Stolen from the Garden: The Kidnapping of Virginia Piper

The Pipers will speak of their ordeal many times over the next several years, but only once directly to the public.

Even then, Bobby tells the crowd of reporters and photographers who have abandoned the bottom of the family’s Spring Hill Road driveway and reassembled in the ballroom of the Northstar Inn in downtown Minneapolis, “We’re obviously doing this thing reluctantly.” He is dressed as though for business, in a dark suit and tie. He says that today’s agenda will be to tell the world “everything we can within the realms of safety and propriety” and then “hope that we will be left alone.”

Whose idea “this thing” might have been is not clear. In his capacity as a corporate CEO, Bobby has had occasion, of course, to stand in front of microphones and cameras. Such occasions, though, have been to discuss financial results and mergers and the opening of another branch office, not to rehash the details of what he has described in private as an “act of terrorism in my house.” Bobby is hardly a recluse, but he would never meet the press if he didn’t believe he had to. His opening statement suggesting that the media will learn what they want to know in the next thirty minutes and then leave the family in peace is, even by early 1970s standards, either touchingly naive or wishful thinking.

In any event, it is Ginny the reporters want to see and hear, and Ginny neither looks nor sounds like the victim of a spectacular crime, much less a woman who, twenty-four hours earlier, was chained to a tree in a forest.

This is the first time that most, if not all, of the journalists in the room have seen her in the flesh, and they have to be impressed. She is only lightly made-up for the cameras and wears a dark silk dress with a matching scarf and vintage necklace that seems just right for the occasion. Her by-now-famous white hair, girlishly tucked behind her ears, is indeed “striking.” She speaks fluidly in a low, somewhat smoky voice that may put some of her audience in mind of Anne Bancroft, the middle-aged femme fatale best known for her role a few years earlier in The Graduate.

“If you really want to hear this …” she begins in a casual, self-mocking tone, and for three and a half minutes, efficiently and without notes or histrionics, recounts her abduction and nearly forty-eight hours in the hands of armed, masked strangers. One moment she seems amused (“he was shivering as much as I was”), at another moment mildly exasperated (“and we just sort of sat there for two days”), overall sounding as though she is describing a preposterous dream of which she still can’t make sense. She clenches and unclenches her hands as she speaks, but otherwise shows no sign of nervousness or unease. For a split second her eyes glisten when she recalls her joy at seeing the FBI agents “running through the underbrush” toward her, but that’s the extent of obvious emotion.

Then she and Bobby open the floor to questions, which, as usual in press conferences, with reporters waving their arms and shouting for attention, follow no particular logic or order.

Composed and articulate, Virginia Piper meets the press on July 30, the day after her rescue. A video clip of her statement is available at tinyurl.com/VirginiaPiper. Mike Zerby, Star Tribune/Minneapolis–St. Paul 2014

Asked if she was threatened, Ginny says no. “They did no harm to me at all.” In fact, she says, the man who stayed with her in the woods was “really very decent.”

Her abductors were “heavyset” and looked very much alike. She believes they were both “close to six feet tall,” and “I’m just guessing [but] I would say between thirty-five and forty years old.”

She did not see the men’s faces because they wore masks. “I only really saw … one of them,” she says, “and I saw his feet only most of the time. He did not want me to look at him …”

“Yes. When he stuck the gun in my back and said to get into the car, I knew something was up.”

“No. They wanted to get me out of there fast, but they drove, I think, quite carefully. The speed limit. I didn’t have the feeling they were whipping around curves, that sort of thing.”

“Yes. I had an indication there were more than two … As far as I knew, through [the man in the woods], three.”

She says she had no idea where they were going, where they were when they got there, or how long they had been in the car. She did not recognize either man’s voice.

When a reporter asks if she knew the amount of the ransom, she says no—not until she got home. “Needless to say, I felt like a very expensive parcel.”

A reporter asks Bobby about his contact with the kidnappers prior to the ransom delivery. He says, “They identified themselves to me so that I was sure I was getting a call from the right party, because obviously I was afraid of a crank call that would get me going off on a wild goose chase.”

“You bet. Among other things, I was fearful of an intercept.” The ransom run was “quite an elaborate journey.”

“Well, we were scared to death, and we just hoped to God we were going to get her home. I mean, there really just wasn’t another thing on our minds. Just what can we do to get her home. And what are our chances.”

Ginny tells them that when she was finally left alone on Friday night, “I decided that I must not panic, that I must not give up … And the only way I thought I could get out was to uproot the tree and fell it and lug the chain and the tree out to the highway … So I started digging. And I got down to the bare roots, and I kept working at it—at least it kept me busy. I had it all planned that it would—you know, even if it took two weeks, I was going to get out.”

“No,” Ginny says. “I was thinking of that today. It seems just like, you know, a very bad nightmare. Unreal.”

Some of the details that she and Bobby reveal today will inevitably, given the passing of time and the peculiarities of memory, vary in mostly small ways with successive tellings, but this Sunday’s account becomes the “official” public version of the story, the amazing-but-true narrative that their contemporaries will remember for decades.

Given the extensive coverage on this evening’s television and radio broadcasts and front-page play in tomorrow’s papers,¹ the press conference will also provide the public with durable images of the Pipers. (Son David appears with his parents in one of the newspaper photos, an arm wrapped protectively around his mother, who looks self-conscious as the focus of the photographer’s attention. Forty years later, David will recall being “blown away” by his mom’s “rock star” performance that day.) In the short span of three days, Ginny’s has become one of Minnesota’s most instantly recognizable faces.

But whatever the intentions of their preemptive statements, the Pipers’ nightmare is not over, nor does the story belong to them. The case is now a million-dollar whodunit² driven by the US Attorney in Minneapolis and FBI personnel here and in Washington. The black-and-white patrol cars stationed at the bottom of their driveway will be gone in a few days, when the family is no longer deemed in imminent danger, but the lives of the Pipers and many of their friends, neighbors, and associates, not to mention innumerable strangers who may or, more likely, may not have had anything to do with the case, will be changed forever.

Bobby, Ginny, and David Piper following their July 30 press conference. Mike Zerby, Star Tribune/Minneapolis–St. Paul 2014

¹ The Twin Cities had four major daily newspapers in 1972, as well as four commercial television stations, more than a dozen locally owned radio broadcasters, and the bureaus of both the Associated Press and United Press International. In addition, the Piper story was avidly covered by news organizations throughout the Upper Midwest and beyond.

² That day’s Minneapolis Tribune proclaimed the Piper ransom a US record, ahead of Kansas City schoolboy Bobby Greenlease’s $600,000 in 1953, the $500,000 paid for Florida heiress Barbara Jane Mackle in 1968, and the $240,000 for nineteen-year-old Frank Sinatra Jr., kidnapped in California in 1963. The “world record” at the time, according to the Tribune, was the $2.1 million paid for the release of German businessman Theo Albrecht in 1971.