At 4 o'clock one morning last week, just before he was going out to milk his cows, John Bonifas, a chicken farmer of Issaquah, Wash., heard a knock on his door. He opened it and there stood a dishevelled child wrapped in a dirty white blanket.
"I'm the little boy who was kidnapped," said 9-year-old George Weyerhaeuser (TIME, June 3). "I want to go home."
Farmer Bonifas and his large family took George in, fed him, dried his stockings, gave him a pair of girl's shoes. Then Farmer Bonifas got out his old automobile, drove George to the telephone office at Renton. He was told it was too early to make a call. He then drove to a filling station, called the Weyerhaeuser home in Tacoma, 20 miles away. No one answered. At last, after the filling station man had shut off his noisy air compressor, Farmer Bonifas made the police of Tacoma understand that he had on his hands the most sought-after person in the U. S. What should he do with him? Bring him home at once, barked the frantic police. Meantime, in the automobile outside, George heard newsboys yelling that his uncle had paid his kidnappers $200,000 night before, that apparently arrangements had thereafter become confused, for George had not been delivered at the appointed place. Farmer Bonifas came out of the filling station and he and George chugged off toward Tacoma.
For eight frantic days, George's parents, members of the multi-millionaire Weyerhaeuser lumber family whose domain stretches from Wisconsin to Washington, had been dickering with "Egoist" for the boy's return while Federal and local police had reputedly kept hands off. The Weyerhaeusers had got little sleep.
Another who had been sleepless was a corpulent, 59-year-old police reporter named John H. Dreher of the Seattle Times, one of a flock of 75 newshawks which alighted at Tacoma to cover the Northwest's biggest snatch. Oldster Dreher justified his 40 years in the business with an oldtime scoop. Somehow he got word of Farmer Bonifas' early morning call to the Tacoma police. "On one of those hunches that come like a royal flush," wrote Reporter Dreher afterward, "I started out in a taxicab to meet the farmer's automobile." Meet it he did. He commandeered the child, dragged him down on the floor of the taxi in case any of his rivals might have had a similar "hunch," got the whole exciting tale first hand.