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

The kidnappers waited until dark. Then they put the goggles over Hamm’s eyes and put him in a car with three other men, including the driver. Then they were off on another long ride, one that Hamm was happy to be taking. The ride lasted most of the night.

Shortly after 5:30 that morning, the car carrying Hamm came to a stop, and he was let out.

“If there is anything we can do to help you, Mr. Hamm, just let us know,” a kidnapper said. 57

The car sped off before he could reply—not that he would have asked for anything. He saw lights in a farmhouse. He was glad that farmers rose early and glad that the farmhouse, he soon discovered, had a phone.

The kidnappers had deposited Hamm near Wyoming, Minnesota. A St. Paul police officer came to fetch him. Hamm was back home around 8:30. His widowed mother collapsed in joy and relief.

For the time being, a key question remained: Where had Hamm been held? It would be a while before the question was answered.

Back in his real world, Hamm recalled the moment when he was seized while on his way home for lunch. “I had only a fleeting impression of the two men’s appearances, although one of them resembled Verne Sankey.”

The Minneapolis Tribune jumped on Hamm’s “partial identification” of Sankey, noting that federal officials had been pursuing a tip that Sankey and Alcorn had been hiding out not far from where the ransom was delivered and Hamm was released.

The New York Times had implicated Sankey from the start with its headline “Kidnappers Seize St. Paul Brewer…Hold William Hamm, 39, for $100,000 Ransom—Death Threat Made in Note…Sankey Linked to Gang—Fugitive in Bohn and Boettcher Abductions Is Identified as Sender of Missive.”58

So Sankey had rolled the dice one more time! Or so it seemed.

But wait. Hamm said one of his kidnappers resembled Sankey. Was it possible that the headline in the New York Times and the report in the Tribune had gone too far in implicating Sankey? Could it be that Sankey had had nothing to do with kidnapping Hamm? And if he hadn’t done it, who had?

Sifting through the events all these years later, one is tempted to ask why it took so long for lawmen to find the answers, since some avenues of investigation could hardly have been more obvious. Or perhaps law investigators did have suspects in mind but were loath to share their knowledge. For those looking for suspects and clues, they were there for the taking.

Elsewhere in the country, the summer of 1933 would be a busy one for criminals and those who followed their exploits, perhaps deriving vicarious pleasure in so doing. But let us first acquaint ourselves with St. Paul, Minnesota, and with some of the people who made that city so special.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

DOTING MOTHER, DEVOTED SONS

The term parenting skills hadn’t come into use in their lifetimes, but it is fair to say that Arizona Donnie Clark Barker and her farm laborer husband, George Barker, lacked them. It is fitting that she is far better known than he is, for she was the dominant personality in the household. She nurtured her four boys, all of whom would grow up to be criminals, and she tried to instill in each a sense of self-esteem. No wonder she was known as “Ma” Barker.

She was born in 1872 in southwestern Missouri, a rugged region where Civil War hatreds still smoldered, highwaymen roamed, and honest lawmen were scarce. The Barker boys, Herman, Lloyd, Arthur (later to be known as “Doc”), and Freddie, spent their boyhoods in tar paper–shack poverty. They were wild boys, for their passive father was too weak to be a disciplinarian, and their mother never tired of defending them, no matter how outrageous their behavior.

Around Webb City, Missouri, a mining town where the family settled, the conduct of the lads evolved from bratty to maliciously mischievous and on to criminal—petty at first, then less so. By the time the family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Barker boys (Freddie was the youngest and his mother’s favorite) routinely engaged in robbery and thievery. But it was not what her boys did that bothered Ma Barker. It was how the law reacted to what they did. She was ever eager to defend her boys when the Webb City cops came after them for one crime or another, but she finally tired of the persecution. So the clan left for Oklahoma.

Ma Barker’s blind devotion did not lessen as her sons morphed into hardened criminals who took up with men of the same ilk. The Barker boys surely sensed that they had no prospects for honest prosperity and social standing, and they didn’t want their horizons in life defined by the ridges of the Ozarks. Soon, the Barker men were at ease with various Midwestern artists and thugs, including one Frank Nash, who in 1933 would unwillingly play a central role in one of the bloodiest incidents of the thirties. The Barker home in Tulsa became an occasional shelter for criminals on the run.

Ma Barker was never shackled to the social norms of the times. She tired of her milquetoast husband and left him for Arthur Dunlop, a shiftless drinker. Nor would Ma be limited by conventional notions of “a woman’s place.” She listened in on the household chatter about bank robberies, then began to take part in planning them, although she could hardly have been described as the “brains” of the outfit. Jigsaw puzzles took up much of her time.

Of course, Ma Barker envisioned starring criminal roles for her precious sons. The “bloody Barkers,” as the sons came to be known, towered in infamy but they were slight of build. The tallest, Herman, stood only five feet five. He was the first son to die, shooting himself with his own pistol in 1927 when he was cornered and wounded by lawmen in Newton, Kansas, after robbing a store and killing a police officer. Herman