Murder of Bobby Greenlease

On September 28, 1953, six-year-old Robert "Bobby" Cosgrove Greenlease Jr. was abducted from Notre Dame de Sion, a Catholic pre-school in Kansas City, Missouri. Bobby was the son of multi-millionaire auto dealer Robert Greenlease Sr. and his wife Virginia Greenlease. Bonnie Heady, posing as Bobby's aunt, told a nun at the school, Sister Morand, that Bobby's mother had suffered a heart attack and needed to see him. Heady then took the child away by taxi, driven by John Oliver Hager of the Ace Cab Company, who later testified in court. The ruse was discovered when another nun called to check on Virginia Greenlease's condition.

Heady's accomplice, Carl Hall, had attended Kemper Military School in Boonville in the early 1930s alongside Bobby's adopted older brother, Paul Robert Greenlease, and had reportedly planned for years to target the wealthy family. After crossing the state line into Johnson County, Kansas, Hall shot Bobby with a snubnosed .38 caliber revolver after a failed attempt to strangle him. The pair buried the child's body in the backyard of Heady's residence at 1201 South 38th Street in St. Joseph, Missouri.

Only after the murder did Hall and Heady send ransom messages to Robert Greenlease Sr., demanding $600,000 — the largest ransom payment in American history at the time. Greenlease paid the ransom in hopes of saving his son, unaware the boy was already dead. Hall, fearing detection in St. Joseph, relocated to St. Louis, where the pair collected and split the ransom money before fleeing. Hall enlisted associates to help divert police attention, including a woman named Sandra O'Day, but his lavish spending of the ransom cash drew police attention in St. Louis, leading to his arrest and interrogation. Hall implicated Heady, who was found at an apartment on Arsenal Street; police subsequently discovered Bobby's body buried in her backyard.

Because the child had been transported across state lines, the case fell under the Federal Kidnapping Act. Both Hall and Heady pleaded guilty to kidnapping, and a jury deliberated just over an hour before recommending death sentences. They were executed together in Missouri's gas chamber on December 18, 1953 — only 81 days after the crime. Heady became the third woman ever executed by U.S. federal authorities and remains the only woman executed by the federal government via gas chamber.

Only $288,000 of the $600,000 ransom was ever recovered. The disappearance of the remaining $312,000 became the subject of extensive investigation and speculation, implicating the two arresting officers, Lieutenant Louis Ira Shoulders and Patrolman Elmer Dolan, both of whom were later federally convicted of perjury for falsely claiming that the recovered amount represented the full sum seized from Hall.