The judge called it the most “coldblooded, brutal murder” he had ever tried. News articles described it as the most horrible kidnapping in decades, or as the St. Louis Dispatch wrote, a “tale of evil, stupidity and corruption.”
On September 28, 1953, Bonnie Brown Heady walked into Notre Dame de Sion, a Catholic school in Kansas City, Mo., and posed as the aunt of Bobby Greenlease, the 6-year-old son of one of the city’s richest men. She and her boyfriend, Carl Austin Hall, kidnapped the boy and demanded ransom from his parents. They picked up a duffel bag of $600,000, the largest ransom ever paid at that point, and promised to return the boy safely to his family.
But the boy was already dead. Hall had shot him soon after the kidnapping and buried him in Heady’s backyard. It became Missouri’s most famous crime of the 20th century.
Just 81 days after the grisly killing riveted the country, the two kidnappers were executed side by side in a Missouri gas chamber. The swift punishment marked the last time a woman died by federal execution.
Now, almost seven decades later, another woman has been executed for a federal crime: Lisa Montgomery, who was convicted in 2007 of strangling a 23-year-old Missouri woman who was eight months pregnant, and cutting the baby from her abdomen. The infant survived and was raised by her father. A federal jury in Kansas City convicted Montgomery of kidnapping resulting in death and unanimously recommended a death sentence.