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

Fitzgerald quickly implicated three other men and two women in the enterprise. They were arrested in and around East St. Louis. Among the suspects were a husband and wife who lived on the farm in Madison County, Illinois, where Luer had been held.

If Fitzgerald was counting on his quick confession to gain him some leniency, he must have been disappointed. There were immediate cries of outrage over the treatment of a well-liked banker in his senior years and suffering from a heart condition. There was smoldering anger not just over what had happened but what could have happened.

“I can’t conceive why they put that old man in the hole instead of in the shed above,” one lawman commented. “Unless for this reason: Had he died, all they would have had to do would have been to fill in the hole. Then nobody on earth would ever have found his grave.”93

Eight and a half decades later, it is impossible to measure the mood of the American people, but it is reasonable to assume that they were becoming increasingly disgusted, even horrified, at the plague of kidnappings.

In 1933, the killer of the Lindbergh baby was still at large. In Philadelphia in July, a real estate broker was fatally shot by would-be kidnappers as he tried to flee. And in the Midwest especially, the ordeal of August Luer, a man of integrity who was nothing like a stereotypical banker with cold eyes and a sharp pencil, stoked deep anger.

By the time detectives and prosecutors sorted out who should be charged with what in the Luer case, there were six defendants—five men and a woman. When they went to trial in late September in Edwardsville, Illinois, the Madison County seat, prosecutors said all should go to the electric chair. Assistant State’s Attorney John F. McGinnis called the kidnapping “an atrocious crime” inflicted upon a “kindly old man” and urged jurors to “protect your home and fireside and children” by imposing the death penalty.94 Were the prosecutor’s remarks a bit extreme, considering that the victim had been freed by the kidnappers, albeit after an ordeal in a confined space? Again, the prosecutor was inviting the jury to imagine what could have happened. The judge must have been thinking along those lines too. In early October, after the six defendants were convicted, he imposed life terms on three of them, Percy Fitzgerald, Randall Norvell, and Lillian Chessen. Mike Musiala drew twenty years, and Christ Gitcho and Charles Chessen (Lillian’s husband) got five years each.

Any Washington politician with decent political antennae could sense the deepening public anger at kidnappers or at least those kidnappers who preyed upon good citizens instead of fellow criminals. Joseph B. Keenan, the special assistant attorney general who was the spearhead of the federal government’s drive to stamp out kidnapping, made it a point to sit in on the trial of Luer’s abductors.

Keenan stayed in Edwardsville only a few days. Then he was off to Oklahoma City to check on the status of yet another sensational kidnapping.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

THE OIL TYCOON

Oklahoma City

Saturday, July 22, 1933

Charles Urschel and his wife, Berenice, and friends Walter Jarrett and his wife, Kelly, were playing bridge on the sunporch at the rear of the Urschels’ Heritage Hills mansion. The home was routinely described as “palatial,” and in fact Charles Frederick Urschel was a fabulously rich oil tycoon, a billionaire if his fortune were converted to twenty-first century dollars. Jarrett, his friend and sometime business partner, had also been very successful in the oil fields.

Urschel, forty-four, was a powerfully built six-footer. He was occasionally called pompous, though not to his face. More charitably, he was described as forceful and dignified. He liked his privacy, didn’t like to talk to strangers about his personal life, didn’t like to read about himself in the newspapers. Who could blame him for that, really?

Besides, Urschel and his wife had good reason to be on their guard. The papers were full of lurid tales of kidnappings. Recently, the Urschels had read an article in Time magazine about the spread of the crime. It seemed that any family of means could be a target. Why, it was only last weekend that a banker in Alton, Illinois, was freed after being held for a week. He’d been taken right out of his home, and his wife had been roughed up! And as the foursome shuffled and dealt cards, the fate of John J. O’Connell Jr., the political prince of Albany, New York, was still unknown.

The Urschels’ young daughter, Betty, had had a chilling experience just a few days earlier. While driving down from Tulsa, she’d spotted a blue car in her rearview mirror early on. She hadn’t been alarmed at first, but the car, carrying two men, had stayed behind her all the way to Oklahoma City, more than a hundred miles to the southwest.

With loving firmness, Betty’s parents told her to stay in the house. Maybe we’ll hire a bodyguard if you absolutely have to go out, but otherwise, we want you to stay put, they said.

Dedicated bridge players, the Urschels and Jarretts stayed focused this Saturday night on spades, clubs, hearts, and diamonds. The weather had been in the nineties for a few days, hardly unusual for Oklahoma in July, but the night air on the screened-in porch was comfortable enough.

No doubt, the card players welcomed a respite from recent troubling economic events. Just three weeks earlier, on July 1, Albert R. Erskine, president of the Studebaker Corporation, was having breakfast with his family in their home in South Bend, Indiana, headquarters of the automaker. Studebaker was in deep financial trouble and had been placed in receivership, leaving Erskine president in name only. Rather abruptly, Erskine left the table, went to his study, and wrote a note: “I can’t go on any longer.” Then he picked up a revolver and fired a bullet into his chest, dying at age sixty-two.

And only four days before