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

Sankey’s photographs in the newspapers and called the FBI’s Chicago office. This time, the occasionally dense Melvin Purvis listened alertly. He visited the barbershop and showed a photo of Sankey to the proprietor. “Yes,” Mueller said. “That’s one of my regulars. His name’s W. E. Clark.”

“No, it isn’t,” Purvis told the barber. “It’s Verne Sankey. We’ll be watching for him.”

Purvis assigned several agents and handpicked Chicago cops to stake out the shop. This they did, day after frigid Chicago day. Nor did night guarantee a respite. There was a funeral parlor next door to the barbershop, and some agents slept in coffins so they could awake refreshed and in time to watch the barbershop from the moment its doors opened.

On Wednesday, January 31, Sankey entered the barbershop, looking uncharacteristically sloppy in a baggy suit. He wanted a haircut. As he sat nestled in the chair with a sheet around him, three federal agents and three Chicago detectives walked in. Two detectives approached Sankey, one on each side, and pressed the muzzles of their handguns against his head.

“Don’t move, Verne,” said Sergeant Thomas Curtain. “We’re police officers. You’re under arrest.”125

Sankey surrendered meekly. When investigators searched the apartment where he had been living, not far from Wrigley Field, they found some $3,500 in cash, a shotgun, two pistols, and a supply of ammunition.

Under questioning, Sankey—who had somewhat improbably been pronounced “Public Enemy No. 1” by the Justice Department, largely because of the speculation linking him to several unsolved kidnappings—readily admitted to having snatched Haskell Bohn and Charles Boettcher, but he denied any part in the kidnapping of Edward Bremer. And he became indignant at the merest suggestion he might have been involved in the Lindbergh kidnapping: “I am a man. I would kidnap a man. I would never kidnap a child.”126

The Justice Department seized jurisdiction and made plans to ship Sankey to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to have him answer first of all for the kidnapping of Charles Boettcher, who had been transported across state lines, giving Washington jurisdiction in the case. Sankey’s wife was already jailed in Sioux Falls awaiting trial for conspiracy in the Boettcher case (she had been acquitted earlier in the Haskell Bohn kidnapping).

Manacled and escorted by several agents, Sankey made the journey to Sioux Falls by train. People who knew Sankey were aware that he had vowed never to go to prison, that he could not stand the thought of his two children growing up with a jailbird for a father. Perhaps these people should have spoken up, should have told the authorities that Sankey had a personal code of honor.

On the night of February 8, 1934, Sankey freed himself from his captors. Careless jailers had failed to confiscate the two neckties he had with him in his cell. These Sankey fashioned into a noose, put the loop around his neck, fastened the other end of the ties to a crossbar, and stepped off his cot.

Sankey’s new widow screamed for an hour after hearing of her husband’s suicide.

Charlie O’ Brien, a Denver Post reporter who had followed Sankey’s career, injected no compassion into his writing. “While this notorious outlaw and kidnapper was running loose with a gun preying upon unarmed victims, he obtained the undeserved title of being a ‘desperado with nerve and bravery.’ Sankey took the easy way out—suicide—leaving his widow and two children, Echo, 15, and Orville 5, to make their way thru life alone.”127

Two days after the suicide of Verne Sankey, one of his accomplices, Gordon Alcorn, began serving a life term in federal prison for the kidnapping of Charles Boettcher. On his way to Leavenworth, he offered advice to young people tempted to embark on a life of crime: “Look into the future first. Try to see the terrible consequence and then avoid what I am facing now.”128

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

The Bronx, New York

Wednesday, February 14, 1934

New York City was shivering in a cold wave. The previous Friday, February 9, the mercury had fallen to fifteen below zero in Central Park, the coldest reading ever in New York City. Now, on this Ash Wednesday and Saint Valentine’s Day, there was some relief, relatively speaking. It was three degrees at 8:30 in the morning; the temperature would top out around twenty in midafternoon.

Arthur Koehler and New Jersey Detective Lewis Bornmann visited another Bronx lumberyard and building-supplies company, Cross, Austin & Ireland, hoping to trace the origin and sales history of the Douglas fir that the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby had used to fashion some parts of his ladder.

This time, they seemed to be lucky. This lumberyard kept scrupulous records. Koehler and Bornmann asked to see information on transactions from the previous three months.

“Certainly,” said Arthur Tinker, secretary of the company. “And let me say you’re lucky you don’t have to copy the list of what we sell when times are good.”

Just then, something strange occurred. As Koehler and Bornmann sat waiting in the lumberyard office, two men entered. One offered a ten-dollar gold certificate to buy a forty-cent piece of plywood.

“Do you have anything smaller?” cashier Alice Murphy asked. She had been warned to be on the lookout for counterfeit gold bills. Genuine ones were being withdrawn from circulation and were therefore becoming scarce.

The man who wanted the plywood snatched back the gold certificate as Alice Murphy was scrutinizing it and pulled out a five-dollar bill. The cashier went to the rear, near the little cubbyhole where Koehler and Bornmann were sitting, to open the safe so she could change the five-dollar bill for five singles.

When the cashier returned to the counter, the second man said, “Never mind. I have the change.” Whereupon he plunked down forty cents. Then the man who had wanted to buy the plywood took the five singles from the bookkeeper, and both men started to leave. There are conflicting accounts on whether they abandoned the plywood altogether or said they’d return to pick it up after it had been cut to a certain size.

Both the