The Kidnap Years: by David Stout (popular books of all time TXT) 📗

In 1930, Waley was doing six months for vagrancy in the Idaho State Penitentiary. There, he met William Dainard, who was serving twenty years for bank robbery. Somehow, he obtained a pardon and was turned loose in mid-1933. He knocked around the Northwest, drifting to Salt Lake City, where he met his future wife and married her after a three-day courtship. They eked out an existence as Waley dabbled in burglary and robbery.

Fatefully, Waley happened to run into Dainard in Salt Lake City, and they decided to relocate to Spokane, where they rented a house. In mid-May, Margaret saw a newspaper obituary for John Philip Weyerhaeuser Sr., which described the family’s vast holdings. So the kidnapping idea was born. They rented an apartment in Seattle and waited for a chance to grab a member of the Weyerhaeuser family. They got their chance when young George took a shortcut on his way home from school.

The Waleys gave signed confessions to the FBI. Upon learning that they had been nabbed, Dainard took off for Butte, Montana, where he was spotted by a cop who thought he looked suspicious loitering near a car with Utah plates. As the cop approached, Dainard vaulted an alley fence and disappeared. Inside the car was a suitcase with some $15,000 in ransom money.

Back in Salt Lake City, the Waleys told the FBI where they had buried their share of the ransom: in a canyon several miles outside the city. Agents found some $90,000 in a sack wrapped in oilcloth.

The law moved with remarkable dispatch. Officials elected to try the Waleys in federal court on kidnapping, conspiracy, and extortion charges. Perhaps hoping for mercy, Harmon Waley pleaded guilty to kidnapping and conspiracy and was sentenced to forty-five years. Off he went, in July 1935, to Alcatraz.

Margaret Waley, despite having signed a confession, went to trial. She was convicted of kidnapping and conspiracy and sentenced to twenty years. But where was William Dainard?

Early in 1936, Federal Reserve notes with altered serial numbers began to appear on the West Coast. The FBI lab determined that the notes were part of the ransom. On Wednesday, May 6, employees of two San Francisco banks reported that a man had exchanged altered bills for clean ones. They noticed the man’s car and wrote down the license plate number. The vehicle was registered to one Bert E. Cole, who was living in a hotel—across the street from the Federal Building, of all places. Early the next morning, FBI agents located the vehicle, disabled it, and waited. Around noon, “Bert Cole,” better known as William Dainard, appeared and checked under the hood when his car would not start. Thus preoccupied, he was an easy arrest. Just over $7,000 in ransom money was found in his pockets and $30,000 in the hotel where he’d been staying.

The fight had gone out of William Dainard. He declined to be represented by a court-appointed lawyer and pleaded guilty at once to kidnapping and conspiracy to kidnap. He was sentenced to sixty years in prison, a short part of which was spent at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, and in a mental hospital in Missouri. Then it was off to Alcatraz.

The final suspect in the Weyerhaeuser kidnapping, one Edward Fliss, was tracked down and arrested in San Francisco in October. He pleaded guilty to being an accessory—his main job had been to launder the ransom money—and was sentenced to ten years in prison.

About $157,000 in ransom money was recovered, the rest having been spent or lost. But the return of the money to the Weyerhaeuser family did not end the story.**

George’s father, John P. Weyerhaeuser Jr., gave Louis Bonifas a lifetime job in a Washington State lumber mill owned by his company. He also gave Bonifas a monetary reward, big enough so the chicken rancher with ten children could buy several acres of land and build a house.

The Weyerhaeuser case gave Hoover a happy ending and good reason to be proud. The FBI laboratory, created under Hoover, had traced the ransom notes, contributing greatly to the solution of the case.

Hoover was in dire need of an ego boost in 1936. American Agent, an autobiography by ex-FBI man Melvin Purvis, whom Hoover had driven into exile, was a bestseller, no doubt to Hoover’s chagrin. (Two years later, Hoover’s own ghostwritten literary effort, Persons in Hiding, was a flop, critically and commercially. “It is time that Mr. Hoover gave his ghost some fresh material,” a New York Times review said. “This book is washed over and dimmed by banalities.”175)

Margaret Waley was released from prison in 1948 after serving two-thirds of her sentence. Divorced from Harmon Waley, she remarried and settled in Salt Lake City. She died in 1989 at the age of seventy-four.

Harmon Waley wrote to the Weyerhaeuser family several times while in prison. He apologized for his crime and asked if he could have a job with the company when he got out. He was released in 1963 after serving twenty-eight years. In an act of great kindness, the Weyerhaeusers did give him a job at one of their Oregon mills. Waley died in Salem, Oregon, in 1984 at the age of seventy-three.

William Dainard was eventually granted parole and died in Great Falls, Montana, in 1992 at the age of ninety.

Edward Fliss served most of his ten-year sentence. He was released in 1946 and disappeared into anonymity.

George Weyerhaeuser’s father, John Philip Weyerhaeuser Jr., died of leukemia in 1956 at the age of fifty-six.

And George Hunt Weyerhaeuser, whose kidnapping captivated the nation, graduated from Yale, rose through the ranks of his family’s company, becoming chief executive. At the time of this writing, he is ninety-three years old.

*Some later accounts say that George’s father drove into the country to effect delivery. But reports at the time, including direct quotes from Titcomb, make it all but certain that he undertook the mission.

**In reconstructing the Weyerhaeuser case, I relied on contemporary accounts in the