John Heidenry was a child in his native St. Louis when the events in his latest book, the quick-moving true-crime story Zero at the Bone (St. Martin's Press, 230 pages, $25.99), unfolded. The kidnapping and murder of 6-year-old Kansas City boy Bobby Greenlease terrified parents here and across the state for years afterward, but in Heidenry's hometown, the September 1953 crime also launched a treasure hunt that would fascinate Midwesterners and thwart the FBI for decades.
The book is not a work of suspense -- the jacket outlines the events of the case, from money-hungry Carl Hall's Lindbergh-inspired kidnapping plot to Hall's execution alongside his partner, Bonnie Heady. Bobby Greenlease, son of pioneering Kansas City car dealer Robert Greenlease, dies on page 7, shot through the head while struggling to get away from Hall. The murder itself is so stunning in its offhandedness that there's no turning it or what follows into a thrill ride or an examination of a killer's psyche. Instead, Heindenry compounds the gut-churning simplicity of the crime -- Hall's plan had always been to kill his victim (the Greenleases' daughter was the first target, before Hall decided that the 11-year-old would be too much work) immediately -- by showing that its success owed nothing to planning.
Heady, who posed as Bobby's aunt to get the boy off Notre Dame de Sion's grounds, was a drunk and a bad liar, and the nun who allowed the child to leave never forgave herself for her lack of suspicion. Hall was collected enough to have bought plastic sheeting, lime and a shovel weeks ahead but so thoughtless that, in a typical display of big talk during a moment that called for anonymous silence, told the hardware store clerk that he planned to use the shovel only once. As things turned out, that was about as discreet as Hall got.
Hall and Heady consume a staggering amount of liquor before, during and after their crime. In fact, Heady all but disappears in the middle third of the book; were it not for Hall's foggy big spending, she might still be passed out in a St. Louis flophouse today, waiting for her partner and pimp to return. Hall's dissipation is so thorough that his ransom notes and calls to the Greenleases achieve an almost dada-like scramble of syntax and intent; by the time police interrogate him, his unraveling is so complete that a cop has to run to a bar when it opens at 6 a.m. to get the confessing man a shot of whiskey. His shrugging incompetence would be funny if it were a byproduct of mere alcoholism rather than sociopathy.
As the ransoming and the manhunt advance and Hall and Heady become increasingly careless, Heidenry lays out details like the hardware-store transaction in plain, merciless language, choosing his quotes with care. In the first ransom notes, for example, Hall signed himself "M." According to Heidenry, he told authorities later, "I could just as well have used any other letter of the alphabet." If the author veers occasionally into convention -- a few times too often, he quotes what someone thought -- he never lapses into judgment or mockery. And there's plenty of room to mock: Luckless and dimwitted Hall and Heady could have been characters from a Coen brothers movie.
Heidenry, relying on case files, court transcripts and daily newspaper accounts, manages to reconstruct the crime and its aftermath in cinematic detail. In a spartan 211 pages (not counting source notes and the index), he still finds seamless space for Hall's grim family story (his widowed mother is neglectful and eventually disowns him after a telltale series of self-destructive and criminal fuckups well before the Greenlease murder) and an appealingly unglamorous explanation of St. Louis mob hierarchy under Frank Costello (with whom the secret of the missing ransom money -- half of the then record-setting $600,000 was never accounted for -- died). The book also benefits from the era's swift justice system: The kidnapping and murder occur on September 28, 1953, and Missouri puts Hall and Heady in its gas chamber together on December 18 of the same year. That allows Heidenry to concentrate on the details, which is what ultimately makes the book both immediate and resonant.
Along the way, particularly in the book's first half, Heidenry summons the Kansas City of nearly 60 years ago, with its new highways, roadside saloons, full-service retailers and clothiers (even Hall, so destitute that, when he hatched the Greenlease plot, he was in state prison for robbing multiple KC cabbies -- with a total haul of just $36 -- gives himself away late in the game when someone notices his real initials printed on his hatband) and bustling downtown. It was a city used to sin but capable of shock. The community finally peeking out from under the Pendergast machine learned, over a few days in the fall of 1953, that it would take more than the new polio vaccine to keep their children safe.
(photo taken from the book, from the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri-St. Louis)
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