One possible explanation to the Traynor puzzle is that Hager had not only alerted Shoulders and Costello that Hall was the probable kidnapper, but also that his accomplice was staying in an apartment on Arsenal Street. Shoulders, who claimed that he had been on a stakeout on the day of Hall’s arrest, may have been telling at least a version of the truth—he may have been staking out Hall and Heady’s apartment. When Heady abruptly left the apartment at 5 P.M. to buy whiskey, milk, and cigarettes, Shoulders—and possibly Costello—may have entered the apartment to look for more ransom money. If money was found, Shoulders may have been directed to take it directly to Traynor for laundering—thus the piece of paper with Traynor’s address on it that police later discovered in the apartment.
If Traynor had laundered the money, as Costello asked her to do, she may have shortchanged him, and he subsequently found out about it. That theory would explain her retraction that Costello was behind the attack, because otherwise Traynor would be implicated in laundering the money.
The following February, Costello was arrested in the fatal shooting of Edward G. Brown, a thirty-year-old hoodlum, outside Brown’s Tic Toc Club on St. Louis’s DeBaliviere Strip. Brown had been found dying in the gutter in front of his club, with his head on the curb. Before he died, he told a patrolman that he and Costello had quarreled over a demand by the latter that his cab company be given exclusive loading privileges at the club. An hour later, an intoxicated Costello—his trousers, overcoat, and shirt collar splattered with blood—showed up at the emergency room of Barnes Hospital with a bullet wound in his left forearm. An unidentified young woman had driven him. He said Brown had shot him in a quarrel, but he did not know who shot Brown—claiming he did not even know the other man had been shot. At an inquest, a policeman testified he had heard Costello admit the shooting. Costello was subsequently indicted for second-degree murder.
Shoulders died in May 1962 of a heart attack at Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. After his release from prison, he had suffered from bouts of depression and bitterness.
Costello, described by the St. Louis Globe-Democrat as “the unwilling star of the Greenlease ransom melodrama,” died at his home of a heart attack at age fifty-three in July 1962. He had been under treatment for hypertension, diabetes, liver trouble, ulcers, and sinus headaches, and for a time was under psychiatric care. Although associates claimed he was bankrupt and owed money to everyone, his home was tastefully furnished and a Cadillac was parked outside. He had spent twenty-three months in federal prison on the federal firearms charge, and was due to stand trial on the second-degree murder charges on September 5.
Despite the promise of a presidential pardon, ex-patrolman Elmer Dolan refused to reveal everything he knew about the case until after both Costello and Shoulders died. In September 1962, the FBI flew Dolan to Washington, where he confessed that Shoulders had given half of the ransom to Costello before the two policemen took Hall to the Newstead Avenue police station. He confirmed that Costello had been the mysterious third man that Hall had seen in the corridor on the night of his arrest at the Town House, but added a new twist—there had also been a fourth man. This unidentified fourth man—not Hager—was possibly the person in Hall’s hotel room that Shoulders briefly spoke to while Dolan was escorting Hall down the corridor. After Hall was booked, Dolan further confirmed, both policemen separately drove to Costello’s home, where Shoulders offered him $50,000. This same mysterious fourth man also attended the basement meeting. Most likely he was an associate of Costello, or perhaps of Traynor, whose function was simply to provide extra security while the money was being moved from location to location.
Dolan had lied, as almost everyone involved in the case suspected, because he feared for his and his family’s lives. Although he did not accept hush money from Costello, he did take $1,500 from the mobster after he was released from prison because he had been granted his freedom at Christmastime, and had a wife and six children to support. President Lyndon B. Johnson, at J. Edgar Hoover’s urging, pardoned Dolan in 1965. Dolan died in 1973.
The missing money was to remain a black mark against the corruption-riddled St. Louis Police Department for years. The FBI met with a similar lack of success in its attempt to find out what happened to the stolen half of the ransom. Director Hoover assigned agent Howard Kennedy to work full-time on recovering the money. He spent fifteen fruitless years on the assignment.
In August 1972, Shoulders’s son, Louis D. Shoulders, was murdered while he was staying at a resort in the Missouri Ozarks. Car bombings were a favored method of execution of the St. Louis underworld, and the younger Shoulders died when he turned on the ignition of his Cadillac. Police speculated that he had been killed in retaliation for the murder of Edward Steska, the business manager of Pipefitters Local 562, a corrupt union at the center of a protracted power struggle. Wortman controlled the union, and Shoulders had been a bodyguard on the local’s payroll. Shoulders’s pallbearers included James Giamanco, the reputed new head of the St. Louis Mafia. From 1962 through 1981, the St. Louis area was rocked by nineteen car bombings, or about one a year, leaving thirteen people dead, leading the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to call St. Louis “the unofficial car bombing capital of the country.” Most were hoodlum-related.
(In a sad postscript to the Shoulders saga, the Post-Dispatch reported in June 2007 that the body of a homeless woman named Susan Jansen had been found at a local recycling center. She apparently fell asleep in a Dumpster, and her body was later crushed by a recycling truck’s compactor. Susan was subsequently identified as the daughter of Louis D. Shoulders. She and her husband, Thomas Jansen, both heroin addicts, were often in trouble with the law, and had recently been evicted from their home. Sometime later, Jansen’s missing husband turned up dead on a conveyor belt at a recycled paper factory in Arizona. Both apparently had been crushed in the same recycling bin.)
Arthur Reeder, a member of the FBI’s special kidnapping squad who led the interrogation of Hall and Heady, took their statements in which they admitted their guilt, and read Hall’s confession at the trial, committed suicide at his Denver home in August 1981.
John Carr passed away in 1984, bequeathing the Coral Court to his widow, Jesse, and their longtime housekeeper, Martha Shott. Route 66, bypassed in 1975 by U.S. Interstate 44, was now a back road, and the motel itself had become a seedy outpost used mostly by adolescents for one-night stands. Although listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the motel fell into disrepair and was demolished in 1995 after it was sold to a developer to make room for a generic subdivision. The Museum of Transportation in St. Louis did manage, however, to preserve a complete two-room bungalow.
The Greenlease case led most schools to enforce a new policy whereby parents had to sign cards providing the names of individuals who were permitted to remove a child from school in the event of an emergency. A rash of custodial wars in the 1970s between feuding parents also led to a series of unlawful kidnappings, with the result that schools were faced with an even more complicated problem of who was authorized to remove a child from school. Despite new technologies for preventing or foiling a kidnapping—for example, inserting a microchip in a child’s book bag—nearly a million children in America are currently listed as missing.
Robert and Virginia Greenlease, Bobby’s parents, found consolation and refuge in their Catholic faith. They frequently visited the Abbey Mausoleum in Forest Hills Cemetery, and were often comforted by Father Joseph Freeman, a Jesuit who taught philosophy and theology at Rockhurst College. They later funded a professorship in the priest’s honor, provided funds for a library and an art gallery, and in 1962 donated land for the construction of a high school on the college campus. Robert Greenlease passed away at his home in Mission Hills on September 17, 1969, just a few days before the sixteenth anniversary of Bobby’s abduction, at the age of eighty-seven. When Virginia Greenlease died at age ninety-one, in 2001, she left $1 million each to both the college and the high school in the names of her husba
nd and Bobby. Though both parents lived into old age, Bobby’s adopted older brother, Paul, and his sister, Virginia Sue, who as an adult struggled with drug addiction, never quite recovered from the tragedy; both died in their forties.
In early 2002, the Greenlease estate was auctioned off. Dutch, English, and French oil paintings, French fainting couches, crystal glassware, hand-painted china, and a seven-carat diamond ring were among the highlights. During the estate sale, in the Grand Ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel in Country Club Plaza, waiters in tuxedos and crisp white aprons served guests. Five hundred people attended. All proceeds went to Rockhurst University, which Bobby probably would have attended had he lived.
The French Institute of Notre Dame de Sion in Kansas City’s Hyde Park is now known as the Notre Dame de Sion School, and is managed by a lay board. Unable to attract a sufficient number of new members in the United States, the congregation of Notre Dame de Sion no longer supplies the school with teachers. Its relationship with the school is in name only. Soeur Morand, the nun who delivered Bobby to Bonnie Brown Heady on Monday morning, September 28, 1953, never recovered from the kidnapping and was haunted by guilt all her life. Unable to be dissuaded that she was not responsible for Bobby’s fate, she frequently burst into tears at the mention of his name. Like all of the other nuns at the school, she eventually returned to the congregation’s motherhouse in Paris.
Sources and Acknowledgments
In October 1953, I was a high school freshman in St. Louis, and lived a half-block away from the Newstead Avenue police station where Lieutenant Shoulders and Patrolman Dolan brought Carl Austin Hall and Bonnie Brown Heady after they were arrested. I vividly recall the crowd of reporters and onlookers gathered outside as the two kidnappers were being processed and interviewed within. By curious coincidence, as an even younger boy I had lived only a few doors away from the house on Arsenal Street, across from Tower Grove Park, where Hall and Heady holed up after arriving in St. Louis from Kansas City, and where Hall abandoned a drunken Heady in search of the good life and a hooker. A Jesuit uncle of mine taught at Rockhurst High School.
A few days after Hall and Heady were arrested, and news of the missing ransom became the talk of the nation, my father drove my two brothers and me to the grounds of Kenrick Seminary, not far from the Coral Court motel on the old Highway 66, where he had once studied. Hundreds if not thousands of people were now scouring possible sites where Hall might have hidden the missing money. My father’s theory was that few people even knew about Kenrick’s heavily wooded grounds, which were not open to the public, and that Hall could not have found a more hidden and yet convenient place to bury the money. For several hours, we tramped the creek beds and woods, searching for signs of recently upturned earth before Dad reluctantly decided that most likely the money was hidden elsewhere.
Over the next few years, the subject of the kidnapping and the missing ransom money continued to turn up occasionally in daily conversations and in news reports. My father managed a bookstore, where I clerked during college, and among the customers were reporters and detectives who had covered or worked on the case. Most notable of these was John J. Hines, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who had written a number of front-page stories on the kidnapping. From time to time, some of us would gather in the back room, where Dad always kept a bottle of wine for his favorite customers, and the conversation would sometimes drift to the Greenlease case. Hines liked to tell about the time he interviewed Shoulders, who menacingly spun the barrel of a loaded revolver during the course of the interview in an effort to intimidate him. Hines, who stood a hulking six foot six, was merely amused. Since Hall and Heady had both been executed, the only matter of speculation in the aftermath concerned who had taken the missing half of the ransom money. The consensus then as now was that, acting on orders from Joe Costello, Shoulders had stolen it; Dolan had been a patsy who refused to point an accusing finger at the police lieutenant because he feared for his own life and that of his family; and Costello quickly laundered the money, with everyone having a different theory about how exactly he went about doing that.
I later moved from St. Louis, but the Greenlease case remained a persistent and even haunting memory. It was not any desire to solve the mystery of the missing ransom that ultimately impelled me to write this book. That would be a fine feather in any reporter’s cap, yet it is a relatively minor detail in an unspeakable tragedy. It is also a chapter that can never be written because the handful of people involved in the disappearance of the money are long dead, and have taken their secrets with them.
My goal in writing this book was to provide the first definitive account of the Greenlease case, one of the worst crimes this nation has ever seen, and thereby to restore to public memory the last terrible day of Bobby Greenlease’s life; to chronicle the sorrow of the Greenlease family and their friends; and to document the crime, punishment, and first steps at rehabilitation of a psychopathic murderer whose only motive, like that of Raskolnikov, was greed. I have written it without feeling the need to embellish. The stark chronology of this uniquely American tragedy speaks all too somberly for itself.
Two extraordinary examples of in-depth reporting of a major event in our national life during the 1950s were the exhaustive coverage of the Greenlease case by the reporting staffs of The Kansas City Star and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. This book could not have been written without those two indispensable resources. Other primary sources included the extensive confessions obtained from both Carl Austin Hall and Bonnie Brown Heady, and the thousands of pages of related investigative material, contained in the FBI’s Greenlease Kidnapping Summary Report; court transcripts of the United States v. Hall and Heady murder trial; statements given by Carl Austin Hall and Bonnie Brown Heady on November 30, 1953, in the Missouri State Penitentiary to St. Louis chief of police Jeremiah J. O’Connell, circuit attorney Edward L. Dowd, and FBI agent Dan Walters; St. Louis Board of Police Inquiry, “Interim Report: Lt. Louis Shoulders—Ptn. Elmer Dolan,” February 2, 1954; and Elmer Dolan, Appellant, v. United States of America, Appellee, U.S. Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit, January 21, 1955.
Other print and Internet resources were the archives of the Chicago Tribune, Detroit News, Detroit Times, Jefferson City News-Tribune, Kansas City Daily Record, Kansas City Times, Life, New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, Newsweek, Pleasanton Observer-Enterprise, St. Joseph News-Press, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, St. Louis Star-Times, and Time. These sources were also consulted: James Deakin, A Grave for Bobby: The Greenlease Slaying, New York: William Morrow, 1990; East St. Louis Action Research Project archives; David Krajicek, “The Greenlease Kidnapping,” Crimelibrary.com; William O. Luton, Jr., “The History of Route 66 and the Coral Court,” Isuzoperformance.com; J. J. Maloney, “The Greenlease Kidnapping,” Crimemagazine.com; John Bartlow Martin, “The Struggle to Get Hoffa,” Saturday Evening Post, a seven-part series running from June 27 to August 8, 1959; Patterson Smith, “Ransom Kidnapping in America,” AB Bookman’s Weekly, April 23, 1990; and Anselm Theising, Ph.D., “The Beginning of Organized Crime in St. Louis,” Riverweb.uluc.edu.
In instances where there were different or conflicting accounts of an incident, a date or time of day, or a conversation, I have used my best judgment to decide which version to use.
During my research, I visited Pleasanton, Kansas, and St. Joseph, Kansas City, Boonville, and St. Louis, Missouri. Along the way, I took notes and scoured archives. I am grateful to the research staffs of the Kansas City Public Library, the St. Louis Public Library, the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis, the archives of the Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri St. Louis, and the New York Public Library for their generous assistance.
I am also indebted to Charles Brown, Martin Duggan, Dolores Friesen, the Honorable Thomas Grady, Colonel Jim Hackett, Matt Heidenry, Donna Korando, the Honorable Arthur Litz, John McGuire, Mickey McTague, Ted Schafers, and Sue Ann Wood. I had a very special conversation with Judy Haudrich, who was a stu
dent at the French Institute of Notre Dame de Sion on the day Bobby Greenlease was kidnapped, and who shared her memories, insights, and a brief memoir of that traumatic time with me. My wife, Pat, helped me with the archival research in Kansas City, St. Louis, and New York, and gave the manuscript the kind of exhaustive, constructive editorial scrutiny that challenged every lazy sentence, unproven assertion, or complicated story line. I could not have written this book without her patient, loving support. My other first readers were, as always, my four children—Mary, John, James, and Margaret—whose close readings also provided me with invaluable advice and editorial judgment. I am also grateful to my editor, Michael Flamini; assistant editor Vicki Lame; and copy editor Fred Chase for their indispensable help; and to my agent, Andrew Blauner, who found this fifty-year obsession of mine a very good home. To all of you, my very deepest thanks.
Index
Ace Cab
AFL National Association of Letter Carriers
Alder Insurance Company
Allen, Clinton L.
Allen, Raymond
Alphonsina, Soeur
American Magazine
Associated Press
Atlantic Monthly magazine
Baker, Barney
Baker, Mollie
Baker, Nellie
Bennett, James V.
Bennett, Richard
Benzedrine (“bennies”)
Bergmeier, Raymond
Binder, Mildred
Bland (MO)
mysterious digging at
Boecker, Forrest
Boone, Daniel
Boonville (MO)
Boonville Boarding School (MO)
Bordelon, Thomas
Bradley, Edward
Bradley, Marsh
Brannon, Bernard C.
Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease Page 21
