Kidnaping: A Worldwide Increase

Kidnaping, once among the rarest of crimes, has increased sharply within the past decade. In the U.S. in 1964, there was a total of 20 convictions for criminal kidnaping; last year there were 96.

The increase is not limited to the U.S. In Latin America, particularly Argentina, there have been scores of kidnapings by political extremists in the past year. Quite a few of them have netted million-dollar ransoms (one brought $60 million), usually intended for the purchase of terrorist weapons. In Europe, political abductions have multiplied over the past few years in Germany, and kidnapings for money have been concentrated among the wealthier classes in Italy. There have already been 39 Italian cases this year, compared with 41 during all of 1974, and Milan Police Chief Mario Massagrande gloomily says, "I am afraid kidnaping is the crime of the future."

Just as the rise of kidnaping skips mysteriously from nation to nation, the crime has changed in style over the years. The most celebrated kidnaping of the century involved a 20-month-old child, the son of Charles Lindbergh, who was killed by Bruno Hauptmann in 1932. The same fate awaited Bobby Greenlease, 6, in a notable tragedy of the 1950s. The theory was that kidnapers took small children so that they would not be identified, then killed them in fear. But recent kidnapings have more often involved adolescents, and instead of being killed they have been subjected to some bizarre forms of mistreatment. In 1968 a man and a woman kidnaped Barbara Mackle, the 20-year-old daughter of a Florida land developer, and buried her in a box with a supply of air and water for 83 hours. She was found unharmed, and her kidnaper was arrested the day after he had collected $500,000 in ransom. In 1973 the kidnapers of 16-year-old Eugene Paul Getty II, grandson of the oil billionaire, kept the boy in captivity through nearly six months of negotiations; the case proved to have any number of sensational aspects. After cutting off the boy's right ear and mailing it to a newspaper in Rome to show his parents that they meant business, the kidnapers collected $2,890,000 and then let him go. Three of the four abductors were captured.

Some adults have suffered harsh treatment at the hands of kidnapers as well, and undergone long, lonely bouts of uncertainty over what was to become of them. Jack Teich, a Brooklyn businessman, was chained in a closet for a week last year until his family paid $750,000 for his release. The kidnapers are still being sought.

Recent years have also brought political kidnaping to the U.S. The most striking example is Patty Hearst, who was seized in February 1974 by the so-called Symbionese Liberation Army. The group's chief demand was that her wealthy father, Publisher Randolph Hearst, finance a $2 million free-food program for the poor, which was carried out. Patty Hearst may be the first major kidnap victim to end by making common cause with her captors, and the FBI is still pursuing her. The Hearst case took another odd turn last week when FBI Informant Walter Scott, brother of Sports Radical Jack Scott, announced that he had lied when he told the FBI that he had seen Patty twice. Scott said that he had been drinking and was under pressure and now wanted to "set the record straight." Said he: "I don't have the slightest idea if she's in the world or not."

Kidnaping seems lucrative, but it generally attracts such high-powered police action and such widespread popular hostility that the odds against its succeeding are overwhelming. In more than 95% of the FBI'S cases, the victims have been returned, the kidnapers arrested and most of the money retrieved.

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