Arrest
Once in St. Louis, Hall left Heady in the middle of the night in a rented room, then contacted old criminal associates in an attempt to divert police attention from them. One of the associates, a former prostitute named Sandra O'Day, was supposed to fly to Los Angeles and mail a letter Hall had written from there in order to divert police attention from St. Louis; however, O'Day caught a glimpse of the ransom money and decided to do some redirection of her own. St. Louis police soon learned that Hall was flaunting a large sum of money, and they soon brought him in for questioning. Hall eventually implicated Heady; the police found Heady back at her own home outside Kansas City, and found a shallow grave in the backyard.
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.
Only about half the ransom money was recovered. The fate of the missing money remained a subject of wide speculation that a cab driver who took Hall to the Coral Court Motel had tipped off mob boss Joe Costello, that Hall tried unsuccessfully to bury the cash near the Meramec River (FBI searched the area in vain), that suitcases in Hall's possession upon his arrest were not brought to the 11th District Precinct Station (with two arresting officers, Lieutenant Louis Ira Shoulders and Patrolman Elmer Dolan, subsequently federally indicted for perjury), that the cash fell into the hands of mobsters or was hidden in the walls of the motel itself (the 1995 demolition of the Coral Court turned up nothing).
United States Attorney General Herbert Brownell followed the case intensely, as undoubtedly did President Eisenhower. Eisenhower's eldest brother, Arthur, was president of Commerce Bank in Kansas City, where the Greenleases kept their money.
Read more about this topic: Bobby Greenlease
Famous quotes containing the word arrest:
“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)
“Let me arrest thy thoughts; wonder with me,
Why plowing, building, ruling and the rest,
Or most of those arts, whence our lives are blest,
By cursed Cain’s race invented be,
And blest Seth vexed us with Astronomie.”
—John Donne (c. 1572–1631)
“One does not arrest Voltaire.”
—Charles De Gaulle (1890–1970)