4

If the Pipers expect a resolution of the case in 1972, they will be sorely disappointed. In November, an internal FBI accounting acknowledges the elimination of 479 “possible suspects,” with 254 “individuals who may be connected with this case … receiving vigorous investigative attention.” The year ends with no arrests and only a few thousand dollars of the ransom in the authorities’ hands.¹

The earth hasn’t stopped turning. Since Ginny’s abduction, Palestinian gunmen have terrorized the Olympics in Munich and Americans have reelected President Richard Nixon. By year’s end, more than three dozen commercial airline flights will have been hijacked, albeit with generally disappointing outcomes for the hijackers.

On the night before Halloween, a career criminal named Robert Billstrom and three associates held up a supper club on Wayzata Boulevard. When police responded the robbers opened fire, and in the ensuing exchange, Billstrom was hit five times and gravely wounded. The shootout was relevant to the Piper investigation because the so-called “Billstrom gang” was among the upper ranks of Piper suspects the FBI had been investigating since late July. Though the Bureau eliminated Billstrom as a Piper suspect in November, a couple of the other members of his gang remained on the PINAP list. Billstrom himself will remain incapacitated until he finally succumbs to his injuries in March 1973.

Most of the thousand-odd individuals whose names and (often) criminal records fill the FBI’s bulging case files by year’s end do not make the papers and would not be known to the general public or to the Pipers in particular. They are all men. Most are petty miscreants who have stolen a car or written bad checks or robbed a liquor store, and may coincidentally share one or more characteristics or quirks attributed to UNSUB 1. Few, if any, have been involved in an armed abduction—certainly not a major kidnapping-for-ransom—in which case they would have been the first persons the FBI called on. An individual makes the list and is visited by an agent because someone, usually a former partner-in-crime or cellmate, tells the FBI there is some reason to believe he may be “capable” of kidnapping Ginny Piper. Or, beginning in late 1972, because someone believes he or she recognizes the face portrayed in the widely publicized FBI sketch of the man who exchanged Piper twenties in southern Minnesota. There are, for a short while, many such calls—which shouldn’t be a surprise considering the face in the sketch is reminiscent of half the middle-aged white men in the region.

On the other hand, in 1973 and for some years hence, the names of several hardened career criminals—Robert Billstrom among them—appear on the FBI’s suspect list and sometimes in the papers, juxtaposed with the names of the Pipers in a way that both embarrasses the family and makes their skin crawl. Harvey Carignan, for one egregious example, is a rapist and child molester serving a life term in Stillwater for murder. Mobster Rocky Lupino is currently serving time in federal prison on a weapons charge. Drug smuggler William (“Wild Bill”) Cooper will become a federal fugitive following a bank-robbery conviction. These are not the kind of folks with whom the Pipers are accustomed to being associated.

Agents run the suspects’ names past the Pipers and routinely update the family on the investigation’s progress, such as it is. The investigators—and Assistant US Attorney (AUSA) Thorwald Anderson, who will prosecute the case if it ever reaches a federal courtroom—continue to visit the Pipers on Spring Hill Road and at Bobby’s office downtown. Anderson, a professorial, pipe-smoking former state legislator, has already queried Ginny about possible romantic affairs and asked Bobby if he has embezzled funds from his firm. (The Pipers seem to accept the unpleasant line of questioning as required by the AUSA’s job and don’t hold it against him.) After their polygraph exams, they have finally and formally been eliminated as suspects.

Curiously, the Bureau hasn’t received any false confessions. Big cases such as this one almost always draw a number of crackpots who, for whatever perverse or pathetic reasons, confess to the crime. To the agents’ surprise, nobody has yet come forward with a mea culpa in the Piper case.

In a bizarre side note to an already bizarre saga, somebody burglarizes the Pipers’ hotel room during a brief late-fall visit to New York City. They report the theft of a mink coat and twelve pieces of jewelry valued at $6,000. The items are never recovered, and no one is arrested in connection with the crime. The FBI doesn’t see any reason to believe that the kidnapping and the burglary are related, but the Pipers are understandably flustered by the incident.

In February 1973, Special Agent in Charge Richard Held is transferred out of the Minneapolis office. The transfer might appear to be institutional comeuppance for the sorry state of the Piper investigation if Held’s new position weren’t SAC of the Bureau’s 350-man office in Chicago, an apparent promotion. But he leaves the Minneapolis office with, in addition to many active cases, a million-dollar albatross around its neck.

Early in the new year, the Bureau releases for the first time a photo of the sweatshirt the kidnappers gave Ginny in the woods. The few pieces of hard evidence the agents brought back from up north have been closely guarded so far. But in March 1973, a description of the sweatshirt is distributed to the media. The garment is unusual if not unique: a dark-blue fleece pullover, extra large, with horizontal gray stripes and a small St. Olaf College logo stitched in white on the left breast. The shirt is, according to investigators, one of only three of that particular style garment sold at the college’s bookstore in Northfield, a short drive south of the Twin Cities.

The Bureau announces at the same time that one of the Piper suspects has an “opaque white or grayish ring around the pupil of his left eye.” This refers, of course, to the imperfection that Ginny noticed when she caught a glimpse of her captor’s face in the woods. (The Minneapolis Tribune explains that the mark is symptomatic of arcus senilis, a condition often associated with older people with elevated cholesterol levels and excess weight.) Agents are also asking the public’s help in determining where the kidnappers kept the Monte Carlo between July 11, when it was reported stolen, and July 27, the day of the abduction.

The announcements include word that the September 1, 1973, deadline for claiming a $50,000 reward established by an anonymous citizens group shortly after the kidnapping has been extended indefinitely and would be paid upon an arrest of the perpetrators, not following a conviction. In addition, a “hotline” has been opened so the public can call the Minneapolis office directly with information. (The FBI has always been listed in local phone books.)

When a reporter asks if the release of the data means the Bureau is stymied, Joseph Trimbach, Held’s successor in Minneapolis, says, “Definitely not.”

In June, Trimbach announces that the Bureau is seeking the public’s help in determining where the Japanese-made Detective Romo–brand handcuffs used to restrain Mrs. Piper were purchased. The Bureau declines to either confirm or deny a Star report a month later that the cuffs were bought at a sporting-goods store in Duluth.

True to his word, Bobby has no comment on the various reports. When pressed, he tells a reporter that the Pipers have learned nothing about the crime that they didn’t know last July.

An internal FBI memo dated June 15 reports, “There [are] 205 persons having knowledge of or believed capable of committing the offense.”

And, just like that, a full year has passed. The inevitable anniversary stories appear in the papers with the inevitable uninformative response from the FBI.

Joe Trimbach, a forty-four-year-old seventeen-year Bureau veteran whom you couldn’t blame for wondering what he had done to deserve this assignment, won’t tell reporters how many agents are still working the case. The number, he says, is “adequate to handle our leads.” Which might suggest that the number of leads has declined significantly from what it was a year ago, when more than a hundred agents were crawling over the case.

Nevertheless Trimbach insists, “We’re not at all thinking that we won’t solve it.”²

A typical update, this one in the St. Paul Dispatch, is forlornly headlined, PIPER CASE NOT ABANDONED. In it, an unnamed “family spokesman” says, without much evident conviction, that life for the Pipers is “more or less back to normal.” Ginny’s sister Chy Morrison is slightly more revealing, telling the paper, “We would just as soon … stay in the background and out of sight. But we do hope, obviously, that the public doesn’t forget [the case] and it is solved.”

Forgetting the case isn’t likely. This is the kind of crime story—featuring an appealing victim, dozens of colorful suspects, and a missing million dollars—that will keep reporters coming back forever. Solving the whodunit while the FBI stumbles around ineffectively could be the defining story of a reporter’s career.

A week after the Dispatch report, the Star reveals that the Sportsman’s Retreat was the likely site of the ransom pickup. Richard Gibson, who wrote the front-page story, provides, in fact, a laundry list of hitherto untold odds and ends, including the weight of the ransom package (though he is four and a half pounds on the high side), news that the FBI has identified the kind of typewriter on which the ransom note and delivery instructions were written (though he doesn’t provide the specifics: a Royal machine with pica type manufactured before June 1950; the typewriter itself has not been located), and that the “actual” reward money offered by an “anonymous committee” is $100,000, not $50,000 as previously reported. The government, according to Gibson, has so far spent “several times the $1 million ransom” on its investigation.

Gibson’s story draws the customary “No comment” from the FBI. But the reference to the Sportsman’s Retreat, a noisy dive “featuring country-western music … in a neighborhood of junkyards and light industry,” is a noteworthy scoop, as are the comments of the bar’s owner, one Gary Moore (whom Gibson doesn’t name in his story). Of the agents who “swarmed over the place” following Bobby’s run, Gibson quotes Moore as saying, “They’ve talked to just about every customer we’ve had in here in the past two years and they spend a few bucks for booze (for those they’ve been questioning), too.” Moore told Gibson that agents are still, a full year later, dropping by to ask questions. There is no indication from Moore or anyone else Gibson spoke with that any of the bar’s patrons on July 28, 1972, recalled seeing Bobby Piper on the premises.

Gibson says the Bureau is feeling the heat. “Not only is it receiving gibes from other law-enforcement officers, some who think the FBI has bungled the investigation, but there is a time limit.” The federal statute of limitations for kidnapping is five years, which, Gibson notes, is now down to four.³

Though repeatedly assured that the investigators are making progress, Ginny and Bobby are increasingly skeptical about a criminal-justice system they have had no reason, until her kidnapping, to be part of or, for that matter, to question. The Pipers have gotten to know several of the FBI men and the Assistant US Attorney reasonably well, appreciate their respectful treatment, and have no cause to doubt their effort. But why, they wonder, given the amount of man-hours and money behind that effort, can’t the Bureau narrow the suspect list down to a critical few and make some arrests?

The agents and the AUSA patiently explain what the Pipers have known since their high school civics class—that law enforcement must have sufficient evidence to arrest, indict, and convict. The evidence in hand—the Monte Carlo and its contents (including the “transmitter,” actually an ordinary transistor receiver, that Bobby was told to place on the car’s dashboard), the flotsam and jetsam from the park site, the interviews with the victim, cleaning women, bank employees, and a few other witnesses—does not, so far, implicate a particular suspect or suspects.

The case remains a high priority, the feds assure the Pipers, and they will keep working the leads, though, as Richard Gibson has pointed out, they don’t have forever.

In the absence of an arrest, the Pipers live with a nagging unease, an unfamiliar sense of helplessness and anxiety that’s exacerbated by the rumors and the intermittent, inconclusive, and sometimes inaccurate news stories, not to mention random events such as the unexplained appearance of the white Mustang with California plates and the burglary of their New York hotel room. Victims of serious crime tend to look at the world differently after the fact and may not as easily believe in coincidence.

Ginny and Bobby go about their lives—Ginny at home and at the hospital, Bobby downtown and on his business trips—and rarely talk about their feelings. But family members and close friends can sense an anxiousness in Ginny, a level of intensity that wasn’t there before the kidnapping. She seems to be smoking and drinking more than she used to, though nobody (except maybe Bobby) says so to her face.

In early February 1974, the national media explode with news of the sensational abduction of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. The nineteen-year-old college student has been dragged from the Berkeley, California, apartment she shares with her fiancé by a group of armed radicals who call themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army. The FBI begins a nationwide search for Hearst and her captors after what is almost immediately determined to be a lunatic act of domestic terrorism. Her ransom, the SLA declares, is several million dollars in donated groceries for the Bay Area poor.

In March, much closer to home, another Twin Cities businessman’s wife is abducted. A pair of masked men grab forty-six-year-old Eunice Kronholm while she scrapes frost off her car’s windshield outside her suburban St. Paul home. Her husband, South St. Paul bank president Gunnar Kronholm, promptly pays the $200,000 demanded by her kidnappers. Three days later, she puts on her coat and walks out of the house where she has been held by a trio of bumbling amateurs. The FBI quickly arrests the alleged culprits, and all but eighty dollars of the ransom is recovered.

Then in May the forty-seven-year-old wife of banker Daniel Graham is kidnapped from her lakeside home in Waverly, a sleepy farm community west of Minneapolis best known as the summer retreat of Hubert Humphrey. The kidnapper, a cash-strapped former postal worker with no criminal record, asks his victim’s husband for $100,000, but, when the banker says he can’t come up with that much, settles for half. Less than twelve hours after Graham delivers the money and his wife is released unharmed, police arrest the hapless perpetrator in the Twin Cities. The abduction, transaction, and release come about so quickly the FBI doesn’t have a chance to get meaningfully involved.

The Kronholm and Graham kidnappings are similar enough to the Piper case to suggest a copycat mentality among the perpetrators, though, given the specifics of the methods, demands, and outcomes, they are different enough to quash any serious thought that the same men were somehow involved in all three crimes. Still, along with the ongoing and increasingly hallucinatory Hearst case,⁴ the recent abductions are frightening reminders of what has befallen the Pipers.

What’s more, the swift arrests and ransom recovery in the Kronholm and Graham cases stand in stark contrast to what hasn’t been achieved in their case, going on two years now after Ginny’s abduction.

So much is happening in the world and in their own lives and in the lives of family members and friends that time flies by no matter how stalled and static their preoccupation. The Watergate burglary, in June 1972, has become an all-consuming national story that, in August 1974, culminates in President Nixon’s resignation. The United States is preparing to abandon its long war in Vietnam, which has cost close to sixty thousand American lives and many times that number among the Vietnamese. There is even some news worth celebrating: Henry Aaron hits his 715th career home run, besting Babe Ruth’s forty-seven-year-old record.

On July 30, 1974, a bearded and bespectacled middle-aged white man with a “medium to stocky” build purchases work clothes, gloves, two coils of Ameriflex-brand wire, a garbage can, and other items at the Village North shopping center in suburban Brooklyn Park and pays for the goods with twenty-dollar bills that will be identified as Piper ransom money. “He was just quiet,” a clerk tells the Tribune. “He never said thanks.” Two weeks later, the FBI says its investigation “strongly indicates that this individual is involved in Mrs. Piper’s abduction, rather than someone who acquired this money innocently.” Another artist’s sketch is hastily produced and distributed, this one, thanks to the neatly trimmed beard and the absence of a hat, is somewhat less universal than the previous attempts to visualize a suspect. Agents say they believe the several sketch subjects are all the same man.

As usual, the subsequent surge of top-of-the-news stories sets off a flood of phone calls and posted tips, some of which are from cranks, but all of which are dutifully checked out and proved worthless.

In April 1975, agents sit down with Harvey Carignan, the murderer and child molester. Reportedly, a woman told the FBI that the man in one of the sketches looks like a “person associated with Carignan.” Carignan denies any special knowledge of the Piper case or its perpetrators and nixes whatever deal the authorities are prepared to propose in exchange for his cooperation.

“The answer is here in our files,” a frustrated agent tells the Assistant US Attorney. “We’ve interviewed these kidnappers. We just don’t know it.”

On July 27, 1975, Minnesota’s three-year statute of limitations expires. If Ginny’s kidnappers are ever apprehended, they will be tried in federal court under federal law or they won’t be tried at all.

Who knows when, if ever, during the turmoil and stress of the four years that follow the kidnapping the names Kenneth James Callahan and Donald Floyd Larson first register in the Pipers’ consciousness.

Because both men were on the FBI’s suspect list soon into its investigation—Larson within a few days, his buddy Callahan a short time later—the Pipers may have been asked about one or both men in early August 1972. If they were, there is no record of their response or any reason to believe that either name meant anything to them. Then again, the FBI list would quickly comprise more than a thousand names, several of which, as already noted, would have been much more likely to catch the family’s eye.

Larson, in the summer of 1972, is a forty-five-year-old truck driver with an eighth-grade education and a rap sheet dating back to his early teens, when he ran away from his hardscrabble south Minneapolis home. He has since served significant time following multiple convictions of robbery and burglary. He is a tall, heavyset, loquacious man, by most accounts not the brightest guy in the room, but a fellow with a lot of friends, some of whom still live behind prison walls and at least one of whom tells the FBI, inside a week of the Piper kidnapping, that “Donnie” is certainly “capable” of such a thing.

Larson is promptly interviewed by an agent and denies knowing anything about the case. Aside from the informant’s recommendation, there is no obvious reason to suspect that he does.

Callahan—who has known Larson since their overlapping prison sojourns during the middle 1940s—is a carpenter and cabinetmaker by trade. Like his pal, he has a wife and kids and a lengthy criminal record. He has served serious time for auto theft, burglary, possessing counterfeiting tools, and indecent assault involving the photography of an underage girl. He has, according to an FBI report, an above-average IQ of 121, owns a bungalow on Alabama Avenue in St. Louis Park, and is generally considered a resourceful man. It is unclear why he makes the FBI suspect list in the late summer of 1972 other than the fact that he is yet another ex-con of a certain age (forty-seven) and general physical description and is an associate of Donnie Larson.

He, too, is asked to speak to the FBI shortly after the kidnapping, which he does with no immediate consequence.

In fact, the FBI eliminates both men as possible suspects in the fall of 1972 and presumably pays them scant attention for the next two and a half years.

Then, in the late spring of 1975, a memorandum appears in FBI files captioned “Re: KENNETH CALLAHAN, ET AL.” The memo reveals that the Bureau has “reinstituted” its investigation of Callahan, Larson, and two others, including a man identified as a former Piper, Jaffray employee. Aside from some alleged associations with various Piper suspects, reasons for the renewed interest in the men are not given. In any event, the two other named individuals will soon be scratched from the suspect list, and for the next two years, agents will focus on a shrinking roster of possibilities, Callahan and Larson among them.

Special Agent Paul (“Pete”) Neumann has been working the Piper case from the beginning.

Neumann is a Minneapolis native, a World War II combat veteran, and a twenty-five-year Bureau stalwart who came up from the Chicago office to help with the case in July 1972 and stayed. In charge of the investigation (“case agent,” in FBI terminology) since June 1974, he has become well acquainted with the Pipers, who consider him a friend. A powerful-looking but soft-spoken man with a high forehead and dark-rimmed glasses, Neumann is known as a plodder, an old-school gumshoe who one day sits in front of four large steel cabinets bulging with Piper case files and tells a Tribune reporter, “It wouldn’t be hard to lose faith. I’ve been discouraged. A lead falls through. But then you get moving when something else comes along.”

By the end of 1975, Neumann and the dozen-odd other agents still working the case full time are very interested in Ken Callahan and Don Larson. They know that in November 1973 Larson bought an eighty-acre farm with a house and garage near Willow River, Minnesota, and has traveled with his wife to Las Vegas and Palm Springs.⁵ They’ve learned that Larson had a heart attack in the fall of 1974 and hasn’t worked much since. They know that Callahan has purchased and begun remodeling a south Minneapolis duplex and is building a year-round A-frame cabin on a lake near Cumberland, Wisconsin. They have learned that both men have traveled frequently to Duluth and other points in that general direction and are familiar with the area.

Most important, the pair matches, at least in broad terms, the descriptions of the kidnappers provided by Ginny and the cleaning women, and are somewhat similar to the men in the sketches of the ransom-money passers. Their recorded voices have been played for Ginny, her housekeepers, and the two persons who received a call from the kidnappers revealing Ginny’s whereabouts; the witnesses have deemed Callahan’s voice as at least “similar” to the voice of one of the men, as best they can remember it three-plus years later.

Callahan says he was fishing with friends on Lake Minnetonka the afternoon of the kidnapping and at home with his family that night. Larson says he was at work at the cabinet shop he shared with Callahan at the time and spent the night with his wife at home. Despite corroboration from the friends and the wives, Neumann and his colleagues are suspicious.

Ginny has, from the beginning, believed that there were three men involved in the abduction, and investigators have been open to the possibility. In fact, as the dragnet tightens around Callahan and Larson, other names, such as William Cooper and a Minneapolis burglar named Thomas Grey, are frequently included with theirs, usually suggested by informants in prison or the local underworld.

In a January 1976 memo, the FBI calls Callahan, Larson, and Grey “prime suspects” in the case. A later note says the evidence suggests that Larson and Callahan kidnapped Mrs. Piper and drove directly to Jay Cooke State Park. It also alleges that Larson drove the car, Callahan stayed with the victim in the woods, and Larson and Grey picked up the ransom. The note says that AUSA Thor Anderson is “prepared, if ultimately necessary, to offer Grey immunity in return for full testimony.”

Then this very strange case gets stranger.

On April 24, 1976, a rainy Saturday afternoon, Donald Larson and his five-year-old son drive from Minneapolis to his muddy farmstead outside of Willow River. There, Larson confronts his wife and a neighbor and shoots them both, along with the five-year-old boy and two other children. His wife and two of the kids are dead at the site; the neighbor and the third child will die a short time later in a Duluth hospital. Two other children are able to escape unharmed.

When the first Pine County sheriff’s deputy arrives, he finds a scene of blood and desolation. “No sounds other than the wind, no crying or pleas for help, nothing was moving,” says Gerald Olson, the deputy, nearly forty years later. “The little boy was wearing a train-engineer’s cap and coveralls. His arms were wrapped around his mother’s legs, and he was clutching a pack of Juicy Fruit gum.” By that time, Larson is on his way back to the Twin Cities, where he will fling a pair of .38-caliber pistols into the Mississippi River. Three days later, Minneapolis police will find him drunk and apparently suicidal in a South Side motel.

The murders stun even the hardened cons who have run with Larson for decades. He is not known to be a violent person and, if no genius, not a madman, either. But Larson’s thirty-two-year-old second wife, Ruth, and the neighbor, a struggling farmer named James Falch, were lovers who were about to move in together at Falch’s place down the road, so Larson would seem to have been driven by a jealous rage. The three children had had the bad luck to find themselves in the cuckold’s line of fire.

Not everyone believes the murders went down that way. The following morning Deputy Olson, standing guard at the crime scene, watches an unmarked car pull up at the end of the Larson driveway. It is the FBI’s Pete Neumann and Brent Frost from Minneapolis. They tell Olson that they had talked to Ruth Larson about the Piper case the previous Monday. She told them, they say, that she would have to move out of her husband’s house before she’d feel safe enough to talk about the case further. She promised to sit down with them after she settled in with Jim Falch.

No one knows what Ruth Larson was going to tell Neumann. When agents spoke to her a few days after the kidnapping, she vouched for her husband’s whereabouts the nights of July 27 and 28. Was she now about to tell a different story? Did Donald Larson kill five people in order to keep her quiet?

While they can’t rule out the possibility—an FBI memo refers to Ruth as a “potential” witness—it is doubtful the Piper investigators believe that silencing her was the motive for Larson’s rampage. Why would he kill Falch and the kids, including the five-year-old boy people who knew the family insisted he dearly loved? (Why would he bring the boy along from Minneapolis in the first place?) What’s more, multiple murder convictions would surely put him in prison for the rest of his life, while a kidnapping sentence would at least give him a chance for eventual freedom.

Others, however, point out that Larson brought two handguns to the farm—just as each of the kidnappers has been described as carrying two handguns at the Piper house. To skeptics of the enraged-husband scenario, the two guns and a box of ammunition left at the scene suggest he intended to shoot everyone in sight.

In any event, when Larson’s trial begins in Pine City in October 1976, Ronald Meshbesher, a well-known criminal defense attorney from the Twin Cities, enters a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.

One day four months after the murders, men armed with a search warrant, shovels, and a backhoe dig up a large patch of earth next to a shed on Donald Larson’s farm. A confidential informant, reportedly Tommy Grey, has told the FBI that Piper ransom money has been buried there. But the men with the shovels and the backhoe find no trace of it, nor any sign of any recent excavations.

Every now and then, in various places, a twenty-dollar bill from the ransom turns up, including one that was part of a drug deal in Philadelphia, yet four years after the kidnapping, scarcely more than $4,000 has been recovered.

Though he’s been dead since early 1973, Robert Billstrom and his associates have been the subject of retrospective interest. Lynda Billstrom, described as the late gangster’s girlfriend or common-law wife, has alternately told authorities that (a) Bob and several friends pulled off the kidnapping, and that (b) she made that story up, trying to mislead them. At the time, she is an armed robber living at the state correctional institution for women in Shakopee and is presumably angling for a shortened stay. In October 1976, the Bureau says enough—too much of her story doesn’t check out—and removes the Billstroms from consideration, turning “current investigative avenues” instead toward “Kenneth J. Callahan et al.”

When Larson’s murder trial gets under way in October, the teenage survivors and the first responders testify for the prosecution. Evidence includes horrendous crime-scene photos and a tape-recording (made by one of the deputies at the site) of mortally wounded Jim Falch naming Larson as the shooter. Psychiatrists debate whether Larson was sound of mind when he committed the murders as the defendant looks on impassively, appearing to doze off at times.

Ron Meshbesher offers a spirited defense of the temporary-insanity plea, but, in the end, after a week of testimony, the Pine County jurors don’t buy the big-city lawyer’s argument and convict his client of murder in four of the deaths and not guilty by reason of insanity only in the fifth (his five-year-old son’s). Larson is sentenced to life in prison.

By early 1977, with the expiration of the federal statute of limitations drawing close, the FBI decides that Callahan and Larson are indeed their men. There may be a third (or fourth) man involved—Tommy Grey and a South Side bar owner named Oscar Fleitman⁶ are mentioned as possibilities—but the evidence in hand thus far points, the Bureau believes, only to Callahan and Larson.

With the clock ticking, the Bureau sends one of its senior sleuths to Minneapolis to review the case from top to bottom. Ramon Stratton is a hard-nosed veteran of thirty years and was reputedly a close friend of Hoover’s. He concludes that Callahan and Larson are the kidnappers but acknowledges that there’s a “paucity of ‘hard’ evidence” to prove it. In fact, the only “hard” evidence in hand is a single fingerprint lifted from a scrap of brown paper found on the front-seat floor of the kidnappers’ Monte Carlo and a six-inch strand of hair also found in the car.

Because the paper scrap matches a torn-away piece of the Piggly Wiggly shopping bag the agents recovered in the woods, and because the single latent print on the scrap didn’t come from Mrs. Piper, Stratton believes the print has to belong to one of her abductors. Unfortunately, the print has been “determined positively to be not identical” with the prints of Callahan, Larson, and Grey. Stratton notes, moreover, that the print “is somewhat of a double image” and “not entirely clear,” though it is “capable of positive identification.” He orders the Bureau’s forensic analyst in Washington to reexamine the print and compare it with the prints of known “thieves” in local law-enforcement files.⁷

The FBI, meanwhile, has been poring over Callahan’s bank accounts, purchases, and real estate transactions. They keep the suspect under extensive “observation,” executing frequent “spot checks” of his St. Louis Park home and south Minneapolis cabinet shop, recording the license numbers of nearby vehicles and following him on sundry errands, with no apparent revelations. Armed with a search warrant, agents examine the main floor and basement of Calco Wood Products, Callahan’s nondescript storefront operation off Thirty-Eighth Street, but come across nothing of investigative value. A single, six-inch strand of reddish-brown hair found in the Monte Carlo, however, has been determined to be microscopically similar to samples Callahan has given to the FBI.

Then, on January 28, 1977, the Minneapolis office is advised that the fingerprint on the paper scrap does match the “left little finger impression of Donald Floyd Larson.” The internal FBI announcement describes the fingerprint as “only a partial print, very distorted and fragmentary,” and doesn’t explain why the previous comparisons, by the same analyst, didn’t yield a match. Confronted with the discovery, Larson, now a long-term resident of Stillwater prison, again insists he knows nothing about the kidnapping. “Ain’t it strange that my fingerprints come up after four and a half years?” he says to a reporter. But the government finally has at least one piece of what it purports to be incontrovertible proof of his involvement.

Publicly, the FBI’s Minneapolis office, now under the direction of yet another new SAC, thirty-seven-year-old St. Paul native John Otto, says little about the case, but for the first time since the twenty-dollar bills began appearing in November 1972, reporters sense some institutional optimism in the air. The investigation seems at last to be developing momentum.

Quietly, the Bureau drafts an action plan that it expects will lead, in early June, to the indictments of Callahan and Larson. The decision to seek the indictments, however, belongs to the US Attorney in Minneapolis, Andrew Danielson, who is also new to his job. Danielson has taken over the post from retiring Robert Renner, who cautioned him, “One of the first decisions you’ll have to make—and it’s going to be a tough one—is what to do with the Piper case.” Danielson and his first assistant, Thor Anderson, have serious discussions about their options. The Larson fingerprint will be a problem at trial, the new USA tells Anderson. “But we now have a positive identification,” he says, “so we have a responsibility to take the case to the grand jury.” Despite his misgivings, Danielson is willing to trust the FBI’s findings. Besides, though no one will say so on the record, it would be almost unthinkable, given its public profile and the prominence of the victim, not to push the case forward, toward an indictment and trial.

In March an FBI examiner says that Callahan “did not tell the complete truth” during a polygraph exam and that it is his considered opinion that Callahan was “personally involved” in the kidnapping. A week later the Bureau drops Tommy Grey as a suspect following a pair of polygraph tests, a review of his work record, and his “extensive criminal activities since … the kidnapping [which] would tend to indicate he was not involved.”

In April the Twin Cities papers carry front-page stories about the fingerprint match while reminding readers that the government is running out of time to make its case. In a rare public comment, Ginny tells the Associated Press, “I’m pleased they’re getting someplace. I’m quite surprised about their progress.”

On May 5 Ginny stands behind a one-way window at the Hennepin County jail and views a lineup of seven men wearing nylon stockings over their heads. Ken Callahan is lineup subject Number 6, but Ginny identifies Number 2, who happens to be a Minneapolis police officer, as one of her kidnappers. She also listens to five different voices and says Callahan’s sounds “similar” or “familiar” or “identical” to “Alabama”’s. The exact word she uses will be an issue later on.

On July 11, 1977, sixteen days before the statute of limitations expires, a federal grand jury in St. Paul indicts Callahan and Larson on kidnapping charges. Larson learns about the indictment in his Stillwater cell, while four FBI men led by Pete Neumann and a Hennepin County sheriff’s deputy arrest Callahan at his unfinished cabin in Wisconsin. Callahan does not seem surprised to find the agents at his door and offers no resistance. Later, talking to a reporter, the sobersided Neumann can’t suppress a grin. With rarely expressed emotion, he says, “I feel great!”

When a reporter contacts her at home, Ginny is not surprised, either. Even if Pete Neumann hadn’t told her himself, she and Bobby read the papers.

“I’ve known that it was coming,” she tells the Star, “so I guess I don’t feel one way or another.”

¹ There was some debate as to whom the recovered money belonged. Several of the banks where the twenties were exchanged believed the cash should be returned to them. The US Attorney’s office in Minneapolis argued, however, that “the FBI considers the money to be [its] property” while investigating the case and will return it to “the original source once [the] matter has been resolved.”

² The Minneapolis office also had jurisdiction over the explosive American Indian Movement occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in the late winter and spring of 1973.

³ The FBI attributed much of the reporter’s “news” to an unnamed informant in Twin Cities law enforcement. According to an internal memo, Gibson got some things right, including the cost of the Bureau’s investigation, which is “now ten million dollars.” The memo also confirmed Gibson’s assertion—broached during the reporter’s visit to the local office the previous day but not included in his story—that one of the Piper, Jaffray employees Bobby mentioned to the FBI immediately following the kidnapping was still, a year later, a suspect, though, according to the memo, not “as a doer,” but as a possible “planner.” The man had agreed, the memo said, to take a polygraph exam and was subsequently eliminated as a suspect.

⁴ Two months after her abduction, Patty Hearst declared herself a member of the SLA and, brandishing an assault rifle and the nom de guerre “Tania,” took part in several violent robberies in California. Then she and a handful of her captors/cohorts disappeared and became the objects of a nationwide search that concluded with their capture by the FBI the following year.

⁵ Larson told the FBI that they were guests of Arthur Stillman, a well-known Minneapolis businessman who owned a group of Flower City flower shops around the country. Larson said Stillman employed him as a truck driver and occasionally lent him money, including the $16,000 with which he purchased the Willow River farm. Stillman, who once served on the three-person Minnesota Parole Board, was known for finding jobs and otherwise helping ex-convicts.

⁶ Fleitman owned Occie’s Bar near Lyndale and Lake in Minneapolis. Though neither Callahan nor Larson was a serious drinker, both men often spent evenings at Occie’s and considered Fleitman a friend. Callahan, in fact, said Fleitman was one of his three fishing partners the afternoon of the kidnapping.

⁷ Stratton noted that one of Ginny’s kidnappers, while at the house, pocketed the six dollars he found in her purse, which suggested to the agent that even a kidnapper demanding a million-dollar ransom, if he’s a thief by trade, will rifle his victim’s billfold as a matter of habit. By peculiar coincidence, one of Eunice Kronholm’s kidnappers reportedly pilfered six dollars from her purse during her abduction a year and a half later.