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Chargement... Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease (2009)par John Heidenry
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Carl Hall had a great fall. The scion of a prominent family in my mother's hometown of Trading Post, Kansas (his grandfather Austin survived the Marais des Cygnes border massacre) had a less-than-stellar career in the Marines, including a stretch in the Quantico brig, then ran off with Irene Holmes, who watched him squander his fortune. Things did not improve when Irene left. After robbing a series of cab drivers at gunpoint, Missouri sent him to the state pen, where he hatched a scheme to kidnap Bobby Greenlease, nephew of a former military school classmate. The subtitle is a spoiler: Hall hooks up with a hooker and kills their captive by page 7. This account of the notorious 1953 case follows their boozy improvisations to collect a $600,000 ransom. Many clues suggest that no one fares well. Other reviewers are right; this is a pretty dry, unimaginative retelling of the Greenlease kidnapping. I kept waiting for the gun that appears in the first act to go off in the third act but no, there really are just a lot of inconsequential facts included for the sake of inclusion. Still I love true crime and this is a really well researched book. It's set between Hyde Park, Mission Hills and St. Louis, places where I live, work, and have lived (respectively) so it's hard for me not to take interest. A good but not great book. I was thrilled to find this book when I was browsing. I was a child when Bobby Greenlease was kidnapped. Like Bobby I attended a private Catholic school run by an order of French nuns. the kidnapping was frightening to me. I was afraid of being kidnapped so the case became very real to me. not long after Bobby was kidnapped the young Peugeot boy was kidnapped in St Cloud a suburb of Paris. Because of my fears I followed carefully these kidnappings. I learned many years later that at about the same time a woman called my school to ask if I or any of my brothers were in school that day. Apparently alarmed the Mother Superior called my mother and then accompanied each of us as we exited the school and watched us until we were out of sight.
As a boy in St. Louis, Mr. Heidenry came into close enough proximity to the kidnapping of 6-year-old Bobby Greenlease in 1953 to have developed an enduring fascination with it. That fascination has yielded a tough, gripping chiller of a book, written straightforwardly yet cloaked with the trappings of pulp fiction.
In 1953, six-year-old Bobby Greenlease, the son of a wealthy Kansas City automobile dealer and his wife, was kidnapped from his Roman Catholic elementary school by a woman named Bonnie Heady, a well-scrubbed prostitute who was posing as one of his distant aunts. Her accomplice, Carl Austin Hall, a former playboy who had run through his inheritance and was just out of the Missouri State Penitentiary, was waiting in the getaway car with a gun, a length of rope and a plastic tarp. The two grifters thought they had a plan that would put them on the road to Easy Street; but, actually, they were on a fast-track to the gas chamber. Shortly after they snatched the little boy, the two demanded a ransom of $600,000.00 from the Greenlease family and it was paid; but, Bobby was already dead, shot in the head by Hall and buried in a flower garden behind the couple's house, exactly where his body was found by police shortly thereafter. The Greenlease ransom was the highest ransom ever paid in the US to that date and the case held the US transfixed in the same way the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby had done decades earlier. In a bone-chilling account of kidnapping, murder and the dogged pursuit of a child's killers, John Heidenry crafts a haunting narrative that involves mob boss Joe Costello, a cast of unsavory grifters, hardboiled detectives and a room at the legendary, but now razed, Coral Court Motel on Route 66. Heady and Hall were apprehended quickly, convicted and executed in a rare double execution in the State of Missouri's gas chamber on a cold December night not long before Christmas. By that time, little Bobby Greenlease was stone cold in his grave and a fickle America had turned back to its Post-War boom. However, one question has never been solved: as Hall was being pursued around Kansas City and St. Louis, half of the ransom was lost and never recovered. Did it end up with the mob via Joe Costello? To this day, no one knows and dead mob bosses tell no tales. In a book that brings to mind films like "Chinatown" and "Double Indemnity", John Heidenry has written a compelling work that blends true crime and American history to take a close look at one of the United States' most notorious murders. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)364.152Social sciences Social problems and services; associations Criminology Crimes and Offenses Offenses against persons HomicideClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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