Stolen from the Garden: The Kidnapping of Virginia Piper

This is not where Ginny Piper expected to be, not the first time and not the second, either. Especially not the second.

But here she is, as though trapped in a recurring bad dream, on the witness stand at the federal courthouse in downtown St. Paul, testifying in a replay of United States v. Kenneth Callahan and Donald Larson.

Much has happened since the first trial ended with the convictions of the two men in November 1977—almost two years ago now. Callahan was sentenced to life in prison, and Larson was sent back to Stillwater, another life sentence added to the life sentences he received in 1976 for the Pine County murders. Judge Edward Devitt refused to grant the men a new trial. But earlier this year, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in a two-to-one ruling, overturned the convictions on the grounds that Devitt erred in not allowing the wandering witness, Lynda Burt Billstrom, to testify for the defense. The case was sent back to St. Paul for retrial.

On the other hand, much seems to be the same. With the exception of Devitt, who has removed himself from the case and been replaced for the retrial by Donald Alsop, the faces are familiar—too familiar, some of them.

Callahan and Larson have both put on weight, though otherwise they seem to be the same men plus two years. Seated beside them again are their attorneys, Ron Meshbesher and Bruce Hartigan, the former now sporting a neatly trimmed beard and another notch on his litigator’s belt: this summer’s acquittal of Marjorie Congdon Caldwell at the conclusion of her spectacular murder trial in state court.¹ Thor Anderson is back at the government’s table, though, in yet another outlandish twist in a case that has been full of them, the distinguished AUSA has been accused, on the Star’s front page the day before this trial begins, of hiring prostitutes.² (To Anderson’s credit, he makes no effort to deny or diminish the allegation, and the incident is not mentioned during the trial.)

Though you wouldn’t know it from appearances, the government secured guilty verdicts against Kenneth Callahan and Donald Larson at the end of the first Piper trial. From left: US Attorney Andrew Danielson, FBI agents Robert Smashey and Pete Neumann, and Assistant US Attorney Thor Anderson, who tried the case. Bruce Bisping, Star Tribune/Minneapolis–St. Paul 2014

This time the jury comprises eight women and four men, the reverse of its composition during the first trial.

Ginny is fifty-six. The toll that the past seven years have taken is not readily visible. The white (or “silver,” or “platinum”) hair is still what you notice first, but her film-star face and stylish attire are those of a middle-aged woman who has taken good care of her natural attributes. Her voice betrays the decades-long cigarette habit, but, responding to counsel’s questions, her words are clear and measured. As it was during the first trial, some effort will be required to picture her dirty, unkempt, and chained to a tree, never mind clawing at the dirt in a desperate bid for freedom.

For two hours she patiently recounts the story she told the first trial’s jury. She also concedes that she was not able to identify Callahan in a police lineup in 1977, nor can she positively identify him now as the man who stayed with her in the woods more than seven years ago.

The second trial is even longer and more complicated than the first. Meshbesher and Hartigan will be damned if they lose this time around, even though this is federal court, where the defense almost always loses. Before the lawyers are finished seven weeks later, no fewer than 154 witnesses will be presented by the two sides.

Many of the witnesses are likewise familiar from the first trial. But many are not, and some of the newcomers’ testimony is dramatic.

The testimony includes, at last, the first-person account of Lynda Burt, formerly if unofficially Lynda Burt Billstrom, who says she overheard Robert Billstrom and his crew plot a “big job” prior to the Piper kidnapping. Burt is currently serving time in West Virginia for armed robbery and a pair of prison escapes. She says she overheard the Pipers mentioned by name during one conversation and saw a photograph of a gated driveway entrance similar to the Pipers’ passed around by the plotters. In mid-July 1972, she says, she and Bob camped one night in Jay Cooke State Park and checked into a nearby motel on July 27, creating an alibi for Bob, who then left; she says she didn’t see him again until July 29. Besides Bob, the gang, as she recalls it, included an ex-con named Ronald (“Runt”) Alger and two others she knew only as “Art” and “Taylor.” The group did not, she insists, include Callahan or Larson. Bob, however, had a friend in the construction business nicknamed “Alabama.”

Under a determined cross by Anderson, Burt, a dark-haired, vaguely furtive-looking woman in her early thirties, admits that she does not know for certain that Billstrom and his cronies had anything to do with the kidnapping. She also admits again that she lied to the FBI in late 1972 when she denied that Billstrom and his friends were involved.

“I guess I really didn’t know for sure if he had anything to do with it,” she says. “Of course, I wasn’t going to incriminate [Billstrom]. He was still alive.”

(Alger will later testify for the government that he knows nothing about a kidnapping scheme and never heard Billstrom or any other member of the gang discuss a plan to abduct either Mr. or Mrs. Piper.)

Two other defense witnesses, a Rochester bank teller named Esther Dahl and Paul Andersen, a Minneapolis druggist, cause unexpected problems for Meshbesher and Hartigan. The teller first says she didn’t recognize the man who asked to exchange several twenty-dollar bills in November 1972, then says she can and points at Larson. Andersen testifies to making a set of keys for what may have been the stolen Monte Carlo. Unable to identify the customer during interviews with the FBI, Andersen, while cross-examined, now points at Larson and says, “It was either that gentleman or his twin brother.”

The Piper relative who was once an FBI suspect washes up in Alsop’s courtroom, too, called by the defense. The nervous young man admits that while he did, in fact, talk to a man about kidnapping Ginny several years before the crime, he had been drinking, was never serious about it, and was only venting a teenager’s immature anger toward his family at the time. He has long since apologized to the Pipers, and the Pipers have forgiven his youthful indiscretion.

To the surprise of many in the courtroom, the defense, apparently feeling it has nothing to lose, calls both Callahan and Larson to testify on their own behalf. Their respective testimonies tread well-traveled ground and probably add little to the jury’s understanding. For example:

“Are you sure it was on July 27 that you went fishing?” Thor Anderson asks Callahan.

Larson says he worked at the shop he shared with Callahan and Harold Combs the afternoon of July 27, then went home for dinner, and then over to Occie Fleitman’s bar, where, he said, “everybody was talking about the kidnapping. Not just a few people, but almost everyone.” He says yet again that he had nothing to do with the crime.

Still, it is the first time a Piper jury hears either man—Callahan low-key and wry, Larson animated and windy—speak for himself. And there is at least a modicum of fresh information. Callahan holds his own when Anderson questions his personal finances after the kidnapping, insisting, for instance, that purchases of a pickup truck and a small airplane were made with minimal down payments and that the plane was sold again a year later.

The defense reiterates its argument that there are nine different ways to reach Jay Cooke but only one crosses into Wisconsin, thus challenging, again, the government’s justification for trying the case in federal court. This time the lawyers direct the jurors’ attention to a large, multicolored map vividly showing the various routes.

The defense hits its mark, though, when Meshbesher and Hartigan call their own fingerprint expert, who, in an often technical but compelling discussion, says that, according to his analysis, the print on the shopping-bag fragment cannot be positively identified as Larson’s.

The expert, a New York–based “independent consultant-criminalist” named Herbert MacDonell, helped Meshbesher puncture the state’s case against Marjorie Caldwell last summer. Now he challenges not only the accuracy of the FBI’s most recent fingerprint analysis but the Bureau’s integrity in presenting the analysis as a key piece of evidence. A government photograph of the disputed print, he says, has been altered to give the appearance of a match. In short, he says, the FBI doctored the evidence to make its case.

Anderson strikes back at MacDonell, but the accusation of government impropriety hangs in the air like a skunky odor.

Then, on December 3, nearly six weeks after her first appearance at this trial, Anderson calls Ginny back to the stand. He asks her to look at Callahan again, especially in profile.

“It strikes me as very familiar,” Ginny now says of the defendant’s face. “I believe that I saw it in the woods.”

She says she has been certain that the man was Callahan since seeing him during her previous appearance on the stand. “I was extremely shaken,” she says. “I observed a familiar look.” Especially familiar, she says, was Callahan’s darkish complexion and his left eye that she is sure was marked with a white imperfection when she caught a glimpse of it through the flaw in his mask. She does not explain why she couldn’t identify him in the 1977 police lineup or here in court a month and a half ago. She is on the stand today for scarcely five minutes.

Meshbesher responds by asking Callahan to get up and walk slowly past the jurors. Pay particular attention to the defendant’s eyes, he tells them. The idea, of course, is to show that Callahan has no sign of the condition that everybody who has followed this case knows as arcus senilis. Meshbesher reminds the jury that the condition doesn’t come and go; you either have it or you don’t.

Ginny again leaves a strong impression. Even the middle-aged female juror who dozed off during the testimony of previous witnesses is wide awake when Ginny is on the stand. But, in truth, Ginny can’t hope to advance the government’s case with her belated identification of the man in the woods.

Years later, Anderson will praise her performance on the stand. “She was cool, calm, and collected—very matter-of-fact,” he says. But, as Robert Kent, one of the federal agents who knew her well by the time of the second trial, will point out, “She was, I thought, an excellent witness, the problem, of course, being that she didn’t see anybody.”

Defense attorneys Ron Meshbesher, left, and Bruce Hartigan following the not-guilty verdicts that concluded the second Piper trial. Linda Wilkie, courtesy Bruce Hartigan

In the early afternoon of December 6, after less than four hours of deliberation—only half as long as the defendants’ lawyers needed for their final arguments—they find Callahan and Larson not guilty of the kidnapping of Virginia Piper.

“I thought we had it in the bag when the jury came back so quickly,” Meshbesher tells the Tribune’s Margaret Zack in the immediate afterglow of the victory, his jaunty self-confidence restored. “The last case should have been an acquittal, but we had a fluky jury. It’s unfortunate we had to go through it again.”

Anderson gamely tells the paper, “The price we pay for the jury system is some acquittals, but the jury system is worth it.” While he doesn’t know why these particular jurors decided the way they did, he says the controversial fingerprint was no doubt a problem for the prosecution. Years later, he shakes his head and says that trying a case before a jury is “just a couple of steps above witchcraft.”

These jurors, less “fluky” than their predecessors or not, are, at any rate, less talkative afterward. Only a few of them say anything to the media. One woman tells reporters that the government simply didn’t have enough evidence to convict. The swiftness of its decision, however, leads some court watchers to believe that this jury didn’t get beyond the essential jurisdiction question. If the government couldn’t prove that the kidnappers carried Mrs. Piper across that state line, the other evidence would be moot.

A free man, Callahan quietly heads back to Wisconsin with his wife. He can’t be tried again for the kidnapping, though he could conceivably be charged with possession of stolen property if he were caught spending any of the ransom money. Larson—a mass murderer but not, in the eyes of this jury, a kidnapper—is returned to his stark lodgings at Stillwater. But there, and no doubt in more than a few watering holes around the Twin Cities, he is a celebrity of sorts, to some minds an unlikely perpetrator of the perfect crime.

¹ In an earlier trial, her husband, Roger Caldwell, was convicted of killing her mother, heiress Elisabeth Congdon, and her mother’s nurse in the Congdons’ Duluth mansion in June 1977. Mrs. Caldwell, understandably a Meshbesher fan following her acquittal on the same charges, was in the gallery during the second Callahan-Larson trial. When David Piper introduced himself during a pause in the proceedings, she squeezed his hand and gushed, “Isn’t Ronnie wonderful!” David just smiled.

² Anderson was one of six public figures—the others were a state district court judge, two state legislators, an assistant city attorney, and the spokesman for the Twin Cities’ archdiocese—named by the paper after a six-month investigation of prostitute patronage by “the area’s most prominent and powerful men.” Anderson was never charged with the crime.