The Kidnap Years:

by David Stout

  It was clear that the message sender was not highly educated. “We want axion now at once,” the message said. It was also clear that whoever had sent it had indeed abducted the minister. The message alluded to Dr. Seder’s red cane, which it said was in the kidnappers’ possession, and it described one of the blankets that had been ripped from the bed.

  Most ominously, it ended with a crude but clear threat: “Act at once and dont for get if you dont follow instructions you will not see him alive again.”

  The use of the U.S. mail, plus the considerable time that had elapsed since the victim’s disappearance, conferred jurisdiction on the FBI. Agent R. E. Vetterli (a survivor of the Union Station Massacre in Kansas City) was in charge of ten agents on the case, and he advised the family to cooperate and maintain contact. So the Seders put an ad in both city dailies: “PEG—Anxious to see you but haven’t enough money to make trip. Write and advise. Am waiting call—SALLY.”

  The ads brought no response.

  Arthur Ronk was used to the sounds of the woods at night. He was a farmer in Gragston Creek, a mountainside community in Wayne County. On the night of Wednesday, November 10, he thought he heard a man moaning in the dark. No, he thought. Probably an animal. Anyhow, sounds could carry considerable distances at night. No telling where the noise had come from.

  But even as he was about to fall asleep, the sound bothered Ronk. Haunted him, really. So the next morning, he fetched his nephew, Edgar Ronk, and the two of them set off along a road that Arthur thought might bring them close to where the sound had originated.

  On a wooded slope several feet from the entrance to an abandoned coal mine, they saw an old man. His body bore cuts and bruises, and he was mumbling incoherently. The Ronks found someone who had a car, and Dr. Seder was gently put inside for the trip to the little town of Wayne. There, a crowd had begun to gather.

  The old minister moaned and cried out as he was removed from the vehicle. It was clear from his blackened eyes and the cuts on his head that he had been badly beaten.

  Onlookers recalled this exchange between Dr. Seder and his son Willard:

  “Do you know me, Father?”

  “It’s Willard!”

  “Yes. You’re all right now, Father. Everything is all right. You’re going to be just fine. Arthur and all the family are in Huntington.”

  “Thank God! It is like Heaven to be here, Willard. It is like Heaven!”

  Taken inside, the minister asked for something to eat. An officer gave him milk to sip. “I was gagged and thrown in the mine,” he said. “It rained in there, and the stones were sharp.” He had been left tied up, able to capture some warmth by squirming into the bedclothes his captors took with them—bedclothes that became stained with his blood.

  Drawing on the last bit of his physical and spiritual strength, Seder freed himself from his bonds at last, crawling out of the cave and moaning for help—the sounds that Arthur Ronk heard at night and returned to investigate.

  Then the minister said something that stunned investigators: “I knew one of the kidnappers well. I can’t recall his name, but he lives in one of my apartments. He is bald-headed, and he gave me a check that was bad.”

  Immediately, lawmen knew the man they were looking for: Arnett A. Booth, forty-six, who lived around the corner from Seder and had indeed recently passed a bad check—one that Seder, with characteristic kindness, had made good on.

  Federal agents found Booth in his apartment, listening to the radio. Searching his apartment, agents found stationery and envelopes similar to the kind used to convey the ransom demands. Then the agents gave Booth a little quiz: write down what was in the first ransom message, they requested.

  Booth did—and wrote the non-word axion for action, as in the first message. When this was pointed out to Booth, he confessed—sort of. “Okay,” he said. “I sent the letter hoping to cash in on the minister’s kidnapping. But I had nothing to do with it.”

  At first, Booth said, he had no definite plan to get the money, although he recalled reading about a kidnapping case in Michigan in which the ransom bundle had been thrown from a car. He said he didn’t see the newspaper ads responding to the ransom demand, didn’t even look in the papers, as a matter of fact, since he had heard that the Seder sons had gone home.

  The story didn’t wash. It sounded like a spur-of-the-moment account cooked up by a criminal who wasn’t terribly bright, which was just what it was. So agents started questioning Booth again, and this time, he cracked, laying out the whole ugly episode on Friday, November 12. And he named two accomplices, Orville (Pete) Adkins and John Travis, both twenty-five, who lived in Huntington.

  The plot was inspired, as so many crazy ideas are, with the aid of alcohol. But maybe the plot didn’t seem crazy to the three comrades in crime. All had done jail time and seemed unable to make it in the real world, whatever that meant to them.

  “On November 1, while we were in various saloons drinking, Pete and I decided that we ought to make some money,” Booth recalled. They decided to enlist John Travis in their scheme.

  With a pint of whiskey for company, the three talked things over. Travis suggested blowing up a safe somewhere. No, Booth said. Kidnapping someone would be easier. Booth said he was sure Dr. Seder had a lot of money, especially for a minister, and could be parted from it.

  “We then had to think of a place where we could keep him,” Booth related. He said he knew of a log cabin at the confluence of three creeks in Wayne County. As for spiriting the minister from his home, Booth entered the place while the other two waited outside nearby. He confronted the old man in a hallway. Subjected to cajolery mixed with intimidation, Seder went with his treacherous tenant. A short time later, Booth picked up Adkins (his account did not make clear where Travis was) and headed for the hideout.

  By this time, Seder had grown increasingly suspicious and asked where they were going. “You’re being kidnapped,” Booth said.

  After one night in the cabin, Booth decided that the minister should be hidden in an abandoned mine where Booth had once worked. He explained that another accomplice whom he had recruited to guard the captive in the cabin had failed to show up.

  Meanwhile, Booth sent Adkins and Travis back to the minister’s home with the keys to the house and instructions to pick up any money they found (the minister said about $25 was on a shelf) and bring back bedding. The pair did as instructed and headed back to the mine after buying sandwiches and whiskey, none of which they shared with their captive.

  Just before dawn, the victim was taken to the old mine. Then Adkins and Travis headed back to Huntington with instructions from Booth to mail the letter demanding ransom and to return to the mine with food. Booth said he planned to stay at the mine hideout for several days. Instead, he rejoined his two accomplices in Huntington the very next day—and said that he had killed the minister.

  As Booth told interrogators, “I was of the opinion that Dr. Seder was either dead or dying at the time I left him.” Booth explained that he had thrown stones at the old man while he was in the mine, hitting him on the head, shoulders, and upper body and seeing no response.

  But James Seder had refused to die. Inspired by his faith, determined to be reunited with his sons, he had somehow survived and crawled out of the mine. As he was examined in the hospital, it became sadly clear how cruelly he had been treated. Besides being left to shiver in the cold dampness of the mine without food, he had suffered a broken nose. His right eardrum had been punctured. His entire left side was paralyzed, the result of a blood clot in his brain caused by blows to the head.

  Travis was arrested at the home of his mother just after returning from his honeymoon. He had gotten married three days after the kidnapping. Adkins was arrested in Kentucky at the home of a relative. Both defendants admitted taking part in the kidnapping but said they had been led into the endeavor by Booth, the ringleader. Besides, they said, they were drunk when events were set in motion. Later, they said they had planned to free
Seder on the second day after the kidnapping but had gotten drunk and forgotten their intention. State prosecutors announced that they would try the three defendants under West Virginia’s new law on kidnapping. It would be the first trial under the law. Modeled after the federal Lindbergh Law, the West Virginia statute provided for the death penalty even if the victim survived. And prosecutors were determined to gain death sentences.

  The prosecutors’ task was made easier early on the morning of November 15 when Dr. James Seder died.

  The case proceeded with remarkable speed. Booth went on trial first. He had no defense, really, as psychiatrists opined that he was not insane. (Just evil, perhaps?) On December 11, 1937, jurors took less than an hour to convict him. Four days later, a judge sentenced him to death.

  Perhaps Travis and Adkins hoped for mercy since they had been led into the whole mess by Booth and, well, they were drunk much of the time. Besides, they testified, they really had meant to free Seder, but again, they got drunk.

  Jurors were in no mood to show mercy. They took just forty-two minutes to find Travis and Adkins guilty. Knowing that they faced death, the two cried uncontrollably as they were led out of the courtroom.

  On March 21, 1938, the state prison in Moundsville, West Virginia, carried out its first executions for kidnapping and the state’s first triple execution in decades. Adkins and Travis went to the gallows first and together, since the scaffold could accommodate two at a time.

  Things didn’t go smoothly. As straps were being fastened about their arms and legs, a mechanical malfunction caused the trapdoor under Adkins to open before the noose was in place. He fell eight feet to the concrete floor below, cutting his head. Then he was hoisted back up through the open trapdoor for the final plunge. Both men offered prayers of a sort before they dropped.

  A short time later, Booth stood alone on the gallows. He prayed aloud that God would take care of Adkins and Travis. He asked for blessings on the warden and guards and prayed that the Lord would receive him. Surely, he knew that he was asking for more mercy than he had shown to an old minister.

  Then he dropped to his death.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  THE LUCKLESS ONE

  Holdenville, Oklahoma

  Wednesday, October 24, 1934

  He had come of age in the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma. He had never had much in life, and he didn’t expect much. He was a career criminal, though not a vicious one, and his name was Arthur Gooch. In the autumn of 1934, he was twenty-six, and he was soon to become one of the saddest figures of those hard times.

  On this particular Wednesday, he and another prisoner, Ambrose Nix, broke out of the jail in Holdenville, a little town in the east-central part of the Sooner State, along with several other prisoners. Gooch, who had been jailed to await trial on robbery charges, and Nix stole a car, drove south to nearby Texas, pulled off a robbery in Tyler the next day, then hoped to stay out of sight for a while.

  On November 26, they pulled into a service station in Paris, Texas, just south of the Oklahoma border. The car they had swiped had a flat tire. Wherever they were going, they needed good tires to get there.

  Maybe it was the flat tire, or maybe Gooch and Nix looked like the nickel-and-dime criminals they were. For whatever reason, two local cops who happened to stop at the station were suspicious. They approached Gooch and Nix to check the papers for the car. Immediately, there was a struggle. Nix knocked one of the cops into a display case. The glass on the case broke, and the cop suffered a minor cut on one hip. Nix managed to pull out a pistol, and he ordered the cops into the back seat of their patrol car. With Nix training his gun on the cops, Gooch went to the stolen car and retrieved the several weapons he and Nix had acquired.

  With Nix at the wheel and Gooch pointing a gun on the cops in the back seat, the patrol car sped off—fatefully, it would turn out—across the state line and into Oklahoma, first into Choctaw County then into Pushmataha County. The fugitives stuck to the back roads. The next night, some forty-two hours after seizing the cops, Gooch and Nix let them go after Gooch had dressed the hip injury one cop had sustained.

  And off went Nix and Gooch again, not to be heard from until late December.

  On December 22, several bandits robbed two banks in Okemah in east-central Oklahoma, netting about $17,000. Not surprisingly, the area was soon teeming with local, state, and federal lawmen. There was a farm whose owner was suspected of happily shielding criminals for money, so police and federal agents staked out the place, thinking the bank robbers might stop there.

  During the stakeout, a strange car drove up. Two lawmen drew their guns as two men got out of the car. Gunfire was exchanged, and one of the men who had just alighted from the car fell dead. He was not one of the bank robbers. He was Ambrose Nix. The other man was Arthur Gooch, who surrendered and was soon on his way to Muskogee, Oklahoma, where he was charged with automobile theft and with violating the Federal Kidnapping Act, since the police officers they had seized weeks earlier had been taken across state lines.

  No doubt, Gooch expected to go back to prison for a long stretch, a prospect that probably didn’t scare him. He had been committing crimes since dropping out of school after the sixth grade and had done several stretches behind bars. His misdeeds consisted mostly of robbery and theft.

  Maybe he even looked forward to resuming the prison life he was used to. He could be sure of three square meals a day, a routine he had never enjoyed in his life outside.

  Arthur Gooch was born on January 4, 1908. His father, James, was a member of the Muscogee-Creek tribe and his mother, Adella, was illiterate. James Gooch died when Arthur was eight, and Adella struggled to earn money as a laundress and pecan picker. Three of her seven children died. Eventually, the household included her widowed brother and his son and two daughters. Arthur became a petty thief early on, sometimes to bring money home to his mother.

  Oklahoma may have suffered more than any other state from the Depression and Dust Bowl. The unemployment rate in the state reached twenty-nine percent, wheat prices collapsed, and many people were hungry much of the time.*

  By his twenties, Arthur Gooch had married, fathered a son, and split with his wife, who tired of his stealing. But Gooch’s life path had been set. He continued to steal, shuttled in and out of jail, and when he was on the outside, was one of the first suspects the police looked for after a burglary or theft.

  And so his life went until he broke out of jail in Holdenville and he and Ambrose Nix took two cops hostage in Paris, Texas, and drove into Oklahoma.

  It is likely that Gooch did not understand, at least at first, the implications of crossing a state line. That act made him subject to the federal Lindbergh Law, which had recently been amended to provide for the death penalty if a jury so recommended. But a death sentence was not to be imposed if the kidnapped person or persons were released unharmed.

  But one of the kidnapped cops had suffered a cut in the struggle with Gooch’s partner in crime, Ambrose Nix, which under the law made Gooch just as guilty of inflicting that injury.

  When Gooch tried to plead guilty to the kidnapping charge, Federal Judge Robert Lee Williams wouldn’t let him.** The judge wanted to be able to impose the death penalty, which required a jury recommendation.

  It is impossible to know what influenced the judge and jurors. Few people in our time can appreciate the crushing poverty and everyday hardships endured by Oklahomans of that time. Kidnappings were being committed with dismaying frequency. Arthur Gooch was a fourth-rate citizen who seemed incorrigible, though he was not the kind of monster the drafters of the Lindbergh Law had in mind.

  Whatever the reason or reasons, the jury found Gooch guilty of kidnapping—not that there was any factual doubt—and recommended that he be put to death. Judge Williams was happy to oblige.

  After pronouncing the sentence, the judge asked Gooch if he had anything to say.

  “I think there have been worse crimes than mine, and I don’t see why I should hang,�
� Gooch said.188

  Gooch had a limited intellect, but he had a point. However, Judge Williams, who had earned a reputation for being tough on repeat offenders, responded that other juries had been “cowardly” in declining to recommend the death penalty. He said that it was “no pleasure for me to sentence a man to die but when they roam about the country like a pack of mad dogs, killing and robbing and kidnapping, I am going to do it.”

  Governor E. W. Marland of Oklahoma applauded the sentence, expressing the hope that it would help to “exterminate the kidnappers.” President Roosevelt declined to commute the sentence. His attorney general, Homer Cummings, praised the judge for doing his part in the “national battle against crime.”

  Gooch’s appeals went nowhere, and he climbed the steps to the gallows on Friday, June 19, 1936. “It’s kind of funny—dying,” he said. “I think I know what it will be like. I’ll be standing there, and all of a sudden everything will be black, then there’ll be a light again. There’s got to be a light again—there’s got to be.”189

  Just before the trap door was released, he offered farewell advice to his six-year-old boy: “Don’t get into any trouble, son.”190

  Gooch’s hard luck persisted to the end. The executioner was used to throwing the switch on the electric chair, but he was unaccustomed to carrying out hangings, the federal method for executions at the time. He mistimed the trapdoor release, and Gooch slowly strangled, becoming the only kidnapper put to death under the Lindbergh Law who had not killed a victim.***

  *I wish to express my gratitude to Leslie Tara Jones, whose 2010 thesis about Arthur Gooch and the Oklahoma of his era, was invaluable to me. Ms. Jones submitted her thesis for a master of arts degree in history from the University of Central Oklahoma.