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

great wealth, he had succeeded on his own, forming a successful brokerage firm with a friend. In the midst of the Great Depression, Charlie and Anna Boettcher lived a life so full of riches and seemingly free of cares as to be inconceivable to millions of Americans.

And yet Charlie Boettcher could never be entirely happy with who he was, what he was: the easygoing son of a man who needed to dominate everyone around him, Claude Boettcher.

Claude’s father, Charles Boettcher Sr., was a man of amazing ability and iron determination. He had come from Germany in the nineteenth century and made a fortune selling hardware to miners. Then he had pioneered Colorado’s sugar beet and cement industries, two sectors of the economy that seemingly had little in common. But Charles Boettcher Sr. had a genius for business.

A photograph of Charles Sr. in late middle age shows a handsome, confident-looking man with a slight smile beneath his mustache. One could imagine him in the uniform of a Prussian general. A photo of his son Claude seems to show a very different kind of man: stern eyes behind pince-nez and a humorless, disapproving face, as though someone had just broken wind at the dinner table.

Yet appearances notwithstanding, father and son were enough alike that Claude was not overshadowed by a powerful father as some sons are. Claude was hard-driving like his father and aggressively expanded the reaches and riches of the family enterprises, investing in mining, railroads, banking, real estate, and utilities as Charles Sr. crossed into his senior years.

It was the fate of the patriarch’s grandson, Charlie, to be left out. He lacked the vision and grit of his father and grandfather and so was denied a seat in the most holy and sacred inner lodge of the family, whose membership consisted of Charles Sr. and Claude.

Or so young Charlie thought. The impression was reinforced when Claude bought a controlling interest in his son’s brokerage firm, a move Charlie did not resist. But how could he, given Claude’s emasculating generosity? After all, the twenty-one-room mansion where Charlie and Anna Lou lived had been built by Charlie’s father as a wedding present.

Thus, Charlie played the role seemingly meant for him. He dressed well, partied enthusiastically, and gambled, sometimes too much. He drank, often too much. He did not always reject the affection of other women. His vices put strains on his marriage. But Charlie and Anna Lou were not recluses. They went to a social event on the night of Sunday, February 12, 1933.

It was near midnight when they arrived home after a pleasant evening that included a snack at a chili parlor. As they pulled into their driveway, two men with handkerchiefs on their faces emerged from the darkness near the garage.

“Come here, Charlie, and throw up your hands,” a man said. “Do what you’re told, and everything will be all right.”

“Don’t resist!” Anna Lou, still in the car, implored her husband.

The man reached into the car and handed Anna Lou an envelope. “Mrs. Boettcher, open that envelope, please.”

As she did, a smaller envelope fell out.

“Now open that one,” the man said as he retrieved the bigger envelope. “Good night.”

The stunned wife saw the two men hustle Charlie off into the dark. When she had ceased trembling, she opened the smaller envelope and found a typed note.

The noted demanded $60,000 in old tens and twenties. The signal that the money was ready was to be an ad in the Denver Post. It was to read, “Ready to come home, Mabel.”

“Do not notify the police,” the note warned. “You know what happened to little Charles Lindbergh through his father calling the police. He would be alive today if his father had followed instructions given him.”52 That wasn’t entirely accurate, of course, but the words were still chilling.

At once, Anna Lou called Charlie’s father. She told him about the kidnappers’ warning. But Claude Boettcher was not a man to take orders from criminals. Of course, he called the police, and within minutes, officers were questioning Anna Lou. She was able to describe one of the kidnappers accurately: a man in his forties, around five feet seven inches tall, solidly built.

The police thought the kidnapping was the work of well-rehearsed professionals. They had minimized the chances of leaving fingerprints with the double-envelope gimmick and by taking care not to touch the Boettchers’ car. No doubt, the men had put Charlie in another car and were long gone.

It seemed to Charlie Boettcher that the ride went on forever. Many, many hours went by. For him, it was always night; his eyes were taped shut.

The car slowed to a stop. Charlie, blindfolded and with his wrists tied behind his back, was pulled out. Then the car started up again but stopped just a short distance away. Charlie was bewildered until he heard the sound of gasoline being pumped into the car by an attendant.

Charlie was put back in the car, and away they went. On and on, they drove. The car stopped a second time to refuel, with Charlie and one of the kidnappers stepping out as before. Then it was back on the road.

Now and then, his captors spoke to him. Their words were a mix of encouragement and threats. “Do what we say, and you’ll be fine. Fight back, and things will be ‘unfortunate’ for you.”

The car stopped yet again for fuel. Three stops for gas; that had to mean a lot of miles. But miles to where? Many, many hours. Charlie sensed that morning had come and gone and maybe the afternoon. Was it night again?

At long last, the car slowed to a stop. The car doors opened, and he was pulled out. It was colder than it was in Denver. Charlie didn’t know it, but he was at Verne Sankey’s ranch in South Dakota, almost six hundred miles from Denver.

Charlie was led through a door—into a house, he sensed.

“Take this fellow downstairs and put him in the little room,” a man