Two big-time bookmakers, William Rutstein and Herman Kohn, who worked together and ran at least five gambling dens, were among the targets. Alas for the would-be kidnappers, Rutstein and Kohn were no dunces with firearms. They shot it out with their assailants, killing one and routing the others.
And even as the fate of Dr. Isaac Kelley was unknown, it was disclosed that some people of means had been coerced by telephone or mail into paying what could be called “preventive ransoms,” meaning they paid to avoid being kidnapped in the first place.
Dr. Kelley’s new place of captivity was no more comfortable than the first.
“Why don’t you fellows let me read?” he suggested. “Just let me have a magazine or newspaper.” His captors give him a newspaper in which he read about his own kidnapping. They gave him some detective magazines—not his usual reading fare. Then he was given a biography of Al Capone.
His captors also made him write a second letter to his wife, declaring that he would not be released until a ransom of $150,000 was paid.
Most of the time, he could not see, either because a hood was draped over his head or goggles were in place. His emotional state swung from anxiety to boredom. Occasionally, he heard the rumble of a train not far away.
The food did not improve. He slept fitfully. He was beginning to feel the lack of a shower and change of linen, and his socks were clammy. His feet were cold, too, as his captors often removed his shoes. To prevent him from fleeing, Kelley assumed.
He told himself that the police must be doing all they could to find him.
Ace reporter John T. Rogers of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had been covering the Kelley kidnapping. He had been working long hours, shuttling between the newspaper office, the police station, and the Kelley home, mostly waiting for something to happen.15
Around 1:30 on the morning of Tuesday, April 28, Rogers arrived home after another tiring day. His wife said a man who wouldn’t identify himself had called several times, saying he wanted to speak to the reporter.
The phone rang again. This time, Rogers picked up.
“Have you got your clothes on?” a man asked.
“Yes,” said Rogers, who wanted dearly to get out of his clothes and dive into bed.
The caller said Rogers should go to North Grant Boulevard and Finney Avenue, park, and blink his headlights because “a friend of yours wants to see you.”
Rogers was jump-started out of fatigue by adrenaline and his reporter’s instincts, which seldom failed him. Fifty years old in April 1931, Rogers had written extensively about major crimes, including murders committed by the Ku Klux Klan. In 1927, he won a Pulitzer Prize for leading the Post-Dispatch’s inquiry into a corrupt federal judge and forcing the judge’s resignation.
Rogers got back into his car, hurried to the designated spot, blinked his lights, and waited. Before long, the passenger side door was yanked open, and a man got in. “Don’t get nervous,” the man said.
Don’t get nervous? The newcomer had a pistol in each hand!
“Is this going to lead anywhere?” the shaken reporter managed to say.
“Yes.”
Rogers was ordered to drive to a bridge and cross the Mississippi to East St. Louis, Illinois. Once across the river, he was directed onto a dark road, which led north into a rural section of St. Clair County. Soon, the car went by an abandoned service station.
“Turn around,” the gun-toting passenger commanded. He told Rogers to drive into the gas station lot as he would if the station were still open for business, then go right back onto the road. Rogers did as he was ordered.
Kelley sensed that his time in captivity was ending. His keepers were behaving differently, their whispers telling him they must be trying to figure out how to let him go without being caught.
And there was a moment when he saw one of his captors standing in a doorway, lovingly caressing a Thompson submachine gun. “If you do any talking, you’ll be smeared with this,” the kidnapper said.
Possibly because he’d experienced combat in the Great War, Kelley was able to think more clearly than other men would have in the same circumstances. Why would his keepers warn him not to talk too much? Because they’re going to free me, he reasoned.
Sure enough, late on the night of Monday, April 27, exactly a week after he’d been taken, Kelley was hustled outside and pushed into a car, the taped goggles over his eyes. As the car sped off, he detected the sound of another vehicle close by.
Kelley felt the car turning this way and that, describing a route he wouldn’t be able to reconstruct. He heard no big-city noises. We’re still out in the country somewhere, he thought.
Suddenly, the car came to an abrupt stop. The rear door opened, and Kelley was pulled out.
“Just wait here,” a man said.
Then he was alone in the chill of the night. The surface beneath his feet was hard, and a faint odor of gasoline and oil was in the air. He could hear two car engines idling.
When Rogers had driven about a hundred yards past the abandoned gas station, his armed passenger ordered him to pull off the road and stop. Rogers waited in the dark. After a few minutes, two sets of headlights approached. The man with Rogers reached over and flicked the switch to blink the headlights. The approaching headlights blinked in reply as the cars went by.
“Make a U-turn and follow those cars,” the man ordered. As Rogers did so, he saw that the two cars had stopped next to the station. He was ordered to stop behind them.
“There’s your friend,” the passenger said. “He’s waiting for you.”
“What friend?” the bewildered reporter asked.
“Dr. Kelley,” the man said as he got out and ran to one of the waiting vehicles.
As the two cars sped off, Rogers spotted a man
