Snatch Stories

JOY AFTER TERROR Thus read a one-column headline in the Kansas City Star one clay last week. Another in an adjacent column read:

FIVE DAYS IN BONDS That was the Star's manner of heralding two stories which screamed from the front pages of nearly every newspaper in the land for most of the week. Most of the headlines were more explicit. Instead of "Joy After Terror." The Los Angeles Times had

JUNE ROBLES FOUND ALIVE CHAINED IN DESERT CAGE.

And instead of "Five Days in Bonds'':

GETTLE RESCUED UNHARMED; RAIDERS TRAP FIVE SUSPECTS

With the Gettle story breaking in Los Angeles exactly 43 min. after six-year-old June Robles was found in the desert out-side Tucson, Ariz., the Press was in a frenzy. So warm was the Gettle story in Los Angeles that old Arthur Brisbane, visiting there, stepped back into his favorite role of reporter for the day. He went to the Hall of Justice, spent four and a half hours with the prisoners in the case, wrote live columns instead of one for his syndicate next day. After interviewing Kidnappers Kirk, Kerrigan & Williams (see p. 16), Reporter Brisbane met their two women and melted. Wrote he:

"If you had been a newspaper man for 50 years and had observed what 'civilization,' and some men in it, do to girls thrown out into the gutters of a big city; if you knew what little chance they have, how entirely they are at the mercy of the criminals that own them, you would divide any prison term for those girls among the men and seek some way to atone, to those unhappy young women, for the horrible life forced upon them."

With the imprisonment of the captors, the Gettle story was the first to sag. Not so the case of June Robles, who all over the U. S. continued to hold a commanding position in the news with the Nantucket lightship disaster, the Chaco War, the drought, the Pennsylvania primary.

Two thousand miles away the New York Journal on successive days covered its front page with pictures of: 1) June Robles before the kidnapping; 2) her "coffin prison" in the desert; 3 ) June receiving "a warm kiss from her loving mother"; 4) June examining her school report card. The New York tabloid Mirror ran an interview, headed "TOT TELLS TORTURES." The interview went as follows:

"What do you want done to the kidnappers?''

"I think they ought to be chained and put out there in that hole where I was."

''Don't you think the chains should be put around their necks?"

"I don't know. Maybe. . . ."

The thoroughgoing Associated Press asked her pointblank:

"Well, June, does it seem nice to be back?"

"'Yes. indeed,' she answered precisely."

June Robles' parents were considering film offers last week.

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