Bobby Greenlease - Abduction and Murder

Abduction and Murder

In September 1953, Carl Austin Hall and Bonnie Emily Brown Heady kidnapped six-year-old Bobby Greenlease from Notre Dame de Sion, an exclusive Kansas City Catholic school. The kidnappers were drug-addicted alcoholics then living together in Saint Joseph, Missouri. In the early 1930s, Hall had attended Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri with Paul Robert Greenlease, Bobby's adopted older brother, and Hall had planned for some time to victimize his old classmate's wealthy family.

Heady went to the school, persuaded a nun that she was Bobby's aunt (and told the false story that Bobby's mother had suffered a heart attack), and took him away. Hall and Heady then took Bobby across the state line to Johnson County, Kansas, where Hall shot him to death.

After the murder, Hall and Heady then sent Bobby's father a message demanding a ransom of $600,000. Greenlease, desperately hoping to save his son, held off the police and FBI, and paid up. Hall and Heady collected the ransom and got away. It was the largest ransom paid up to that point in U.S. history.

However, Hall then became convinced that police would trace them to St. Joseph, and impulsively decided to drive to St. Louis, instead.