The Kidnap Years: by David Stout (if you give a mouse a cookie read aloud TXT) 📕

“They’ll have us all in jail,” another man replied. His voice was different; Charlie sensed he was not one of the men who had abducted him.

“Don’t worry,” the first man said. “This is as safe as sitting in an armchair.”

In Denver, Mayor George D. Begole immediately issued a proclamation urging law-abiding citizens everywhere to help in the apprehension of the kidnappers. Colorado Governor Edwin C. Johnson voiced similar sentiments. (Begole was a Republican and Johnson a Democrat, but the plight of Charlie Boettcher was a bipartisan concern.)

Several thousand volunteers from the American Legion and civic clubs joined police officers in searching the Denver area for any sign of Charlie Boettcher or the men who had kidnapped him.

Applications for pistol permits rose sharply, especially among the Denver elite. Some wealthy Denver residents looked for chauffeurs who were familiar with firearms as well as cars.

On Valentine’s Day, forty-eight hours after Charlie Boettcher was seized, J. Edgar Hoover waded into the case, sending several FBI agents to Denver to…to…

To do what, exactly?

The seven-day waiting period for federal intervention was still in effect, but Hoover still sensed an opportunity to expand his agency’s power. As the comments of Denver Mayor Begole and Governor Johnson had indicated, the Boettcher family had friends in politics. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had routed President Hoover in the 1932 election, was to be inaugurated as president on March 4 and had let it be known that he was planning a nationwide anticrime campaign. J. Edgar Hoover envisioned a chance to solidify his position in the new administration and to carve a major role for the FBI.

It turned out that the FBI was largely on the sidelines and did not turn up a single significant clue as the Boettcher kidnapping was being investigated. But this would not stop Hoover from shamelessly issuing statements later that described his bureau’s “vital role” in solving the case.53

As will be seen, the case would be solved in part because someone drank too much and talked too much.

“Ready to come home, Mabel,” read the ad placed in the Denver Post by Claude Boettcher as the kidnappers had demanded. Soon, Claude was exchanging letters with the kidnappers, with the Episcopal church the Boettchers attended acting as a go-between. Verne Sankey was making the exhausting commute from his South Dakota ranch to Denver to follow local developments.

Tension soon arose between the Denver police and the Boettcher family, with the police brass warning against capitulating to the kidnappers. To do so, the police argued, would encourage other would-be kidnappers. But Claude loved his son (perhaps more than Charlie realized) and would do anything to get him back.

Claude had friends in the highest realms of politics as well as finance and society. He had been a delegate to the 1928 Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri, at which Herbert Hoover had been nominated. Time magazine had pronounced him one of the country’s most influential men.

In short, Sankey, who had said that kidnapping Charlie Boettcher would be like sitting in an armchair, had wildly underestimated the Boettcher family’s vast influence and the storm that kidnapping a member of the clan would set off.

From the start, the Denver police chief, Albert T. Clark, said gangsters in Chicago or Kansas City, Missouri, were probably behind the kidnapping. The chief professed optimism that the kidnappers would soon be caught and that Charlie Boettcher would be unharmed.

N. W. “Red” Mitchell, reputed to be linked to Kansas City bootleggers, was picked up. Mitchell had supposedly been spotted following Charlie and Anna Lou Boettcher from the chili parlor, and Chief Clark said Mitchell didn’t have a good alibi for that fateful Sunday night. Unfortunately, Anna Lou could not identify him as one of the men who had confronted her and her husband.

No matter; there were plenty of suspects. Chief Clark said he wanted to talk to Louis “Diamond Jack” Alterie, often described in the press as a former Chicago gangster who had once been a lieutenant of Dean O’Banion, a one-time bootlegger and rival of Al Capone. (O’Banion was shot to death in 1924 in the flower shop he ran as a cover for his criminal activities.)

Initially, Alterie seemed to be a promising suspect: he had been tried in Chicago the previous June on a charge of kidnapping a bookmaker for ransom. Alterie was acquitted of actual kidnapping, but a conspiracy-to-kidnap charge remained against him in Chicago, prompting him to relocate to Glenwood Springs in Western Colorado. There, he ran what the press described as a dude ranch, surely an allusion to Glenwood Springs’ reputation since frontier days as a haven for gambling dens and brothels.

Unfortunately, investigators had just missed their chance to interview Alterie. Having been convicted of assault in Glenwood Springs, he’d been given a choice by the law, one reminiscent of Colorado’s Wild West days: go to prison or get out of Colorado for good. The deadline was February 1. Alterie checked out of the state a day early without leaving a forwarding address.

Meanwhile, the police in Chicago tried to help their Denver counterparts by hauling in several men with shady reputations, most intriguingly Mike “Bon Bon” Allegretti, a cousin of Al Capone. All were said to have traveled to Denver recently or to have talked on the phone with people in Denver, or both.

None of those leads panned out, nor did the arrests of a score of other suspects who, if not exactly innocent in their daily lives, were innocent of the Boettcher kidnapping. Investigators were further confounded when Joe Roma, a part-time grocer and full-time bootlegger who had offered to help track the kidnappers, was shot to death while playing the mandolin in his Denver home. He left a steaming pot of spaghetti on the stove. (It was soon determined that Roma had met his demise because of a dispute over liquor trafficking.)

In his basement prison, Charlie occasionally managed to dislodge his blindfold enough to peek out and note his surroundings: cement floor, part of it