A Man with Soft Hands

After midnight, two FBI agents slipped into the backyard of a trim white bungalow on the outskirts of St. Joseph, Mo., tried the locked doors of the darkened house, inspected'the yard until their flashlights' beams came to a cluster of wilting yellow chrysanthemums by the back porch. Shoveling the flowers aside, the agents started digging. As the sun came up, they stopped and waited until a workman, Claude James, came along the street. They gave him a job: digging for the body of six-year-old Bobby Greenlease, murdered by kidnapers who had planted the chrysanthemums over his grave.

It took a long time. By 10 o'clock, neighbors clung to telephone poles and tree limbs, stood on ladders and clambered to rooftops to peer over a dense honeysuckle hedge into the yard. At noon, having dug out 3 ft. of dirt and a foot of quicklime, James stepped back with a sick sigh. A pair of undertakers, their pants legs rolled up, got down into the grave and lifted out a blue plastic bag. Inside was the fully clothed body of Bobby Greenlease. He had been shot once through the head, from behind.

The FBI had been told where to find Bobby. Their informant: the kidnap leader. He was Carl Austin Hall, 34, a thief, an alcoholic and a morphine addict (one-half grain every six hours). His past was odd and ugly.

"I'd Rather Be In Jail." Around Pleasanton, Kans. (pop. 1,200), Hall's father was regarded as a fine lawyer but a hard man who once exacted as his fee in a homicide case his acquitted client's whole 600-acre farm. Carl Austin Hall had a mentally deficient older brother who died at five in a mental institution, sent there because "the folks didn't want Carl brought up around him." But as a boy, Carl himself was always in trouble, always trying to cheat someone, always bragging about how he would one day make big money without working. When he was eleven, his mother, trying to keep him busy and out of scrapes, paid the local telephone company to hire him as a lineman's helper. The experiment failed, and Carl was shipped away to Kemper Military School at Boonville, Mo. When he got into more trouble, his mother pushed him into the Marine Corps. He went AWOL, explaining later: "I'd rather be in jail than in the Marines."

His parents dead, Carl Hall went back to Pleasanton to receive a $200,000 inheritance which included a large home and 1,170 acres of fertile Missouri and Kansas farm land. He sold the family property as fast as possible. "Sentiment," said he, "don't mean a damn thing to me." Pleasanton was too small for Carl Hall. "People got their noses up at me," he complained. "They're jealous because I got money. I'll show 'em how money and brains can really get goin'."

With that, he went off with the wife of a Pleasanton businessman and took her to Kansas City, where, after her divorce, he married her. He used to come back to Pleasanton in a Cadillac convertible with men whom he fatuously introduced as "my broker" and "my lawyer." During the next four years, he lost money playing the stock market, in liquor-store ventures and in an airplane crop-dusting business. He drank and gambled. His wife left him. He turned to passing bad checks in hospitals, and then to holding up cab drivers. In 1952, he went to the Missouri penitentiary for robbery.

In prison, he wangled a soft job on the hospital detail. He remembered a Kemper schoolmate, Paul Greenlease. foster brother of Bobby. The Greenlease family was rich, Hall knew. His plans began to take shape. He was paroled last April, after serving only 14 months of a five-year term. He got and lost a job as an auto salesman, and then told the parole office, to which he reported regularly, that he was working for an insurance company. This was a lie, detectable by a telephone call, but Hall was not caught in it.

A Changed Woman. Last July, in a tavern in St. Joseph, 50 miles north of Kansas City, Hall met puffy, whisky-soaked Bonnie Brown Heady. 41. * People around Nodaway County, Mo. remembered Mrs. Heady as a pigtailed little girl on a dappled pony given her by her father, a prosperous farmer. In St. Joe, she had been known for 20 years as the attractive wife of a livestock broker, with whom she attended square dances and club meetings. A year ago, her personality seemed to change. She divorced her husband. She took to swilling a quart of liquor a day and arriving drunk at the shows where her boxer dogs were being exhibited.

Although she had an income from an $85,000 farm left by her father, she became a prostitute, picking up men in bars, giving $2 apiece to cab drivers who brought customers to her. She charged $20 a night. Neighbors complained of wild parties in her home. Several months ago, in a drunken scuffle, she shot a traveling salesman in the wrist; he declined to prosecute. Bonnie Heady was just the girl for Carl Hall. He moved in with her.

Last month Mrs. Heady went to Kansas City's French Institute of Notre Dame de Sion, where little Bobby Green-lease was in the first grade, and tricked a nun into letting the boy go with her (TIME, Oct. 12). She took Bobby to Hall, who was waiting several blocks away in her station wagon. Then, according to her original story to police, she went shopping, returned to drive with Hall to St. Joe and noticed a large bundle under a blanket on the vehicle floor; Hall told her it was "dog food."

Special Delivery. Mrs. Heady told police that she had known nothing about the killing, and Hall, with an alien twist of chivalry, backed her up. But Mrs. Heady's fingerprints were plastered all over a special-delivery ransom note sent the afternoon of the kidnaping to Bobby's father, Robert C. Greenlease, a General Motors distributor in Kansas City.

In a childish scrawl--police thought at first Bobby had written it--a demand was made for $600,000 in $10 and $20 bills. When the money was ready (it had to be drawn from all twelve Federal Reserve Bank districts), the Greenleases were to put a classified ad in the Kansas City Star, saying: "M. Will meet you in Chicago Sunday. G." At Kansas City's Commerce Trust Co., Arthur B. Eisenhower, executive vice president of the bank and President Eisenhower's brother, set 80 clerks to work assembling the 40.000 pieces of currency. Stuffed into an Army duffel bag, the money weighed 85 Ibs.

To the Greenleases came another note, enclosing Bobby's Maltese cross school pin as proof that the family was dealing with the real kidnapers. After that, Hall called the family by telephone. He sounded sober, speaking in a low but brisk tone, introducing himself each time as "M." From Kansas City pay stations, he sometimes talked for as long as ten minutes. To find out if her son was still alive, Mrs. Greenlease one night talked to him directly and requested Hall to ask Bobby two questions: What was the name of the Greenlease driver in Europe last summer? What did Bobby do his last night at home? (Answer: he built an Eiffel tower with blocks.) Hall told her he would try to get replies from Bobby, later said he could not because the boy would not "cooperate." Those in the Greenlease home, knowing something of the history of child kidnapings. feared from the first that the boy was dead. After Mrs. Green-lease's failure to get answers, they were even more fearful. But they acted on the slim hope that they were wrong.

Receipt Delayed. Robert Ledterman and Norbert O'Neill, business associates of Bobby's father, made two abortive efforts to deliver the ransom to Hall. The first time his instructions were too confused to follow. Next, the cash-filled duffel bag was dropped off in a rural spot, but Hall telephoned to say that he had not found it. Ledterman and O'Neill went back and retrieved it.

"Our third call," Ledterman said, "came early one morning. The caller said another call would be made to us ~at 11 a.m. At that hour, I was told another call would be made at 8 o'clock that night. At 8, the same man called and instructed me to go to a certain telephone booth in a hotel to await another call. At 11:30 o'clock that night, the call came in. The man was very jittery. He told me where to go and deposit the money."

Thirty-five minutes later, Ledterman and O'Neill left the duffel bag at the end of a highway bridge in a heavily wooded area ten miles east of Kansas City. They drove away. Carl Hall scrambled up from a hiding place under the bridge. He put the bag in the station wagon parked in a thicket near by. Bonnie Heady, he said later, was sprawled "in an alcoholic stupor" in the car. Hall did not wait round to count the money--three times larger than any ransom ever paid in the U.S. He never did get around to counting it.

Conclusion Foregone. So far, Hall had kept enough control of himself to carry out his complicated plan. Now, with achievement, his character betrayed him. He and Bonnie drove 240 miles east to St. Louis and rented an apartment. Both promptly got drunk. They fought, and Hall, after battering Bonnie's face, walked out. He went to a saloon and watched the sixth game of the World Series on television. He left behind a wrapper for a $2,000 packet of the ransom money. A barfly picked it up, looked at the figure, dropped it back on the floor.

Hall next attached himself to John Hager, an ex-convict (bad checks) turned taxicab driver and pimp. When the kidnaper gave Hager an $18 tip, the cabbie was elated. "I knew I had a Good-Time Charl'e." he gloated. He took Hall to a hefty (176 Ibs.), blonde prostitute named Sandy O'Day, and the three drove to a motor court near St. Louis. Hall tossed $2,480 onto the bed for Hager who counted it and announced the total. Hall, to make it a round figure, added $20. Next morning Hager returned to the motel and picked up Sandy O'Day, who was about to leave for Kansas City, where she was later arrested. She told Hager of seeing a suitcase loaded with money. "There must be a million dollars back there," she said. "Then." said Hager, "I knew I did not have a Good-Time Charlie."

Hager was scared, so scared that he called St. Louis Police Lieut. Louis Shoulders, telling him: "I've got a guy that's really hot. He's throwing away money and lots of it. He's got a big gun, and he's drunk and on dope." With a patrolman. Shoulders went to the Town House, an apartment building where Hall had rented Room 303, and where he expected Hager to bring him another woman. The patrolman, following instructions from Hager, knocked three times and called: "Steve, this is Johnny." Hall unlatched the door and opened it. The cops shoved in, revolvers drawn.

Shoulders took a key from Hall's pocket and opened one of two suitcases in the room. It was filled with money. The policeman took Hall to the station, where Shoulders opened the second suitcase. When he saw the currency in it, he thought: "This has got to be the payoff on the Greenlease boy." He turned to Hall and said: "Now, mister, you're hooked. We know all about you." Replied Hall: "I know. I knew when you put that gun in my belly it was all up with me."

Hall confessed to the kidnaping, and told police where Bonnie Heady was. During Mrs. Heady's stay in the apartment, she had worried about her dog. Doc, left at the St. Joseph bungalow. She had called a St. Joseph veterinarian and asked him to take care of Doc, since she would be "tied up for a while." Caught by police (with $2,000 in her possession) and questioned, she admitted being the woman who had taken Bobby Greenlease from school. But she said she had not known it was a kidnaping. Hall, she claimed, had told her Bobby Greenlease was his son by a former marriage, and he just wanted a visit with the boy. Bonnie was willing to help because "I love him so much."

Carl Hall denied having killed Bobby. He said that another bum, a tattooed sex degenerate named Thomas John Marsh. 37, had shot the boy when Hall and Bonnie Heady were not around. Police were skeptical, but a nationwide alarm went out for Marsh's arrest.

An End of Lying. Meanwhile, a bullet had been found embedded in the floor mat of Mrs. Heady's station wagon. Ballistics tests proved the slug had been fired from the .38-caliber revolver found in Hall's room when he was arrested. Bloodstains, which Hall had tried to clean up, were also found in the station wagon.

Faced with this evidence. Hall and Mrs. Heady, six days after their arrest, stopped lying. They admitted taking Bobby Greenlease across the Missouri state line into Kansas to a spot twelve miles east of Kansas City. There Hall, in the presence of Mrs. Heady, shot the boy. At the murder site, FBI agents found a mechanical pencil which Bobby's father had given him. Hall cleared Tom Marsh, still unfound. of any part in the crime. Hall disclosed the most grisly detail of the whole horrifying crime, one of the worst in U.S. history. He said that the grave had been dug and the quicklime bought before the boy was kidnaped.

This cleared up the case, except for the whereabouts of some $300,000 of ransom money, for which police are still searching. After confessing. Hall sank into a sullen silence, and Mrs. Heady asked for a pencil so she could work a crossword puzzle. The request was refused because she was classed as a "maximum security prisoner." So she settled down with a comic book: Intimate Love. Hall was being kept in solitary confinement, so that other prisoners would not harm him.

Years ago, Carl Hall had told the postmaster of Pleasanton: "My hands are white as lilies--and you'll never see a callus on them." In his way, he had kept his promise.

* Mistakenly identified by the FBI as a gun moll of the same name, who in 1935 slipped a pistol through the bars of her desperado husband's cell, thereby aiding in his break from the Muskogee, Okla. jail'.

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