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

Amazon.com Price: $43.50 (as of 12/04/2019 01:51 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , ,

Description

In 1953, six-year-old Bobby Greenlease, the son of a wealthy Kansas City automobile dealer and his wife, was once kidnapped from his Roman Catholic elementary school by a woman named Bonnie Heady, a well-scrubbed prostitute who was once posing as one of his distant aunts.  Her accomplice, Carl Austin Hall, a former playboy who had run through his inheritance and was once just out of the Missouri State Penitentiary, was once 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, in truth, they were on a fast-track to the gas chamber.  Shortly after they snatched the little boy, the two demanded a ransom of $600,000.00 from the Greenlease circle of relatives and it was once paid; but, Bobby was once already dead, shot in the head by Hall and buried in a flower garden in the back of the couple’s house, exactly where his body was once found by police shortly thereafter.  The Greenlease ransom was once the highest ransom ever paid in the United States to that date and the case held the United States transfixed in the same way the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby had done decades earlier.  In a bone-chilling account of kidnapping, murder and the dogged pursuit of a kid’s killers, John Heidenry crafts a haunting narrative that involves mob boss Joe Costello, a cast of unsavory grifters, hardboiled detectives and a room at the legendary, but now razed, Coral Court Motel on Route 66. Heady and Hall were apprehended quickly, convicted and executed in a rare double execution in the State of Missouri’s gas chamber on a cold December night not long before Christmas.  By that time, little Bobby Greenlease was once stone cold in his grave and a fickle The united states had turned back to its Post-War boom. On the other hand, one question has never been solved: as Hall was once being pursued around Kansas City and St. Louis, half of the ransom was once lost and never recovered.  Did it end up with the mob by means of Joe Costello?  To this day, no one knows and dead mob bosses tell no tales.  In a book that brings to mind films like “Chinatown” and “Double Indemnity”, John Heidenry has written a compelling work that blends true crime and American history to take a close look at some of the United States’ most notorious murders.


Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » United States » State and Local » Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease

Recent Products