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

to one another. And he had built a reputation as an investigator with bottomless patience, an iron resolve, really. It would be tested as never before, but he would never lose it.

*It would be a furnace-like summer. On one day alone, July 6, six New Yorkers died from the heat, the New York Times reported.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ANOTHER DOCTOR TAKEN

Peoria, Illinois

Monday, March 14, 1932

Had the Lindbergh case not been dominating the news that spring, a kidnapping in Peoria, Illinois, might have gotten more attention.

On this Monday night, Dr. James W. Parker was kidnapped from the driveway at his home in Peoria while he was about to drive to his club. Or perhaps he was seized while he was arriving home from his club. Contemporary news reports differed on that point.

What is known is that the doctor’s wife, Donna, who was also a physician, got a telephone call late that night from a man who introduced himself as “Double X.” The caller told her that her husband wouldn’t be coming home on this night but that she would hear from him in the morning. His car could be found near a city golf course, Double X said. Donna Parker was warned not to contact the police.

It is also known that Dr. James W. Parker became an unwilling passenger in his own car after it was commandeered by two men. We can also be sure that Dr. Parker hoped a quick agreement with his captors would bring his early release. But that was not to be; his ordeal would last eighteen days.

In the first minutes, Parker was taken to a remote location in Peoria where he was blindfolded and transferred to another car—one that had followed the doctor’s own, it would be revealed later. Then it was on to a farmhouse near Manito, in Mason County, about thirty miles from Peoria.

At the time Donna Parker was talking on the phone to Double X, an alert security guard at the Pere Marquette Hotel in Peoria saw something suspicious. The guard, Edward Ohl, saw a man enter a phone booth in the hotel lobby while another man stood outside as though he was a lookout. The man in the phone booth, it would be learned, was James W. Betson, a former police officer, though that description hardly does justice to his resume. The apparent lookout was Arlo Stoops, who had a brother named Raymond, who had leased the farmhouse that became James Parker’s new quarters.

Parker was told he would be well treated. He was also told to write letters to relatives and friends saying that his captors wanted $50,000, an enormous sum for the Parkers, who were well off but not wealthy.

In captivity, Parker was guarded by the Stoops brothers and several other men who took turns watching over him. Days went by, and Parker had no idea how long he would be held.

As would be revealed later, negotiations were going on. Soon, the abductors reduced their demand to $10,000—a sign that they knew their negotiating position was poor, or that they were panicking, or both.

The kidnappers were right to be nervous, for the law was in fact closing in.

On the night of Friday, April 1, the captive was bundled into a car, blindfolded, taken for a lengthy ride, and finally tossed out of the vehicle, unharmed. Almost at once, two men were arrested and charged with being part of the plot. Soon afterward, a third man was arrested.

Not long after Dr. Parker’s release, it was reported that his wife and other relatives had decided immediately after the kidnapping to seek the help of the Chicago Secret Six, a crime-fighting organization created by prominent businessmen. Officially, it was the Citizens’ Committee for the Prevention and Punishment of Crime. Since it was reputed to have half a dozen members, a reporter dubbed it “the Secret Six.” And so it became in Chicago lore.

The Secret Six was created in 1930 by a blend of civic pride and self-interest. Robert Isham Randolph, a consulting engineer who was one of the group’s organizers, was president of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce. He and other prominent business figures were looking forward to the world’s fair to be held in the Windy City in 1933.

With Chicago’s reputation as a gangland hub well established and with some police officials and rank-and-file cops believed to be corrupt, the businessmen were desperate to avoid further blemishes on the city’s image. The memory of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre of 1929, in which seven gangsters were shot to death in a garage, was still fresh.

Enter Alexander Jamie, chief investigator for the Prohibition-enforcement unit of the Department of Justice and the brother-in-law of Eliot Ness of “the Untouchables” fame. Jamie became the chief investigator for the Secret Six, which got funding from the group’s wealthy founders.

A shrewd and seasoned investigator, Jamie knew that information was everything, and he did not flinch at using unconventional methods to obtain it. Thus, the Secret Six opened its own speakeasy in the Chicago suburb of Cicero to eavesdrop on liquor-fueled underworld gossip.

Right after Dr. Parker was abducted, operatives of the Secret Six, along with the Illinois State Police and Peoria police, zeroed in on the three men who would become the case’s major defendants: Joseph H. Pursifull, James W. Betson, and Claude “Red” Evans. Evans had already done serious prison time and had been jailed yet again, on a safe-cracking charge, days after Dr. Parker was released.

But Pursifull and Betson were the ones with the truly remarkable backgrounds. Pursifull was a Peoria lawyer and former candidate for state’s attorney. An ex-Sunday school teacher, he had written a book dispensing advice on love and marriage. As for Betson, he was described in the press as a former detective and Ku Klux Klan leader who had once aspired to be Peoria’s mayor. He was arrested in the campaign headquarters of the notoriously corrupt Lennington “Len” Small, a former Illinois governor who was trying (unsuccessfully, it would turn out) to win