Sandra O’Day told investigators, as she had from the very beginning, that she and Hall did not have sex at the Coral Court. She was contradicted by Hager, who said that O’Day told him the two did have sex. Hall also insisted that he did not have sex with the prostitute, saying that both of them merely lay side by side on the bed. Both were so drunk, he claimed, that he did not even make a pass. Possibly, both Hager and Hall were telling the truth as they saw it. The cabdriver was, after all, O’Day’s pimp, and perhaps O’Day had only wanted to assure him during their ride together, after leaving the motel, that she had earned her money.
Once they settled into their cells at the Jackson County jail, Hall lapsed into sullen silence. Heady asked for a pencil so that she could work on a crossword puzzle, but her request was denied because she was classified as a “maximum security prisoner.” Instead she was given a comic book, Intimate Love, to read.
On October 19, the St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners launched a formal inquiry into the missing ransom money. Chief O’Connell told reporters that he doubted the entire amount had ever been brought to St. Louis. Astonishingly, the FBI had refused to provide the police department with copies of Hall’s and Heady’s full confessions, and O’Connell was unaware of Hall’s insistence that he had both suitcases in his possession when he was arrested. But police investigators did want to know why Shoulders had left the station house shortly after booking Hall. Mudd’s call had gone out at 9:32 P.M., soon after Hall was booked at 8:57 P.M., so where was Shoulders?
At first, O’Connell simply accepted as true the version concocted by Shoulders and Dolan about how they had brought two half-full suitcases into the station house when Hall was arrested. “It is hard for me to believe that any policeman would take that much money,” he told reporters. “I can see, if he had any larceny in his soul, he might pick up a package of $10 or $20 bills—but not $300,000.”
On the morning of October 19, Dolan gave a statement. The commissioners then went to the Town House to take photographs, measurements, and notes, and to examine the premises. That afternoon, Jean Fletcher, the manager of the Town House, testified. Dolan was then reinterviewed in Fletcher’s presence. Hager testified on the second day. All three witnesses kept to their original stories.
The police had originally announced that the board of inquiry would not question Shoulders, although he was credited with solving the case, because he was suffering from a nervous condition brought on by the investigation and subsequent inexplicable disappearance of the ransom. The detective’s physician explained that Shoulders needed rest, and that interviewing him might adversely affect his health. No doubt also adversely affecting Shoulders’s health was a blunt warning from Costello not to implicate him in the disappearance of the ransom.
Shoulders then abruptly changed his mind and, on the third day of the inquiry, agreed to testify. Asked about his whereabouts after booking Hall, he said he had driven his private car to his home to allow his landlady, June Marie George, to use it, because he expected the interrogation of Hall to last through the night. In his official report, he had made no mention of his absence from the station. He clashed bitterly with commissioner Herman Willer about a stakeout he claimed to be on, on the afternoon of Hall’s arrest. Shoulders refused to give information about the stakeout, saying that information was confidential. Other ranking officers said they had no knowledge of any such surveillance.
A few days later, on October 25, Shoulders angrily resigned from the force, saying that the police inquiry has ruined his reputation. In his letter of resignation he said, “After twenty-seven years as a police officer, to be castigated and have my character assassinated, on the heels of performing my duty with the highest sense of responsibility, is more than I can endure with any degree of self-respect and pride.”
For the first time, Shoulders also claimed that he had received a second tip that would have led him to the Greenlease kidnappers even if Hager had not telephoned him. But he emphatically refused to divulge the name of the informant. “I’ve never told anybody who it is. I haven’t told the FBI, and I never will tell anybody,” he said. Then he added, “It’ll be found out,” without explaining how.
The police department, however, refused to accept his resignation. That same day, the police arrested Hager, searched the house where his estranged wife lived, and questioned him for eight hours. The police revealed that they were acting on a tip that the missing money was buried in the Hagers’ basement. Shoulders suggested to reporters that, in his opinion, a group of local hoodlums—whom he did not identify—had gotten hold of the missing ransom. He discounted a theory that some of the ransom had been mailed to St. Joseph from an East St. Louis post office. A man had been reported mailing a heavy package to St. Joseph from that post office some days earlier. Police investigators had learned that Hall asked for a cardboard box when he purchased a radio soon after moving into his Arsenal Street apartment, and was pleased when the clerk presented him with a large one. The possibility that he had used the box to mail some of the ransom was just one of many false leads they were pursuing.
Hampering the police department’s investigation was the inexplicable refusal of the FBI to cooperate. Asked what kind of cooperation the department had received from the federal agency, Chief O’Connell bluntly replied: “Absolutely none.” He complained that FBI agents would not even tell him whether O’Day had been arrested.
On October 27, a U.S. grand jury in Kansas City began hearing evidence seeking an indictment against Hall and Heady. Robert C. Greenlease was the first witness. In all, about twenty-five witnesses were called to testify. The previous day, Shoulders had declared that he would refuse to testify on grounds that it would incriminate him; his resignation from the police force still had not been accepted. The next day, having changed his mind, he testified for three hours.
Shoulders had steadfastly refused to identify his second tipster, saying he would rather go to prison or die than do so. But in a secret session of the grand jury, he did admit that it was Costello, while continuing to maintain the fiction that Hager was his first tipster. “I was trying to find out [what happened to the money] and he [Costello] was trying to use the same sources,” Shoulders testified. “I have confidence in him and I think he was trying to find out about the money, but he could have misinformed me. I don’t want to make a forecast—he might be in on the deal. . . . I think if he had been in on a deal like this at first and then was informed by me what it was [a kidnapping], he would have backed away from it.” Shoulders told the grand jury that he no longer hoped to find the missing money and thought it had probably been burned.
Asked why he thought Costello had contacted him and not another officer, Shoulders replied, “I think he picked me because he drove a cab with me and had known me for a long time. I want to keep his name out. I don’t like to say this braggingly. He is an ex-convict and an associate of thieves and belongs to the underworld. He told me I was the only man he would deal with, and if I give my word I would live up to it.”
Asked if he suspected that his second tipster stole the money, Shoulders said, “I suspected he knew who stole it. I always suspected.”
When the St. Louis Post-Dispatch obtained a transcript of Shoulders’s testimony and revealed that Shoulders had identified Costello as the second informant, the mobster phoned the detective and insisted that he change his story and say it was someone else. Depressed, frightened, and altogether miserable, Shoulders complied, and told reporters that his second tipster was, in fact, not Costello but someone else.
Still in handcuffs, O’Day also testified, though she provided no new information to the grand jury. Reporters and photographers rushed into the corridor on hearing she would be brought from the Jackson County jail. In the courthouse, O’Day was identified as the former Mary Ann Melvin of Du Quoin, Illinois, and the former wife of Raymond Day.
Meanwhile, the mystery of Thomas Marsh remained unsolved. His father told reporters that he was convinced his s
on had been murdered. The older Marsh’s daughter, Rose Marie, informed the FBI that she was not even aware that she had a brother until the bureau began its investigation.
On November 1, less than a month after arresting Hall, and just a week after he resigned from the police department in anger at the Board of Police Commissioners, Shoulders and June Marie George flew to the island of Maui in Hawaii. Although they traveled under the assumed names of Sherman Woodlaw and Mrs. Mae H. Rossi, they were immediately recognized at the Honolulu airport. Shoulders told reporters, “I’m not Lieutenant Shoulders. I’m ex-Lieutenant Shoulders.”
Shoulders also said that he was “sick and tired” and “just fed up with talking about” the Greenlease case. Moreover, he was convinced that the missing $300,000 would be found, and emphasized that he would not have been so foolish as to steal it because it had “a red lantern on it.” On previous occasions, he had theorized that the ransom had been stolen by “hoodlums,” or had been burned.
“I got the kidnapper,” he said. “I got the gun. I didn’t get the money, but they’ll find it.”
On that same day, police and federal agents revealed they had established that Hall’s two suitcases were not brought into the Newstead station at the time of his arrest. The finding was considered a breakthrough, and was based on the testimony of several witnesses at the station at the time.
The trial of Hall and Heady began on the morning of Monday, November 16, fifty days after Bobby was killed, in federal court in Kansas City, with seventy-nine-year-old Judge Albert L. Reeves presiding.
That morning, just before proceedings began, Heady wrote to Clinton L. Allen, a monument dealer in Maryville, Missouri, whom her former husband had known for many years. Heady asked Allen to select a tombstone for her because “I might be needing it.” She also asked him to care for Doc, her registered boxer, describing it as a prizewinner at many shows, while also cautioning that it was a “meanie.” Allen maintained a dog kennel in addition to his monument business. She told Allen that she wanted to be buried at Clearmont, in Nodaway County, where she had been born forty-one years earlier.
In contrast to Heady’s quiet demeanor in her prison cell, said reporter Bill Moore of The Kansas City Star, “she is jaunty as she enters the courtroom. Her eyes sweep across the press tables, and she swivels her chair and glances back to the spectators. There is defiance in that glance. But it is plain that if there was someone—just one person—in the courtroom to smile and nod at her that she would be pleased to return the smile.” But there was no one to smile back at.
The trial lasted only three days, and the jury found both Hall and Heady guilty within eight minutes of convening in the jury room. Throughout the trial, every seat in the large, walnut-lined courtroom was filled, and many more spectators waited in the corridor.
The trial opened with the bailiff intoning, “God save the United States and this honorable court,” causing Heady to put her hand over her mouth to stifle a giggle.
In his opening statement, U.S. Attorney Scheufler described the kidnapping and murder of Bobby Greenlease as “one of the outstanding kidnappings in the annals of America—in the entire world.” He also told the jury that, just days before the kidnapping, Hall and Heady decided that it would be necessary to kill the boy—though, of course, Hall had made that decision months beforehand, as his elaborate preparations for Bobby’s burial proved.
Hall’s court-appointed defense lawyer was Roy K. Dietrich, president of the Kansas City Bar Association, who had entered a guilty plea on Hall’s behalf—not to kidnapping, but to murder, in a gambit to avoid the death penalty for his client. In his opening statement, Dietrich admitted that neither he nor his client disputed any of the charges that Scheufler had just recounted. But, he added, Hall “was used to wild and riotous living. He did not know how to work. He tasted the joys of money, without knowing what it was to toil for it. He did not have the love from his parents that a child should have.”
Harold Hull of Maryville, Missouri, assumed the role of Heady’s defense attorney after William Rosenthal of St. Joseph, her original lawyer, withdrew from the case, without giving any reason, after spending an hour conversing with her in the Jackson County jail. Hull had represented Heady during her divorce and in other matters, and now also arranged for her to transfer ownership of her house to her aunt Nellie, who as a young woman used to drive Bonnie to basketball games. Nellie’s married name was Baker, and she was to be Heady’s only family support in the months ahead.
Like Dietrich, Hull entered a plea of guilty to a charge of murder on his client’s behalf, in a similar hope that she might escape the death penalty.
Scheufler then spent forty-five minutes reading Heady’s twenty-six-page typewritten confession into the court record. Heady sat quietly at the defense table, staring at the floor. Only once did she show any emotion—when Scheufler read: “I wanted to stay drunk so that my conscience wouldn’t bother me.”
During the trial, Hall sat diagonally across from Heady, looking hopeless and depressed. FBI agent Arthur S. Reeder read Hall’s thirty-six-page confession. While it was being entered into the court record, Hall kept his hand on his chin. His eyes were downcast, and he blinked frequently.
Bobby’s father, sitting with his friends Robert Ledterman and Norbert O’Neill in the back of the courtroom, swallowed hard and worked his jaw when the confession recounted the actual killing of Bobby. Hall bit his knuckles. Several spectators sobbed openly. Both the St. Louis Police Department and the public were startled by one new piece of information—Hall’s insistence that neither of the two pieces of luggage containing the eighty-five pounds of $10 and $20 bills was taken to the police station when he was booked. “At the time of my arrest,” Hall declared in his confession, “I had been drinking, but definitely was not drunk or under the influence of narcotics, and was aware of the incidents which transpired during my arrest.”
In describing his arrest by Shoulders and Dolan, he noted that he and Dolan walked the length of the hotel corridor, looking for a rear stairway, while Shoulders stayed behind. “We were unable to locate any steps there,” Hall said, “and as we turned to go back, looking up the hallway, I noticed a man standing at the end of the hallway facing my room. I am not positive but this man appeared to be talking to someone in the direction of my room, but I was not able to hear any of the conversation.”
That man in the hallway, of course, was Costello, and the person in the hotel room to whom he was talking was Hager.
Defense attorney Hull informed the court that Heady desired no one to testify on her behalf. Nevertheless, he did intend to call one witness for his client—Nellie Baker, Heady’s aunt, who had raised her. Heady painted her fingernails red and was wearing a two-piece black suit and brightly colored earrings that Baker had bought for her to wear. She had also brought other suits, dresses, hats, and jewelry for her niece to wear on subsequent days of the trial. Hall, always the flashy dresser as a young man, wore a brown gabardine suit throughout the trial that had cost him $55.75.
Among the early witnesses was Soeur Morand, who sat with her crucifix on her lap. Asked to identify the woman who had taken Bobby from the French Institute on the morning of September 28, the nun hesitated, briefly scanned the courtroom, and pointed at Heady, who stared back impassively at her accuser. Hall looked down at his shoes.
Bobby’s father also took the stand, and was able to speak only with great effort. He was given the government’s exhibit number 4, a mechanical pencil, and identified it as Bobby’s. Returning to the rear of the courtroom, he stared hard at Hall and Heady. Tears welled in his eyes, but he said nothing as he struggled to maintain his composure.
Dolan, in his sworn testimony, denied ever taking the walk down the hotel corridor described by Hall, and also said that he never saw a stranger such as the one Hall described. He remained adamant that he and Shoulders had brought the two suitcases with them when they brought Hall to the Newstead station for booking. In an exchange with Di
etrich, the policeman also denied taking any keys from Hall at the time of his arrest.
Q. Who went into the closet? After the FBI have told us and after about fifteen days of working on it, and he [Hall] said that the suitcase clicked, who was that did that? Was that you or Shoulders that went into the clothes closet where those suitcases were?
A. Lieutenant Shoulders went in the clothes closet.
Q. Did you hear the suitcases click?
A. No, sir.
Q. Did you see him take the keys in there?
A. No, sir.
Q. Do you know anything about the keys at all?
A. Not that I recall there.
Q. After the FBI had worked on this matter from the seventh of October until the twenty-fourth of October and had pretty well gotten the facts and they prepared a statement here—you have read it, haven’t you?
A. Yes, sir; yes, sir, I did.
Q. As far as you know that is pretty accurate, isn’t it?
A. I guess the statement is accurate.
Q. You think it is? You have read it, haven’t you?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. You want to state to this jury that you think that statement is accurate?
A. In part, yes, sir.
Q. And what wasn’t accurate?
A. He said positively none of the baggage went to the police station. That is inaccurate.
Throughout the day’s testimony, Time reported, Heady appeared to show no remorse. “She lolled, squinted and smiled, scratched her nose, plucked at her shoulder straps.”
During the second day of the trial, Bobby’s mother was called to testify. Appearing fairly composed, and wearing a gray flannel suit, she slipped through the rear door of the courtroom and took the witness stand. Heady glanced up at her only once, and then looked away. Hall, his elbow propped on the defense table and supporting his jaw with a cupped hand, did not look up at all.
Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease Page 14
