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“Dad was never explicit about our futures,” Tad Piper says.

Over breakfast one morning in 2012, Tad talks about his life and what his parents might have intended for him and his brothers. At sixty-six, he is “officially retired” from the family firm, though his days are full, what with board meetings, volunteer activities, and other demands on a community leader and philanthropist. Slight, bespectacled, and careful in his choice of words, he is unmistakably the son of Bobby Piper.

The boys’ paths had already been plotted, at least the general directions, when their mother was kidnapped. Harry had just graduated from Stanford Law and David was about to begin his sophomore year at Whittier, with law school to follow. Tad, the middle son, had been a regular at Piper, Jaffray since he was six or seven, when he would go downtown with his dad on Saturday mornings and sit at one of the associates’ desk and color. Later he worked there during breaks in the school year.

“Dad wanted his kids to do what they wanted to do,” Tad says. “Our parents were about love, values, and education. What happened after that—they were fine with it. They said, ‘We’ll give you the opportunity, but it’s your life. Follow your dreams.’”

Intrigued by his father’s work dating back to those Saturday mornings, Tad was thinking about a career in finance from the beginning. He majored in economics at Williams College in Massachusetts and earned an MBA from Stanford. After grad school he very nearly accepted a job at Goldman Sachs in New York. A friend of the family at Goldman suggested, however, he talk to his dad before going to work on Wall Street. “The man said, ‘Piper, Jaffray is a great firm,’” Tad recalls. “‘You’ll have way more opportunity there earlier in your career than you’d have here. And I think you’ll have more fun, too.’ The man was right on all counts.”

Tad went to work at Piper, Jaffray in 1969 as an assistant manager and held several positions before succeeding his father as CEO in 1983. He became chairman of the board in 1988; in 1997, Piper, Jaffray was acquired by US Bancorp. After the firm was spun off from USB in 2003, he served as vice chair, a position he held until his retirement in 2006.

After graduating with his juris doctorate from Hamline in 1979, David opened a one-man shop in Minneapolis and practiced law for twenty years. Between 1983 and 2011, he additionally served in several contract capacities in Hennepin County, including conciliation court judge and referee, family court public defender, child support magistrate, and family court referee. He was appointed a Hennepin County District Court judge by Governor Mark Dayton in 2011.

Every once in a while someone asks David if he is related to Virginia Piper. Her kidnapping sometimes comes up at parties. The Twin Cities legal community is not as large as New York’s or Chicago’s, so he has had occasion to bump into Thor Anderson, Ron Meshbesher, and Bruce Hartigan. He doesn’t see the point in trying to dodge the questions or evade familiar faces. He is extraverted and talkative like his mother. And his face, of all her sons’, is most reminiscent of hers. He has Ginny’s smile.

Harry studied economics at Harvard before getting his law degree in Palo Alto. Energized by the era’s idealism, he took a job in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and lived with his wife and small son in Washington. Unlike his parents, he was a progressive Democrat, and, upon returning to Minnesota a few years later, he directed a friend’s successful statewide election campaign and briefly entertained the idea of running for Congress. Instead, he spent eight years with one of the Twin Cities’ preeminent law firms litigating contract disputes and other civil cases before enrolling in a creative-writing program at the University of Minnesota. During the next few years he published a few articles and poems in regional magazines and “did a little journalism” for the Sun suburban newspaper chain. In 1989 he moved to Montana, invested in and sold ranch land, and married for the second time. Fifteen years later he retired from the real estate business, and the couple resettled in Oregon.

Despite the differences in their interests and the physical distances between them, the brothers were close growing up—especially Harry and Tad, only two and a half years apart—and have remained close into their fifties and sixties. The three of them talk often and share holidays and fishing trips. Harry and Tad have each been married twice and have children and grandchildren. David is gay and single.

Each of their lives was likewise changed by the series of events that began when the two masked men walked into their parents’ house that summer afternoon in 1972. Each has his separate memories, thoughts, and theories about the case that overlap but don’t always coincide. Tad, for instance, concurs with his parents’ belief that Callahan and Larson were the perpetrators. “Mom was a very intelligent woman,” he says. “If she believed those guys did it, they probably did.” Harry has become increasingly convinced that the two men didn’t do it, and David, pending fresh revelations, goes back and forth among the possibilities, though as a lawyer and judge he understands both trial verdicts. Busy with their own active lives, careers, and outside interests, Tad and David have been content to “move on” the way their father did. Harry, however, has been reluctant to let go.

Stepping into a restive middle age, Harry decided he would write a book.

Harry was not, of course, the first person who wanted to write at length and in depth about the Piper kidnapping. It was one helluva tale, after all—an unresolved real-life mystery with a glamorous victim and a purloined million dollars. But whether it was a local journalist who had covered the story from the beginning or an eager outsider who fancied himself Sherlock Holmes with a word processor, they all slammed into the wall that Bobby had thrown up around the family and the crime.

“Bobby wouldn’t talk about the case to anyone,” Harry says. “That was the whole idea behind the news conference after my mom came home. That was going to be it. There would be no interviews. Later, during the trials, that probably worked to our disadvantage. Thor Anderson had the same philosophy—they wouldn’t talk to anyone. But Meshbesher and Hartigan took the opposite tack and talked to everyone,” which, Harry believes, did the defendants some good at least in the court of public opinion.

The media, in Minnesota and around the country, had been chasing the case from the beginning and over the next seven years sought story lines that would freshen up the narrative. The papers profiled FBI agents Richard Held, John Otto, and Pete Neumann, and Thor Anderson’s prostitution admission was briefly front-page news. Once the trials began, Callahan and Larson were prominently featured, and Meshbesher and Hartigan, talkative and telegenic in their styled haircuts and three-piece suits, were everywhere, happy to chat with reporters. Before and after the first trial, WCCO-TV, in the person of its iconic anchorman, Dave Moore, broadcast lengthy specials on the case that included interviews with the defense team, Callahan and his wife, various special agents, a handful of witnesses, and (following the verdict) several jurors. The station aired a half-hour retrospective on the case in 1993.

Ginny and Bobby declined to be interviewed for any of the features. A brief response following the indictments and the first trial verdict was the extent of their direct participation after the post-rescue news conference. Angered by videos of Meshbesher and Hartigan confidently awaiting the first trial verdict and what he perceived as sympathetic coverage of the defendants, David Piper vented his exasperation in the Star. “I wish people would pay attention to what the victim has been through,” he said.

People might have been more understanding if Ginny and Bobby had sat down with Moore or one of the hometown papers’ reporters. But that was not going to happen. In his father’s eyes, Harry says, the kidnapping was a “sordid thing to talk about.” What’s more, their private lives were sacrosanct, off-limits to prying eyes. “It’s the way they were, the way their parents were, the way a lot of wealthy people were at the time. Their lives were not open to [public scrutiny] the way the lives of politicians and entertainers were.” The attention profoundly embarrassed them. “You didn’t air your dirty laundry in public,” Harry says, even if you weren’t responsible for the dirt.

Unfortunately for would-be authors, as long as Ginny and Bobby were alive, any book about the case would have to start with them. There was a mountain of newspaper clips and court records, of course, but the bulk of the investigative files were out of reach in the FBI’s vaults. Without interviews with the family, or at least the family’s tacit approval, there would be no inside information, and the Pipers’ friends and colleagues weren’t likely to cooperate if Bobby didn’t say okay.

But Harry Cushing Piper III was not an outsider. Harry was family. And Harry was convinced that his mother would help him write the book and that his father, whatever his misgivings, would at least be willing to go along with the project.

“I believed my mother wanted me to write the book,” Harry says. “She wanted to talk about it. She needed to talk about it—she would bring it up herself. She told me she had tried to write about the experience herself but didn’t get very far, and now she was kind of encouraging me to do it. My father—when I first brought up the book, when I had all these ideas about how I’d write it—he didn’t really say much.” To a writer obsessed with an urgent topic, Bobby’s reserve was tacit approval.

“I was really serious about it,” Harry recalls. “I talked to Jonathon Lazear, the literary agent. I had written enough, gotten enough published, that he was interested in the idea. I bought notebooks and recording equipment and began doing research on that period of time. I went out and interviewed Bernice Bechtold, one of Mom’s housekeepers, to sort of test everything out.” Harry felt prepared to interview his mother.

“She agreed, and we set a date,” he says. “I thought about how many times she had gone through the experience—all those interviews with the FBI, then with Thor, and then the trials. But she was very good about it, and I believed she was ready to go through it all again, this time for my book.”

Then Harry got a phone call from his father. Bobby said, “We need to talk. I want you to come down to the office tomorrow.”

“He might not have been forthcoming about why he wanted me to come downtown instead of to the house, but of course I knew,” Harry says. “He wanted me on his turf, the dutiful son in his office.”

The next day’s conversation started quietly, Harry says. “He told me I had no idea what it was like living with my mother after the kidnapping. He said I’d be opening old wounds if I wrote a book about it. I told him I considered him and Mom heroes, that what they did under very frightening circumstances was admirable, and I would make that clear in my book. He said that wasn’t the point. He said he didn’t want to frighten Mom all over again and open old wounds—he repeated the phrase—with friends of theirs who believed they had sicced the FBI on them.

“You could tell when my father was angry, because he would clench his jaw and get red in the face and wouldn’t look at you. When I argued with him, he couldn’t sit still behind his desk. He got up and paced back and forth. He began to yell. He accused me of ‘trying to profit off the family’s misfortune.’ Of ‘yellow journalism.’ But it didn’t take me long to figure out who he was really trying to protect—himself. Mother wanted me to do this. She told me that. We were going to talk. I don’t know—maybe she told him something else.

“At one point I said, ‘What if I wrote this as fiction and changed the names?’ He said, probably correctly, ‘That wouldn’t matter. Everybody would know who you were talking about.’”

Twenty-five years later, Harry remembers the scene as though it took place the previous Wednesday. “I’d never seen him so mad,” he says. Bobby’s fury was a revelation both for Harry and for the Piper, Jaffray employees who couldn’t ignore the unfamiliar noise level on the other side of the chairman’s door.

“I was the oldest son, and the oldest child often has the hardest time,” Harry muses, thinking now about his childhood at home. There were many rules and lofty expectations of the boys, and of Harry, the oldest, Bobby expected the most. “It often seemed that my most significant interactions with my father were the times I was called in because I had done something he didn’t like or approve of. On those occasions I would stand there staring at the floor while he’d lecture me about one thing or another.” That day in his office, Harry, then in his forties and a father himself, felt as though he was ten again.

“He said some pretty hard things to discourage me, which surprised and angered me. I really didn’t know how strongly he felt about this, because, until now, he’d just shut up whenever I’d mention it. He never said I shouldn’t do it, and I took the silence for his assent.”

Bobby had obviously made his opposition clear to Ginny, because when Harry went to see her, she was no longer willing to talk for his book.

“I can’t do it,” she told him. “Your father is very upset.”

Then, as she always did when one of her sons’ spirits had been dampened, she tried to buck him up. She said, “Keep your notes. When your father passes away, you can do it.”

“No one knew,” Harry says decades later, “that she would be the first to die.”

Other members of the extended family either were warned off by Bobby or had their own objections to a book. Some feared copycat crimes that might be inspired by a detailed retelling of the story. Others shared Bobby’s distaste for “opening old wounds” and said it would be cruel to make the family relive their nightmare in print. Others, especially among their west-metro neighbors, believed that the case was closed, and the Pipers’ experience was no longer anybody’s damn business.

Reluctantly, Harry put his unwritten book on the shelf.

There were plenty of other itches to scratch. In addition to their families and careers, he and his brothers had followed their parents’ example and immersed themselves in professional, civic, and philanthropic activity, mainly in the areas of education, health care, the law, animal welfare, and the environment. Harry and his second wife were especially active in progressive social causes and political candidates, and contributed substantial amounts of time and money to both.