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.