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

covered by linoleum, part by a carpet. Two chairs, a table, a coal oil lamp.

He subsisted on sandwiches, soup, milk, coffee, and water. And he listened intently for sounds that might be clues to his whereabouts, should he ever get back home. He listened for airplanes, train engines, train whistles. Nothing.

Ironically, the very isolation of the Sankey ranch was becoming a danger for the kidnappers. When neighbors dropped by now and then, they were country-friendly and informal, apt to barge in without knocking, then call out names: “Hi, Fern… Hi, Verne… Hi, Gordon…”

Suppose some of the neighbors suspected that someone was being held for ransom at the Sankey ranch. They’d think he must be rich and that the family might be offering a reward. In fact, Claude Boettcher was offering a reward of $25,000 for his son’s safe return.

Thus, another irony: although Charlie was the prisoner, Sankey wanted to be free of him as soon as possible—but not before being paid for his trouble. Yet getting the ransom money was proving to be a great deal of trouble. Claude was standing strong.

“I am going no place at no time to deliver money on their word to release my son later,” he said. “Public opinion may condemn me as a heartless man… But I feel if I paid that money before I got my boy, I would be signing his death warrant. Men who will kidnap will murder.”54

The father was not being callous; he had lost twenty pounds in the days following the kidnapping. He simply remembered the Lindbergh kidnapping a year before. Charles and Anne Lindbergh had complied with the ransom demand, and still their baby had been slain.

Further complicating things was an apparent disagreement between the Denver police and Claude, with the latter pressing for a free hand in negotiating with the people who held his son.

Because he was blindfolded, the days and nights blurred for Charlie. When his body ached for sleep, he thought it must be night. He’d been counting the days. He thought it was February 28, which meant he’d been yanked out of his old life more than two weeks before.

“Stand up,” a man said.

Charlie obeyed. Then he was pulled up the basement steps, out into the cold, and then he was in a car again. He dared to hope.

He sensed that there were two men in the car. “Keep that blindfold on,” one commanded.

The hours and miles went by. They must be taking me home, Charlie thought. The view inside his blindfold was gray instead of pitch black. The change meant it was daylight.

His blindfold came loose a little, enough for him to spot a train station as the car went by it. A sign read “Torrington, Wyoming.”

Torrington was a little town on the eastern side of Wyoming, north of Denver. So, Charlie figured, if he was being driven home, the car he was in was headed south. Which meant that when he’d been kidnapped, he’d been taken north. Pretty far north too. But then where?

At long last, the car stopped, and Charlie was pulled out. Walk, he was told. Count to 150 paces before you turn around.

He walked, realizing that he was more tired than he had ever been. The night was mild; he really didn’t need his overcoat. He heard the car speeding off. Not waiting to reach 150 paces, he wheeled around, took off his blindfold, saw the car melting into the blackness.

As his eyes adjusted, he realized he was in a quiet residential neighborhood. East Denver! Only a few miles from home! He walked a little more and saw that he was at Thirty-Fourth Street and York Avenue. There, on York, was a drugstore, only a block away.

It was just before 8:00 p.m. on March 1, 1933, coincidentally the first anniversary of the Lindbergh kidnapping. From the drugstore, Charlie phoned his father. Then he phoned a friend who lived not far away. Oddly, he did not call his wife.

The friend sent a car, and Charlie was driven to the friend’s home. Exhausted, Charlie collapsed onto a bed. He lay there for a couple of hours, crossing between sleep and half-awake.

Finally, the friend roused Charlie and told him his father was eager to see him. The friend drove Charlie to Claude Boettcher’s home, stopping in an alley so Charlie could hop a fence and enter his father’s house out of sight of reporters and photographers.

After what must have been an emotional reunion, Claude talked briefly to the New York Times by telephone. He confirmed that his son was safely home but refused to divulge more details. Then Claude opened the front door of his house and waved a pistol at the throng of press people. “Stand back!” he said. “I’m sick and tired of being pestered.”

Seemingly forgotten was Charlie’s pregnant wife, Anna Lou. More than three hours elapsed between Charlie’s release and his reunion with his wife and young daughter. It’s unclear whether this lapse arose from the domineering, super-male personalities of Charlie’s father and grandfather or pure neglect on Charlie’s part, perhaps linked to pure exhaustion. Regardless, it would become clear one day that the long ordeal and her husband’s actions immediately after his release had done terrible harm to their marriage…and to her.

While there had been tension between the Boettcher family and the Denver police, there had also been a secret agreement: as soon as Charlie was back home safe, a posse of police officers would swarm the ransom-delivery location and nab the kidnappers.

Which was what almost happened. By prearrangement, the Boettcher family chauffeur, a family friend, and two private detectives had driven to a point north of Denver where one of the men tossed a package containing the ransom into a dry creek bed. It was dark as Sankey and Alcorn approached the pickup point. Sankey saw the delivery car and was alarmed when its headlights blinked. A signal to the police, Sankey thought. He was right. Just after Sankey scrambled down to the creek bed, picked up the