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In prison, he wangled a soft job on the hospital detail. He remembered a Kemper schoolmate, Paul Greenlease. foster brother of Bobby. The Greenlease family was rich, Hall knew. His plans began to take shape. He was paroled last April, after serving only 14 months of a five-year term. He got and lost a job as an auto salesman, and then told the parole office, to which he reported regularly, that he was working for an insurance company. This was a lie, detectable by a telephone call, but Hall was not caught in it.
A Changed Woman. Last July, in a tavern in St. Joseph, 50 miles north of Kansas City, Hall met puffy, whisky-soaked Bonnie Brown Heady. 41. * People around Nodaway County, Mo. remembered Mrs. Heady as a pigtailed little girl on a dappled pony given her by her father, a prosperous farmer. In St. Joe, she had been known for 20 years as the attractive wife of a livestock broker, with whom she attended square dances and club meetings. A year ago, her personality seemed to change. She divorced her husband. She took to swilling a quart of liquor a day and arriving drunk at the shows where her boxer dogs were being exhibited.
Although she had an income from an $85,000 farm left by her father, she became a prostitute, picking up men in bars, giving $2 apiece to cab drivers who brought customers to her. She charged $20 a night. Neighbors complained of wild parties in her home. Several months ago, in a drunken scuffle, she shot a traveling salesman in the wrist; he declined to prosecute. Bonnie Heady was just the girl for Carl Hall. He moved in with her.
Last month Mrs. Heady went to Kansas City's French Institute of Notre Dame de Sion, where little Bobby Green-lease was in the first grade, and tricked a nun into letting the boy go with her (TIME, Oct. 12). She took Bobby to Hall, who was waiting several blocks away in her station wagon. Then, according to her original story to police, she went shopping, returned to drive with Hall to St. Joe and noticed a large bundle under a blanket on the vehicle floor; Hall told her it was "dog food."
Special Delivery. Mrs. Heady told police that she had known nothing about the killing, and Hall, with an alien twist of chivalry, backed her up. But Mrs. Heady's fingerprints were plastered all over a special-delivery ransom note sent the afternoon of the kidnaping to Bobby's father, Robert C. Greenlease, a General Motors distributor in Kansas City.
In a childish scrawl—police thought at first Bobby had written it—a demand was made for $600,000 in $10 and $20 bills. When the money was ready (it had to be drawn from all twelve Federal Reserve Bank districts), the Greenleases were to put a classified ad in the Kansas City Star, saying: "M. Will meet you in Chicago Sunday. G." At Kansas City's Commerce Trust Co., Arthur B. Eisenhower, executive vice president of the bank and President Eisenhower's brother, set 80 clerks to work assembling the 40.000 pieces of currency. Stuffed into an Army duffel bag, the money weighed 85 Ibs.