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

At the time, Muench’s dress shop was in debt. Since she had had at least one prior brush with the law (in 1919, she was arrested for stealing jewelry from a guest at a St. Louis hotel), the idea of committing a crime was not inconceivable to her.

There was early talk about kidnapping a member of the Busch family, but it was decided that snatching someone from the clan that headed the beer empire would bring too much heat. After all, the sensational kidnapping of young Adolphus “Buppie” Orthwein on New Year’s Eve 1930 was still fresh in the civic memory.

To judge by the wealth of detail that he supplied to John Rogers, Fiedler listened acutely as Muench and her accomplices brazenly discussed how to go about grabbing Dr. Kelley. Muench and at least some of the other plotters infiltrated a birthday party given at a hotel for Kathleen Kelley in early April 1931, barely two weeks before the kidnapping, to size up their prey. In fact, William D. Orthwein, one of Buppie’s cousins, was married to Kathleen Kelley’s sister, and he later testified that Muench and a man he recognized as Rosegrant were dancing nearby and drifted near the birthday party gathering as if showing a special interest.

“Don’t worry,” Muench told her confederates at some point. “I’ll figure out how to get the doctor out of his house at night.” Eventually, she learned the name of a prominent Chicago doctor with whom Kelley was acquainted. Whichever kidnapper called Kelley the night he was to be kidnapped was to use the name of the Chicago physician to gain Kelley’s trust.

Unfortunately, neither McDonald nor Davit, who were to pull off the actual abduction, bothered to write down the name of the Chicago doctor. So on the stormy night when they planned to grab Kelley, they first stopped at Fiedler’s hangout, where one of them telephoned Muench and sheepishly asked her to say the name again. Ballinger, she reminded him.

Then McDonald, calling himself “Holmes,” called the Kelley residence and pleaded for the doctor to come and minister to his sick nephew. When the doctor balked at first, McDonald waited a while and called him again, this time persuading him to embark on what he thought was an errand of mercy.

Then McDonald and Davit “examined their pistols and asked me to wish them luck,” Fiedler recalled. And off they went to snatch the doctor.

In Fiedler’s recollections, the kidnapping was a failure. Not only were the abductors unable to collect a ransom, but by April 29, when he saw McDonald and Davit, “they were tired of cooking” for their prisoner and wanted to give him back.

State prosecutors obtained indictments against Rosegrant, Johnson, McDonald, Wilders, and Muench in March 1934, although Wilders remained a fugitive. The defendants successfully petitioned to have separate trials, and prosecutors elected to try Rosegrant first. They announced that they would seek the death penalty.**

Rosegrant went on trial in late September 1934. A key witness against him was supposed to have been Johnson, the farmer in whose home Kelley was held initially. Johnson had pleaded guilty months before and agreed to testify against the other defendants in hopes of a lighter sentence. Alas, his own sentence was death—not imposed by the state but by assassins armed with machine guns and presumably bent upon obtaining his silence. They gunned him down on May 12, 1934, as he was sitting outside the garage of a sheriff’s deputy to whose home he had been sent for safekeeping.***

Upon hearing of the slaying, Fiedler decided to go into hiding. “It might be a good idea for me to put a few miles between myself and St. Louis,” he reportedly told a friend.131 Soon, he was placed in the county jail where, presumably, he would be even safer than he would have been at the home of a deputy.

Fiedler probably made a wise decision. Initially, the St. Louis police thought they had promising clues to the slaying, as witnesses had noted the license plate number of the car carrying the assassins. But just two days after Johnson was shot to death, it was discovered that the plates had “mysteriously disappeared from the State Auto License Bureau” weeks before, and there was no record of their having been issued to anyone.132

During the trial, Dr. Kelley identified Rosegrant as one of his captors and McDonald as one of his abductors. He also testified that he recognized Johnson’s house as the location where he had been held for about thirty hours.

Rosegrant was convicted on October 4 and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Soon afterward, prosecutor Charles Arthur Anderson was trailed by a carload of mobsters who ran him off the road and into a ditch. The crackup left Anderson with a badly broken leg that required weeks of hospital treatment.

But the prosecutor was not easily intimidated. With the testimony of Fiedler and Kelley, he managed to win the conviction of Felix McDonald early in 1935. Already a convicted robber in a separate case, McDonald was sentenced to sixty years for the Kelley kidnapping. As for Bart Davit, he was sentenced to life in prison in October 1935 for killing a grocer during a 1932 holdup, so he was never brought to trial for the kidnapping.

This left Nellie Muench, whose trial in October 1935 was held in Mexico, Missouri, 120 miles west of St. Louis, because of the publicity in the latter city. At first, she seemed to be a sympathetic defendant, since she was not only an attractive woman but…a new mother! Yes, after twenty-three years of a childless marriage, she held a baby boy in her arms.

Muench took the stand to deny all the accusations against her. Her denials were enough to persuade the jurors, who acquitted her on October 5, 1935. The overjoyed defendant walked proudly out of the courtroom, proclaiming herself ready to embrace motherhood and grateful for God’s gift in the form of a child. “I was not guilty,”