Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease Read online

  ZERO AT THE BONE

  Also by John Heidenry

  The Gashouse Gang:

  How Dizzy Dean, Leo Durocher, Branch Rickey, Pepper Martin, and

  Their Colorful, Come-from-Behind Ball Club Won the World Series—

  and America’s Heart—During the Great Depression

  What Wild Ecstasy:

  The Rise and Fall of the Sexual Revolution

  Theirs Was the Kingdom:

  Lila and DeWitt Wallace and the Story of the Reader’s Digest

  ZERO AT THE BONE

  The Playboy, the Prostitute,

  and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease

  JOHN HEIDENRY

  St. Martin’s Press New York

  ZERO AT THE BONE. Copyright © 2009 by John Heidenry. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  ISBN-10: 0-312-37679-0

  First Edition: July 2009

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Prologue: A Trusting Child

  1. Kansas City Noir

  2. The Vigil

  3. The Shady Motel

  4. The Third Man

  5. The Shadow

  6. Burial

  7. A Tale of Two Cities

  8. Death Row

  9. Goodbye and Thanks

  10. The Greenlease Curse

  Sources and Acknowledgments

  Index

  But never met this Fellow

  Attended, or alone

  Without a tighter breathing

  And Zero at the Bone—

  —Emily Dickinson,

  A Narrow Fellow in the Grass

  ZERO AT THE BONE

  Prologue

  A Trusting Child

  On the morning of Monday, September 28, 1953, Carl Austin Hall, a thirty-four-year-old ex-playboy just five months out of prison, and his forty-one-year-old mistress, Bonnie Brown Heady, a prostitute, woke up early. They had spent the night at Heady’s home in St. Joseph, Missouri.

  An old frontier town on a crook of the Missouri River, fifty miles north of Kansas City, St. Joseph, like Heady and Hall, had known better days. As the westernmost railway destination in the United States until after the Civil War, it had served as the prosperous gateway for settlers, miners, and others seeking their fortune on the frontier. It had also achieved a modest fame as the eastern starting point for the Pony Express, and considerable notoriety as the last hometown of the outlaw Jesse James. James had been living under the pseudonym of Mr. Howard when, on April 3, 1882, “the dirty little coward” Robert Ford shot him in the back as James, just before setting off to rob another bank, paused to straighten a picture hanging on a wall.

  In the annals of infamy, a new chapter in criminal history was now about to be written unlike anything St. Joseph, or any other town in America, had ever seen. It starred sorry losers straight out of a bad pulp novel, and a child who lived a fairy-tale existence.

  “It’s very hot today,” Heady remarked, as she got dressed.

  A plump, big-breasted woman with red-tinted hair, a slightly bulbous nose, and oily skin, who stood five feet three inches tall, Heady was an ex-horsewoman and breeder of pedigree boxers and had fallen on hard times. Now, to make ends meet, she turned tricks in a glitzed-up bedroom in her modest suburban home. Trying to make herself look respectable, she put on her best dark brown gabardine skirt, a beige nylon blouse, a brown velvet hat, and white gloves.

  Hall got into his blue sharkskin suit. Like Heady, he also came from a wealthy background, but had quickly squandered his inheritance on gambling, whiskey, women, luxury automobiles, hand-tailored suits, and one disastrous investment after another. Reduced to robbing taxi drivers, he had been caught and spent more than a year in the Missouri State Penitentiary. During his stay in prison, Hall had completed his transformation into a hardened criminal, and whiled away the hours fantasizing about committing the perfect crime—the ultimate get-rich-quick scheme—that would enable him to retire to the wealthy community of La Jolla, California, and build a house with a circular bed that overlooked the Pacific Ocean. They would also travel widely in Europe, he assured Heady, the barfly hooker he had met just four months earlier, living off their investments and supplementing their income by playing the horses.

  While finalizing the details of his cold-blooded, utterly conscienceless, and brilliantly simple master plan, Hall acted as Heady’s pimp. Either he had not noticed, or ignored the fact, that she had fallen in love with him. She almost certainly did not realize that he cared almost nothing for her, and that her only value to him was to serve as an accomplice until he could dispose of her. Both were chronic alcoholics, each drinking at least one bottle of whiskey a day. Hall was also addicted to amphetamines, and occasionally used morphine.

  During all the time Hall spent rehearsing every last detail of his bold attempt to become wealthy again, he had overlooked only one small detail—his own unpredictable behavior once he drank too much, and had money stuffed in his pockets. Back in his playboy days, that very combination had been his undoing.

  By 7:30 Hall and Heady were on the road, taking with them her pet boxer, Doc. The dog was brought along so that casual observers might think it was the family pet. Heading down Highway 71 in her two-year-old Plymouth station wagon, they stopped at Lynn’s, a tavern and package liquor store in North Kansas City, to muster their courage with a couple of shots. The tavern was the first on that particular highway between St. Joseph and Kansas City that sold liquor by the drink. Hall also insisted that Heady once again practice her lines, as they had the previous afternoon and evening. Before they left the tavern, he bought a packet of Clorets for Heady to chew so that her breath would not smell of alcohol.

  By 8:50 they were parked outside the French Institute of Notre Dame de Sion, an exclusive Catholic elementary school in Hyde Park on the Missouri side of Kansas City. Hyde Park was a once fashionable neighborhood that had slowly begun to decline after the end of World War II, as affluent families moved to the suburbs. Many of its large old Victorian, Queen Anne, and Prairie School homes had been converted into apartments and boardinghouses. Yet the French Institute remained a sturdy and stylish presence, with a reputation for providing young boys and girls with both a first-rate education and sound religious formation that appealed to the well-to-do Catholic parents who enrolled their children there. Although subjects like history, science, and mathematics were taught in English, other subjects, including French, religion, and penmanship, were conducted in French, as was playtime.

  As Hall and Heady watched, an elderly man named Robert Greenlease drove up in his brand-new blue Cadillac, as he unfailingly did every school-day morning, and dropped off his six-year-old son, Bobby. Satisfied that they could now proceed with their plan, the pair drove to the city’s downtown area, parked in the lot of Katz Drug Store at 40th and Main Streets, and waited. A little after 10:30, Heady walked to the nearby office of Toedman Cabs, got into a taxi, and asked to be taken to the school. When it pulled up at the French Institute at 10:55, she told the driver to wait, walked up the steps, and rang the bell. A French nun, Soeur Morand, who was the portress, or keeper of the door, answered. The school kept the front doors locked and was generally careful about visitors. But Heady, perhaps simply because she was a woman, aroused no suspicion, even though she fumbled her part several times despite her repeated
rehearsals.

  Appearing upset, she told Soeur Morand that her sister Virginia, little Bobby Greenlease’s mother, had suffered a heart attack.

  “How did it happen?” the nun, visibly distressed, asked.

  Heady replied that the two of them had been shopping at Country Club Plaza, the city’s most fashionable shopping center, when she collapsed. Now Mrs. Greenlease was in the hospital and wanted to see her children, including Bobby, her youngest boy.

  Thanks to extremely good luck and not to any careful planning on their part, Hall and Heady had chosen to snatch Bobby Greenlease from school on one of those rare days when every circumstance that might otherwise have thwarted their plan worked in their favor. Notre Mère Irene, the mother superior and a worldly wise American, was not in her office but away on an errand. She would easily have seen through Heady’s impersonation of Virginia Greenlease’s sister and summoned the police. The second in command, Mère Marthanna, was not only an American but also a Kansas City native. She, too, would have proved more than a match for the self-conscious, insecure Heady, but at that moment she was teaching a class. That left mild-mannered, sweetly innocent Soeur Morand temporarily in charge of greeting and vetting visitors. Although she spoke English quite well, Soeur Morand simply lacked the probing temperament that would have been second nature to someone in authority—to wonder why, for example, a woman taken to a hospital after suffering a heart attack would improbably ask to see her children.

  Bobby’s older sister, Virginia Sue, had only recently transferred from the French Institute of Notre Dame de Sion to another school. She also would instantly have known that Heady was not her or Bobby’s aunt.

  Soeur Morand suggested that Heady say a prayer while she went to fetch Bobby. As the nun led her visitor to the chapel, Heady blurted, “I’m not a Catholic. I don’t know if God will answer my prayers.” If Soeur Morand had been the least bit suspicious, the plot to kidnap Bobby would have unraveled right there and then, since the Greenleases—including, presumably, Virginia Greenlease’s “sister”—were devout Catholics.

  As Heady made her way to the chapel, a nun who had been cleaning the hallway happened by and thought the visitor seemed unfamiliar with the school. But as she spoke only French, she said nothing. Another nun, Soeur Alphonsina, also passed by, thought Heady did not at all resemble Mrs. Greenlease, and wondered if perhaps she was a sister-in-law.

  “Are you Miss Greenlease?” she asked, in heavily accented English.

  “I don’t understand you,” Heady, nonplussed, replied.

  The nun continued on her way, and Heady once again avoided a potentially awkward moment that might have thwarted the kidnappers’ plans.

  Soeur Morand had gone up to the second floor to Bobby’s firstgrade Latin class. The nun conferred with the teacher in French, and then summoned Bobby, telling him that his aunt was downstairs, but without mentioning that his mother was ill. Bobby put down his books, but asked the teacher if he could take his Jerusalem medal with him; only two students had won one so far that year. Bobby left the classroom wearing it on a red ribbon pinned to his shirt, and he also took with him a mechanical Eversharp pencil imprinted with the name of one of his father’s companies, Greenlease-O’Neill Oldsmobile. “We’re going to see Mama,” the nun reassured him.

  By now Heady had come out of the chapel and met Soeur Morand and Bobby at the foot of the stairs.

  “I’m not a Catholic,” she again foolishly told the nun, “but I hope he heard my prayers.”

  “I’m sure he heard them,” the nun answered.

  Bobby, though he had never seen Heady before, walked out of the school holding her hand. “He was so trusting,” she later remarked.

  During the return trip to Katz Drug Store, Heady gently interrogated the boy, asking him, “Bobby, what are the names of your two dogs?” She also asked him for the name of his black parrot. Dutifully, Bobby answered her questions, even though the parrot was green, not black. He also told her that his family had two Cadillacs.

  Heady explained to Bobby that they were not going to see his mother, after all, but his father. First, though, they were going to stop to get some ice cream. Hall was waiting for them in the station wagon when they arrived at the drugstore parking lot. Heady paid the eighty-five-cent fare with a dollar bill and told the driver to keep the change. Hall greeted the youngster with the words: “Hello, Bobby, how are you?”

  “Fine,” Bobby replied.

  Heady and Bobby got into the front seat with Hall and they drove off, heading west on Westport Road to State Line Road, then south into Kansas to Highway 50 and west to Highway 69, skirting through Overland Park. Bobby, still trusting the two strangers simply because they were adults, never complained or suspected that anything was wrong.

  At the intersection of Highway 69 and 95th Street, also known as Lenexa East Road, Hall turned in to 95th. They were now in Johnson County, nearly five miles west of the Kansas-Missouri border, and about twelve miles from downtown Kansas City. Heading down a lane belonging to the Moody family’s farm, Hall followed the ruts of a tractor until he came to an isolated spot concealed by crops and a windrow—hay gathered up on a rake to dry—and stopped. Hall thought Bobby seemed interested in the ride and was enjoying himself. Chatting happily, the boy observed some large green hedge balls and Heady offered to get him some. Hall quickly got out of the car to unlatch the tailgate and let Doc jump out. Heady, eager to be as far away as possible from the gruesome scene about to unfold, nervously trailed after the dog as it frolicked away.

  Hall’s first order of business was to smooth out a sheet of plastic—Bobby’s shroud—that he had stored in the back of the car. He then went around to the passenger side and sat down next to the boy. His plan was to strangle his young hostage right away. But stupidly the murder weapon he had brought with him to accomplish that cruel task was a length of clothesline scarcely more than a foot long—not enough for him even to get a good grip on.

  Bobby, perhaps growing suspicious that two people he did not know had brought him to such a lonely place, reacted violently when Hall tried to slip the rope around his neck. Kicking and screaming, he fought back furiously, but Hall managed to keep the boy within his grasp.

  Finally, in exasperation, he threw Bobby to the floor of the car, held him down with both feet, and drew his .38 caliber revolver. Cursing and sweating profusely as Bobby continued to kick wildly, Hall struck the boy in the face with the butt of his gun. The blow knocked out three of Bobby’s front teeth. Hurt and briefly stunned, he grew quiet—just long enough for Hall to take aim and fire. But the shot missed, ricocheting off the floor into the panel of the left door. He fired again. This time the bullet entered Bobby’s head about one and a half inches behind his right ear, and exited two inches above the left ear, killing him instantly.

  When the two shots rang out, Doc started to bark and leap about. While trying to restrain the dog, Heady lost her brown velvet hat—one she had bought years earlier at a hat shop in New York—and only much later realized that it was missing.

  Hall dragged Bobby’s lifeless body out of the car and laid it on the ground. After he wrapped the body in the plastic sheet, he and Heady lifted it into the back of the car and covered it with an old comforter used for the dog. Blood and brain tissue were splattered all over the front seat and floor, as well as on Hall’s face, hands, and suit. Heady helped him remove the jacket, which he folded inside out and placed in the car. He rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, which was also covered with blood, and Heady used Kleenex to wipe his face and hands. She also picked up his glasses and the holster to his gun, which were lying on the ground, and put them in the glove compartment. Then they turned around and headed back to Kansas City.

  “Why did you have to shoot him?” she demanded irritably. “I thought you were going to strangle him.”

  “I tried to,” he replied, “but the goddamned rope was too short. Goddamn it, he was fighting and kicking. I had to shoot him.”

  At 11
:30, Mère Marthanna finished teaching her class and was immediately told that Bobby Greenlease had been taken from school. She asked Soeur Morand for the name of the hospital where the boy’s mother was being treated, and the poor nun replied that she did not know. She had not even thought to ask. Mère Marthanna went directly to the phone to call the Greenlease residence to find out the name of the hospital and to inquire about Mrs. Greenlease’s status. Virginia Greenlease herself answered the phone.

  “How are you feeling?” a surprised Mère Marthanna asked.

  “Why, just fine,” Mrs. Greenlease replied.

  1.

  Kansas City Noir

  A granite obelisk stands in the cemetery of Trading Post, the oldest continuously occupied settlement in Kansas, about seventy-five miles south of Kansas City near the Missouri border. The historical marker commemorates the slaughter of innocent civilians in the so-called Marais des Cygnes Massacre, one of the bloodiest incidents in the Kansas-Missouri border struggles in the years preceding the outbreak of the Civil War. On the morning of May 19, 1858, Georgia native Charles Hamelton led a band of pro-slavery Missourians to Trading Post, captured eleven Free State settlers, and marched them to a nearby ravine. Hamelton fired the first shot, and then ordered his men to execute the rest. Five men were killed, and five others were wounded and left for dead, though they survived. The eleventh man, Austin Hall, escaped injury by feigning death.

  Word of the massacre horrified the North. Abolitionist John Brown arrived at the site a few weeks later, and built a rudimentary log “fort,” where he and several of his followers remained throughout that summer, lusting for a return engagement and revenge. John Greenleaf Whittier, the abolitionist poet and Quaker, immortalized the dead in his poem “Le Marais du Cygne,” published in the September 1858 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. He wrote: