Stolen from the Garden: The Kidnapping of Virginia Piper

Harry Piper, eating supper in a hotel restaurant near the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, says, “I hoped that someone would come out of the woodwork or sit up on his deathbed and say, ‘I kidnapped Virginia Piper.’ But it never happened.”

Harry is sixty-eight years old and, all things considered, would rather be fishing. He has pale-blue eyes, a mustache that could use a trim, and shaggy gray hair that he often covers with a ball cap. He has his father’s narrow face and lean construction, but he looks more like a senior member of a sixties folk-singing trio than the scion of a prominent financier. He has been in the Twin Cities to visit his family.

Forty years have passed since his mother’s abduction, approximately twenty-five since he started thinking about writing the book, and he is talking about the last time someone did, in fact, appear out of nowhere with information he thought might crack the case.

In the summer of 1999, he got a tip from someone (he is careful about using names) who said she had heard a woman talk with apparent inside knowledge about the kidnapping during an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting ten years earlier. Harry’s source said the woman told her a long, meandering tale in which she, her ex-husband—who happened to be the stepson of one of the FBI’s early suspects—and unidentified others kidnapped his mom. The woman was still guilt-ridden almost two decades after the event by the thought of Virginia Piper chained to a tree in the forest. Unfortunately, in addition to its reliance on questionable hearsay, his source’s story had several problems. For one thing, she described the kidnap car as yellow. For another, the witness said she saw his mother sitting beside her captors in the car’s front seat. Finally, the timing precluded, per established timelines, the ex-husband’s participation.

For a while, though, Harry thought the lead held promise. He hired a private investigator to track down the remorseful woman, and then attempted to run her story past the FBI. “Their attitude was, ‘We solved the crime. The jury didn’t get it right, but now it’s over and we’re no longer interested,’” he recalls. In any event, the story didn’t add up in Harry’s mind, and he regretfully let it go.

“I was so disappointed when I figured out that [the man the woman had implicated] couldn’t have done it,” he says this evening in the restaurant near the airport.

His long slog through the case files, while not providing an epiphany, has given him what he believes is a somewhat clearer sense of events.

“I don’t believe that Callahan and Larson were the kidnappers,” he says. “If they were, there was at least one other person involved. I believe that, in any case, the actual kidnappers were carrying out someone else’s plan.” He doesn’t buy the government’s argument that if Callahan and Larson were the culprits, Callahan babysat his mother in the woods while Larson tracked Bobby on the ransom run and took possession of the money behind the Sportsman’s Retreat. At the same time, he has spotted too many holes in the Billstrom story, and while dodgy customers such as “Wild Bill” Cooper offer tantalizing possibilities, convincing evidence that could lift possibility above mere suspicion, hearsay, and the allegations of cons looking to cut a deal was nowhere to be found between the redactions in the files.

And, of course, there was no longer the opportunity to examine, or reexamine, the fingerprint and hair sample, because the evidence had been destroyed.

Nor was Harry able to develop any reasonable hunches about the money’s whereabouts. Roughly $4,000 in twenty-dollar bills turned up in scattered locations within a few months of the kidnapping and then there was no more—at least none whose serial numbers could be matched against the numbers in the FBI’s ledger. The government argued that Callahan had lived beyond his means, that the amount of business he generated in his carpentry shop was paltry. But Callahan, circa 1972 and after, did not appear to live anybody’s idea of the high life, and the FBI could never prove that he was sitting on any ransom money. There was no good reason to challenge Erna Callahan’s account that her husband occasionally got lucky in Las Vegas.

Harry can’t envision that sturdy Bemis sack full of twenties moldering in the subsoil of a Minnesota cornfield, either. Whoever hauled the bag out of the Monte Carlo that night surely found a way to safely spend or launder most of it. The kidnappers would have had, of course, more than the FBI to worry about. A cool million would draw any number of disagreeable characters eager for a share of the spoils, which would argue for moving the cash out of harm’s way in a hurry.

Whatever happened to the money, and whoever was responsible for the crime, Harry no longer expects to find out, let alone announce his findings to the world.

“I was hoping to write this spectacular book in which I’d solve the crime all these years later,” he says with a wan smile. “I didn’t believe that the FBI had solved it, and I thought I was carrying the torch for my mother. I realized later that solving the crime was more important to me than writing the book, and once I realized that solving the crime was going to be impossible, I lost interest.”

So Harry is not going to write his book. He decides that the case files—incomplete, maddeningly redacted, and ultimately inconclusive, yet possibly of interest to a future sleuth or historian—will eventually become the property of the Minnesota Historical Society.

The files will be accessible, but many more of the people who played a role or had something relevant to say about the Piper kidnapping case and its principals are now gone.

Three of Ginny’s four sisters have passed away, as have her sister-in-law and several close friends since Harry interviewed them during the late nineties. John Morrison and George Dixon died within the past two years. Additional FBI personnel and several of the local police officers and sheriff’s deputies who were present in July 1972 are dead. So is Edward Devitt, who presided over the first trial of Kenneth Callahan and Donald Larson, and so are Harold Combs and John Dineen, among others who testified against them. (Dineen dropped dead at a rehab center, Larson told Harry, adding, with evident satisfaction, “and nobody came to his funeral.”)

Callahan died, of an apparent heart attack, in October 2004, at the age of seventy-nine. He was living by himself in a Cumberland apartment, still doing an occasional carpentry job around town and enjoying a tight circle of friends. Larson died in August 2008, at the state prison in Oak Park Heights. He was eighty-two and believed to be Minnesota’s oldest inmate.

Three men who knew the case as thoroughly as anyone with the possible exception of the victims, a handful of FBI men, and the perpetrators themselves are the lawyers who twice battled over the evidence and witness testimony in a federal courtroom. Ron Meshbesher, Bruce Hartigan, and Thor Anderson are still around and eager to talk about the case that may have been the most memorable of their eventful careers.

Meshbesher is in his early eighties, but most days he can still be found behind the cluttered desk of his paper- and memorabilia-filled office near downtown Minneapolis. He concedes that he is “personally not so busy anymore.” He now “advises” on cases his colleagues handle instead of arguing them in court. Indeed, the steady hum in the hallway outside his door as the firm’s lawyers and their assistants pass by does not involve him. Funny, profane, and alternately self-deprecating and full of himself, the old lawyer sometimes struggles to recall a name or a detail from the distant past, but he is fully alert and fired up when he talks about the Piper case.

The 1970s was a “good period” for Meshbesher. Among his noteworthy clients during the decade were pro-hockey player Dave Forbes (felony assault, hung jury), Marjorie Caldwell (first-degree murder, not guilty), and, of course, Ken Callahan. He produces a five-page spreadsheet enumerating his many victories (including reduced sentences), with the charges ranging from “mail obscenity” to “capital double murder” (in Nevada). As anyone who has read the papers during the past fifty years knows, if you were in serious trouble in the Twin Cities (or elsewhere), you could have done worse than call Ron Meshbesher.

“I won nine murder cases in my career—nine acquittals,” he says. “Of course, I only talk about the ones I won.”

He says, “To me [Piper] was an open-and-shut case. I was sick losing that fucking case. If [Callahan and Larson] had all that money, they certainly never spent it.” He confirms that he received $20,000 after Callahan turned over the mortgage on his Minneapolis duplex, “but that was it.” He is not sure if Hartigan got anything from Larson. (Hartigan says he didn’t.) He says Larson’s employer and benefactor, the businessman Arthur Stillman, paid for his defense in Pine County. “It wasn’t a lot,” he says, “but it was enough for me to take the case.”

Of Piper he says, “It was the most intriguing case of my career—the only case where we could show that the government phonied up the evidence.” He insists that the government’s failure to counter Herbert MacDonell’s fingerprint testimony played a decisive role in the second trial’s outcome. The feds “were up against it,” he says. “They were getting criticized—it was the largest case of its kind, a million-dollar ransom, never resolved—having waited until the last hour to indict. Why did they cross Callahan off the list of suspects? Had they confirmed the alibi with the boat-rental people? We argued that these guys were framed by the FBI because they were embarrassed they hadn’t solved the case.”

Reviewing the government’s files during discovery, Meshbesher said to Hartigan, “We got innocent guys here!” Now he says, “I was absolutely convinced they were innocent—and it’s not too often I could say that.” He says he has not heard or read anything since that might have changed his mind.

“One time Callahan said to me, ‘Ron, I didn’t fuckin’ do it.’ He just volunteered that. I never asked guys if they did it—they’d lose confidence in me. The vast majority of these guys did do something wrong. Not all of them, but most were questionable people. But I believed this guy. He had a lovely family. A son who talked about becoming a minister. A daughter who was this sweet kid. His wife was a hardworking woman. He was working all the time. Talented with his hands.”

Years after the trial, Callahan would call Meshbesher once in a while. He would say he was coming down to the Twin Cities and wanted to say hello. The two of them—sometimes with Hartigan—would have lunch. The last time, several years ago now, Callahan brought along a sack of newspaper clippings from the case. “I don’t want them anymore,” he told Meshbesher. “Maybe you do.” Afterward, Meshbesher says, he pondered Callahan’s motives. “Was he trying to tell me something? Could there be something in there that would lead me to believe he really did do it? But when I went through it all, it was just the same shit I had collected myself.”

One day in late 2004, a Cumberland policeman called Meshbesher. “He started crying,” Meshbesher says. “He said, ‘You know, Ken had become one of my best friends. We’d have coffee every morning. He was just a terrific guy.’ I hadn’t even known he died.”

Defense attorneys are not required to produce a fully developed counter-narrative to the government’s case, explaining who, if not their client, is responsible for the crime, and neither Meshbesher nor Hartigan did so during the Piper trials. (Their suggestions that the kidnapping could be an inside job or the work of another group of criminals were intended to create doubt about the prosecution’s case, not to argue a conclusive alternative theory.) Nor, forty years after the crime, is either lawyer offering any serious speculation as to who kidnapped Virginia Piper. But from the alpine stacks of paper that rise from nearly every flat surface in his office, Meshbesher manages, after a determined search, to pull out a photocopy of a three-page letter postmarked December 28, 1977, and addressed to Dave Moore of WCCO-TV. Meshbesher says Moore passed the letter along to him shortly after receiving it.

The unsigned correspondence, hand-printed in large block letters, looks more like a ransom note than the Piper ransom note itself. It reads:

I AM THE MAN WHO DROVE THE AUTO TAKING MRS PIPER UP NORTH. WE NEVER CROSSED A STATE LINE. MRS PIPER LIED IN COURT WHEN SHE SAID THAT SHE DIDN’T STOP AND THAT SHE MADE THE RECORDING WHILE THE AUTO WAS MOVING. NO ENGINE OR ROAD SOUNDS WILL BE FOUND ON THE TAPE. WE STOPPED FOR 15 MINUTES TO LET HER RECORD THE RANSOM MESSAGE. A REST STOP ON THE LEFT SIDE OF 23 GOING NORTH. WHEN WE STOPPED I ASKED HER IF SHE HAD TO GO TO THE TOILET. SHE SAID THAT SHE HAD ALREADY GONE IN HER DRAWERS. SHE SAID SHE WAS SORRY FOR GETTING THE SEAT WET. THE FBI AGENTS MUST BE COVERING THIS UP. THE ONLY REASON FOR HER TO LIE ABOUT IT WOULD BE BECAUSE SHE AND THE FBI AGENTS REALLY KNOW THE WAY SHE WAS TAKEN. THEY MADE HER LIE IN COURT SO IT WOULDN’T COME OUT WHERE SHE STOPPED. I HOPE THE LAWERS [sic] FOR LARSON AND CALLAHAN CAN DO SOMETHING WITH THIS. IF IT HELPS IT’S OUR YULE GIFT TO THEM AND A ROOT IN THE ARSE TO YOUR FBI. DURING THE WAR THE JERRIES¹ SENT QUEER 5 POUND NOTES TO ENGLAND TO HURT THE ECONOMY. [THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT] PUT METAL THREADS IN THE REAL ONES SO THEY COULD BE SORTED OUT BY MACHINE. WE THOUGHT THERE MIGHT BE A SYSTEM LIKE THAT HERE. THAT IS WHY WE SAID THE BILLS WOULD BE TESTED FOR CONDUCTIVITY. IF YOU GIVE THIS LETTER TO THE FBI LOOK INSIDE THE ENVELOPE FIRST. MAKE SURE THERE ISN’T A HAIR IN IT. THEIR BLOODY MIRICLES [sic] ARE BETTER THAN THE VIRGIN BIRTH THAT WE ARE CELEBRATING THIS WEEK. MERRY CHRISTMAS.

The note is interesting, to say the least. The Briticisms echo those in the kidnappers’ instructions, and, though playful and mocking in a way the kidnappers’ ransom communications decidedly were not, the writer’s voice bears at least a slight similarity to the voice in the earlier messages. It is also logical to believe that Ginny’s abductors might have stopped en route up north both for physical relief and to make the recording for Bobby.

On the other hand, the kidnappers’ original messages had been reproduced in the newspapers during the first trial and could certainly have been mimicked and improved—the word “conductivity,” misspelled in the ransom note, is spelled correctly now. The point about the road noise is intriguing, but extraneous sounds on an audio tape recorded the way Ginny described it would not necessarily be discernible as such.² It’s unlikely, moreover, that Ginny would forget or prevaricate about a stop during the ride north. And there was no mention in the available reports of evidence that Ginny had relieved herself in the car.

Meshbesher, who thought the note had an “authoritative ring to it,” turned it over to Thor Anderson, then asked the prosecutor what he was going to do with it. According to Meshbesher, Anderson replied, “I’m not going to do anything with it. Stuff like that is usually bullshit.” Anyway, how would he check its authenticity? Assuming the sender was smart enough to make sure his fingerprints were not on it, what was there besides three sheets of plain paper, a standard business envelope, a thirteen-cent first-class stamp, and a Minneapolis postmark?

More to the point, the first trial had ended with guilty verdicts. The government had gotten its convictions. An anonymous note to a newscaster, probably the work of a prankster, was irrelevant.

Meshbesher says he couldn’t do anything with the letter, either, doubting whether the judge would admit an anonymous message into evidence. It would not be part of the defense team’s appeal.

Bruce Hartigan doesn’t remember the Moore letter and doesn’t blink when he is told about it. Anderson won the first trial, but Hartigan and Meshbesher prevailed in the second. Case closed.

Hartigan is also in his early eighties and retired as a private attorney and Hennepin County District Court judge. Despite struggling with three separate cancers and a near-fatal stroke a decade ago, he is cocksure, sharp tongued, and spry. His handshake is firm, and his pale-blue eyes stare back at you from behind large tortoise-shell glasses. Cancer surgery has made speaking laborious and eating impossible; he receives nourishment through a port in his stomach. “Sad,” he says with a shrug, “but that’s the way it is.”

He says he could not avoid the Piper kidnapping in the media, but did not pay much attention “until I realized I could get a piece of the action.”

“I met Bobby Piper once,” he says. “A friend of mine who knew him from the Minneapolis Club introduced us. He said, ‘Bobby, you ever get in trouble, this is the guy you want.’ But I didn’t know him, and in two months he wouldn’t remember who I was, either.”³

The first time Hartigan met Donald Larson, in the summer of 1977, Larson (then in prison for the murders) told him, “This is going to be the hardest case you ever had.” Larson struck him as a “nice fellow, but definitely a hoodlum. A ‘dees-dem-and-doser,’ we used to call them. Rough hewn. No education. But direct, straightforward. He said, ‘I didn’t do it. I had nothing to do with [the kidnapping].’ He said, ‘They tried to get me to plead, they offered me deals, but I didn’t give a shit about that.’”

Hartigan says, “This was an unsolved kidnapping, and the FBI intentionally framed two innocent guys—innocent of this crime, anyway. Back in 1977, you couldn’t convince a jury that the FBI would do something like that. By 1979, I guess you could.”

He says, “The FBI convinced Virginia Piper that those two guys had done it. They were the FBI, after all, and they were working to solve her kidnapping. Ergo, she was no longer a witness—she was an advocate. It’s understandable. Until the day she died, she believed they had done it and that a couple of smart-ass lawyers had gotten them off.”

Hartigan snorts when he talks about his remuneration from the Piper case and the notion, still heard around town, that the defense team had been paid with ransom dollars. He says he didn’t get a nickel from Larson or Larson’s friends or anyone else. So why would he take a case knowing he probably would never get paid? “When someone asked Ronnie that, he said, ‘Because we didn’t want to wake up and read the headlines about the Piper case and see some other lawyer’s name.’ That was a damn good answer. We weren’t about to let any other lawyers take that case.”

Hartigan says he never heard Larson or Callahan speculate about who might have been involved, either. He says the feds offered Larson several opportunities to finger Callahan or another con—Tommy Grey or Harvey Carignan, to name a couple of obvious candidates—in exchange for a transfer to a federal prison and eventual parole, but Larson refused. “Honor among thieves,” Hartigan says with a wink. “It’s a mystery,” he says. “Lynda Billstrom was a great witness, but how believable was she really? I would have put, for the sake of conversation, seven-to-one or maybe ten-to-one odds on Bob Billstrom being the kidnapper.”

Like Meshbesher, Hartigan still marvels at the many peculiarities of the Piper kidnapping. “The plan was sophisticated,” he says. “The notes, the instructions, the money retrieval—all that was brilliant. On the other hand, hiding Mrs. Piper in a state park, driving the kidnap car back to the city, et cetera—all that says rank amateur.” He shakes his head.

Thor Anderson, now in his middle seventies, does not seem to be troubled by the contradictions when he looks back at Piper. In fact, if anything, he sounds more certain of the government’s case than he did when he talked to Harry fifteen years ago.

“The evidence clearly shows that Callahan and Larson were guilty,” he says. “The allegation that the fingerprint had been doctored is a bunch of crap, though the FBI wasn’t of much help in dealing with that claim. I think Meshbesher had convinced himself that they were not guilty. He was so disappointed that they lost [in the first trial], he so expected that they would win, that retrying that case became a passion for him. That’s my feeling anyway.”

Anderson, now retired, enjoyed a long career of public service, beginning when he was a member of the state House of Representatives in his twenties. He has since served as a federal prosecutor, Acting US Attorney, and, for twelve years, a Hennepin County District Court judge. He is a large man, with a gleaming bald head fringed with thin gray hair. Even seated at the dining-room table in his west-suburban townhome, he speaks in a stentorian voice that he must have used to good effect on the bench.

“The word we got was that Callahan told people before the kidnapping, ‘I want to do one big job.’ I felt he had committed the crime, was proven guilty, and should have done the time for it. But I didn’t really consider him a hazard to commit additional serious crimes. Callahan was the brains of the operation—anyway that’s what you’d think after you met Larson. Larson was a stumblebum, impulsive and dangerous. He killed five people.

“I never had any question that it was Larson’s fingerprint. And, in the first trial, Meshbesher and Hartigan didn’t, either—not really. Their cross was pretty superficial. The explanation for it was straightforward. [The FBI] brought in Ramon Stratton, an old buddy of Hoover’s. That’s what they did in those days: When they couldn’t solve a case, they brought in Ray Stratton. Well, Stratton went over all the evidence and said, ‘It’s Callahan and Larson. That has to be [Larson’s] fingerprint because he did it.’”

Reminded that the FBI investigated Callahan and Larson in 1972, checked out their alibis, three times failed to match the paper-bag print with Larson’s, and eliminated them as suspects, Anderson waves his hand dismissively and says, “The FBI was its own worst enemy sometimes. Stratton took a new look at the case and said that was it. I can’t tell you what exactly he looked at to come to that conclusion. He never told me. But he was a very experienced agent, and, say what you want, those guys were usually right. A hunch isn’t evidence, but this was more than a hunch.

“The FBI had a financial case they wanted me to put in to show that Callahan couldn’t have lived the way he lived if he hadn’t had the kidnap money,” Anderson continues. “He hadn’t spent a hundred thousand dollars or anything, but his cash flow couldn’t be explained by his cabinetmaking. But it was hard to prove, and it would have taken us another week, and it would have detracted from some pretty good circumstantial evidence. It was a circumstantial case, but a good circumstantial case. The evidence all pointed to them.

“I don’t think it’s at all implausible that Callahan and Larson did the job by themselves, either, and there’s no evidence there was a third person involved. Often, in the middle of a crime like this, things go wrong, someone gets hurt, and [the perpetrators] get caught. In this case, things didn’t go wrong. Everything they did turned out right.

“We don’t know what happened to the money. The FBI was sure Callahan had it. He never had an elaborate lifestyle, but if he had the money I don’t think he would have flaunted it.”

Anderson recalls his interview with Harry Piper in 1998. Harry, he says, definitely felt that the government had botched the case. Harry’s point of view notwithstanding, the former prosecutor speaks fondly of the Piper family and says he thinks Ginny and Bobby grew confident in him as the case wore on.

“Bobby didn’t know what to think of me at first,” he says. “His wife has been kidnapped, and here’s this kid with a crew cut asking impertinent questions. The first thing he did was send his personal lawyer over to check me out. His lawyer asked me, ‘How much experience do you have anyway?’⁴ He didn’t say, ‘Are you up to the job?’ but I got the impression that if he didn’t think I was, he would go to the US Attorney and get the case reassigned.” That never happened, and Anderson did not hold Piper’s due diligence against him.

“Bobby was a bright guy who didn’t take things at face value,” he says. “He was friendly and totally cooperative, but he maintained his distance. When you talked to him it was as though you were at a board of directors meeting—all business. I think he was that way with everybody. He was clearly ill at ease dealing with the police and the FBI. Virginia was warmer.

“The investigation, the trials, the whole experience was very distasteful to the two of them. They were nice about it to me, but this was just not something people in their situation should have to go through. Bobby did admit to me, if admission is the right word, and it was not an apology, but he did say, ‘I realize this case would have been solved if I had let the Bureau run the ransom route.’

“Still, he made it clear that he thought it was the right thing to do—to run it himself. And he probably would do it his way again, if he had to.”

Before he died in 1990, Bobby Piper gave the house on Spring Hill Road to the Wayzata Community Church, and two years later the church sold it to a businessman and his wife for more than half a million dollars. The new owners made alterations but maintained the house’s basic architecture and informal charm. It is the kind of house in which visitors feel welcome and comfortable the moment they walk in the door.

Though it has now been nearly twenty-five years since they lived here, traces of the Pipers remain: a couple of the fanciful light fixtures that Ginny picked up on her travels, the black-and-white enameled accents on a staircase that reflected her fondness for “Oriental touches,” and the two or three phone jacks that Bobby had installed around the house, never dreaming that the FBI would one day put them to use. The glorious backyard, from the terrace where Ginny tended her flowers down the sloping greenway dotted with mature trees to the little dock where Bobby tied up his bass boat, is not much changed at all.

It is easy to picture the Pipers here, beginning that particular Thursday the way they began most Thursdays almost half a century ago: Bobby driving off to work, Bernice and Vernetta arriving to clean the house, Ginny rushing to her hair appointment in Wayzata, then returning home, eating a sandwich, and puttering with the flowers until it was time for the hospital meeting in the city.

This was the Pipers’ comfortable and accustomed life right up until the moment it wasn’t—until the terrified housekeeper ran out onto the terrace, interrupting whatever Ginny was thinking as she fussed with her pansies, to announce the arrival of “those men.” And then that comfortable, accustomed life was over.

¹ British slang for Germans.

² The actual cassette on which Ginny recorded her message, found on the street near the Sportsman’s Retreat, as well as the FBI’s recordings of that recording were among the evidence destroyed or discarded after the second trial.

³ Meshbesher said he, too, met Bobby sometime prior to the kidnapping. “I shook his hand,” he said. “But we didn’t travel in the same circles.”

⁴ In 1972, the thirty-five-year-old Anderson had been an Assistant US Attorney for three years.