(4 of 5)
taken into the O'Connell family's
confidence. In Albany their word is law. They were going to get their
boy back in their own way. Up to late last week they had not gotten
him. Ransom asked: $250,000. Banker. The courtesy of a sick old
gentleman, neither brewer nor swindler, resulted in his kidnapping at
Alton, 111. one night last week. At 9 p. m., August Luer, 77, and his
wife were preparing to retire when two men and a woman appeared at
their door, said they wanted to communicate with one of the Luers'
neighbors. Mr. Luer, a banker, packer and Alton's first citizen,
offered to telephone the neighbor. His slippers flew off as his
captors seized and dragged him to a waiting automobile. Mr. Luer's
sons, fearful lest their father's serious heart ailment be fatally
aggravated by the shock of his capture, broadcast that Mr. Luer should
be allowed to stand up if an attack came on, should be given no coffee,
only mild cigars. "We cannot accept any ring, stickpin, or
fingerprints," they warned. "You can take such things from a
dead man. We must have something in father's handwriting." After
five days old Mr. Luer was turned loose on a road near Collinsville.
He had been kept, he said, in a dank, narrow concrete crypt in the
basement of a house he could not locate. Reported ransom: $10,000.
Elsewhere the week's snatching wave lapped and lashed. At San Diego,
Calif., onetime President Pascual Ortiz Rubio of Mexico received two
telephone calls demanding $50,000 on pain of being kidnapped. A
42-year-old poultryman named Patrick Fallon was taken from a farm at
Bridgewater, Mass. Frederick J. Persons, 16, son of an East Aurora, N. Y.
bank president, told how he had run away from two men who tried to
snatch him on a dark street. In Atlanta, President John K. Ottley of
the First National Bank identified two boys who had seized, later released
him fortnight ago on his way to work (TIME, July 17). Three men
were arrested as they lay in wait for another banker, Cecil C. Vaughan,
near Franklin, Va. John C. Lyle, mail carrier of Crawfordsville, Ga.,
was kidnapped by three escaping convicts, driven in his own car to Wake
Forest, N. C., freed. A St. Paul physician named Walter H. Hedberg said
he was shot through the ear, beaten, drugged, left in his car in the
path of a train when he refused to mutilate a chiropractor at the
request of thugs who seized him. What to Do. The kidnapping and killing
of Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. changed the law of the land.
Because abduction across a state line is now a Federal offense
(punishable one year to life imprisonment), the Department of Justice's
Bureau of Investigation can and does now enter a kidnapping case at
once. Last week's flagrant cases set Attorney General Cummings to
pondering further Federal legislative weapons. Joseph B. Keenan, fat
and fierce Cleveland prosecutor, was made special assistant to the
Attorney General for the suppression of rackets. Publicly Assistant
Keenan advised : "Upon receipt of a threatening letter or the
disappearance of a relative or friend, place a long distance call
immediately to Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, Washington. Officers will be dispatched to the scene.
. . . We were not notified of the O'Connell kidnapping until Monday
night. The young man disappeared Friday. That meant four days of
supremely valuable time lost. . .
