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

Actually, it wasn’t quite all. It was soon revealed that there was someone who loved the baby boy even more than Muench: the infant’s real mother, an unwed servant girl named Anna Ware, who had come to St. Louis from Pennsylvania to give birth. Days after Muench was acquitted, Ware sued to recover the child she had at first given up.

The ensuing hearing on Ware’s petition contained elements of sadness and low humor. Dr. Marsh Pitzman, a wealthy bachelor and colleague of Nellie’s physician husband, had certified that Nellie Muench had indeed delivered the baby she claimed as her own, an assertion supported by Dr. Ludwig Muench.

It was soon disclosed that Nellie Muench had made an earlier attempt to pose as a mother, working with her lawyer, Wilfred Jones, to obtain the baby boy of an unwed Minneapolis waitress who gave birth in a St. Louis hospital. But soon after arriving in the Muench home, the infant became ill and was taken by Jones and a friend of Nellie’s named Helen Berroyer to a hospital, where he died on July 16.

The presiding officer at the hearing, the distinguished lawyer Rush Limbaugh Sr. (grandfather of the present-day conservative commentator), was incensed by the sordid series of events. The entire fake-motherhood scheme was “a deliberate and consummate deception,” he concluded on December 5, 1935, going on to call it “a sham and shallow pretense” concocted to gain sympathy from the jury at the kidnapping trial, and just maybe for other “ulterior reasons.”134

Soon, Muench was back in court, along with her husband, Jones, and Berroyer. All were charged with conspiring to obtain Anna Ware’s baby without court approval. For eight days, the trial offered the jury—“a panel of open-mouthed farmers,” as the Washington Post put it—an entertaining glimpse at the seamier side of city society.

The entertainment ended on the ninth day, April 16, 1936, when the judge declared a mistrial after learning that one of the jurors had been offered a bribe of $100 to deadlock the jury. The retrial was scheduled for August. This time, the proceedings went smoothly, and the defendants were convicted and fined. In addition to a $450 fine, Nellie Muench was assessed a $25 contempt-of-court penalty for an outburst at one of the witnesses.

Case closed? Not yet. Soon, it emerged that Muench had not only convinced Dr. Pitzman that she had really given birth but had told him that he was the father—and that she would reveal that fact unless he paid her to keep quiet. Or she might just commit suicide on the doctor’s front porch. Pitzman had, in fact, been her lover. To buy her silence, he gave her several thousand dollars.

Now, Muench and her codefendants faced federal mail-fraud charges, since blackmail letters had been sent to Pitzman. The defendants were convicted on December 20, 1936. The sentences were imposed the day after Christmas, with Nellie Muench drawing a ten-year prison term and $5,000 fine; her husband, Ludwig, eight years and $5,000 (despite Nellie’s insistence that he was blameless); Jones a ten-year term; and Berroyer five years.

It had all begun with the kidnapping of a wealthy doctor in April 1931. Much later, a grotesquely obese former justice of the peace, in whose presence people felt free to plan crimes, had come forward with a story, not out of a sense of civic duty but because he was short of money. A prosecution witness had been slain while under protection at the home of a sheriff’s deputy. Mysteriously, the information on the license plates of the assassins’ car had vanished from a clerk’s office. A prosecutor had been run off the road and nearly killed. And a juror had been offered a bribe.

It was all enough to make one wonder how far Missouri had come from the days of the Wild West.

Rather uncharitably, newspapers noted that Nellie Muench had to surrender the mink coat she had worn to court and exchange it for a plain calico dress that she would wear when helping to scrub the toilets and jail floors before she was shipped off to prison.

While Muench was imprisoned, her husband divorced her. She was released in 1944 and died in a Kansas City rooming house in 1982 at the age of ninety-one.****

*The newspaper’s style was to render the noun and verb “kidnaper” and “kidnaped.”

**Since the kidnapping had taken place more than a year before enactment of the Lindbergh Law, that federal statute did not apply to the case. But Missouri lawmakers had made kidnapping a capital crime under state law in response to the plague of abductions in their state.

***An account in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the next day told much about the casual racism that was the accepted order of the day, in St. Louis and elsewhere. A front page photo of the victim identified him by race, and the main article noted that he was a “Negro farmer.” The headline was “Machine Gunner Murders Negro Who Implicated Three in Kidnaping of Dr. Kelley.”

****In recounting the denouement of the Isaac Kelley kidnapping case, I relied not only on contemporary accounts in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch but on Barry Cushman, “Headline Kidnappings and the Origins of the Lindbergh Law,” Saint Louis University Law School Journal, 2011, https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/268Saint Louis University.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

EVIL RESURFACES

New York City

Wednesday, May 30, 1934

Scores of warships steamed into New York Harbor for a Memorial Day display of American naval might, a once-in-a-lifetime thrill for hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children. The fleet included battleships and aircraft carriers, whose planes (“the sky talons of the American fighting eagle,” as the Daily Mirror put it) swooped and darted to the delight of the throngs below. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had been assistant secretary of the navy a decade before, beamed with pride.

The fleet would be anchored around New York for eighteen days. Its officers were celebrities, feted by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and other politicians, while