by David Stout
Investigators who conferred with the postmaster concluded that the letter was probably from a crank. But the letter couldn’t be ignored, especially since on the lower left corner, there appeared to be a rough diagram of three roads and a curved line. Did the curved line depict a section of the Mississippi River? Platoons of investigators searched both banks of the river, paying special attention to irregularities in the snow.
Nothing.
Then Joseph B. Keenan, the assistant attorney general spearheading Washington’s drive to combat kidnapping, made an especially tactless remark that deepened the family’s ordeal: “In the Bremer case we may have the misfortune of experiencing another Lindbergh situation.”124
Magee, who had become the intermediary between the kidnappers and the Bremer family, pledged publicly that the family would let the kidnappers have a free hand—if only they would release their victim unharmed.
Edward Bremer had been thoroughly traumatized. The men who’d seized him had pistol-whipped and punched him repeatedly. They had slammed a car door on his legs when he’d tried to break away. He’d been pushed down under the dashboard of the kidnappers’ car for a time as he was driven hundreds of miles.
Somewhat reluctantly and emphasizing that he wouldn’t have been roughed up if he hadn’t resisted, his captors let Bremer clean himself up. Then they put mercurochrome on his wounds. Bandages were applied, some over his cuts, others over his eyes to blindfold him. Cotton was stuffed into his ears.
He was forced to sit on a bed facing the wall in a gloomy room. He was determined to remember as much as he could. He concentrated on the pattern of the wallpaper. He listened to the voices in the house, up to a dozen different ones at one time or another. He heard dogs barking. He heard cars outside occasionally—but no streetcars. So, he reasoned, I’m not way out in the country, but I’m not in the heart of a city either.
Most intriguingly, Bremer heard chimes from a church—not bells, but chimes. Twice a day, they played the “Angelus,” a song he recalled from his youth. He tried to remember all the sounds. He hoped they would be useful if he were freed. And concentrating on something, anything, was a way to keep from going mad with terror.
He wrote a dozen notes to his family, trying to be reassuring. But in a note specifically to his father, he made it clear that captivity was an ordeal, and he asked for quick action to free him.
The kidnappers, in messages accompanying Bremer’s notes, warned that the ransom demand would be raised to $500,000 if the initial $200,000 demand were not paid quickly. In fact, the family was eager to pay up to get Bremer back. Early on, Magee was instructed to take the $200,000 to a hotel in Des Moines, Iowa. He was to travel by bus. Unfortunately, the money was in a bank vault at the time, secured by a time lock, so the bus trip had to be canceled.
Finally, an arrangement was made. Magee would rendezvous at night with one or more of the kidnappers at a point on a road near Zumbrota, Minnesota, a little town fifty miles south of St. Paul. On the designated night, Magee drove for miles into the darkness until he saw blinking headlights and four red lantern-like lights by the road—the signal. He stopped, encountered two men, and gave them two cardboard packages with the money.
The kidnappers had let Bremer know that they were honorable people, in a sense. They told him that a rival gang had offered to “buy” him so they could extort money from the Bremer family. But don’t worry, the kidnappers told Bremer with perverse pride. We’ll keep our word.
On the night of Wednesday, February 7, 1934, Bremer was stuffed into a car in the company of three kidnappers. He dared to hope that his ordeal was ending. By this point, time and distance had lost all meaning for him. After traveling on a paved highway, the car pulled onto a gravel road. Two of the kidnappers got out, removed cans full of gasoline, and refueled the car. Then they drove back to the paved highway to continue the journey.
Finally, Bremer was put out of the car at Rochester, Minnesota, about eighty-five miles south of St. Paul. He made his way home by train and bus, still bruised and dazed. Given the hours that Bremer had spent in the kidnappers’ car after he was seized, investigators speculated that he might have been driven to Kansas City, Missouri, some 440 miles due south of St. Paul. After all, Kansas City had a vibrant mob presence, and the kidnappers surely could have found accommodations there.
But they would have been welcome in Sioux City, Iowa, as well. Some 280 miles southwest of St. Paul, Sioux City had a population of about eighty-five thousand and was known informally as “Little Chicago” because of its thriving beer businesses during Prohibition.
But what about the chimes Bremer recalled hearing during his captivity? How many Catholic churches were there within a radius, say, of three hundred or four hundred miles of St. Paul that chimed out the “Angelus” twice a day? Maybe that was an angle worth pursuing.
Only hours after Bremer returned safely to his home, agents had more concrete clues to go on. The clues had practically been gift-wrapped for them—and their discovery made it clear that while the kidnappers of Edward Bremer were nasty, violent men, they were not particularly intelligent.
In retracing the route taken by Magee to rendezvous with the kidnappers, agents found four flashlights fitted with red lenses next to the road several miles south of Zumbrota, Minnesota. The flashlights bore the trademark “Merit Product.” Checking the outlets where flashlights of that type were sold, the agents found that one outlet was the F. & W. Grand Silver Store in St. Paul.
Meanwhile, on February 10, a farmer near Portage, Wisconsin, found four empty gasoline cans and a tin funnel by the side of a road near his spread. He turned them over to the local sheriff, who turned them over to FBI agents, who immediately sent them to Washington for testing.
A clerk at the Grand Silver Store was shown a photograph of a man whose criminal exploits throughout the region were well known. Yes, she said. That was the man who bought the flashlights. His name was Alvin Karpis. His nickname was “Creepy,” perhaps because of his eyes, which glittered with malevolence, and his pouty, mean lips.
The kidnappers’ carelessness in leaving the flashlights and red lenses at the ransom-drop site was a big break for investigators. Had the kidnappers taken the flashlights and lenses with them, it probably would have taken much longer to trace the purchase to the Grand Silver Store.
And back came the results from the FBI laboratory in Washington. Its vaunted fingerprint unit had lifted a latent print from one of the gasoline cans. It had been made by the right index finger of one Arthur “Doc” Barker, whose fingerprints were in the FBI’s collection because of his earlier arrests.
Feeling intense heat, members of the Barker-Karpis gang began darting hither and yon across the country, occasionally recruiting quack doctors to perform makeshift plastic surgery. Some gang members ventured as far as Cuba. The big showdown would come in a remote rural part of Florida where people coexisted with alligators and coral snakes.
But before that happened, a veritable feast of crime news (and entertainment!) would be served up almost daily.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
A GAMBLER FOLDS HIS HAND
Chicago
Early 1934
Verne Sankey knew all the clichés of gambling; he lived by them. You have to play the hand you’re dealt; you have to know when to hold and when to fold. It was neither fair nor unfair if you were dealt three bad hands in a row—or three good ones. It was what it was.
But there was one gambling cliché he failed to heed: quit while you’re ahead.
He had pulled off the kidnapping of Haskell Bohn, the son of a refrigerator tycoon, in St. Paul, Minnesota, the previous summer. No one had been hurt, and the operation had netted a decent profit. He probably should have bowed out of the kidnapping racket right then.
But no. He had gone to Denver and masterminded the kidnapping of Charlie Boettcher in February 1933. The Boettcher family was wealthier and more influential than the Bohns, so it should not have come as a surprise t
hat the Denver kidnapping generated much more heat. Plus, the operation was accompanied by a shootout with the police.
Sankey had become a trophy for ambitious lawmen. But it wasn’t all his doing! He’d had nothing to do with the kidnapping of William Hamm, even though the newspapers had all but declared him guilty in that snatch. And the fact that Charlie Boettcher and Charles Lindbergh were friends had stirred whispers that Sankey might even be involved in the Lindbergh kidnapping. Yes, he was a gambler, bootlegger, robber, and kidnapper, but he was no killer. The very idea that he could have killed a child must have wounded him deeply, for he was a husband and father, a family man.
All right, he was not a perfect family man. He’d fled to Chicago to lie low, and he’d been lonely. So he’d taken up with another woman. After all, he didn’t know when he’d be reunited with his wife, Fern, if ever. He tried to build a new life for himself in the Windy City.
Sankey had read newspaper reports about himself, in particular articles describing three prominent moles on his face. So one day in January 1934, he had a doctor remove them with an electric needle. Then he grew a beard, as the removal of the moles had made him unable to shave. By this time, he had become a regular at John Mueller’s barbershop at 4823 North Damen Avenue in the city.
A sharp-eyed Chicago woman who lived in the neighborhood had spotted him on the street more than once, entering or leaving the barbershop. She remembered Sankey’s photographs in the newspapers and called the FBI’s Chicago office. This time, the occasionally dense Melvin Purvis listened alertly. He visited the barbershop and showed a photo of Sankey to the proprietor. “Yes,” Mueller said. “That’s one of my regulars. His name’s W. E. Clark.”
“No, it isn’t,” Purvis told the barber. “It’s Verne Sankey. We’ll be watching for him.”
Purvis assigned several agents and handpicked Chicago cops to stake out the shop. This they did, day after frigid Chicago day. Nor did night guarantee a respite. There was a funeral parlor next door to the barbershop, and some agents slept in coffins so they could awake refreshed and in time to watch the barbershop from the moment its doors opened.
On Wednesday, January 31, Sankey entered the barbershop, looking uncharacteristically sloppy in a baggy suit. He wanted a haircut. As he sat nestled in the chair with a sheet around him, three federal agents and three Chicago detectives walked in. Two detectives approached Sankey, one on each side, and pressed the muzzles of their handguns against his head.
“Don’t move, Verne,” said Sergeant Thomas Curtain. “We’re police officers. You’re under arrest.”125
Sankey surrendered meekly. When investigators searched the apartment where he had been living, not far from Wrigley Field, they found some $3,500 in cash, a shotgun, two pistols, and a supply of ammunition.
Under questioning, Sankey—who had somewhat improbably been pronounced “Public Enemy No. 1” by the Justice Department, largely because of the speculation linking him to several unsolved kidnappings—readily admitted to having snatched Haskell Bohn and Charles Boettcher, but he denied any part in the kidnapping of Edward Bremer. And he became indignant at the merest suggestion he might have been involved in the Lindbergh kidnapping: “I am a man. I would kidnap a man. I would never kidnap a child.”126
The Justice Department seized jurisdiction and made plans to ship Sankey to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to have him answer first of all for the kidnapping of Charles Boettcher, who had been transported across state lines, giving Washington jurisdiction in the case. Sankey’s wife was already jailed in Sioux Falls awaiting trial for conspiracy in the Boettcher case (she had been acquitted earlier in the Haskell Bohn kidnapping).
Manacled and escorted by several agents, Sankey made the journey to Sioux Falls by train. People who knew Sankey were aware that he had vowed never to go to prison, that he could not stand the thought of his two children growing up with a jailbird for a father. Perhaps these people should have spoken up, should have told the authorities that Sankey had a personal code of honor.
On the night of February 8, 1934, Sankey freed himself from his captors. Careless jailers had failed to confiscate the two neckties he had with him in his cell. These Sankey fashioned into a noose, put the loop around his neck, fastened the other end of the ties to a crossbar, and stepped off his cot.
Sankey’s new widow screamed for an hour after hearing of her husband’s suicide.
Charlie O’ Brien, a Denver Post reporter who had followed Sankey’s career, injected no compassion into his writing. “While this notorious outlaw and kidnapper was running loose with a gun preying upon unarmed victims, he obtained the undeserved title of being a ‘desperado with nerve and bravery.’ Sankey took the easy way out—suicide—leaving his widow and two children, Echo, 15, and Orville 5, to make their way thru life alone.”127
Two days after the suicide of Verne Sankey, one of his accomplices, Gordon Alcorn, began serving a life term in federal prison for the kidnapping of Charles Boettcher. On his way to Leavenworth, he offered advice to young people tempted to embark on a life of crime: “Look into the future first. Try to see the terrible consequence and then avoid what I am facing now.”128
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
The Bronx, New York
Wednesday, February 14, 1934
New York City was shivering in a cold wave. The previous Friday, February 9, the mercury had fallen to fifteen below zero in Central Park, the coldest reading ever in New York City. Now, on this Ash Wednesday and Saint Valentine’s Day, there was some relief, relatively speaking. It was three degrees at 8:30 in the morning; the temperature would top out around twenty in midafternoon.
Arthur Koehler and New Jersey Detective Lewis Bornmann visited another Bronx lumberyard and building-supplies company, Cross, Austin & Ireland, hoping to trace the origin and sales history of the Douglas fir that the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby had used to fashion some parts of his ladder.
This time, they seemed to be lucky. This lumberyard kept scrupulous records. Koehler and Bornmann asked to see information on transactions from the previous three months.
“Certainly,” said Arthur Tinker, secretary of the company. “And let me say you’re lucky you don’t have to copy the list of what we sell when times are good.”
Just then, something strange occurred. As Koehler and Bornmann sat waiting in the lumberyard office, two men entered. One offered a ten-dollar gold certificate to buy a forty-cent piece of plywood.
“Do you have anything smaller?” cashier Alice Murphy asked. She had been warned to be on the lookout for counterfeit gold bills. Genuine ones were being withdrawn from circulation and were therefore becoming scarce.
The man who wanted the plywood snatched back the gold certificate as Alice Murphy was scrutinizing it and pulled out a five-dollar bill. The cashier went to the rear, near the little cubbyhole where Koehler and Bornmann were sitting, to open the safe so she could change the five-dollar bill for five singles.
When the cashier returned to the counter, the second man said, “Never mind. I have the change.” Whereupon he plunked down forty cents. Then the man who had wanted to buy the plywood took the five singles from the bookkeeper, and both men started to leave. There are conflicting accounts on whether they abandoned the plywood altogether or said they’d return to pick it up after it had been cut to a certain size.
Both the yard foreman and Alice Murphy thought the men’s behavior odd, so much so that Alice Murphy wrote down the license number of the small green car in which they drove away: 4U-13-41. But neither the foreman, who recalled one of the men as a previous customer, nor Alice Murphy thought to mention the encounter to Detective Bornmann and Arthur Koehler. And why would they have? The investigators, guided perhaps by an excess of caution and discretion, had chosen not to tell the people at the lumberyard that they were investigating purchases in connection with the Lindbergh kidnapping.
Looking back on the incident months later, Koehler recalled that his
Forest Service badge might have been visible beneath his overcoat. And Detective Bornmann—well, he might have looked like the cop that he was.
Had there been more communication, yard employees might have remarked to the investigators on the nervous departure of the men who had left the plywood behind, might have wondered aloud if the very presence of the investigators had scared the men away. Alice Murphy might have told the investigators that she’d written down the license number of the car.
If that had happened, the Lindbergh case might have been solved months earlier than it was. Reflecting later on that reality, Koehler wrote that the close encounter at the lumberyard “keeps me wondering at the endless repercussions of all men’s acts, that in a Niagara of mysteries pour down upon us unperceived, not understood, each day.”129
Koehler and Bornmann were never able to trace the path of the Douglas fir used in the kidnapper’s ladder. As for the car for which Alice Murphy wrote down the license number, it belonged to a man who lived in the Bronx. His name was Bruno Richard Hauptmann.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
A SORDID DENOUEMENT
St. Louis
February 1934
After almost three years, Dr. Isaac Kelley, St. Louis’s leading ear, nose, and throat specialist, had put his kidnapping ordeal behind him. At least the doctor had a good story to tell.
So, it turned out, did one Adolph Fiedler, a man hard to describe in a few words. He had been a justice of the peace in Maplewood, Missouri, where he distinguished himself by being indicted several times for soliciting bribes, accepting illegal fees, and perjury, among other things. But he was never convicted, a fact that said much about the administration of justice in St. Louis at the time.
By early 1934, Fiedler had money troubles. He ran a “recreation parlor,” consisting of a tavern, restaurant, pool hall, and dance floor, that was barely earning enough to keep food on his table. And Fiedler needed a lot of food, since his weight fluctuated from three hundred pounds or so to more than five hundred pounds.
