Cash & Catch

CRIME

Not from the West, where his family's lumber kingdom lies, but from Washington, D. C. last week went news that one of 9-year-old George Weyerhaeuser's kidnappers had been caught, another identified. Few were the facts which Chief J. Edgar Hoover of the Department of Justice's Bureau of Investigation chose to reveal, but they were enough to make the nation cheer for its police, blush for its prisons.

Promptly on George Weyerhaeuser's release after payment of $200,000 ransom (TIME, June 10), Chief Hoover had issued a serial number list of the ransom bills, put 100 of his agents on the kidnappers' trail. Within a few days 30 of the bills had turned up in Utah banks, been traced to Salt Lake City stores. A local detective was waiting when, one week to a day after the kidnapped boy's release, a short, brown-haired woman walked into a Salt Lake City 5-&-10-c- store, made a small purchase. At the cashier's cage her $5 bill was quickly checked with the ransom list. The detective made his arrest. Other officers were waiting at the woman's home when her husband appeared a few hours later, with two ransom bills in his pocket. The man, Harmon Waley, promptly confessed his part in the kidnapping. Suspended sentences or paroles after five convictions for burglary had given 24-year-old Harmon Waley a proper contempt for U. S. courts and prisons. It was soon discovered that the Waleys had spent a penniless year in Camden, N. J., boasted that they were "going to do something that would fix us for life," moved to Salt Lake on relief funds last January.

Next morning in Butte, Mont, a policeman strolling his beat spied a man named William Mahan whom he had once arrested for bank robbery. As he approached, the man began to run. The policeman lost his quarry over a back fence and roof top. But in the Ford sedan which the man had deserted were found $15,155 worth of Weyerhaeuser ransom bills. All roads leading from Butte were promptly bottled up.

William Mahan, 32, known as a dangerous bank robber, had been paroled after a conviction in 1924, later escaped after serving seven years of a 20-year prison sentence in Boise, Idaho.

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