Stolen from the Garden: The Kidnapping of Virginia Piper

His mother’s consoling words—“Keep your notes. When your father passes away, you can do it”—have never been far from Harry’s mind, but several years go by following Bobby’s death before he acts on them.

Harry and his second wife have adopted a pair of South American children and are living in Bozeman. He makes a good living in real estate, indulges his love of fly-fishing, and tries to get his poetry and short stories published in national magazines. He knows he will be flouting his father’s express desire, and he wrestles with the moral and ethical issues of doing so. At the same time, he is filled with an almost religious conviction that his parents’ story is the “one big thing that has been given to me to write about.”

He knows, for that matter, that his parents’ siblings, not to mention at least one of his brothers, fervently wish he would let sleeping dogs lie and will be upset when they learn about his renewed intentions. On the other hand, he believes that his parents’ strength and bravery should be memorialized and that, far from embarrassing the Pipers, he would be honoring them with an honest account of their experience. Theirs is a story that needs to be told.

And maybe, just maybe, reviewing the case with fresh eyes, he could determine, once and for all, who kidnapped his mother and what became of his father’s money.

Brother Tad, now chairman of Piper, Jaffray and a prominent citizen in his own right, worries, however, about copycats—criminals or terrorists or wannabes who read about a spectacular kidnapping and think they can get away with something similar. There is reason to believe that copycats are copied as well, creating a chain reaction of heinous crimes, one an inspiration and tutorial for the next.

As it happens, three months to the day after Bobby’s death, the chairman of the First Bank System was abducted by an armed man when he arrived for work in downtown Minneapolis. The victim, Jack Grundhofer, was one of the best-known businessmen in the Twin Cities at the time. He, too, lived in Orono.

Approaching Grundhofer in the busy Pillsbury Center parking ramp shortly after eight that morning, the man produced a gun and, after a brief scuffle, forced Grundhofer to drive to Wisconsin in the banker’s Mercedes. En route, Grundhofer called his secretary on the car phone and relayed the man’s demand for $3 million. Near Hudson, just across the state line, the man bound Grundhofer’s hands, zipped him into a sleeping bag, tied the bag to a tree, and drove off. The fifty-two-year-old banker was able to free himself in minutes, however, and called the police from a farmhouse nearby.

The crime bore obvious similarities to the Piper case eighteen years earlier. It seemed to have been carefully planned, but it was riddled with an amateur’s miscalculations and mistakes.

The abduction had been witnessed by several people, one of whom jotted down the Mercedes’s license number as it exited the ramp. The gunman dropped a piece of paper on which he had printed his instructions for the banker. Later he demanded that the ransom include thousand-dollar bills, which would be difficult to spend or exchange without attracting attention. The kidnapper’s description, moreover, was reminiscent of the man who chained Ginny to a tree: a heavyset, middle-aged white male with a ruddy complexion and a gruff voice who had some knowledge of his victim’s routine. And the kidnapper crossed into Wisconsin, then returned to the Twin Cities in the kidnap car, which, though its license-plate number and detailed description were on the radar of every law-enforcement officer in the Upper Midwest, was not discovered, near downtown Minneapolis, until the next day.

Also similar is the fact that while the FBI spent years investigating the Grundhofer case and insisted that its agents were onto at least one promising suspect, no arrests were made and the case remained unresolved. No ransom was ever paid, so there was no ransom to recover.

Small wonder that Tad is concerned about revisiting his parents’ case in print. Who says lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice? And, as Tad pointedly reminds Harry, he and his family still live and work in the Twin Cities, while Harry does not.

At any rate, in the middle 1990s, Harry has to think about the project in a different light than he did when his parents were alive. Their accounts, as told directly to him, can no longer serve as the center of his narrative. Other individuals important to the story have died as well, most notably Chy Morrison and Pete Neumann.¹

But several key players should be available. Thor Anderson and Andy Danielson still live in the Twin Cities, as do Ron Meshbesher and Bruce Hartigan, not to mention—if not in town, nearby—Ken Callahan and Don Larson. Presumably, some of the dozens of FBI agents who worked the case, though many have likely retired, could be contacted wherever they are currently residing.

There are also, Harry assumes, the trial transcripts and the accompanying petitions, appeals, and rulings in whose often arcane legalese Harry is fluent. Most important, the FBI has five-plus years’ worth of case files in its archives, as well as, presumably, the disputed fingerprint on the scrap of brown paper, the strand of hair found in the Monte Carlo, the Detective Romo handcuffs, the eight-foot chain, the St. Olaf sweatshirt, and other physical evidence. Because the FBI, despite the acquittals at the end of the second trial, considers the case closed, Harry reckons that the documents and evidence will be accessible for public review. He decides to embark on the book.

In December 1997, using the protocol provided by the federal Freedom of Information Act, Harry requests data concerning the FBI investigation of his mother’s kidnapping from his former employer, the US Department of Justice. During the following year, he begins interviewing, in person or over the phone, family members, friends, and employees of his parents, business associates of his father, his mother’s colleagues at Abbott Northwestern Hospital, the trial lawyers, former FBI agents, his own friends, his ex-wife, and others.² Two of his aunts write letters entreating him not to proceed, but they, too, eventually agree to participate. Both David and Tad, despite the latter’s uneasiness about the project, submit to interviews with their brother.

The recollections he gathers about their parents prove to be wonderfully diverse, touching, funny, and occasionally barbed. Ginny and Bobby emerge as a loving but sometimes troubled couple who treasured their kids and cherished their many friends, who took their respective roles seriously, and who were transformed in large and small ways by the kidnapping.

Ginny vociferously defended Richard Nixon against any critics around the dinner table and stood by individuals who had been given the cold shoulder by other members of her circle. She had a great golf swing and was quite willing to use a four-letter word when Bobby was out of hearing range.

Harry himself provides an indelible image of his mother in a dress and high heels running along the sideline during a junior varsity high school football game, exhorting her son, a startled tailback, to go all the way for a touchdown. His friends joked that she beat him across the goal line, he says, tickled by the recollection four decades later.

There is broad agreement that her abductors would have killed her if she hadn’t been as kind and congenial with them as she was with everyone else.

Her friend Gata Snyder tells Harry, “Ginny adored Bobby, quoted Bobby all the time. ‘Bobby thinks this.’ ‘Bobby thinks that.’ ‘Bobby and I are so proud of you.’”

But Bobby could be difficult: demanding, taciturn, and “all business.” He was also incredibly brave and coolheaded under pressure, which was another reason his wife survived her captivity.

David recalls his father calling him at work one afternoon and asking what he was doing that evening. His father said, “I need you to come home for dinner tonight.” It was the first anniversary of Ginny’s death, and all three sons joined Bobby to commemorate it. David tells Harry, “I remember us sitting by the front door, like in a football huddle, hugging and crying, which was so unlike us to do.”

Nobody among the family members and friends has any novel ideas about Ginny’s kidnappers or the whereabouts of the ransom money.

The former agents, tracked down in their respective retirement communities, believe the Bureau got its men, the not-guilty verdicts notwithstanding, and have only scattershot recollections of the kidnapping’s aftermath.

Former Special Agent Donald W. Peterson, for instance, tells Harry he “rigged up the telephone so we could record the incoming calls, and stayed [at the house] for maybe three days. I cooked breakfast.” Somewhat more startling, he says Bobby wanted to take a gun with him on the delivery run, “but we talked him out of that”—a revelation that nobody else, including Tad and David, who were also present on that fateful Friday night, can remember.

Harry asks Peterson about the lingering suspicion that his phone, and presumably other family members’ phones, had been tapped during the investigation.

“There would be, especially when I made a long-distance call, some clicking, and there were long delays before the connection [was made],” Harry says. The ex-agent tells him with a presumably straight face that clicking noises and delays were “kind of normal in the phone system” in those days, but people didn’t really notice the quirks until they started thinking the phones might be bugged. “I’m ninety-nine and a half percent sure that nobody was eavesdropping on your phone,” he says, not entirely to Harry’s satisfaction.

Robert Kent was the agent in charge at the Piper house on the night of the ransom delivery. He tells Harry that he believed that he should make the run instead of Bobby. Mr. Piper was in a “highly nervous state, but at the same time very determined” about what he should do to secure his wife’s release, Kent says. “I had a lot of respect for your father.” (He says nothing about Bobby offering to carry a gun on the drive.) Kent also recalls maintaining an “excellent relationship” with both Mr. and Mrs. Piper after her release, the only hitch being a “very large dog” at the house.

Thor Anderson and Bruce Hartigan are both Hennepin County District Court judges when Harry catches up with them in 1998, and neither has strayed from his position on the Piper case, which is now more than twenty years in their rearview mirrors. Neither has Ron Meshbesher, who is still in private practice.

Meshbesher and Hartigan, though they haven’t tried a case together since Piper, are of the same mind about the two trials—they should have won the first one and thus there wouldn’t have been a second. They insist that the FBI manipulated Larson’s alleged fingerprint and that Judge Devitt should have allowed Lynda Burt Billstrom’s testimony, though, as events transpired, the judge’s refusal proved to be the reason the guilty verdicts were overturned.

“Absolutely not!” Hartigan replies. “I’m a hundred percent sure they didn’t do it.”

Meshbesher tells Harry—and will tell whomever else will listen—that Callahan and Larson were not only not guilty, they were innocent. (There’s a difference.) He doesn’t think Larson is smart enough to pull off that kind of job (Meshbesher should probably know, having defended him in the Pine County murders), and while Callahan is a bright guy, he is not the type to kidnap a tycoon’s wife. Callahan did some “dumb things” in his life, Meshbesher allows, but he didn’t abduct Ginny Piper.

Over lunch in downtown Minneapolis, Anderson tells Harry that he believes the kidnapping “terrified your father a lot more than it did your mother, because she was there, she was alive and knew what the situation was, and he didn’t know where she was.” Harry’s father, Anderson continues, was “insulted” by the crime—an “act of terrorism” in his home—and, when talking to the prosecutor, he “took the responsibility right on the chin for not catching the kidnappers” because of his insistence on delivering the money himself.

“By the way,” Anderson says, “I found out later, by accident, that notwithstanding [Bobby’s] instructions, the sheriff’s office followed his car on the ransom run. They followed it, and they lost it. I don’t know at what point, but they lost him.”

Anderson says he was similarly impressed with Harry’s mother, whom he describes as a “very good witness.” Ginny was not a “professional kidnap victim” who wore her ordeal on her sleeve and became the “heroine of her bridge club.” She was “businesslike” about it.

“She made an interesting observation,” Anderson tells Harry. “She said, ‘It’s a good thing I was kidnapped instead of my husband because he’s stubborn, and he wouldn’t have done what they told him to do, and they would have killed him.’” Anderson doesn’t know if that’s true or not, he says, but the FBI did expect to find her body in the Monte Carlo. “We had no hope that she was alive.”

Anderson concedes that the government did not have a strong case against Callahan and Larson. The debacle involving the multiple tests of the Larson fingerprint and the FBI’s change of opinion was a gift to the defense, though Anderson says he believes the print was, in fact, Larson’s. (He notes, in a grim aside, that if the Bureau had positively identified the print the first time, Larson would have been arrested within weeks of the kidnapping and the five victims of that farmyard bloodbath would still be alive.) Lynda Burt Billstrom’s story “didn’t wash.” Unreliable and maybe insane, witnesses such as John Dineen didn’t help the prosecution, either.

“It was a case nobody thought we were going to win,” he says. “We went in [to the first trial], jumped in the pool, and swam like hell.” He was probably as surprised as Meshbesher and Hartigan that the government won the first time, and he was not surprised when the appeals court overturned the guilty verdicts. “I have a hunch that if the Billstrom thing hadn’t been there, [the appellate judges] would have found something else” to justify the reversal. “They didn’t like our case.”

He says he doesn’t think the prostitution accusation publicized just before the start of the second trial had any impact on either his ability to argue the government’s case or the jury’s decision. Nor does he think that, despite the timing, the defense had any hand in the Star’s revelations.

“But when it comes down to it,” Harry asks him, “do you think the two defendants were guilty?”

“Oh, yes,” Anderson tells him. “I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it at all.” He adds that he still doesn’t think there was any “real evidence” that others were involved, despite Ginny’s belief that there was a third man.

Then the former prosecutor says one more thing that takes Harry aback. Anderson says that when he visits his relatives at Lakewood Cemetery, he makes a point of pausing at the Pipers’ graves. He tells the couple that he’s sorry about losing the case.

“I apologize to them for the fuckup,” he says with a little laugh. They were difficult people to get close to, he says, “and yet I kind of felt like I was a friend of theirs when the whole thing was over. I don’t feel they held [the not-guilty verdicts] against me.”

One summer morning in 1998, a guard at the state correctional facility in Faribault, an hour south of the Twin Cities, escorts Harry into a small, windowless conference room. There he sits down across a table from Donald Larson, convicted mass murderer and acquitted kidnapper.

Despite the reason he has spent the past twenty-two years behind bars and will spend the rest of his life here or in another Minnesota prison, Larson is not a fearsome figure. He is seventy-two years old. His hair is white and a body type once described as “husky” has gone to fat. True to his reputation, he is as garrulous as a small-town barber and seems pleased to have a fresh ear to bend.

Harry asked Meshbesher and Hartigan to arrange interviews with their erstwhile clients, and they have. Of course, there is little risk for either Callahan or Larson at this point, more than two decades after their acquittals. Callahan politely answered questions whenever he was approached by reporters during and immediately after the trials, but it has been a long time now since anyone wanted to speak with him, and he may have gotten used to his obscurity. Larson, whom fellow inmates call “The Mouth,” has always been eager to talk.

Larson has been married twice. He has three daughters and a son whom he sees “once in a while.” Callahan and Tommy Grey come to visit every couple of months. Larson worked in the prison hospital for eight years and says he “saw a lot of guys die,” several from complications of AIDS. Early on, he says, when other cons kept asking where he had buried the ransom money, he drew up maps of Jay Cooke State Park “with FBI agents behind every tree” and “sold” them to enquiring minds for ice cream. He has since given some thought to writing a book about the case and, in the meantime, has taken to sewing quilts with religious motifs.

Life is dull, Larson tells Harry. “There’s nothin’ going on.” Times have changed for the criminal element as well as for everybody else, and Larson laments the change. “Your younger generation, your gang members, they’re shootin’ people for their shoes,” he says incredulously. As for today’s prisons, “There ain’t no such thing as rehabilitation.”

Donald Larson, Minnesota’s oldest inmate at the time, shows off a square from one of his Christian-themed quilts for a 2005 City Pages profile. Mike Mosedale

Larson talks about running with a “tough bunch of guys” when he was still a kid. He grew up in the old Seven Corners neighborhood of south Minneapolis back when that was a rough part of town, the third youngest of eight kids. “My mother was a wonderful person, but my father was an alcoholic who knew every one of the many bars along Cedar and Washington.” He made it through the eighth grade, then took off for good. At seventeen, he held up a Lake Street liquor store and spent the next seven years at St. Cloud and Stillwater, working in the twine plant. After retelling how he and Grey were fingered for passing bad checks, he concludes with a convict’s self-absolving pique, “There’s no such thing as justice.”

It was, he says, a longtime acquaintance at Stillwater who happened to be an FBI stool pigeon who got him “mixed up” in the Piper investigation. Larson had been driving trucks for his friend Arthur Stillman and working other straight jobs. Then, two days after the kidnapping, the stoolie’s FBI connection showed up at Larson’s house and questioned him for forty-five minutes.³ The agent asked if he had been involved.

“I told him, ‘No, but I wish to hell I had!’ A million dollars! No one I’m associated with thinks like that, in those terms. Twenty-five, fifty thousand dollars—that much I can think of.

“When I first heard about the [kidnapping], I figured it was an inside job. I never thought that any of the guys out of Stillwater had the brains to pull it off. Nobody had ever gotten away with somethin’ like that.”

For more than an hour and a half, Larson talks, sometimes answering Harry’s questions, often rambling off on an elaborate tale in which many of the Piper saga’s names—Bob Billstrom, Bill Cooper, Harold Combs, John Dineen, Occie Fleitman—appear like cast members in a not-quite-classic film noir. Listening to the stories, it wouldn’t be difficult to conclude that Larson served time with half the prison population in Minnesota during the past sixty-odd years, which, of course, may not be out of the question. He and Callahan were convicted in the first Piper trial “because everybody lied, including the FBI.” The FBI recruited Combs, Dineen, and the other prosecution witnesses and swapped reduced sentences for their testimony. “[The government was] talking to every liar in the state, and they all wanted to get out.”

Though Harry is not eager to go there, Larson doesn’t hesitate to revisit the Pine County homicides. He says he had planned to go smelt fishing with his son, but it was raining the afternoon they drove up from the Twin Cities. When he stopped at the farm, Jim Falch was stealing his power tools and preparing to move away with his wife. Ruth had been taunting him, he says, and Falch was a federal informant, “though I didn’t know that at the time.”

“I had a .38 and I shot him in the arm … then went crazy, shot everything in sight, emptied the gun, reloaded, shot [Falch] again …”

Larson does not say that he was insane, as Meshbesher argued during the Pine City trial. In fact, he makes no attempt to excuse himself—“I’m guilty of that, I’m not lying”—though he tells Harry with murky jailhouse logic that he should have been charged with either second-degree murder or manslaughter.

Now, he says, he is regularly denied parole for the Pine County murders because of the Piper accusations, even though he was ultimately acquitted of that crime.

A few days later, Harry shares a booth at Mark’s Restaurant, in Cumberland, Wisconsin, with Ken Callahan, who has driven down from Kirby Lake, a few miles north of town. While they talk, Harry’s wife busies herself in the small town’s shops.

Callahan lives in the house he built for his wife and himself during and after the Piper trials. He has become well known in the area, having spoken to the local Kiwanis Club and a junior college class about his experience as a defendant in a kidnapping trial that attracted worldwide attention. He and several Cumberland police officers are good friends, frequently getting together for coffee and gossip. He is respected in town for his carpentry skills and seems to have as much work as he wants. He has stayed out of trouble and done nothing to attract undue attention to himself.

Ken Callahan and Harry Piper III, Cumberland, Wisconsin, 1998. Mary Piper, courtesy Harry Piper III

Callahan is seventy-three. His two kids and two stepchildren are middle aged, and he is a great-grandfather. Erna died of cancer a year ago—they had been married for forty-three years—and he is thinking of selling the house and moving into town.

He is a laid-back fellow with thinning gray hair, wire-rimmed glasses that keep sliding down his nose, and a smoker’s cough. Today he is in no hurry, though he gives Harry the impression that he is here because he has been asked to be here, not because he is eager to answer questions from the son of the woman who accused him of kidnapping her. Still, he answers whatever Harry asks him, and doesn’t seem to be uncomfortable revisiting his rocky past.

Harry, for his part, imagines his parents spinning in their graves if they could see him now, chatting with Ken Callahan over a cup of coffee. Nobody in the noisy cafe seems the least bit curious about the two men talking into Harry’s tape recorder.

Callahan says he met Larson while serving time during the mid-1940s. Callahan had been convicted at age sixteen of crossing a state line in a stolen car—the first of a mixed bag of felonies that got him serious jail time. His sketchy history, he says, is “why the FBI came to me in the first place. I was interviewed within three or four days of the kidnapping, along with everybody else who had a federal crime on their record.”

He says he told the agents where he was on the afternoon of July 27, 1972—fishing on Lake Minnetonka—and they checked out his alibi. Then they told him that he had been accounted for and was no longer a suspect. He says he didn’t hear any more from law enforcement for three or so years, then “they sat on me like flies.”

Callahan and his wife were living in their St. Louis Park bungalow. “You’d either have to say that they were very inept followers or they wanted me to know they were following me because it was very obvious,” he says. “I’d leave for work in the morning, and they’d follow me all over. If I was working inside, I’d come out for a smoke and there’d be some cars sitting there. And then they started to interview people. They’d go to somebody and say, ‘Do you think this guy could have done it?’ And the guy would say, ‘Well, yeah, maybe he could have.’ Then the guy would tell somebody else and pretty soon there’s a whole bunch of people saying, ‘Yeah, ol’ Ken Callahan could have done that,’ whether they know me or not.”

He talks about the disputed fingerprint, the long strand of hair (“I sure didn’t have any six-inch hair”), and the eye condition that were at the center of the government’s case. He sounds more perplexed than angry, discussing Ginny’s trial testimony and misidentification without apparent rancor. He does not seem surprised or disturbed when Harry tells him that his mother went to her grave believing that he and Larson were her captors.

Callahan spent only three days in jail during the entire period, and that was right after his arrest, while family members scrambled to come up his $10,000 bail. Even after his conviction in the first trial, Judge Devitt, to nearly everyone’s surprise, let him go pending sentencing. Callahan says the government figured that he would either skip the country or lead them to the ransom money, neither of which, of course, happened.

Thor Anderson offered him a deal through his attorney, he says, though he can’t remember if it was before or during the second trial. The deal was ten years maximum for his cooperation. “I told Ron that I would confess for thirty days, with time off for the three days I already served. I probably would have done that, at that time.”

After his acquittal at the end of the second trial, “the FBI dropped me like a hot potato. They had no more interest in me whatsoever.” That, he says, despite the fact that while he couldn’t be tried again for the Piper kidnapping, most of the million-dollar ransom was still missing, and the feds might have thought he had it hidden on his property. He says that, to his knowledge, the FBI never came looking for it in Cumberland. (Callahan’s pals among the local police will later confirm that the FBI never asked them about either the suspect or the money.)

Callahan laughs and says, no, he’s switched to Worths. “Still menthol, but cheaper.”

He laughs again and says, as though to put a lid on any lingering mystery, “I will tell you what I’ve been doing for the last twenty-five years. Not gettin’ rich. Never got rich, never went to Europe, never went to South America, never went to Hawaii, never went to Las Vegas, never bought a new car.”⁴ He adds, “Bought five lottery tickets the other day. That’s my dream of riches.”

The investigation and trials created “a lot of problems,” he says. He and his wife had counted on income from the south Minneapolis duplex they bought, but turned the $20,000 mortgage over to Meshbesher as payment for his services. Once they moved to Cumberland and started building the new house, “things were pretty tight for a while. Had to sell my airplane because my wife wanted windows in the house.” All the negative attention caused the local lumberyard to withhold credit on purchases for the new house and generally made it hard to do business. There was, for a while, he says, in addition to the small-town celebrity, the lingering suspicion and the sense of an uncertain future.

He says he told a reporter that when he went to the drugstore to buy razor blades, he didn’t know whether to buy a ten- or a five-pack “because I didn’t know how long I was gonna be home.”

Their hour-long conversation drawing to a close, Harry asks, “So who do you think did it? Have any theories?”

Callahan thinks for a moment, then says, “What was the name of that guy that got killed?”

“Billstrom, yeah. That was a strange situation there.” He recalls the testimony of Billstrom’s girlfriend, but then asks what everyone else has asked, too: “Why was he out robbing other people if he had all that money?”

Harry tries to imagine Callahan, with a woman’s stocking over his head, responding to his mother’s questions in the woods, but he can’t. Callahan doesn’t seem the type, for whatever that’s worth. He doesn’t have a gruff voice or any sign of arcus senilis, which, as everybody knows by now, is a permanent affliction. He actually seems like a pretty nice guy. Larson didn’t fit the image, either. Larson could have been a helper, but even that seems improbable all these years later. Larson struck Harry, during his recent visit to Faribault, as little more than a lonely old lifer who sews quilts and spins tales.

When they are finished, Harry asks Callahan if he can take a look at his house on the lake. Callahan says sure and leads him out there. It is a decent-sized place, more a house than a cabin, but nothing fancy.

And before he leaves for home, Harry asks his wife to snap a photograph of him with Callahan, just for the record, wondering again what his parents would think if they could see him now.

He and his wife drive up from the Twin Cities on I-35 and Minnesota 23. They find the power line where it has been standing since at least the summer of 1972 and, beneath the line, the vestiges of a track leading up a hill into the woods. This is beautiful boreal country—the hardwood forest basks in its summer warmth—but Harry keeps his eyes on the unlovely cut that will take him up through the brush in his mother’s footsteps.

Twenty-six years have passed since she climbed this hill and since “Alabama” chained her to that tough little maple. Small trees have grown large, large trees have blown down or been cut; the underbrush and grasses have bloomed and withered over a hundred seasons, so the small clearing where his mother waited to die or be rescued would likely be unrecognizable, even to her. But after some wandering around he finds a small break in the trees about a hundred yards above the highway that he thinks could have been the place. At any rate, he believes this is close.

“I felt I was in the presence of something,” he says later. “I could feel a kind of sadness in that spot—the sadness Mom must have felt when they left her, and she believed she might never be found.”

Tracking down human sources is one challenge. Securing the documents he needs to tell his parents’ story will prove quite another. In fact, it will take Harry the better part of a decade, a string of lawsuits, hearings, appeals, and court rulings as well as more than $80,000 in legal fees to get his hands on the roughly eighty thousand pages of FBI case files.

He will never see the physical evidence he asked for in his Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, much less submit the contested fingerprint and hair sample to the independent laboratory tests—including DNA analysis that was not available in the 1970s—he was prepared to pay for, because, incredibly, the evidence has been thrown out or destroyed.

Long delays in processing requests under FOIA are common, given the enormous number of requests and the staggering volume of material requested from government agencies by journalists, scholars, and other private citizens, but the delays drive Harry and his lawyer to distraction. So does the Assistant US Attorney’s inability to produce the evidence that supposedly had been in his care. Even the US District Court judge presiding over the interminable proceedings is incredulous, describing Thor Anderson’s response to Piper’s queries as “cavalier.”⁵

In 2007 he receives the first of two dozen large boxes from Washington. Each box is stuffed with photocopied field reports, memos, newspaper clippings, and photographs. The documents, however, are not comprehensively indexed, and most of the files are not arranged in any meaningful order. Pages are missing, and many of those that are included have been so heavily redacted they are practically worthless.

What is included and what has been inked over seems to have depended on the caprice of an intern with a heavy-duty Sharpie at least as much as any high-minded protection of confidential informants and other purportedly sensitive information by FBI officials. A list of suspects dated July 31, 1972, for example, consists of nearly four pages of impenetrable darkness. “All blacked out,” Harry notes on his legal pad, “except [the name] Donald Larson.” Every face in a police lineup photo has been obscured.

Harry isn’t sure whether to laugh or cry about what would seem to be an exhausting Pyrrhic victory.⁶

Still, as full of gaps and redactions as it is, the cache embodies the ponderous bulk of a stunning crime and its titanic investigation. It also opens a window into the strange, secretive world of the FBI during the 1970s, seemingly as hidebound and opaque as the Vatican’s Curia. The investigative reports and interagency memos are clotted with bureaucratic syntax and references to the SAs, SACs, and UNSUBs involved in PINAP. As challenging as it is to read the files, it had to be stupefyingly tedious to compile them.

As he pores over the paper, Harry finds himself back in the summer of 1972. There are photocopies of the typewritten ransom note and delivery instructions, their demands unnervingly precise and unequivocal. An FBI memo written on the morning of July 29, a few hours before Ginny’s rescue, reveals that the number Bobby was ordered to call from the Sportsman’s Retreat belonged to a pay phone a couple of blocks from the bar, and that agents recovered the Monte Carlo’s trunk key from above the men’s room door where Bobby left it, meaning that that part of the kidnappers’ instruction was a red herring. There are dozens of grainy photos—of the Monte Carlo, the scruffy parking lot behind the long-since-razed tavern, the handcuffs and chain recovered from the state park, his father and John Morrison, their heads bowed but shoulders squared, trudging up the long driveway after meeting reporters the afternoon of the abduction.

One photo stops Harry short. It is a snapshot that one of his mother’s rescuers took of her standing in the woods moments after they found her. She stares back at the camera, exhausted and disheveled yet defiantly erect and beautiful, the homemade blindfold hanging around her neck, the handcuffs and chain draped over her right arm, the spindly tree to which she was bound behind her. It appears as though she is holding a cigarette in her left hand. If so, the smoke was undoubtedly the first thing she asked for after the agents came crashing into the clearing. She would not have been picky about the brand.

Harry looks at the photo for several minutes. Even after he puts it down he sees her standing there, peering out from her wilderness prison. Even knowing the happy outcome, he is sure this image will haunt him for the rest of his life.

In another file—remarkably redaction free—he reads his mother’s tape-recorded words as she recounts her experience in the days that follow. In the FBI’s transcriptions, he imagines he can hear her voice—low and languid and matter of fact, with few stops and starts. Her words tumble onto the paper in an almost uninterrupted stream of consciousness, as though she were describing a bad dream, which, in a sense, she was.

So they told me to get up and get out of the car and I still had this thing on my head and one man, the man on my right, took hold of me with a blanket and some other provisions and escorted me up a hill, it seemed to me, with tall grass because I still had this thing over my head … and we walked for quite a ways and [I] heard him rustling around with, it sounded like polyethylene or something … and he said sit down here, so I sat down and he rustled around, put a few things down and everything and he said this is where we are going to be living for a while …

At times, his mother seizes the initiative, asking questions of her weary, probably nonplussed captor and directing the conversation as though she were chairing a board meeting at the hospital.

I told him … it’s unfortunate that you picked Mr. Piper because … though he’s well off he’s not one of the richest men in Minneapolis. Oh, he said, come on you’re kidding and I said no. I said how much ransom are you asking … and he said I haven’t the slightest idea, he said the man that runs the bar is running the whole show. He said I know what I am supposed to do and that’s it. Well, I said, you must have some idea. I said I hope it isn’t over $50,000 because I said he can’t really afford any more than that. I told him [Mr. Piper] would have to borrow from all of his friends, [but] don’t worry, he’ll get the money because he has a lot of connections, but I said it won’t be his money … [Y]ou know, he just didn’t believe that at all …

On Friday, she says, she begins seeing things—“some beautiful birds that, of course, weren’t there”—and for a while she believes she is losing her mind. “I realize I wasn’t, but my eyes were deceiving me …” That night “Alabama” departed and she was alone in the dark.

Bobby’s commentary is in the files, too, as are descriptions of the firm and its employees and notes about everything from the cars the couple drive to the men who drop off their groceries. His harrowing ransom delivery is described in minute-to-minute detail, albeit in the clipped style favored by the Bureau.

One document—a copy of a teletype from the Minneapolis office to the acting director dated August 4, 1972—tells Harry what surely even his father didn’t know about the ransom run. Thor Anderson had referred to the sheriff’s attempt to follow Bobby that night, but he didn’t mention the FBI’s actions.

SINCE [MR. PIPER] WOULD NOT ALLOW AGENT SURVEILLANCE OR PASSENGER IN CAR, ENTIRE AREA, CONSISTING OF APPROXIMATELY TWENTY-FIVE MILES IN ALL DIRECTIONS FROM THE PIPER HOME, WAS ZONED AND APPROXIMATELY THIRTY-SEVEN BUREAU CARS AND SIXTEEN UNMARKED SHERIFF’S CARS WERE PLACED AT STRATEGIC INTERSECTIONS THROUGHOUT THIS AREA. TOTAL PERSONNEL OF NINETY-SIX WERE UTILIZED ON STREET. THESE UNITS PLACED IN MOST LOGICAL POSITIONS TO OBSERVE RANSOM CAR AND PROVIDE COVERAGE OF MAJOR ARTERIES OUT OF CITY IN EVENT INSTRUCTIONS CALLED FOR TRAVEL OUT OF CITY OR STATE.

But the massive blanket the FBI threw down around Bobby’s run—against Bobby’s express wishes and knowledge—was for naught. Low clouds prevented the aircraft from observing any movement on the ground, and, though “Piper was observed en route to the first pick-up site,” after he switched cars “no further observation” was possible.

Despite the futility that is evident in the documents, Harry can’t help but be impressed by the FBI’s efforts. The sheer scope of the Bureau’s investigation, beginning within an hour of his mother’s abduction and concluding upon the acquittal of Callahan and Larson almost seven and a half years later, boggles the mind. During the darkest period of its storied history, with news of its bungling and malfeasance seemingly in the headlines every day, the Bureau’s inability to solve the Piper case right up to the statute of limitations deadline had to be painful, especially to the agents working the case day after frustrating day. The Bureau desperately wanted to close this case and pulled out all stops to do it.

Reading the files, Harry has no more success building an airtight case out of the thousands of names, events, and allegations than the agents who laboriously collected them. There are reasons to suspect Callahan and Larson—but there are reasons to suspect at least a dozen other men of similar age, size, history, and relationships as well. For all its suspicions, the government had not made a compelling case against any of the men in its files—and Harry can’t, either.

It will take Harry several more years to admit it, but all of his effort and expense represented by the mounds of FOIA files spread across his basement floor have brought him no closer to answering the essential questions than when he started.

¹ Case agent Neumann retired shortly after the second Piper trial and returned to Chicago. He died following a heart attack a short time later. Richard Held, the former special agent in charge of the Minneapolis office, and Special Agent Ramon Stratton, who pushed the arrests and indictments of Callahan and Larson, both died in the early 1990s.

² Some of the information derived from the interviews was to be included in a manuscript Harry expected to be published by the Virginia Piper Cancer Institute as a “portrait collage” honoring his late mother. The manuscript was never published.

³ During the first Piper trial, Larson told a reporter that he initiated the conversation with the FBI.

⁴ The Callahans did, in fact, go to Las Vegas on more than one occasion, according to Erna’s trial testimony in 1977. And though Ken may not have bought a new car, the FBI said he put $3,000 cash down on a small airplane in 1975 as well as $6,000 on the Kirby Lake real estate in Wisconsin.

⁵ Anderson later said that, as best he could remember, he returned the evidence to FBI custody after the second trial.

⁶ Ruling that Harry “substantially prevailed” in his case against the government, the federal judge ordered that he be reimbursed for most of the attorney’s fees.