“Is this Dr. Kelley?” Rogers asked as he got out of his car.
“Yes!”
After Rogers introduced himself and shook Kelley’s hand, the doctor said, “My God, this was an experience! I’m glad to be back in the hands of my friends.”
At which point, the newly freed Kelley got into Rogers’s car. Then, in a development that seems astonishing today, Kelley was driven not to his own home to be reunited with his family but to the home of the reporter. There, in the middle of the night, Kelley told his story to the exhausted but exhilarated Rogers in minute detail. A photographer took a picture of Kelley wearing the goggles the kidnappers had put on him.
Finally, as dawn was approaching, Rogers drove Kelley home, where he was reunited with his wife and had a shower, a change of clothes, and a nap.
Rogers had a big exclusive, and he had revenge over his archrival Brundidge for his exclusive on Charles Abernathy.
“My experience convinced me that the kidnappers were experts and had planned my abduction for weeks,” Dr. Kelley said. When asked why he thought he had been singled out, he replied, “I have no idea.”16
Oh, but he did. Surely, the motive was money. If the kidnappers were such experts, a reporter suggested, they must have obtained a ransom, right?
“That’s a tough question,” Kelley replied.
A tough question? Well, the reporter pressed, was a ransom paid or not?
“I can’t answer that positively,” Kelley said. “I was informed that no ransom was paid.”
William D. Orthwein, the lawyer and cousin of Buppie Orthwein, said he could answer positively. “I can tell you frankly and honestly that not a dime has been paid,” he told newsmen.17
The police believed that Kelley had been held initially in a rural area of St. Charles County, Missouri. They deduced that much from the label on the milk bottle Kelley had been given and his recollection of the airplane overhead, most likely flying a mail route between St. Louis and Kansas City, Missouri. And so what? The police could hardly check every farmhouse, every barn, every shack in St. Charles County.
Questions persisted. Denials notwithstanding, had a ransom been paid? No, William Orthwein and the Kelley family continued to insist. If not, why was Kelley not held until a ransom was paid? Why didn’t the kidnappers just telephone the Kelley residence and make arrangements? Perhaps they suspected—correctly—that the Kelley phone was tapped.
“Kidnapping certainly has become one of our leading occupations,” Kelley remarked the day of his release. “I wonder who’s next on the list.”18
The kidnapping of Dr. Isaac Kelley was shelved, at least for the time being, but not before persuading Missouri politicians that it was time—no, well past time—for the federal government to get involved in stamping out the scourge of people-snatching for ransom.
Questions surrounding the Kelley case would be left unanswered for three years until a former justice of the peace who owned a tavern and pool hall and was having money troubles sold a sensational account to the Post-Dispatch.
The story he told involved a woman of high society, two doctors (one her husband and the other her lover), and a shady lawyer. As the drama played out, in court and in the newspapers, many in the city’s social elite were humiliated, perhaps to the pleasure of the less well-to-do.
But that’s a story for later.
*The kidnapping of Fred J. Blumer was never solved. He died of a heart ailment on May 19, 1956, his seventy-seventh birthday.
CHAPTER FOUR
A DRESSMAKER WITH A VISION
Kansas City, Missouri
Wednesday, December 16, 1931
Nell Donnelly had a dream: “I want to make women look pretty when they are washing dishes.”
How absurd! How impractical! Didn’t she know a woman’s proper place? No, actually. Nell Donnelly was not just a skilled seamstress; she was a force not to be denied. So she started her own dressmaking company. By her early forties, she was rich.
She was born Ellen Quinlan, the twelfth of thirteen children of a couple from County Cork, Ireland, on March 6, 1889, and grew up in Parsons, Kansas, after the family came to America in search of better things. She was just sixteen when she married Paul Donnelly, a representative for a shoe company, and moved with him to Kansas City.
To be sure, she was a skilled seamstress, but working with needle and thread or sitting at a pedal-powered sewing machine was not enough for her. Nell Donnelly had a vision and a will that would not be denied.
She envisioned house dresses with added ruffles and other frills that would appeal to the typical housewife of that time: a stay-at-home mother whose family couldn’t afford much extravagance. The ruffles and frills would make her dresses a bit more expensive than the plain cotton dresses women were used to wearing while doing chores. But a woman wouldn’t have to have a truly rich husband to buy the dresses designed by Donnelly, and she felt sure there was a market out there.
Was there ever! By 1930, the Donnelly Garment Company, which she started with her husband’s help in Kansas City early in the twentieth century, employed a thousand people and sold stylish yet affordable house dresses across the country under the Nelly Don label.
On Wednesday, December 16, 1931, as Donnelly was arriving home in her chauffeur-driven Lincoln convertible, four gunmen hijacked the car in the driveway. Then they drove Donnelly and her young chauffeur, George Blair, about twenty miles west and imprisoned them in a farmhouse.
The next day, a lawyer for the Donnellys, James E. Taylor, got a letter addressed to Paul Donnelly and demanding $75,000 for Nell’s freedom. Taylor knew just whom to call: his law partner, James A. Reed, a neighbor and friend of Nell Donnelly. Reed, who was in court in Jefferson City at the time, immediately raced to Kansas City to take charge.
James Alexander Reed had
