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

*Carroll was killed at Waterloo, Iowa, on June 7, 1934, just weeks before Dillinger was slain in Chicago.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

A MAN OF GOD IS TAKEN

Huntington, West Virginia

Tuesday, November 2, 1937

Dr. James Seder was a retired minister who seems never to have wondered why God put him on this earth. It was to preach against the evils of alcohol, which he had done for much of his adult life. He and other members of the “dry” movement had lost the good fight four years before with the repeal of Prohibition, but the minister never doubted that their cause was right, socially and morally. He held forth on the evils of drink and other issues in articles that he wrote for English- and German-language religious publications.

He was unusually vigorous for a man of seventy-nine, though his eyesight was fading, and he lived alone in a unit of an apartment building he owned in Huntington. His wife had fallen ill on a visit to St. Paul, Minnesota, to visit one of their sons, Arthur, and had remained there. Arthur was a comptroller for a railroad. Another son, Willard, was an official with the Bethlehem Steel Corporation in Pittsburgh.

All in all, the Seders were prosperous, especially for those hard times. The man of God had also shown himself to be quite competent in the ways of the world.

Photographs of Seder show a smiling, friendly face, nothing like the fire-and-brimstone look one might have expected. Even with his fervid opposition to alcohol, he did not seem like a man who made enemies.

But where was he?

“I’m afraid something may have happened to Dr. Seder,” a man who lived in the same building told the police this Tuesday evening. “The lights burned in his place all night, and I noticed today that his mail is still in the box and his evening newspaper is still on the porch.”187

A patrolman rushed to the building and found Dr. Seder’s unit empty. But the rear door was unlocked. Immediately, the patrolman summoned detectives.

Right away, investigators saw reasons for alarm. The sheets and blankets on the minister’s bed had been yanked off; a remaining sheet, next to the mattress, was ripped. And the three white canes that Seder owned were present. It was inconceivable, said the resident who had called the police, that Seder would have left home at night without one of them, given his poor vision. (A fourth cane, a red one, was missing.)

The minister’s sons were summoned to Huntington, as was his daughter, who lived in New York City. Willard Seder asked the FBI to investigate. He was convinced his father had been kidnapped. What other explanation could there be?

Dr. Seder had last been seen the previous Monday evening when one of his tenants stopped by to pay the November rent. Now, as Tuesday night became Wednesday morning, lawmen waited for messages from whoever had taken the minister. FBI agents had special cellophane envelopes to enclose the messages on their way to the laboratory.

Anxiety turned to dread as the days ticked by with no contact. Finally, a week after the minister vanished, a ransom letter arrived. It had been mailed in Huntington the previous Saturday, four full days after the police discovered that Seder was missing. The sender knew enough about the Seder family to address the letter to the minister’s son Arthur (though he was referred to as Raymond, his middle name). “Your father being held for $30,000 ransom,” it began. “Call all law off—pretend you found him in St. Paul.” The message went on to demand the money in small bills—“no serial no’s taken”—and instructed that an ad be put in the Huntington newspaper: “Peg—Am Waiting Call Sally.”

It was clear that the message sender was not highly educated. “We want axion now at once,” the message said. It was also clear that whoever had sent it had indeed abducted the minister. The message alluded to Dr. Seder’s red cane, which it said was in the kidnappers’ possession, and it described one of the blankets that had been ripped from the bed.

Most ominously, it ended with a crude but clear threat: “Act at once and dont for get if you dont follow instructions you will not see him alive again.”

The use of the U.S. mail, plus the considerable time that had elapsed since the victim’s disappearance, conferred jurisdiction on the FBI. Agent R. E. Vetterli (a survivor of the Union Station Massacre in Kansas City) was in charge of ten agents on the case, and he advised the family to cooperate and maintain contact. So the Seders put an ad in both city dailies: “PEG—Anxious to see you but haven’t enough money to make trip. Write and advise. Am waiting call—SALLY.”

The ads brought no response.

Arthur Ronk was used to the sounds of the woods at night. He was a farmer in Gragston Creek, a mountainside community in Wayne County. On the night of Wednesday, November 10, he thought he heard a man moaning in the dark. No, he thought. Probably an animal. Anyhow, sounds could carry considerable distances at night. No telling where the noise had come from.

But even as he was about to fall asleep, the sound bothered Ronk. Haunted him, really. So the next morning, he fetched his nephew, Edgar Ronk, and the two of them set off along a road that Arthur thought might bring them close to where the sound had originated.

On a wooded slope several feet from the entrance to an abandoned coal mine, they saw an old man. His body bore cuts and bruises, and he was mumbling incoherently. The Ronks found someone who had a car, and Dr. Seder was gently put inside for the trip to the little town of Wayne. There, a crowd had begun to gather.

The old minister moaned and cried out as he was removed from the vehicle. It was clear from his blackened eyes and the cuts on his head that he had been badly beaten.

Onlookers recalled this exchange