Zero at the Bone

In 1953, six-year-old Bobby Greenlease, the son of a wealthy Kansas City automobile dealer, 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 from the Greenlease family. 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, where his body was found by police shortly thereafter. The Greenlease ransom was the highest ever paid in the United States to that date, and the case held the country transfixed in the same way the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby had 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, hard-boiled detectives, and a room at the legendary, but now razed, Coral Court Motel on Route 66. Heady and Hall were apprehended quickly, convicted, and sentenced to death. They died in a rare double execution in the State of Missouri's gas chamber on a cold December night not long before Christmas, just 81 days after the murder. By that time, little Bobby Greenlease was stone cold in his grave and a fickle America had turned back to its postwar 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