Undeterred, in 1948 Hall bought a new Buick and drove to California to pursue another business venture. He was accompanied by a friend who had some affairs of his own to look after, and went along for the ride. After the pair checked into a Los Angeles hotel, Hall simply disappeared for two weeks. The two men then drove back to Kansas City, stopping in Las Vegas along the way, where Hall won $1,500 at the craps table. He also bought a new Cadillac, though records showed that it was not purchased from the Greenlease Motor Company or any other Kansas City dealer.
Other ventures soon followed: a plan to pipe music into hospitals and sell earphones to patients; and two liquor stores in Bates County, Missouri, not far from Pleasanton.
Oppressed by Hall’s heavy drinking, Irene divorced him while he was in California in 1950. They had no children. She left him just before his money ran out. He had squandered his entire inheritance, mostly on drink and gambling, in less than five years.
On May 14, 1951, broke and desperate, Hall was arrested in Milwaukee for trying to sell a 1948 Oldsmobile without revealing to the prospective buyer that the car had a lien on it. He was charged with vagrancy, but after he returned the money the case was dismissed.
Sometime later he robbed a store in Kingman, Kansas, but charges were dropped after he was arrested a third time in Kansas City. With his last $20, he had bought a pistol and started robbing cabs. On September 16 of that year, police charged him with holding up eight cabdrivers. In each case, he politely displayed his gun to the driver, assuring him that he would not be hurt if he handed over the money. He was finally caught after stealing $10 from a cabbie, and then taking the cab. The police arrested him after a brief chase. When Hall reached for his pistol, patrolman William Peters knocked him down with a blow to the jaw. The series of thefts had brought him a grand haul of just $33.
Hall later confessed that he had previously cased the Plaza Bank of Commerce, and had gone back the next day—the day of his arrest—to rob it, only to discover to his dismay that it was closed on Saturdays. He was found guilty and sentenced to five years in the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City. He remained there for a year and three months, and was paroled on April 24, 1953.
During his stay in prison, Hall worked as a nurse and began reading medical textbooks. While lying on his bunk bed, he also fantasized about how to pull off a kidnapping, which he considered the easiest way to become wealthy again. He knew that the family of Paul Greenlease, his former classmate at Kemper Military School, was worth millions. Somewhere along the line—probably from reading newspaper accounts about Paul’s father, a respected community business leader and owner of several Cadillac dealerships—he also learned that the older Greenlease and his young wife were the parents of two school-age children. The Greenlease family seemed like a ready-made answer to his prayers.
The hospital dispensary gave Hall access not only to drugs, but also to textbooks that contained information a man contemplating murder might find useful—how quickly a body decomposes, for example. He later invited a cell mate to join him, but the convict declined.
“I’ll be driving Cadillacs when you’re carrying a lunch basket,” Hall sneered. Cadillacs lately were much on his mind.
Upon his parole, Hall went to St. Joseph, Missouri, where a local attorney, Bernard (“Barney”) Patton, found him a job as an automobile salesman. Patton had formerly done some legal work for Hall during several of his business ventures, and also helped secure his early release from prison. A chronic failure at just about everything he tried, Hall worked at several car dealerships in St. Joseph before he was fired for drinking. Patton then helped get him a job as an insurance salesman. Though Hall was not successful in that line of work either, he did manage to sell at least one policy—to a woman named Bonnie Brown Heady.
Hall and Heady met in the latter part of May 1953, about a month after he was released from prison, at the Pony Express bar of the Hotel Robidoux in downtown St. Joseph. The hotel was the city’s finest. Its bar—decorated in a Scottish tartan motif—was a popular gathering place, and its dining room similarly enjoyed a reputation as St. Joseph’s best.
Born on July 15, 1912, on a farm in Burlington Junction, Missouri, Bonnie Emily Brown was the daughter of French P. Brown, a prosperous farmer, and Mabel Clutter Brown. Her mother died when Bonnie turned two, and she was mostly raised by her maternal aunt and uncle, Nellie and Ed Clutter, who were sister and brother. Bonnie attended church as a child. Her former second-grade schoolteacher at the Hazel Dell school in Clearmont, Missouri, near the Iowa border, remembered her as a quiet, obedient girl with long black curls. During Bonnie’s high school years, Nellie often drove her niece into town to attend a basketball game, or a school party, and then waited for her in a Model T roadster. While attending Clearmont High School, Bonnie made the honors list in 1931, the year she graduated.
Like Hall, Bonnie enrolled in college after high school—in her case, Northwest Missouri State College in Maryville—and, like him, dropped out after only a few months. After taking a hairdresser’s course, she went to work in a beauty salon, and in June 1932, at the age of twenty, she married Vernon Ellis Heady, who became a successful livestock merchant. Among the couple’s pastimes were going to square dances, and showing and breeding pedigree boxers. Heady also became an accomplished horsewoman, and often rode her favorite palomino mare in parades on public holidays.
The Headys lived comfortably in a six-room, white-frame bungalow in St. Joseph that reflected the tastes of a well-to-do suburban couple—bookshelves stacked with about two hundred bestsellers and detective novels; dozens of figurines and bric-a-brac; trophies won by Heady’s boxers. The dining room was furnished with an antique dresser; and a flattering charcoal drawing of a younger Heady, dated 1941, hung on a wall. The closets were jam-packed with hundreds of dresses, and her dressing table was crowded with thirty-five perfume bottles and nearly one hundred pieces of costume jewelry.
But the marriage was childless—due to Vernon Heady’s brutal insistence that Bonnie have eleven illegal abortions because he did not want children. Bonnie once confided to a friend that she had wanted children in the early years of her marriage, but later began to dislike them intensely.
In 1948, Heady’s father died and she inherited $44,000 and a 316-acre farm north of Maryville from his estate. By then, her marriage had broken down, and she mostly preferred to stay at home alone, drinking. Apparently, during this time, she also suffered a mental breakdown. Occasionally, she showed up drunk at a dog show. Once, she cursed a neighbor for allowing a dog to enter her well-tended backyard. In a 1951 competition, she won third prize as best-dressed cowgirl.
In September 1952, Heady sued for divorce on grounds of adultery, alleging that her husband left home for long periods of time and refused to say where he was going, or where he had been. In her presence, she further claimed, he was “sullen and morose.” When the divorce was granted the following month, she received the couple’s blue-shuttered house at 1201 South 38th Street in the settlement. Soon afterward a strange man moved in with her. Neighbors began to complain of loud parties and suspicious-looking visitors. The local sheriff’s office twice sent deputies to investigate disturbances.
Heady and her male companion also remodeled a spare bedroom on the second floor into a dimly lit barroom, replete with a cabinet well stocked with Old Stagg whiskey, photographs and four large posters of nude women on the walls, a slot machine, a phonograph player and records, and, incongruously, a bookcase containing a complete set of the World Book encyclopedia. A large partitioned closet off the second floor contained the overflow of the four downstairs closets—even more expensive women’s clothing. A woman friend who had become disgusted with Heady’s behavior and had stopped seeing her, maintaining a tenuous relationship only by telephone, later recalled, “She had enough clothes to last a normal woman twenty-five years.” All had been bought at exclusive women’s shops in a variety of cities.
As she grew older and her youthful a
ppearance faded, Heady craved more and more clothing. Soon the money to buy it ran out, and there was scarcely enough to pay the utility bills. That was when she turned, as her erstwhile friend delicately phrased it, “to other ways of getting money.” Working as a prostitute out of her own home—even though she received rental income from her farm—Heady paid cabdrivers a $2 fee for each referral. She later estimated that she serviced about 150 men, charging $20 a trick. Occasionally, she also posed with another woman for pornographic photos.
On the morning of May 20, 1953, around the time she met Hall, Heady hired Maxine Richardson as a cleaning woman. Three hours later, while she was in the backyard burning trash, Richardson heard gunfire, went inside, and found a man lying in the middle of the floor, bleeding. Richardson got her coat and left. Local police soon arrived. Heady had shot the man, a traveling salesman from Maryville, where she still owned a farm, in the wrist. Both Heady and the man—a customer—had been drinking, and he had tried several times to extinguish a lit cigarette on her breasts. He declined to prosecute.
Heady’s favorite place to pick up customers was the Pony Express bar, and at first Hall was just one more in a very long line. And yet he was a little different from the others, too. On the day they met, Hall spent the night at Heady’s home. Just two days later, they began living as husband and wife. Hall told Heady that he was an ex-convict on parole from the Missouri State Penitentiary, but did not initially tell her that he had been convicted of armed robbery. He said that he had been imprisoned for insurance fraud. He wasted little time taking over as Heady’s pimp. His endearment for her was “Baby doll,” and she called him “Honey bunch.”
What kept them together was not mutual sexual attraction, since Hall continued to market Heady—his only capital—to potential johns. Yet Heady’s degradation and debasement only served to increase her emotional dependence on her new protector, pimp, and lover. She had reached rock bottom from a high place, and had no one else to turn to.
Hall, too, had run out of options, schemes, and daydreams—except for the one last long shot he had fantasized about while lying on his prison bunk bed. A not particularly discriminating user of other people, he saw in Heady the one indispensable ingredient he needed to make his grand kidnapping plan work—a pliable accomplice. Even though he needed her, he beat her regularly, but she always forgave him and took him back. Their common bond was whiskey. They also shared a near-hopeless mutual desperation, and such sociopathic or psychopathic indicators—particularly in Hall’s case—as chronic lying, an inability to feel remorse, frequent trouble with the law, extreme moodiness, paranoia, and so on, down a very long list.
Sometime in mid-June, after Hall had taken Heady’s measure, he revealed to her his plan to perpetrate a kidnapping. It was the one foolproof method, he explained, for obtaining a large amount of money quickly with a minimal chance of being detected. He also confided that the victim would be either the daughter or son of Robert C. Greenlease, a wealthy local automobile dealer.
At first, Heady dismissed the scheme as mere talk. But soon enough she came under the spell of his obsession, and what especially bewitched her was that he genuinely wanted her to be a part of his plan. He also promised to exonerate her of all blame if they were apprehended. Her ostensible cover story was that Hall had lied to her, telling her that the kidnapped child was his own from a previous marriage. Heady, as hard-bitten as Hall, did not require much persuasion. She was willing to do anything to keep him.
What Hall did not reveal in their early planning stages was that he intended to murder his victim. Nor did he suggest that the child, after he or she was murdered, might have to be buried in Heady’s backyard. He only boasted that Greenlease was a man of considerable wealth, and that “I intend to get a lot of it.”
In several phone calls to the Greenlease residence in Mission Hills, Heady—posing as a school official—talked to the maid, who told her the names and ages of the Greenlease children, what schools they attended, and other relevant information, including the fact that Bobby owned a pet parrot. Heady also learned that the family was vacationing in Europe until early September when school started for Bobby and his older sister, Virginia Sue.
On August 28, Hall took Heady’s station wagon to the Donaldson Radio and Electric Company in Kansas City and had a shortwave converter installed in the radio that made it possible for him to overhear police communications.
Early one September morning, two weeks before the kidnapping was actually to take place, Hall and Heady drove to the Greenleases’ ivy-fringed residence in Mission Hills and trailed the children’s father as he chauffeured them to school. They took careful note of the time he left the family home, and what time he dropped the boy off at the French Institute.
Hall even considered going to the Greenlease mansion—after ascertaining that Bobby’s father was at work and his mother away on an errand—and simply abducting the boy. He also still wondered whether he should abduct Virginia Sue instead. In fact, he nearly did seize the Greenleases’ daughter off a Kansas City street. Two weeks prior to the kidnapping, he and Heady tailed Virginia Greenlease as she picked up Virginia Sue at her school, and then drove to Country Club Plaza. After parking her Cadillac, Mrs. Greenlease entered a nearby drugstore. Possessed by a sudden urge, Hall got out of the station wagon and hurried over to the car, hoping to simply grab the girl as she waited for her mother to return. Instead, he saw that eleven-year-old Virginia Sue was, in fact, opening the car door to join her mother—and, furthermore, that she was much older and more mature than he had assumed from his earlier scouting expeditions. Then and there, he determined to kidnap the Greenleases’ younger and presumably much more malleable son.
As Hall and Heady continued to monitor the schedules of Bobby’s mother and father in the days leading up to the kidnapping, Hall mentioned more than once how incriminating it would be for the two kidnappers if Bobby could identify them after his release. The need to dispose of the boy soon after he was abducted was an insistent drumbeat in his conversation. “He’s evidence,” Hall warned her, again and again. By now, Heady had upped her whiskey consumption to two fifths a day, and was seldom if ever sober. She would later claim that she did not finally agree to murdering Bobby until the morning of September 27, the day before the actual kidnapping. But so many of Hall’s preparations laid the groundwork for both killing Bobby and disposing of his body that either she was simply dissembling, or more likely lost in such an alcoholic fog that she no longer knew or remembered what she had agreed to. Regardless, Hall had no doubt that, when the time came, he would prevail. Two other characteristics of the psychopath, which Hall had in spades, were deceitfulness and an ability to smoothly manipulate people. Heady never stood a chance.
To predispose and accustom her to the idea of killing Bobby, Hall sometimes liked to discuss the different ways a body could be hidden—all “hypothetically,” of course. One was to drop it into the Missouri River. The problem with that scenario was that the boy’s corpse might eventually float to the surface. As Hall reminded Heady again and again, the Greenlease family needed to believe during ransom negotiations that their boy was still alive.
He also suggested burying Bobby in a wood on the Kansas side of the state line. But when he took her to see the spot he was thinking of, bulldozers were already there, turning up earth, apparently preparing the land for a subdivision.
On September 10—in a clear indication that Hall already had every intention of murdering Bobby soon after he was kidnapped—he bought a fifty-pound bag of Ash Grove Veri-Fat lime for eighty-five cents from the Sawyer Material Company in Kansas City, and hauled it into Heady’s basement. Somewhere he had read that hot lime dissolved human flesh and bone.
Hall’s other purchases included a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver—a so-called banker’s special; a holster; and a box of cartridges from Uncle Sam’s Loan Office, a pawnshop located on Minnesota Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas. He also bought some ammunition for a .25 caliber revolv
er Heady owned—the same one she had used to shoot the john in the wrist some months earlier.
At a variety store in St. Joseph, Hall bought a pad of Hytone linen-finish stationery, for writing the ransom note. At a post office, he picked up some prepaid envelopes. By now he had decided on the amount of the ransom—$600,000, by far the largest ransom ever to be paid in America. In today’s money, that amount would be the equivalent of about $10 million.*
Hall had settled on that figure because he once read a magazine article that gave the weight and size of a package containing a million dollars in $10 and $20 denominations. A million dollars, he figured, would simply be both too bulky and too heavy. But $600,000 stashed in a large duffel bag would weigh between eighty and eighty-five pounds, and not be too unwieldy for a man of his size to handle without drawing attention to himself.
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*In 1968, kidnapper Gary Krist abducted Barbara Jane Mackle and buried her in a box near Atlanta, Georgia. She was freed after the family paid $500,000 in ransom. Krist was captured and sentenced to life in prison. In 1974, ex-convict William A. H. Williams and his wife, Betty Ruth, kidnapped Reg Murphy, an editorial writer for The Atlanta Constitution. Murphy was freed after the newspaper paid a $700,000 ransom. Williams was captured and given a forty-year sentence; his wife received a three-year suspended sentence.
In Rome in 1973, the family of J. Paul Getty paid kidnappers $2.9 million to ransom sixteen-year-old J. Paul Getty III, whose right ear had been sent to his family during his captivity. His kidnappers were never caught. The following year, Exxon paid $14.2 million to Marxist guerrillas in Argentina for the return of Victor Samuelson, manager of Esso Argentina. In 1975, the Bulgari family in Italy paid $16 million in ransom for the release of jeweler Giovanni Bulgari. He was released in Rome, and his kidnappers were never apprehended. Samuel Bronfman II, heir to the Seagram liquor fortune, was kidnapped in New York in 1976. The family paid a ransom of $2.3 million. The chief kidnapper turned out to be the young man’s homosexual lover. The kidnappers said young Bronfman had blackmailed them into the hoax as a way to extort money from his father. They were found innocent of kidnapping, but guilty of extortion.
Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease Page 3
