Stolen from the Garden: The Kidnapping of Virginia Piper

The Reverend Kenneth Hendrickson does not know Harry and Virginia Piper, has never met either one of them in his capacity as pastor of the Apostolic Lutheran Church in Plymouth, Minnesota, or otherwise, but of course he knows who they are. Two days after Mrs. Piper was kidnapped out of her backyard in nearby Orono and Mr. Piper appeared on TV as the husband of the missing woman, everybody in the Twin Cities, and no doubt well beyond, knows who they are.

The local papers and electronic media have been full of news about both the crime and its victims since an early edition of the Minneapolis Star appeared on the streets Thursday afternoon. The FBI and the family have said little publicly about the kidnapping, the kidnappers, and their means of escape (a “dark green” car incorrectly described as a “four-door sedan” has been noted, as have the cleaning women’s limited descriptions of two “heavy-set men wearing pullover sweaters, gloves and masks”), but the press has been able to crank out a fair amount of mostly accurate information about the Pipers, especially Virginia Piper.

By Saturday morning, you haven’t been paying attention if you don’t know that Mrs. Piper is “an attractive woman … active in civic affairs.” That she’s a Wayzata High School graduate who attended college in Massachusetts on a music scholarship and works hard on behalf of Northwestern Hospital, the Wayzata Community Church, and the Hennepin County Republican Party. You would know, too, thanks to a Star profile that neatly sums up the victim’s physical qualities, that she is a “slim woman with silver-white hair who has acquired a reputation as one of the ‘best-dressed’ women in the Twin Cities.” Photographs accompanying the stories make clear that the fulsome prose is not exaggerated.

The terms “socialite” and “tycoon,” while not commonly used by the Twin Cities media in the early seventies, are inevitably heard during discussions of the case. The absence of local precedent for such a crime is made clear by the fact that the most recent comparisons the Star can dig out of its morgue are the kidnappings-for-ransom of St. Paul brewing executive William Hamm Jr. and St. Paul brewing heir Edward Bremer, both by the infamous Barker-Karpis gang, almost forty years earlier.¹

By Saturday morning it is common knowledge that Mr. Piper has paid a million dollars for his wife’s safe return, and by midday the papers are suggesting that her return is “expected” at any time.

Pastor Hendrickson becomes an improbable player in the Piper drama when the phone rings in his Golden Valley home at nine AM.

A male voice asks if he is, in fact, Reverend Hendrickson and if he’s heard about the Piper kidnapping.

When Hendrickson says he has, the caller says, “Now this is no hoax. I will tell you where you can find Mrs. Piper.” The man says he picked Hendrickson’s number at random from the phone book and wants Hendrickson to call the police when they’re finished. He says he called him because he is sure he doesn’t have a “recording device” hooked up to his phone.

“You don’t, do you?” the man, as though he is having second thoughts, asks.

After the caller tells Hendrickson for the second time that this is “not a hoax,” he provides the following directions:

“You go south of Fond du Lac about one mile. There is a high-voltage power line that crosses the road, and a little beyond the power line is an approach that turns to the right.”

The man says, “I don’t know what direction it is, but it’s as you’re traveling on 23 from Duluth towards Minneapolis.” Then he says, “You go in a little ways in the approach. You call her name, and she can hear you.”

Hendrickson repeats the directions for the man, and the man says, “She’s not hurt, but she is very, very uncomfortable.” He repeats the statement, then asks Hendrickson if he can remember it. Though he did not write down the man’s message, Hendrickson says he can. The line goes dead.

Special Agent Richard Anderson spent the first seven-and-a-half hours of Saturday morning in his car, one of the several agents assigned to watch the Monte Carlo in the Holiday parking lot in Bloomington. No one besides Mr. Piper and his friend has come near it.

At seven thirty the agents have the car towed to a garage near downtown Minneapolis. Richard Held, special agent in charge (SAC) of the local office, who has just returned to the Twin Cities from an “extended leave” on the West Coast, orders Anderson and his partner to pop the Monte Carlo’s trunk.

When the lid rises, the agents see a spare tire and the usual odds and ends found in an automobile trunk.

And, contrary to their worst fears and professional expectations, they do not see the body of Mr. Piper’s wife.

Bobby knows none of this. If the agents who remained at the house all night have been informed of Kenneth Hendrickson’s phone call, they don’t share that information with Bobby or the other family members and friends who have greeted the morning with uncertainty and apprehension.

Some of the Pipers’ friends and neighbors are organizing a search party for Ginny in the wooded hills of western Hennepin County. Comprising some six hundred square miles, the sprawling county is best known as home to Minneapolis and several of the Twin Cities’ most populous suburbs, but it still encompasses, west and south of the major population centers, hundreds of working farms and rural estates. It also contains many of the fields and streams along which serious equestrians such as the Lewises and Morrisons have ridden for decades. There are, in other words, many places the kidnappers could have hidden Ginny within hiking or, certainly, riding distance of her home.

The kidnappers’ stolen Chevrolet Monte Carlo after its recovery by the FBI early in the morning of July 29. FBI photo, courtesy Harry Piper III

John Morrison, reading a statement on live radio Saturday morning, says, “There is … the possibility she may be tied or drugged in an empty room or hotel or motel room or parked car.”

Anyone who might have seen a “drugged or dazed” silver-haired woman is urged to call the FBI.

Bobby has turned over to the agents at the house the envelopes and notes he collected during last night’s run. He tells them, as best he can through his fatigue and anxiousness, where he went, what he did, and who he saw. The agents write down what he tells them and confer, presumably with other agents, on the phone. His sons listen raptly to their father’s account, relieved beyond words that he returned safely from his perilous ride and struggling to believe that the men who took their mom will keep their end of the bargain.

For the first time in two days there is, thanks to Bobby’s courageous gambit, a reason to hope for the best.

Nor does Bobby (or anyone else at the house, with the possible exception of the men keeping watch there) know that one team of FBI agents is flying from the Twin Cities to Cloquet, near Duluth, and another team is in a car en route from Minneapolis to the presumed rescue site.

The Bureau rarely explains its actions to outsiders. Is Richard Held’s decision to not inform the family of Hendrickson’s call based on a humane desire to spare the family dashed hopes if Ginny is not where the caller said she is—or, worse, if she is there and is either hurt or dead? Or does it reveal an institutional compulsion to keep its own counsel as long and as fully as possible? Held’s decision to not notify authorities in Duluth or adjacent Carlton County certainly suggests the FBI’s intention to keep the case to itself, even if local authorities could be at the site—a critical consideration if Ginny does, in fact, need urgent medical attention—in less time than it will take the Twin Cities–based agents to get there. Held is no doubt worried as well about leaks and news bulletins that would result in members of the public reaching the site before his agents do.

Seven agents, in two cars now, proceed in a southwesterly direction along Minnesota 23, a two-lane highway that eventually intersects with Interstate 35 after winding through a series of wooded hills and grassy valleys and past an occasional small farm and homestead. Following the instructions given to Hendrickson, they drive through Fond du Lac, which comprises a filling station, a bar, and a few houses, on the southwestern edge of Duluth’s city limits, and proceed down Highway 23 for another mile. At that point, according to Hendrickson’s instructions, they look for the power line that crosses above the road and, a few yards beyond the power line, an “approach” leading off to the right.

Slowing to a crawl, the agents spot the power line and a rough track, perhaps an overgrown service road, cut into the brush on the right (northwest) side of the highway. According to their maps, they are inside, or on the edge of, a vast, semiwild recreation area known as Jay Cooke State Park.

The agents leave the cars on the shoulder of the road and start on foot up the cut, through the wet, ankle-deep grass. It is almost noon.

In the gray morning light, Ginny can see she hasn’t made much progress, though her fingernails are broken and her hands are filthy and her wrists are worn raw by the handcuffs she struggles against as she digs.

It is yet another cool, damp day, and she is cold, hungry, and spent. She has no idea of the time and doesn’t know if she slept at all against the slender but sturdy tree (she believes it’s a maple—as are most of the trees in her vicinity). She has smoked four Kool cigarettes and eaten a few pieces of bread and a couple of slices of cheese in the past two days and now has nothing. Her determination to free herself by digging up the tree fights against the nagging belief that she is doomed to die of starvation on the spot.

Down on her knees, she digs for as long as she can, then slumps against the tree and possibly dozes.

She believes that it is late afternoon when she hears car doors and voices in the direction of the road. Are the men back, or is it someone else—the FBI? The police? Bobby and the boys? She drags herself to her feet and starts hollering.

Below and as yet unseen through the trees, an unfamiliar male voice hollers back.

Moments later, the G-men come charging through the brush. They look comically out of place in their city clothes, but Ginny has never been happier to see another human being in her life.

Wet and bedraggled, handcuffed and still tethered to that stubborn tree, Ginny Piper stares at her rescuers and, speechless for the moment, begins to cry like a baby.

Half an hour later, the phone rings at the Piper house. An agent answers, listens for a few seconds, then turns to Bobby. They’ve found Mrs. Piper, he says. She is cold and tired, but she seems to be in good health. They’re on their way home from Duluth.

Bobby slumps to the floor. It is as though the tension of the past forty-eight hours has escaped all at once, leaving him empty and undone. He, too, is fine, however, and is immediately back on his feet and making plans to drive to the airport with John Morrison to await Ginny’s return.

Unaware of the day’s developments (though not of the kidnapping itself), a woman named Alice Codden receives a phone call at about two fifteen—coincidentally at almost the exact time the private aircraft carrying Virginia Piper and her FBI escort is approaching Flying Cloud Field in Eden Prairie, a suburb southwest of the city. She is seated behind a desk at an inner-city halfway house and “free store” known as Brother DePaul’s House of Charity.

Virginia Piper, Jay Cooke State Park, July 29. FBI photo, courtesy Harry Piper III

After asking for Brother DePaul (who is at a retreat) and then a “priest” (there are no priests at the House of Charity), a strong male voice, sounding urgent and excited, says, “Get this down.” He then proceeds to tell the woman where Virginia Piper can be located, near a rest stop on Highway 23, south of Duluth.

“Call the Pipers and tell them where they can find her,” the man says before hanging up.

Stepping off the airplane at Flying Cloud, “one of the ‘best-dressed’ women in the Twin Cities” is a mess. Her husband, waiting at the foot of the plane’s short gangplank, will later recall that she was “terribly disheveled and upset and kind of wild-eyed.” What’s more, and at least as memorable to Bobby and the other members of their small party, after two days in the woods without the usual amenities, his wife smelled awful.

The couple embrace on the tarmac. Everybody is in a hurry to get home. Bobby, however, turns to one of the FBI agents who rescued his wife and says, “I’d buy you all a cup of coffee, but I’m a little short of cash right now.”² Everybody laughs.

The ride home is mercifully short, about fifteen minutes is all, but before they get there Ginny must submit to one more indignity. To avoid detection by the mob of reporters, photographers, and television crews waiting on Spring Hill Road, she has to slide down low enough in the car’s backseat so she will not be visible through the windows.

As Bobby did when he set out on his ransom run, they use the Hollanders’ driveway next door to avoid the crowd and the cameras. From the neighbor’s yard above the road they walk through the trees to the Piper house, which is now filled with jubilant family and friends.

David hears the commotion from his room and runs downstairs. When his mother sees him, she asks with a playful smile if he has missed her, and, in front of everyone, he sobs uncontrollably. Harry also rushes downstairs to give his mother a hug. She looks so different from the perfectly attired and put-together woman he’s always known, she might have been another person. “I’d never seen her like this,” he says years later. No one else has, either. Tad was sitting in the kitchen when he learned she had been found. He, too, has been crying with relief.

Dean Rizer, the family’s physician who lives nearby, takes Ginny into a bedroom and gives her a quick examination. He tells the family that she’s in remarkably good condition, the only visible injuries on her wrists, where her skin was abraded by the handcuffs. She needs a bath, the doctor says needlessly, but otherwise she seems to be fine.

Ginny’s sisters Chy and Carol run hot water in the tub upstairs. As beautiful as she is, Ginny has always been a modest person, even with her sisters, but this afternoon she lets them peel off her filthy clothes and put her in the bath. Her sisters can’t get over the dirt—it’s everywhere on her body and embedded in her skin—and her hair is a filthy tangle. Her nails, always fastidiously cared for, are torn and broken, and the sisters remark on the red and blue bruises that circle her wrists. Amazingly, she has only a few insect bites, thanks, probably, to the cold and rain and to the fact that most of her skin was covered.

As her sisters scrub and comb, Ginny talks incessantly. “She was so excited to be back, she couldn’t stop,” Carol later tells Harry. “She was almost in shock—she couldn’t believe she was home.” Ginny tells Carol and Chy about the man in the woods and the wet bread and cheese and the Kool cigarettes and says the man didn’t want to talk but, as the first night wore on, he finally did because she kept asking him questions. Not for the last time, her sisters tell each other that it was Ginny’s engaging personality that kept her abductors from killing her.

After she has put on clean clothes and rejoined her family downstairs, Ginny asks Bobby if the boys who take care of the yard remembered to trim around the trees. She also asks if it would be okay if they don’t go to a cocktail party that is on their calendar that night. She says she is worn out.

“Everything was the same,” Carol remarks years later. “And yet it wasn’t.”

¹ Despite the bloody notoriety of Ma Barker, Alvin Karpis, and their associates, both Hamm and Bremer survived their abductions and lived well into old age. Hamm was released shortly after his family paid a $100,000 ransom; Bremer was set free, likewise unharmed, following the payment of $200,000.

² In another version of the often-repeated exchange, Bobby offers to buy lunch for the returning FBI men, but one of them says, “Oh, no, Mr. Piper. You’ve spent enough money this week.”