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

“Do you know me, Father?”

“It’s Willard!”

“Yes. You’re all right now, Father. Everything is all right. You’re going to be just fine. Arthur and all the family are in Huntington.”

“Thank God! It is like Heaven to be here, Willard. It is like Heaven!”

Taken inside, the minister asked for something to eat. An officer gave him milk to sip. “I was gagged and thrown in the mine,” he said. “It rained in there, and the stones were sharp.” He had been left tied up, able to capture some warmth by squirming into the bedclothes his captors took with them—bedclothes that became stained with his blood.

Drawing on the last bit of his physical and spiritual strength, Seder freed himself from his bonds at last, crawling out of the cave and moaning for help—the sounds that Arthur Ronk heard at night and returned to investigate.

Then the minister said something that stunned investigators: “I knew one of the kidnappers well. I can’t recall his name, but he lives in one of my apartments. He is bald-headed, and he gave me a check that was bad.”

Immediately, lawmen knew the man they were looking for: Arnett A. Booth, forty-six, who lived around the corner from Seder and had indeed recently passed a bad check—one that Seder, with characteristic kindness, had made good on.

Federal agents found Booth in his apartment, listening to the radio. Searching his apartment, agents found stationery and envelopes similar to the kind used to convey the ransom demands. Then the agents gave Booth a little quiz: write down what was in the first ransom message, they requested.

Booth did—and wrote the non-word axion for action, as in the first message. When this was pointed out to Booth, he confessed—sort of. “Okay,” he said. “I sent the letter hoping to cash in on the minister’s kidnapping. But I had nothing to do with it.”

At first, Booth said, he had no definite plan to get the money, although he recalled reading about a kidnapping case in Michigan in which the ransom bundle had been thrown from a car. He said he didn’t see the newspaper ads responding to the ransom demand, didn’t even look in the papers, as a matter of fact, since he had heard that the Seder sons had gone home.

The story didn’t wash. It sounded like a spur-of-the-moment account cooked up by a criminal who wasn’t terribly bright, which was just what it was. So agents started questioning Booth again, and this time, he cracked, laying out the whole ugly episode on Friday, November 12. And he named two accomplices, Orville (Pete) Adkins and John Travis, both twenty-five, who lived in Huntington.

The plot was inspired, as so many crazy ideas are, with the aid of alcohol. But maybe the plot didn’t seem crazy to the three comrades in crime. All had done jail time and seemed unable to make it in the real world, whatever that meant to them.

“On November 1, while we were in various saloons drinking, Pete and I decided that we ought to make some money,” Booth recalled. They decided to enlist John Travis in their scheme.

With a pint of whiskey for company, the three talked things over. Travis suggested blowing up a safe somewhere. No, Booth said. Kidnapping someone would be easier. Booth said he was sure Dr. Seder had a lot of money, especially for a minister, and could be parted from it.

“We then had to think of a place where we could keep him,” Booth related. He said he knew of a log cabin at the confluence of three creeks in Wayne County. As for spiriting the minister from his home, Booth entered the place while the other two waited outside nearby. He confronted the old man in a hallway. Subjected to cajolery mixed with intimidation, Seder went with his treacherous tenant. A short time later, Booth picked up Adkins (his account did not make clear where Travis was) and headed for the hideout.

By this time, Seder had grown increasingly suspicious and asked where they were going. “You’re being kidnapped,” Booth said.

After one night in the cabin, Booth decided that the minister should be hidden in an abandoned mine where Booth had once worked. He explained that another accomplice whom he had recruited to guard the captive in the cabin had failed to show up.

Meanwhile, Booth sent Adkins and Travis back to the minister’s home with the keys to the house and instructions to pick up any money they found (the minister said about $25 was on a shelf) and bring back bedding. The pair did as instructed and headed back to the mine after buying sandwiches and whiskey, none of which they shared with their captive.

Just before dawn, the victim was taken to the old mine. Then Adkins and Travis headed back to Huntington with instructions from Booth to mail the letter demanding ransom and to return to the mine with food. Booth said he planned to stay at the mine hideout for several days. Instead, he rejoined his two accomplices in Huntington the very next day—and said that he had killed the minister.

As Booth told interrogators, “I was of the opinion that Dr. Seder was either dead or dying at the time I left him.” Booth explained that he had thrown stones at the old man while he was in the mine, hitting him on the head, shoulders, and upper body and seeing no response.

But James Seder had refused to die. Inspired by his faith, determined to be reunited with his sons, he had somehow survived and crawled out of the mine. As he was examined in the hospital, it became sadly clear how cruelly he had been treated. Besides being left to shiver in the cold dampness of the mine without food, he had suffered a broken nose. His right eardrum had been punctured. His entire left side was paralyzed, the result of a blood clot in his brain caused by blows to the head.

Travis was arrested