Bobby Greenlease

Robert C. "Bobby" Greenlease (1947-1953) was the son of millionaire car dealer Robert Cosgrove Greenlease, Sr. The elder Greenlease had made his fortune helping to introduce General Motors vehicles to the Great Plains in the early decades of the 20th Century. He owned dealerships from Texas to the Dakotas.

In September 1953, six-year-old Bobby Greenlease was kidnapped from an exclusive Kansas City prep school and brutally murdered across the state line in Johnson County, Kansas. The kidnappers were Carl Austin Hall and Bonnie Emily Brown Heady, two drug addicted alcoholics cohabitating in St. Joseph, Missouri. In the early 1930's, Hall had attended Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri with Paul Robert Greenlease, Bobby's adopted older brother, and Hall had planned to victimize his old classmate's wealthy family for some time.

The Lindbergh kidnapping-type case so scandalized the nation that it led to federal indictments, trials, and subsequent executions for both Hall and Heady, who died together in the Missouri gas chamber in December 1953. Heady was one of only two women since 1865 to be executed by federal authorities.

Herbert Brownell, Dwight Eisenhower's Attorney General, followed the case intensely, as undoubtedly did the president. Eisenhower's own brother was the bank president at Commerce Bank in Kansas City, Missouri, where the Greenleases kept their money, which was used in the ransom dropoff.

The ransom amount was $600,000, the largest paid up to that point in US history. Only about half the money was recovered. It was alleged the remainder was stolen by two corrupt police officers in St. Louis, where Hall and Heady were captured fleeing authorities.

External links

* [http://www.fbi.gov/libref/historic/famcases/greenlease/greenleasenew.htm Federal Bureau of Investigation's case on Greenlease kidnapping]
* [http://www.geocities.com/mike_donnelly_umkc/042801greenlease.html Blood Money and the Death of a Child — The United States v. Hall and Heady]
* [http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/classics/bobby_greenelease/index.html Crime Library Article on Greenlease]