Bertha Lee Green Hammett died in her home near Durango on Wednesday, a few months short of the 82nd anniversary of the day she was kidnapped along with her mother and held captive for 17 years.
Born on March 27, 1923, she was 3 months old when her mother, Nettie Green, received a letter at the Greens’ home in Roswell, N.M. The letter asked the mother to meet with messengers carrying bad news concerning her family, said Hammett’s daughter, Sharon Kaber.
“When my mother showed up, that’s when they took ’em,” said Kaber, who heard the kidnapping stories throughout her life, and as a child once met her mother’s abductors.
Four men surrounded Green and the baby. They took them to Kerr County, Texas, and sent a ransom note to Nettie Green’s father and husband.
Instead of ponying up the cash, Nettie’s father climbed on his horse and scoured the Texas hill country for his daughter and granddaughter. He and Nettie’s husband, Walter, hired detectives.
All the searches proved fruitless. Finally, Nettie Green and her baby were legally declared dead.
Nettie Green recognized some of the kidnappers as itinerant men who knew her father and grandfather. They threatened to kill her baby if she tried to run away, and continued to send ransom notes for years.
During her childhood, Bertha Lee Green got used to moving a lot, as the kidnappers spirited her and her mother from one hiding spot to another. She befriended the 10 children of one kidnapper and his wife, and helped raise the youngest ones.
“Never change your name,” her mother told her repeatedly. “This is not our family. If you change your name, your dad will never be able to find you.”
When Bertha Lee Green was 9, Nettie Green managed to enroll her daughter in school. This displeased the kidnappers. One afternoon, Bertha returned home from class, and was told that her mother had gotten very ill and died.
“That’s when they took my mother out of school and put her in hard labor, cutting wood in the cedar breaks to hide her,” Kaber said. “They told her that my grandmother had diabetes and died. She never knew for sure if they’d poisoned her.”
After her mom died, she worked alongside the men, cutting cedar for posts, picking cotton, living in tents and doing whatever they said to stay hidden and out of town.
After Nettie Green died, the kidnappers controlled Bertha by threatening to kill her or one of the other children. She became particularly close with one kidnapper’s youngest children. She often kept one baby along with her as she worked her way down a cotton row, the infant sleeping or playing on a cloth sack that she dragged with her.
Occasionally, she tried to defy her captors. They responded with vicious punishments.
“I’ve been beaten, manhandled and my bones were broken and allowed to heal the best way they could,” she recounted in an article published Aug. 13, 1967, in the Carlsbad Current-Argus. “I was paralyzed 3 times, and my ribs were broken.
“… Finally, their threats of killing me if I told anyone didn’t matter any longer. I didn’t care whether I lived or died.”
She was 17. She got a weapon, salvaged her birth certificate and her father’s address from a locked trunk and ran away. When her captors followed, she turned on them.
All that cotton picking and cedar logging turned Bertha into a formidably powerful young woman more than capable of making good on her threats to use the ax as a murder weapon.
“Touch me and I’ll kill ya,” she told them.
She could not bring herself to go to the police, fearing the abductors would follow through on the threat of killing one of the younger children.
It seemed her luck turned when she found a job at a club in Comfort, Texas, and finally heard back from her father, who was remarried and long gone from the Greens’ home in Roswell.
Walter Green’s new wife, who saw Bertha Lee Green as an interloper, abbreviated the reunion.
Shortly afterward, a young man named Lueders became smitten with Bertha and proposed, and she accepted. They had five children before she realized her husband was connected to her abductors, who now threatened her children.
“I was so dumb I thought that anyone who was that kind was a nice person,” she said in the Current-Argus article. “To get rid of THEM (the kidnappers), I finally said I’d marry him. I didn’t find out till later that he was just part of the plot. If I inherited anything, they could get it all through him.”
In 1967, she summoned her courage and told her story to the Current-Argus. She withheld the kidnappers’ names, but let them know that if they ever threatened her again, she would go straight to the police.
She divorced her husband and took the children to El Paso. There she bought property and built a house. She carried a gun to discourage unwelcome visitors.
Eventually, she married Morris Hammett. They enjoyed a refreshingly conventional life.
She is survived by son Walter Lueders of Bayfield; daughters Sharon Kaber of Durango and Melba Hughes of Livingston, Texas; 11 grandchildren; 11 great-grandchildren; and one great-great-grandchild born the day after her death. Her second husband and two sons preceded her in death.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
