Evans that Hall seemed to express genuine contrition. “His statement has the ring of truth,” Greenlease said.
Virginia and Robert Greenlease had not stayed up on the night of the execution to await word on the kidnappers’ deaths, but had gone to bed early.
On the day after the double execution, indicted patrolman Elmer Dolan remained in custody in the Jackson County jail, where Heady and Hall had been incarcerated, in default of a $25,000 bond.
Heady was buried in a quiet, brief ceremony on December 19 in a cemetery in Clearmont, Missouri, north of Maryville, where she had graduated from high school. The ten-minute service was conducted in a graveside tent. Earlier that morning, Nellie Baker had gone to the Price Funeral Home in Maryville with a friend, Hester McQuate. Both women had been living in Heady’s home in St. Joseph since the body of Bobby Greenlease was disinterred. The two women were briefly allowed to view Heady’s remains. She had been dressed for burial in a beige-colored suit with a brown flower design, and a brown scarf.
Others at the graveside service included Harold Hull and his wife, and Heady’s uncle, Ed Clutter. Though she had many acquaintances in the area, and her ex-husband had been a successful livestock dealer who traded in Maryville, no one she had known in her former life showed up. Only a few spectators were on hand, and everyone was dry-eyed and silent. Baker, McQuate, and Clutter sent four sprays of flowers. The Reverend Franklin Kohl, pastor of the First Christian Church in Maryville, officiated. Heady had attended services at the church when she was a student at Maryville. After quoting some lines from the Bible, he read several lines from the poem In Memoriam, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:
O, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;
That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroy’d,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete; . . .
Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall,
At last—far off—at last, to all
And every winter change to spring.
Heady’s plain, bronze-colored steel casket was then lowered into the ground. Her grave lay next to that of her father, beneath two pine trees on the top of a hill. Visible across the valley was the farmhouse where she was born.
Just minutes after midnight that same day, a hearse from the Torneden Funeral Home in Pleasanton, Kansas, arrived at the Buescher Funeral Home in Jefferson City. Around five o’clock that morning it departed for the return trip. When the hearse arrived in Hall’s hometown, Hall’s body was transported to the hamlet of Turning Point, a short distance away. Marshall Hoag, city marshal John S. Fletcher, postmaster Lawrence Leisure, merchant Francis James, and retired telephone company executive Samuel Tucker served as pallbearers. The Reverend William O. Pfeiffer, pastor of the Pleasanton Presbyterian Church, officiated at the graveside service. Attending were Amos Hall, the eighty-three-year-old uncle of Carl Austin Hall, and two other relatives. Hall’s body was interred beneath a one-ton granite tombstone on which was engraved simply the name “Hall.” He was buried beside his father, mother, and brother. Nearby stood the granite obelisk commemorating the Marais des Cygnes Massacre that his grandfather Austin Hall had survived by pretending to be dead.
On December 29, the grand jury in Kansas City indicted Shoulders for perjury. Judge Richard Duncan, who received the indictment, set bond at $10,000.
10.
The Greenlease Curse
On the morning of New Year’s Day 1954, former Cuckoo Gang member John “Buddy” Lugar was shot to death on a lonely road outside Madison, Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. Just two hours earlier, at 6 A.M., he had gone to the Paddock, a notorious East St. Louis bar owned by Frank “Buster” Wortman. Wortman, one of the most powerful and ruthless underworld figures in the St. Louis area, lived in Collinsville, Illinois, in a house surrounded by a moat.
St. Louis police had recently questioned Lugar, an associate of Costello, about the missing Greenlease ransom money. He had spent New Year’s Eve at a bar on St. Louis’s DeBaliviere Strip, known for its nightclubs and bar girls. The police were investigating a report that the money was taken to a room maintained at the Roosevelt Hotel near downtown St. Louis by an associate of Lugar, who lived in the hotel. He had previously been part owner of the nearby Capitol Bar; June Marie George, Shoulders’s landlady, had negotiated to buy it, but the sale fell through.
A week later, on January 8, Shoulders pleaded not guilty to perjury charges in Kansas City, and posted bond. That same month, the FBI, in its ongoing search for the missing ransom money, announced that it was investigating Costello’s finances. He was deeply in debt, the bureau had learned, and within the past three years borrowed more than $70,000, using his home and business as collateral. Mrs. May Traynor, a longtime operator of notorious brothels, loaned him $41,000 of that amount. Inexplicably, the police had found a notation of Traynor’s address in the Arsenal Street apartment when Heady was arrested.
The unexplained circumstances behind Lugar’s assassination, and the address notation found in Hall and Heady’s rented apartment, are just two of many clues to a fathomless puzzle that, for more than a half-century, has defied solution: What happened to the $303,720 after Shoulders and Costello stole it, with the collusion of cabdriver John Hager and patrolman Elmer Dolan?
Did Hager contact Costello even earlier than on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 6? If Costello ha
d then immediately contacted Shoulders, one or both of them might have gone to see Heady. Hager knew the address from the moment he met Hall. Hall had handed him an envelope addressed to Esther Grant at 4504 Arsenal Street, and asked him to arrange to have it delivered to Heady by another cabdriver. Did Costello hope to put his hands on enough cash to immediately repay the ex-madam? Was Hall’s “hunch” that “Something’s wrong” when he insisted on immediately leaving the Coral Court the correct one, after all? Unable or unwilling to suspect Hager, a fellow ex-con, of betrayal, had he nonetheless accurately sensed—even given the fact that he was paranoid—that something was amiss?
Moreover, what was the meaning of the mysterious exchange between Heady and Food and Drug agent Roy Pruitt, on the day before her execution, when she told him that she could explain how they obtained drugs, and added, “Carl can tell you all about the money, too.” When Pruitt brought her into the corridor outside Hall’s cell, he had reportedly said to her, “Shut up. We have already talked too much. Remember, we never rat on a pal.” Back in her cell, Heady explained, “Carl and I have a pact. I cannot talk about the drugs or the money without his permission. And he has refused to give it to me. My lips are sealed.”
Heady had made the same boast to others, including St. Louis Globe-Democrat reporter Ted Schafers. Yet the only “pal” in Hall’s life before, during, or after the kidnapping was Hager. He had no other friend except for lawyer Bernard Patton, who was not a pal so much as a well-connected ally. But Hager had ratted on Hall, who would have regarded the cabdriver as a Judas after he contacted Costello. Or was the exchange between Hall and Heady merely an amusement they had improvised to bedevil the authorities, as many observers came to believe? If the testimony of two priests, seasoned defense lawyers Dietrich and Hull, Pleasanton lawyer Marshall Hoag, and assorted law enforcement and prison officials are to be credited, Hall and Heady were sincere in their repentance. Both seemed as genuinely puzzled as everyone else about what happened to the missing ransom. Heady’s guess was that Shoulders stole the money.
Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease Page 19