Robert Cosgrove "Bobby" Greenlease Jr. (February 3, 1947 â€" September 28, 1953) was the 6-year-old son of multi-millionaire automobile dealer Robert Cosgrove Greenlease Sr., of Kansas City, Missouri.
Bobby was the victim of a kidnapping on September 28, 1953, that led to the largest ransom payment in American history (at the time). His kidnappers, however, had no intention of returning him to his family. Before the ransom demand was even issued, he had been murdered by Carl Austin Hall and Bonnie Emily Brown Heady.
The case was the subject of a 2014 episode of Investigation Discovery's series A Crime to Remember (Season 2, Episode 8, "Baby Come Home").
Background
The Bobby Greenlease kidnapping and murder sites then and now! - A visit to numerous locations related to the kidnapping and murder of 6 year old Bobby Greenlease in 1953. FBI Transcripts of interrogation: ...
Multi-millionaire Robert Greenlease made his fortune by introducing General Motors vehicles to the Great Plains in the early 20th century. He owned dealerships from Texas to South Dakota. He was 65 years old when Bobby was born in 1947, and the Greenleases doted upon him.
Bobby was said to be a trusting boy. According to author John Heidenry, whose book Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease is an account of the case, kidnapper Bonnie Heady said that from the moment she appeared at his school posing as his aunt to take him to his sick mother, Bobby just took her hand and did anything he was told to do.
Abduction and murder
In September 1953, Carl Austin Hall and Bonnie Emily Brown Heady kidnapped Bobby from Notre Dame de Sion, a Catholic school located in Kansas City, Missouri.
The kidnappers were drug-addicted alcoholics then living together in nearby St. Joseph, Missouri. In the early 1930s, Hall had attended Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri, with Paul Robert Greenlease, Bobby's adopted older brother. Hall had planned for years to victimize his former classmate's wealthy family.
Heady went to Bobby's school, persuading a nun that she was his aunt, and told her that his mother had suffered a heart attack. She then took him away, and was gone by time the Greenleases discovered the lie.
Hall and Heady then took him across the state line to Johnson County, Kansas, where Hall shot him dead with a revolver.
After the murder, Hall and Heady sent Bobby's father a message demanding a ransom of $600,000 ($5.5 million today). Greenlease, desperately trying to save his son, held off the police and the FBI, paying the money. Hall and Heady collected the ransom and fled. At that time it was the largest ransom ever paid in American history, and remained so until the 1972 kidnapping of Virginia Piper.
Hall became convinced that police would trace them to St. Joseph, so he randomly decided to drive to St. Louis.
Arrest
Once in St. Louis, Hall left Heady in the middle of the night in a rented room. He contacted criminal associates to enlist their help in diverting police attention. One of the associates, a former prostitute named Sandra O'Day, was supposed to fly to Los Angeles and mail a letter Hall had written. It was thought that this would divert police attention from St. Louis. However, O'Day caught a glimpse of the ransom money and decided to do some diverting of her own. St. Louis police soon learned that Hall was flaunting a large sum of money, and they brought him in for questioning.
Hall eventually implicated Heady. The police found Heady at an apartment at 4504 Arsenal Street and discovered Bobby's body in a shallow grave in her backyard. Bobby Greenlease was later interred in a mausoleum at Forest Hill Cemetery in Kansas City, Missouri.
Execution
The kidnapping and murder scandalized the nation and soon led to federal indictments for Hall and Heady. Both pleaded guilty to kidnapping and murder, and were executed together in the Missouri gas chamber on December 18, 1953.
Heady was one of only two women since 1865 to be executed by federal authorities. The other one was Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg. Since the federal government did not have any execution facilities, it used Missouri's state facilities to carry out the execution.
Only $288,000 of the ransom money was recovered. The missing $312,000 remained a subject of wide speculation. Some of the theories accounting for this were:
- A cab driver who took Hall to the Coral Court Motel had tipped off mob boss Joe Costello.
- Hall tried unsuccessfully to bury the cash near the Meramec River, though the FBI would later search that area in vain.
- Suitcases in Hall's possession upon his arrest were not brought to the 11th District Precinct Station (the arresting officers, Lieutenant Louis Ira Shoulders and Patrolman Elmer Dolan, were subsequently federally indicted for perjury).
- The cash fell into the hands of mobsters or was hidden in the walls of the motel, though the 1995 demolition of the Coral Court Motel turned up nothing.
References
External links
- Federal Bureau of Investigation's case on Greenlease kidnapping
- Blood Money and the Death of a Child â€" The United States v. Hall and Heady
- Crime Library Article on Greenlease
- Biography on Greenlease family by a close friend of the family
- Greenlease kidnapping
- Bobby Greenlease at Find a Grave
