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George said that on the day he was kidnapped last fortnight he had grown tired of waiting for his Sister Anne to come out of her school, where the Weyerhaeuser chauffeur was to meet them and take them home to lunch. He had wandered into the grounds of the Tacoma Lawn Tennis Club. As he was emerging on the other side he saw a man standing on the curb beside a "tan sedan." "He asked me where Stadium Way was. I told him I didn't know and he came over toward me and grabbed me and put his hand over my mouth and pulled me into the tan sedan." After that George remembered riding a long time, sometimes in the tan sedan, sometimes in the trunk of a "big, grey Buick." One night he and his captors slept by a river. George asked if they were going to drown him. Another night they slept in a stand of timberland. "That made me think, well, I believe it belongs to my father." His last three nights in captivity were spent in a house near Issaquah, bundled in his blanket and imprisoned in a closet by a man sleeping just outside its door. He said he was well fed, and when they finally released him on a lonely road just before dawn the men told George: "You've been a fine boy."
Reporter Dreher wanted to know if George could identify his kidnappers. George said they wore masks and "the men told me there were six of them in the kidnapping. But I never saw more than three. They called one another Bill, Harry and Allen." Up pricked Reporter Dreher's ears. Was George sure the name was Allen or Alvin? George thought it might have been Alvin. Thus fresh impetus was given to the report that Alvin Karpis, current Public Enemy No. 1 and supposedly the leader in the Bremer kidnapping in St. Paul last year, had engineered the Weyerhaeuser abduction.
Federal agents, who queried George after he had returned home and had a nap, were not disposed to accept the Karpis theory, pointed out that Karpis is known to intimates as Ray, not Alvin. It was suggested that a local gang had borrowed Karpis' name to mislead police. Whoever had done the $200,000 job was still free as the week ended.