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

“Marion?”

“She’s sleeping,” the kidnapper said.

Parker handed over the money.

“Wait here just a minute,” the kidnapper said. With that, he slowly drove off. After a moment, Parker began to follow, trying to make out the license plate number. But the plate had been bent to obscure the digits.

After a block or so, the car slowed, and Marion was pushed out, falling to the curb. Parker braked and rushed to his blanket-wrapped daughter, kneeling next to her. Her eyes were open!

“Marion?”

No response.

Parker embraced his daughter, sensing instantly that the form was too small. With shaking hands, he unwrapped the blanket and screamed.

Marion Parker was dead, a wire wrapped tightly around her neck. Her death-glazed eyes had been sewn open. Makeup had been applied to her face to make her appear alive. Her legs had been cut off and her arms severed at the elbows. Only part of her torso was there, wrapped in towels. Her intestines had been cut out and her body stuffed with rags.

The father’s screams had prompted someone to call the police. Hardened detectives wept at the scene. Parker was driven home in a police car; another officer followed, driving Parker’s car.

Parker told his wife, son, and surviving daughter that Marion was dead. For the moment, he kept the more horrifying details to himself.

Around that time, the kidnapper stopped at a Los Angeles café for a bite to eat. He paid with one of the bills from the ransom and smirked at the pretty young cashier, saying, “You’d be surprised if you knew who I was.”29

The next day, Sunday, December 18, six separate bundles containing parts of Marion’s body were found along roads in the Elysian Park section of Los Angeles. The car used by the kidnapper, a new gray Chrysler coupe, was found in a parking garage. It had been stolen in Kansas City a month before.

The doctor who performed the autopsy said he could not be certain if Marion had been alive for any of the desecration inflicted on her body.

Mary Holt was desolate, even though Principal Freeman said she herself might have let Marion go with the charming stranger had she been there. Or perhaps Freeman was just trying to comfort her colleague and friend. It was no use. Holt was inconsolable. She broke down while testifying at a coroner’s inquest the Monday after the slaying and had to be helped out of the room by her husband. Soon, she stopped working at the school. Her hair turned prematurely white. She would be haunted by her terrible mistake for the rest of her life.

Thousands of police officers from San Diego to San Francisco and little towns in between were looking for the killer. Anyone remotely suspicious was questioned. The case was covered sensationally in papers from coast to coast.

One of the towels used to wrap Marion’s body bore the label of the Bellevue Arms Apartments northwest of downtown Los Angeles. The manager recalled renting an apartment the previous month to a man who fit the description of the man who had taken Marion from her school. The man had given his name as Donald Evans and had asked for a quiet room in the rear. He had left a couple of days before. Perhaps because Evans’s apartment was vacant, the police did not immediately search it.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Police Department had a fingerprint expert, Howard Barlow. Given the science of that time, his contribution seems all the more remarkable: he managed to lift prints from the stolen car the kidnapper had used. The smirking, arrogant criminal had neglected to wipe the car’s interior before abandoning it.

The fingerprints in the car matched those on the ransom messages sent to the Parker house. They also matched prints from an old bank-forgery case that had been handled in juvenile court because of the tender age of the offender, William Edward Hickman. He was nineteen when police concluded that Donald Evans and Hickman were one and the same and that he was the kidnapper.

The police returned to the Bellevue Arms Apartments to search the apartment that “Donald Evans” had vacated. Inside, they found bloodstains, copies of newspaper accounts of the kidnapping, and, in a wastebasket, half a hazelnut. Someone recalled that half a hazelnut had been found in the wrappings around Marion’s body. The two halves were found to fit perfectly.

Some Gillette razor blades were found. And on a sugar bowl, there was a thumbprint that matched Hickman’s.

Hickman had once been a messenger at the bank where Perry Parker worked. After being fired for forging checks worth several hundred dollars, Hickman had been given probation in juvenile court, but he could not get his bank job back. The police speculated he may have blamed Parker for that and wanted to hurt him—and make some money—by kidnapping his daughter, whom he had likely seen at the bank. (Parker had had nothing to do with his hiring or firing.)

An increasingly frail Mary Holt was shown a photo of Hickman and identified him as the man who had taken Marion away.

But some people in Kansas City, where he had grown up, refused to believe Hickman could be such a monster.

“It can’t be so; my boy could not do a thing like that,” Hickman’s mother, Eva, said in Kansas City. “My boy is a good clean boy.”30 Some former teachers echoed those sentiments.

Hickman was born on February 1, 1908, in Hartford, Arkansas, one of several children of William and Eva Hickman. The father was a philanderer, and his wife was mentally unstable, spending time in the State Lunatic Asylum (as the mental hospital was then called) in Little Rock. The marriage broke up, and in 1921, Eva Hickman moved to Kansas City.

Young William (or Edward, as he often called himself) made friends easily. He was a good student at Central High School in Kansas City: class vice president, honor society member, student council member, yearbook editor, a fine public speaker, a star on the debate team, a member of a church Sunday