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

But Sankey preferred a fancy hotel room to a caboose, and he loved to gamble. With the coming of Prohibition in 1920, he established himself as a bootlegger, a career change made easier by his familiarity with Canada, where liquor could be bought legally. Soon, he was smuggling booze from Canada into the Upper Midwest of the United States.

By the mid-1920s, he and his wife, Fern, his childhood sweetheart from Wilmot, had settled in the little town of Melville, Saskatchewan. He became a Canadian citizen. His bootlegging enterprise thrived as he crossed the border easily with his young daughter, Echo, accompanying him on occasion. (He had sensed that her presence alleviated the suspicions of customs agents.)

By the late 1920s, Sankey had become a liquor supplier to members of the social elite of Denver. He was a trustworthy, gentlemanly bootlegger who sent Christmas cards to his customers. He was the kind of criminal with whom law-abiding people felt comfortable.

He and his wife moved from Melville to Regina, the provincial capital of Saskatchewan. Sankey supported amateur hockey, loved to bowl, and was a friendly neighbor.

But the dawn of the thirties threatened Sankey’s prosperity. The Depression was deepening, and fewer Americans had money to spend on contraband liquor. Big criminal syndicates took more control of the remaining bootlegging business. Sankey didn’t have platoons of gun-toting toughs to stand up to the syndicates. What could he do?

In February 1931, two masked gunmen robbed the Royal Bank in Regina, taking some $13,000. The locals, well aware of his bootlegging history, speculated that Sankey may have been one of the robbers. But he was never implicated officially, just as he was never charged with several other bank robberies in the region that he was suspected of around that time.

Weeks after the Regina bank heist, Verne and Fern Sankey returned to South Dakota. They rented a house in the little town of Kimball, in the south-central part of the state, where their daughter attended school. By this time, Verne and Fern had an infant son, Orville.

Soon, Sankey bought a few hundred acres of land about twenty miles northwest of Kimball, near the tiny hamlet of Gann Valley. He built a small house on the land and raised cattle, turkeys, and vegetables.

The Sankey spread was remote and hard to reach, even by the standards of that windswept, Dust Bowl era when paved roads were scarce far from the big cities. The Sankeys’ nearest neighbor was three miles away. But Sankey did not isolate himself. He kept in touch with his neighbors, went to church with them, attended socials and festivals. And he made friends with the local sheriff and prosecutor.

Had Sankey, who had fled the farm in his youth, been drawn back to the joys of country living? Not really. In the summer of 1932, he and Fern relocated to a house in Minneapolis, the twin city of St. Paul. Around the Twin Cities, it was impossible not to be aware of the Bohns, who were a staple of local coverage.

By this time, Sankey was ready to get into kidnapping. He was convinced he could do it more efficiently than the kidnappers he knew from the true-crime magazines he loved to read.

Sankey kept in touch with friends he had made while working on the railroad in Canada. Among them were Ray Robinson and Gordon Alcorn, both Canadians, and Arthur Youngberg, a native of northern Minnesota. All were a decade or so younger than Sankey. Alcorn, especially, was drawn to Sankey, for whom he had been a railroad fireman while Sankey was an engineer. As the Depression worsened, Robinson, Youngberg, and Alcorn had trouble finding and keeping steady jobs.

Robinson was a sometime guest at Sankey’s isolated farm. Sankey and Robinson began to talk about snatching someone for ransom. The talk was hypothetical at first, then much less so as the focus turned to the Bohn family.

It would be revealed later that Haskell Bohn was not held captive in some remote country location but in the basement of the Minneapolis house where Sankey and his wife were staying. For months afterward, Sankey seemed to have gotten away with the caper. Bohn had been freed just before the seven-day waiting period, which would have authorized federal investigators to enter the case, had expired. Sankey figured the local cops didn’t have a clue who had kidnapped Bohn. He was right, at least for the moment, and he was looking for other targets.

On to Denver!

CHAPTER NINETEEN

IN THE MILE HIGH CITY

Denver

Early 1933

Denver would not be the first location of many people seeking mild winter weather, but the city did offer relative relief from the razor cold of South Dakota and Saskatchewan. And Verne Sankey knew from his bootlegging days that some very rich people lived in the city and its suburbs.

So Verne and Fern Sankey rented a house in Denver, and Sankey began gathering information. From public records, he gleaned data on the wealth of about thirty “candidates” for his next caper. He pared the list to several prospects, including the beer magnate Adolph Coors and Charles Boettcher II, a member of one of Colorado’s wealthiest families.

For weeks, Sankey drove around Denver to canvass the homes of the possible targets. He was accompanied by his friend Gordon Alcorn from the railroad days.

Finally, Sankey decided: the honor of being his next kidnapping victim should go to Charles Boettcher II.

“Charlie” Boettcher, as he was known to all, was thirty-one years old in early 1933. He had graduated from Yale and was married to a beauty queen from Montana named Anna Lou Piggott. The Boettchers lived in a twenty-one-room mansion in an exclusive Denver neighborhood. By early 1933, the couple had a five-year-old daughter, and Anna was expecting another child in March.

Charlie was an aviation enthusiast. Charles Lindbergh was a friend and had been a houseguest. The Boettchers worshipped the Protestant God and moved easily in Denver high society, Charlie more so than Anna.

Although Charlie had been born to