At a cocktail party many years ago, a Denver doyenne, well into her cups, was holding forth on the Charles Boettcher II kidnapping. Young Charlie, something of a playboy, was the grandson of family patriarch Charles Boettcher, who was Colorado’s wealthiest and most prominent industrialist.
“The kidnappers got $60,000,” the woman concluded her story. “All the Boettchers got was Charlie back!”
She was right, but in the end, nobody came out ahead in that deal, unless it was crime writers and the fledgling FBI.
After all, this was the Great Depression, when the rich were held in low esteem and the robbers and others who preyed on them were rock stars, glorified by the press. It was the era of Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger and Machine-Gun Kelly. And for a short time, the man of the hour, the first among thieves and the first man to be dubbed Public Enemy No. 1, was Verne Sankey.
Verne who? You’re not alone if you’ve never heard of him. And there’s good reason for that. Sankey, bootlegger to Denver’s 17th Street elite, was a mild-mannered, happily married man who didn’t hold up banks or gun down guards (or murder anybody, for that matter), and his notoriety came from a single crime.
Moreover, Sankey didn’t have a flashy moniker. Nor did he die in a blaze of glory, shooting it out with the coppers. Instead, he was arrested while sitting in a barber’s chair. But for a while, he garnered headlines across the country, as he was hunted down by hundreds of cops, federal agents and those seeking a share of a reward.
Sankey was designated the first Public Enemy No.1, because he was the first to realize that in the wake of the Lindbergh baby abduction, kidnapping could be a lucrative gig.
Ostensibly a South Dakota farmer, Sankey moved to Denver with the idea of kidnapping a wealthy businessman. One name on Sankey’s short list of four candidates was Adolph Coors Jr. But Charlie Boettcher seemed the better victim, especially after Sankey and a confederate spotted Boettcher and his wife driving about town.
The kidnappers accosted the couple in the driveway of their chateau on the southwest corner of East Eighth Avenue and Washington Street (now the site of an apartment building) and grabbed Boettcher. Told not to call the police, Anna Lou Boettcher, some eight months pregnant with their second child, instead called her father-in-law, Claude Boettcher.
Claude and his father, the elder Charles, contacted the police, and eventually the FBI got involved, with J. Edgar Hoover claiming credit for each development in the case.
The FBI was a bungling new agency composed mostly of lawyers, and it was in peril of being abolished before it even got started. That was why Hoover was so anxious to appear on top of the kidnapping, which he wasn’t.
The Boettchers eventually agreed to the ransom, which must have galled the parsimonious elder Charles. He owned the Brown Palace, where he lived, but bought his nightly Coca-Cola across the street because he wouldn’t pay the Brown’s price. And when asked why he wasn’t chauffeured in a limousine, as was Claude, he replied, “I didn’t have a rich father.”
While the FBI and others searched for the victim, Charlie Boettcher was being held in the basement of Sankey’s isolated farmhouse. (Author Timothy W. Bjorkman discredits the popular story that Charlie heard a plane fly over the house at the same time each day, and after Boettcher’s rescue, authorities identified the house by checking flight schedules. The story is false, because during his captivity, Boettcher never heard a sound except those made by his captors.)
After the Boettchers paid the ransom, Charlie was released. But that was just the beginning of the Sankeys’ troubles. While his wife was arrested – just how much she knew about the kidnapping is never clear – he went into hiding. Because President Franklin Roosevelt had shut the banks, Sankey couldn’t launder the ransom money, so he gambled most of it away.
The press accused him of being behind almost every unsolved kidnapping in the country, including the murder of the Lindbergh baby, an accusation that infuriated Sankey. “I am a man. I would kidnap a man,” Sankey retorted after he was caught. “I would never kidnap a child.” However, he’d thought the Boettchers had done him wrong by offering a reward and hiring a private detective to trace him, and Sankey considered abducting Charlie again.
It’s not surprising, since Bjorkman is a judge in South Dakota’s 1st Judicial Circuit, that he does a superb job of discussing the legal aspects of the kidnapping and its aftermath. But what makes “Verne Sankey” so compelling is not just the grasp of facts but the author’s narrative and his understanding of America’s mind-set in the 1930s.
America was both fascinated and horrified by the Depression-era crime wave that began with Sankey. The ransom wasn’t all that much, however, and Sankey was caught and the Public Enemy No. 1 designation moved on to gangsters guilty of more heinous crimes. So Sankey has been largely forgotten. Sankey himself remarked that “my life’s mistake was asking $60,000 instead of 200 grand from Boettcher.”
He meant he’d have been better off with more money, a claim Bjorkman debunks, since Sankey was a compulsive gambler. Still, if he’d demanded that amount, Sankey might have fared better in the history books.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist.
—————————————-
NONFICTION
Verne Sankey: America’s First Public Enemy
by Timothy W. Bjorkman, $24.95
