Kidnappings dominated the national news in 1932 and 1933. There were several reasons so many criminals and desperate people resorted to this particular crime, but there is no doubt one kidnapping stood out from all the rest. Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, putting the 1932 tragedy behind them, were much in the news a year later for other reasons, but 1933 proved even a busier year for kidnappings.

Nation's prayers unanswered
The kidnapping of Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. was 1932's biggest story in the United States, a despicably cruel crime that devastated the nation and touched people throughout the world.

While some may have suspected the worst soon after the boy was abducted on March 1, millions remained hopeful and kept praying long after it was too late. When the body was discovered ten weeks later not far from where the kidnapping took place, it was obvious the child had been killed soon after he was taken.

Meanwhile newspapers went to outrageous lengths to cover the story, reporting every rumor, no matter how ridiculous. There were sightings of the Lindbergh baby all over the country, even abroad. Publicity seekers offered to help, making all sorts of claims. The baffling case remained under investigation until late 1934 when Bruno Hauptmann was arrested. He was tried and found guilty, then executed in 1936.

Whether Hauptmann was really guilty or acted alone has been the subject of controversy ever since.

EVEN BEFORE Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. went missing, kidnapings had become all too common. Many believed there was a nationwide kidnapping syndicate, one with ties to Al Capone, whose offers to help find the Lindbergh baby made law enforcement agencies suspicious that Capone had something to do with the abduction and would use it to barter a deal on his behalf.

Most kidnapings — at least, those of the gangster on gangster variety — went unreported. Also, most kidnapings should have been placed in a separate category because what was involved were gangsters from one gang capturing a gangster boss from another group and demanding money — or else. Almost all captured gangsters quickly coughed up the ransom and did not report the incident, for several reasons.

Many of the reported kidnapings were perpetrated by gangster wannabes who figured it was an easy way to make money, though, in general, ransom demands were modest by today's standard. In most other cases the kidnap victim returned alive, often after the ransom had been negotiated down from the original demand. One victim was released after making a promise he would pay later. It was a promise he must have made with his fingers crossed. What was odd is that this man had been kidnapped by one of our most notorious gangsters, "Machine Gun" Kelly, but, then, this was Kelly's first attempt at abduction, and he could dismiss the result as a rookie mistake.

Some reported kidnapings weren't kidnapings at all, but convoluted stories concocted to cover up the real reasons people went missing for a few days. One "victim" event wrote an account of his "thrilling escape" and succeeded in having it published via the International News Service in newspapers throughout the country. Police who investigated the crime knew something was wrong; sure enough, a few days after his "thrilling" account was published, the "victim" admitted he had made up the whole story.

It was early in the year that another American child was kidnapped. Her parents weren't famous and her story had a happy ending, though the story also may have encouraged would-be kidnappers.

Police obviously had doubts about another January kidnapping. Howard A. Woolverton had banking interests, which made him a target, except that Woolverton had not fared well during the Depression. Nonetheless he was snatched by two men while he and his wife were returning from a visit to some friends.

One of the men responsible for the crime was the aforementioned George Kelly, soon to be better known as "Machine Gun" Kelly. Apparently Woolverton was telling the truth about the $86. Kelly had demanded a $50,000 ransom, but was naive enough to let Woolverton go after two days in return for a promissory note. As you might expect, Woolverton did not deliver on that promise.

Woolverton's story was not accepted at the time. Bruce Catton, who later became famous, at least among historians, for his books on the American Civil War, was a journalist at the time and wrote a newspaper story in 1932 about a kidnapping syndicate operating out of Detroit, Chicago and St. Louis. He believed Woolverton's kidnappers were part of the syndicate and that they received a $50,000 ransom.

Catton also estimated that in the Chicago territory alone, there had been 200 kidnapings in a two-year period and that the syndicate made about $2 million. He said that in the beginning, the targets were gamblers and bootleggers. Problems arose, he said, when the syndicate began abducting legitimate business men and their families. These kidnapings were reported to police who launched intensive, widespread investigations that made life difficult for career criminals. Police hadn't shown much interest when gangsters abducted gangsters, especially because the gangster "victims" denied the abductions ever took place.

Theories about a widespread, even nationwide kidnapping syndicate didn't seem to stand up when applied to some high-profile cases. In January, 1932, for example, Benjamin P. Bower, a wealthy bakery executive from Denver, was kidnapped by a gang that demanded a $50,000 ransom.

This was one of the year's most elaborately planned and interesting cases, starting with the manner in which Bower was abducted. Two members of what would turn out to be a five-man gang began the evening by seizing two married women who apparently had been invited to a party at the Bower home. The two kidnappers forced the women to accompany them to the front door. Mrs. Bower answered the doorbell, looked out onto her front porch and saw two couples, so she opened the door.

The gun-toting kidnappers entered the house, rounded up all the party guests, then told Mrs. Bower they were kidnapping her husband, and that he would be killed if she didn't pay $50,000 in cash by the next morning. The Associated Press article said the two men disguised themselves with "large colored spectacles." You'd have thought these kidnappers would have robbed the party guests before leaving, but they didn't.

Mrs. Bower contacted police immediately after the kidnappers left, but a two-day manhunt which spread to several other states failed. That's when police did something you'd expect to find only in a movie. They contacted newspapers, asking editors to print a phony letter, one supposedly received by Mrs. Bower. The purpose was to make the kidnappers suspect that one of them was double-crossing the others, since no such letter was ever sent.

The plan worked. Apparently the kidnappers decided the best course of action was to release Bower, which they did five days after they had abducted him. They drove past his house and pushed him out of an automobile.

One of the kidnappers then contacted the police and made a deal. He told police where they could find the rest of the gang. When police arrived, the alleged leader of the gang, Joseph Riley, a murderer and escaped convict, killed himself rather than be captured. The others were arrested. Later, when Bower viewed Riley's body, he said he recognized the gangster as the man who had robbed his bakery weeks before.

There were two kidnapings involving families named Brodsky, one living in Philadelphia, the other in Wilmington, Delaware. It's possible the families were related, but I found no story that made any connection. The first actually was more of a robbery, but because the man with the money was forced to take a ride, it was called a kidnapping, though the victim was quickly released:

In early June it was reported that "two rich Hollywood men," an unidentified film director and a business man, had been kidnapped "by eastern gangsters" and forced to pay $12,000 for their release. Another man, a Hollywood manufacturer, was under police protection after three kidnap attempts failed, said a police detective.

In November, Providence, Rhode Island, police got involved in what clearly was a gangster on gangster abduction. However, the Lindbergh kidnapping and stories about kidnapping syndicates prompted authorities to investigate even when victims and their families denied a crime had taken place.

So it was with the Providence victim, a known bootlegger, who was missing for two days. When he returned home, police questioned him. He claimed everything was okay, but would not account for his absence. Police were certain a crime had taken place and that $10,000 ransom had been paid. To investigate the case, Providence police rounded up more than 75 known underworld characters for questioning, along with five people who claimed to have witnessed the abduction on Federal Hill, a predominately Italian neighborhood a few blocks from downtown. This was the kind of attention gangsters wanted to avoid.

In July there was a kidnapping that was quickly (and happily) resolved, but would reverberate for many months. The person who planned and carried out this kidnapping would become the surprising answer to a trivia question, explained further down the page.

Haskell Bohn's family negotiated the ransom demand down to $12,000. The money was paid and the young man was released. The kidnappers later were identified as Verne Sankey and Gordon Alcorn, who began their criminal career as bootleggers who moonlighted as bank robbers in Canada and the United States.

Early in 1933 they temporarily succeeded in another kidnapping. Their victim was a Denver playboy, Charles Boettcher II, grandson of one of the state's wealthiest industrialists. The kidnappers reportedly received $60,000, then released Boettcher back to his family. The victim's reputation was such that the joke around Denver was that the kidnappers got the better of the deal.

For reasons not clear to me, Sankey was deemed more dangerous, or, at least, more notorious, making him the first person ever named Public Enemy Number 1. He was captured in January, 1934, but hanged himself in a jail cell before he could be put on trial. By then Alcorn also was in custody and was later sentenced to life imprisonment for the Boettcher kidnapping

Sankey was briefly considered a suspect in the Lindbergh case and later in two kidnapings carried out by the Barker gang.

While many believed kidnapping had become an underworld industry run by professional gangsters, there was no doubt several abductions were instigated by people who had little criminal experience. Often their crimes were the ones reported to police, which made them fair game for newspaper coverage. The following story concerns a kidnapping committed by people who obviously weren't sure what they were doing and soon had second thoughts.

Notice the boy's photograph already had appeared in a newspaper. The 1920s and '30s were the heyday of newspapers. Each city had several fiercely competing newspapers. Deadlines were later than they would be years later when circulation departments needed more time to deliver their product to subscribers who had moved to the suburbs, far from the city. In the 1930s an evening newspaper published news that happened that afternoon. The news didn't move quite as fast as it does on television and the internet, but it was usually more complete than early accounts we are given today.

Because people had become so concerned — even frightened — by kidnappings, newspapers covered every such crime that was reported or even anticipated. Their frenzy to do so produced a lot of evidence that you can't always believe what you read, though it often helps if you simply keep reading.

Some 'victims' really weren't
In February 1932 the Winter Olympics were underway at Lake Placid, New York, and while it wasn't nearly the event it would become after television came along many years later, it was still important enough to attract many of the country's rich and famous who attended the games by day and partied at the Lake Placid Club by night.

One of the millionaires attending the event was E. Roland Harriman, son of the late E. H. Harriman, a railroad baron, and brother of W. Averell Harriman, statesman and a future governor of New York. Invited to Lake Placid as Harriman's guests were three of the five Blagden brothers, most of them successful and all of them graduates of Yale where they had been outstanding athletes.

Harry H. Blagden, however, was a troubled man. Soon after he arrived in Lake Placid, he went missing. A letter sent to one of his brothers sounded an alarm that sent hundreds of people on what would be a wild goose chase:

On February 14 the story began to unravel. Money in hand, Thomas Blagden went to Tupper Lake, four miles west of Lake Placid, and waited. And waited. There was no sign of his brother or the kidnappers

Thomas Blagden later told reporters he did not believe his brother was held by kidnappers, but he denied reports his brother was suffering from a nervous breakdown or from the effects of injuries suffered in an automobile accident two years earlier. (In an earlier accident, in 1917, Harry H. Blagden was one of six people in an automobile hit by a passenger train in North Carolina. Five of the people, including Blagden, escaped with injuries, the sixth died.)

In his statement, Thomas Blagden also claimed his brother was in "wonderful financial and physical condition," but declined to discuss the case further.

Meanwhile, state police determined there was only a single set of footprints leading away from the bedroom window on the back side of the cottage. They wondered why, with so many people in attendance at the Lake Placid Club, less than 100 yards away, no one had heard or seen anything unusual at the cottage.

On February 16, Harry H. Blagden surfaced in Cleveland, Ohio, claiming he had escaped after a hand-to-hand battle with one of his captors while the other two had run an errand. Blagden appeared haggard and worn, saying he had been forced to take knockout drops after he was kidnapped. He was placed under a physician's care. While sticking to his story that three men had kidnapped him, he claimed he saw eight other members of the gang. But it was the names of those three kidnappers that might have made police even more skeptical about Blagden's story. He referred to those three abductors as Zeke, Jimmy and Curly. It was Curly he claimed to have beaten in that hand-to-hand battle.

On February 17 a first hand account of his "thrilling" escape appeared in newspapers, a story Blagden wrote "expressly for International News Service," a news agency started by William Randolph Hearst.

Appropriately, perhaps, it was on February 22, the birthdate of George "I cannot tell a lie" Washington, that Harry Blagden confessed he had made up the kidnapping story. Police had reached the same conclusion, but kept silent until Captain Charles J. Broadfield of the New York State police received this letter from Blagden:

I have found no explanation of Blagden's "problems," nor any mention that he faced any charges for filing a false report and putting so many people through so much trouble. I found no information on what happened to him afterward, except that he died in 1957.

He was best known in the Adirondacks as the operator of La Jeunesse, a summer camp for boys.

Another highlight of Harry H. Blagden's life was a 1911 expedition in Canada's Rainbow Mountains. On that expedition, a joint venture of the Alpine Club of Canada and the Smithsonian Institution, Blagden served as a hunter who also was assigned to secure big game specimens. Incidentally, another member of that expedition was Donald Phillips, whose nickname was "Curly."

Groupie, mistress or kidnapper?
Embarrassment, shame, jealousy, anger . . . something prompted Mrs. Elsie O'Brine to tell police her husband had been abducted right in front of her eyes. Our guess: her husband told her he had to meet someone, but when he left their hotel room, she insisted on accompanying him:

'And spell our names correctly'
Perhaps this is a harsh judgment, one based on my astonishment (and dismay) that bridge was ever such a big deal that newspaper published accounts of the card game on its sports pages. However, it seems that Mr. and Mrs. Ely Culbertson, were both celebrities in the bridge circuit, which is why the press was interested when the couple announced to police that kidnap threats had been made. Seems like a shameless publicity stunt. And what kind of people nickname their son "Jump Bid"?

Playing tug of war with children
As remains the case today, many children were abducted by parents or other family members. One of the most bizarre settlements was the one reached in the case of a child held hostage for this ransom demand — a divorce.

Destination: a vending machine
The next crime actually was a bank robbery that began as a kidnapping The masked thieves made a clean getaway, but they could not have been happy with their haul.

A week later, a gang in Santa Monica, California, kidnapped a 70-year-old doctor and threatened to kill him unless he paid $3,500. The next morning, however, the gang freed him after settling for the doctor's watch and $30 he had in his wallet.

Collecting a ransom frequently stumped kidnappers. Two young West Virginia men, pretending to be internal revenue agents, kidnapped two wealthy men, then drove to a bank where they ordered one of the men to withdraw $7,500. The kidnappers were oblivious when someone from the bank summoned the police, who quickly arrived and arrested the men.

Three men in Dallas kidnapped a visiting shoe salesman, held him prisoner for two hours, then decided to flee with the man's car and $35 in cash. Before making their escape, the kidnappers gave their victim $3 for bus fare.

The family of a Gibsonburg, Ohio, doctor reported him kidnapped after seeing him whisked away by four men. Police quickly found the doctor — in a Toledo jail. His "abductors" were federal officers.

Look before you steal
Considering the way people felt at the time, it was wise for car thieves to take a good look inside an automobile before stealing it. Because if you didn't . . .

Despite many warnings and the publicity given such crimes as the Lindbergh kidnapping, some parents continued to leave their children unattended in public. Besides the back seats of parked automobiles, infants were often left in carriages parked on streets outside of stores where their mothers were shopping.

A 19-month old child was kidnapped in December from outside a Poughkeepsie, New York, department store. The kidnapper then left the child with a woman who recognized the boy and contacted the parents.

A young Syracuse woman, shopping with her mother, left her infant outside a department store, then panicked later when the child was missing. Turned out someone thoughtfully, but anonymously, moved the carriage from the street to the inside of the store, where the mother eventually found the child, unharmed.