At La Sorpresa

The heat at Buenos Aires sizzled up to 97DEG last week, and it was hot even at Mar del Plata, Argentina's swank summer resort 250 miles south across the pampas. At nearby La Sorpresa, the great wooded estancia of one of Argentina's first families, Sportsman Simon Pereyra Iraola was entertaining his father-in-law, Senator Antonio Santamarina, leader of Argentina's Democratic party. Rancher Pereyra Iraola had ridden over from his neighboring estancia, San Simon, where he breeds some of the Argentine's finest horses. The next to youngest of the Pereyra Iraolas' seven children, 2-year-old Eugenio, was playing on La Sorpresa's big lawn and had just had his dinner. His mother left Eugenio to his nurse to welcome her husband on his return. The nurse left Eugenio for a moment. When she returned he was gone. The nurse and the Pereyra Iraolas frantically searched the woods at the edge of the park. Then to the gate of La Sorpresa two miles away cracked a grim order from Rancher Pereyra Iraola that no one should be allowed to leave. By telephone the whole southern Argentine was then called on its first major kidnap hunt.

Within a few hours every peon in the Pereyra Iraolas' neighborhood was stuttering out answers to police, every estancia gate and fence in rich Buenos Aires province was carefully watched. If Father Pereyra Iraola is no such popular hero as Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Senator Santamarina is nevertheless politically potent, and his brother Enrique, who heads the great Banco de la Nacion, is extremely rich. Also, a great-uncle of the kidnapped child is Carlos M. Noel, president of Argentina's Chamber of Deputies.

At La Sorpresa, the Provincial Chief of Detectives, famed Fernandez Bazan, began to round up suspects. The truck driver, one La Fuente, who had carried Father Pereyra Iraola's baggage from San Simon and had left just before the kidnapping, was dismissed after claiming that two unknown men had asked him for road directions. Two neighborhood vagrants, a Russian and an Italian, were vainly questioned. Then police captured a thick-witted peon named Jose Gancedo who had disappeared from La Sorpresa the night of the kidnapping, and who aroused further suspicion by failing to explain where he got the new clothes he was wearing or why he had shaved his beard. The kidnapped baby's 5-year-old brother Miguel told Detective Bazan that a bearded man had streaked out of the trees, whisked Eugenio back with him. But the most important clue of all to Argentina's press seemed to be that the nation's Public Enemy No. 1 "Pibe Cabeza" (Pin Head) Rogelio Gordillo, had been hanging around La Sorpresa in November and had robbed Father Pereyra Iraola on the road nearby. When Pin Head Gordillo was shot down by police last month, Rancher Pereyra Iraola identified a rosary in Gordillo's pocket as his.

The manhunt tightened around Buenos Aires, where Pin Head Gordillo's lieutenant, one Antonio Capriolo, was still at large. Every car entering the Federal District was stopped and searched. The newspaper Critica scooped its competitors with a "life size" portrait of Baby Pereyra Iraola. Suddenly in a crowded Buenos Aires square, searching police caught sight of Antonio Capriolo, opened fire over the heads of terrified passersby. After a brief duel Public Enemy Capriolo escaped.

Meantime there was no sign of the Pereyra Iraola child and in many an estancia chapel prayers went up for his safety. A newshawk asked Senator Santamarina if his grandson's kidnappers had mentioned ransom.

"If he were kidnapped for ransom," flashed the proud Senator, "we would pay without advising the police."

After three days' search, five years almost to the day after Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. disappeared in New Jersey's Sourland Hills, police found Eugenio Pereyra Iraola in a pigpen on the outskirts of La Sorpresa: dead, naked, with marks on his throat, his small hands crossed on his chest. To this brutish crime Brutish Jose Gancedo, dragged from jail to see the body and driven to the end of his dim wits by questioning, next day confessed.

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