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

“Sign them,” a voice commanded. Hamm scrawled his signature. He expected the hood to be put over his head again. Instead, cotton-lined goggles were placed over his eyes. When the car stopped at long last, his goggles were removed. Because the summer solstice was approaching, there was still enough daylight for him to see a two-story house. The windows were boarded. A farmhouse, he thought. But where?

The next day, Friday, a taxi driver delivered a note to Dunn demanding $100,000 for Hamm’s safe return. If the money was not forthcoming, the note said, Hamm would be killed. At the bottom of the note was Hamm’s signature.

The taxi driver told police a man who had said his name was Gordon had given him $2 to deliver the message. Shown photographs of people known or suspected to be in the business of kidnapping, the cabbie picked out a photograph of Sankey.

There was speculation that Sankey had put together a new kidnapping organization to replace his friends from the railroading days, who had practically invited arrest with their carelessness. Carl Pearce had shot off his drunken mouth in front of the wrong people. And Ray Robinson, who had helped Sankey abduct Haskell Bohn, had stupidly deposited $10,000 in an account under his own name in a Winnipeg bank scarcely a week after Bohn was abducted.

Of course, that was an enormous deposit for a former railroad worker, and it aroused immediate suspicion. The police in Canada as well as the United States were aware of Robinson’s ties to Sankey. On March 31, 1933, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police caught up with Robinson in a tiny village two hundred miles north of Winnipeg. Robinson readily admitted his own guilt in the Haskell Bohn affair. He also implicated Sankey’s wife, recalling that she had cooked meals for Bohn during his captivity.

The capture of Robinson and his willingness to talk helped cause an odd coincidence that was part of a human drama. In June 1933, Fern Sankey was transported to St. Paul to stand trial in the Bohn kidnapping. The prosecution’s case was fairly straightforward. It boiled down to a question: How could Fern Sankey not have been a willing participant in the crime when, in fact, Haskell Bohn was held in the basement of the Sankeys’ home where Fern cooked for him?

But Robinson testified for the defense that Fern had not taken part in the kidnapping itself. What was more, he said, Fern had urged her husband to release Bohn early in his captivity.

A jury is not supposed to think badly of a defendant in a criminal trial if he or she does not testify. That, at least, is the theory and the law. In reality, many jurors want to hear the defendant say “I’m not guilty!” before giving him or her the benefit of the doubt.

Fern elected to tell her story: “I begged and pleaded with my husband to release the boy. I told him I had two brothers and how I would feel if one of them were in such a position. But he told me to mind my own business.”56 She said she was never present during negotiations.

The jurors surely knew that Fern had been separated from her two young children as well as her husband. She cried during part of her testimony. All in all, she was a sympathetic figure.

The jury got the case late on the afternoon of June 15, the very time when William Hamm Jr. was lying blindfolded on the floor of his kidnapper’s car just after being snatched.

After deliberating for several hours, the jurors acquitted Fern Sankey of conspiring to kidnap Haskell Bohn. She slumped in her chair and said, “I am so glad.”

But acquittal did not mean freedom. Fern was quickly rearrested to face federal charges in the Boettcher case.

Given the fact that a taxi driver had picked out a photo of Verne Sankey as the man who had paid him $2 to deliver a ransom message to William Dunn and considering that Fern Sankey had been on trial, it made perfect sense to conclude that Sankey was lurking in the Twin Cities area. Would he try to free his wife? After all, he had already shown he was willing to shoot it out with the police.

“Turn your face to the wall.”

Hamm soon got used to that command, issued each time one of the kidnappers entered the small, dimly lit room where he was being held. He never saw his captors’ faces and could not tell from the voices how old they were. Hamm thought he detected five or six voices.

Except for the fact that he was being held very much against his will, he was not mistreated. At appropriate intervals, he was fed what he later recalled as decent, if rather plain, food. Nothing like the fare he was used to.

Now and then, Hamm was given progress reports. Things were moving along, he was told. In fact, the kidnappers were staying in touch by sending the notes pre-signed by Hamm to people who would deliver them to the family.

On the night of Saturday, June 17, a company beer truck left the Hamm Brewing headquarters, followed closely by a car carrying Dunn, a company lawyer, and several other men. Following them was still another car, driven by Chief Inspector Charles J. Tierney of the St. Paul police. Inside the beer truck was the ransom money, some from the Hamm family and some of it contributed by St. Paul businessmen.

The exact amount of the entire package was not revealed, but it was soon disclosed that the kidnappers had settled for less than their original demand of $100,000. That was another fact that pointed to Sankey. In both the Bohn and Boettcher cases, he had been willing to bargain down, to quit while he was ahead. It was the pragmatic, professional way to kidnap.

“Good news,” one of his jailers told Hamm on the afternoon of Sunday, June 18. “The ransom’s been paid, and