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

next day, the kidnappers told McElroy to meet them on a lonely road in Wyandotte County, Kansas, just across the Missouri state line. McElroy and his son handed over a package with $30,000; in return, they were promised that Mary would be freed within two hours.

Sure enough, around four o’clock, Mary was blindfolded and driven to the entrance of a country club. She was put out of the car and given a small bunch of flowers. She removed her blindfold and saw the kidnappers driving off. She waved to them. They waved back.

After her father picked her up, she emphasized that she had not been harmed and described her abductors as gentlemanly.

Mary said she had almost enjoyed her time in captivity as a break in her daily routine. She said she joked with the kidnappers over the initial ransom demand of $60,000. “I’m worth more than that,” she recalled telling them. “That’s not as much as they got for Mike Katz!”

Mike Katz was a Kansas City, Missouri, druggist who was kidnapped in 1930 and reportedly paid a ransom of $100,000 to gain his freedom.

Speaking to reporters shortly after her release, Mary said her kidnappers had “treated me with such consideration, I have no malice toward them. They were just businessmen.”74

Was it odd that Mary McElroy, who had been handcuffed to a basement wall and whose life had been threatened, described her kidnappers as almost chivalrous? She talked so sympathetically about them that those close to her feared she was having a nervous breakdown.

Since the ransom money had been delivered in Kansas, it appeared that Mary might have been taken across a state line. So the FBI stepped in, using surveillance methods not available to the locals. They soon intercepted a telegram from a car dealer in Amarillo, Texas, to a junk dealer in Leavenworth, Kansas. The telegram mentioned a W. H. McGee who wanted to trade in a 1932 Oldsmobile, which he said he had bought from the junk dealer. Would the junk dealer please verify?

There was nothing damning in itself about the telegram, but the agents asked themselves why anyone who had bought a car in Kansas would be trading it in in Texas. What’s more, the Amarillo car dealer said W. H. McGee and several friends had arrived at his dealership on the morning of Saturday, June 3, in a car with a burned-out bearing. The travelers looked as though they’d been driving all night, pushing their car to the limits.

The Kansas City police chief called the police in Amarillo, who tracked down Walter H. McGee, a thirty-seven-year-old ex-convict who had served time in Oregon. He had in his possession $9,000 in cash—including bills that friends of the McElroy family had contributed toward Mary’s ransom after first writing down the serial numbers.

At first, McGee denied taking part in the kidnapping. Brought to Kansas City for more intensive questioning, he was confronted by Henry McElroy, who recognized him as one of the men who had accepted the ransom money.

“We’ve met before,” McElroy said.

“I want to tell you everything and get it over with,” McGee said amid sobs.

He admitted his crime, implicating his younger brother, George, as well, plus Clarence Click, owner of the house in Shawnee, Kansas, where Mary had been held. A fourth man suspected of having a role in the kidnapping was never caught.

Not surprisingly, the plot to kidnap Mary had been thought up while the men were drinking beer. As McGee told it, they were inspired in part by the kidnapping of Charlie Boettcher in Denver.

In 1933, courts functioned at a speed that seems inconceivable today. Within two months of the kidnapping, the McGee brothers and Clarence Click were on trial in state court in Kansas City, with an assistant U.S. attorney general aiding Missouri prosecutors.

By then, it was clear that the kidnapping had indeed been an ordeal for Mary, despite her initial description of it as a bit of a lark. Escorted to the house in Kansas where she had been held, she collapsed and wept when she saw the basement room.

In questioning the victim’s father during the trial, a defense lawyer tried to create the impression that Mary hadn’t really been harmed.

“Yes, my daughter was injured,” Henry McElroy testified. “To the extent that I fear she will never get over it.”

The McGee brothers and Click were all convicted. George McGee was sentenced to life in prison, and Click got eight years. But Walter McGee, whom prosecutors portrayed as the ringleader, was sentenced to hang, despite the fact that Mary had not been harmed physically. The judge said kidnapping was a scourge that had to be stamped out.

Walter McGee appealed his sentence, to no avail. But he had gained a seemingly unlikely ally: Mary McElroy.

“Walter McGee’s sentence has hung as heavily over me as over him. Through punishing a guilty man, his victim will be made to suffer equally,” she wrote to Governor Guy Park in April 1935. “He will have this advantage—he would not have to think about his execution afterward. In pleading for Walter McGee’s life, I am pleading for my own peace of mind.”75

The governor heeded her plea and commuted McGee’s sentence to life.

But there was no emotional relief for Mary, whose behavior became increasingly erratic. In one incident, she disappeared from her home and was found eleven hours later in Normal, Illinois. Brought back to Kansas City, she offered vague explanations for her absence and insisted that she held “no personal hard feelings” toward her kidnappers.76

Oddly, she added, “I am sure they do not hold hard feelings against me… I have nightmares about these men and the fates they brought upon themselves. I was part of the drama that fixed their destiny.”

She even visited the McGee brothers in prison occasionally. “Something drives me to do this,” she explained. “I cannot let them go.”

Her behavior may have been a reflection of what would later be called Stockholm syndrome. The condition takes its name from a bungled 1973 bank robbery in Sweden’s capital.