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

ransom, and returned to his car, he saw the headlights of other cars coming at him, and fast. Cop cars, he thought. Right again!

Bullets smashed through the windows of Sankey’s car, covering Sankey and Alcorn with pieces of glass. Sankey sped off, the souped-up V-8 engine in his car easily overmatching the horsepower of the police vehicles. And though Sankey didn’t know it, because of a communication lapse within the Denver police department, not all roads into and out of the city had been blocked off.

Sankey and Alcorn drove on lightly trafficked country roads with their lights off, ending up in Greeley, Colorado, in the middle of the night. The distance between Denver and Greeley is a mere sixty miles, an easy hour’s drive on Interstate 25 today. The circuitous route followed by Sankey and Alcorn required eight hours.

They had hoped to rest in Greeley, a quiet city of about thirteen thousand at the time (compared to just over one hundred thousand nowadays). But a car with shattered windows and no headlights was an attention-getter even for small-town cops. Sankey’s car was spotted by officers in a squad car, and when Sankey made several turns with the cop car always in his rearview mirror, he knew he was being followed.

Finally, Sankey and Alcorn found themselves cornered on a road next to a warehouse. At the most inopportune moment, Sankey’s car stalled. Alcorn got out and ran. Not Sankey. Using his car as a shield, he exchanged gunfire with the police. Then he realized to his horror that his car was rolling away from him; he had parked on a slope. He sprinted after the vehicle, scrambled in, and with deft moves of clutch and gas pedal, managed to restart the engine.

And away went Sankey, his car skidding and swerving, taking curves that made it teeter on two wheels until he was free of Greeley, out in the open country with darkness for company. He made it back to his ranch in South Dakota on March 2, to be reunited with Arthur Youngberg, his friend from the railroad days and a sometime accomplice in crime.

But where was Alcorn? As would be learned later, he walked a lot, across fields and dirt roads, after the gunfight in Greeley. Then he hopped a freight train to Cheyenne, Wyoming, then a bus to Nebraska after a rest in a cheap hotel, then on the road again. He arrived at the ranch two days after Sankey did.

There at the remote ranch, the three men thought they were safe. And they might have been, except for a veteran of the Great War named Carl Pearce.

Carl Pearce was a sad figure who had gotten to know Verne Sankey in Denver, where Pearce sold insurance for a time. He was good at it, at least to start with, earning several thousand dollars a year. But while he was fine with numbers, his sales pitch was increasingly hampered by his drooping eyelids and the often uncontrollable shaking of his head and hands.

Pearce had suffered shell shock during combat in France. Psychiatric treatment and hospital stays were to little avail, and his condition worsened over time. More and more, his voice cracked when he was with people, which made him more nervous, which caused his voice to crack more frequently. And so on.

He couldn’t hold a job. His wife left him. He began to drink a little. Then he began to drink a lot. Not surprisingly, he became acquainted with bootleggers. He descended the social ladder by a rung or two. Ever short of money, he passed some bad checks. He was caught and went to jail for ninety days, emerging in the autumn of 1932, around the time Verne Sankey was evaluating candidates for a kidnapping.

Then Pearce’s life changed for the better. He met Ruth Kohler, a widow and the sister of Sankey’s wife, Fern. Pearce and Ruth fell in love. And when Pearce learned that Sankey was planning a kidnapping, he was happy to enlist in the plot for even a minor role.

As Sankey, Alcorn, and Youngberg were settling in at Sankey’s South Dakota ranch, discussing how to divvy up the ransom money, Pearce was celebrating in Denver. His tongue loosened by strong drink, he told some acquaintances that he had played a part in the kidnapping of Charlie Boettcher and would soon be $2,000 richer for having typed the ransom messages to the Boettcher family.

Unfortunately, Pearce had talked in front of the wrong people. A woman who heard of his boasts was the wife of one of Pearce’s bootlegger friends. She also happened to be a friend of a Denver cop. Soon, there was gossip aplenty, and Denver police and federal prosecutors in the Mile High City had gleaned enough information to haul people in for questioning.

On Sunday, March 5, Pearce, Fern Sankey, and her sister, Ruth Kohler, were interrogated. So was Ruth’s teenage daughter. A search of the Sankey home in Denver turned up some $1,400 in cash and handwritten drafts of the ransom messages. What’s more, the handwriting appeared to some investigators, at least at first glance, rather like the writing in the Lindbergh kidnapping notes.

Fern kept her mouth shut. Ruth denied taking part in the kidnapping but admitted that she had heard Verne Sankey and Pearce discussing the crime days before it was committed. The teenage girl was quickly cleared of any involvement.

Pearce folded when he heard that Ruth had implicated him. He gave his questioners the names of Gordon Alcorn and Arthur Youngberg and rough directions to Sankey’s ranch. With remarkable speed, considering the relatively poor communications of that time, lawmen from Denver, Wyoming, and South Dakota were conscripted for a raid.

Meanwhile, Sankey, who was not yet aware that lawmen had brought in his wife and the others, hid his bullet-punctured car in a ravine near his ranch house. Looking at the machine, perhaps he reflected on the fact that he had crossed a Rubicon of sorts. Having seized a member