The Guthrie case provides a somber occasion to revisit the kidnapping cases that fundamentally altered Minnesota’s legal landscape.
By Marshall H. Tanick and Cathy Gorlin
The abduction of Today show co-host Savannah Guthrie’s mother, Nancy, recalls five high-profile kidnappings occurring in or related to Minnesota. These incidents brought about sea changes in legal institutions and practices in the courts. The three-week mystery concerning the disappearance of the 84-year-old Tucson woman provides an opportune occasion to review the Minnesota kidnapping quintet.
“Lucky” Lindy
The first and probably most well-known was the kidnapping of the infant son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, the Minnesota-raised pilot who gained international renown when he became the first to fly solo over the Atlantic in May 1927.
“Lucky Lindy” was born in 1902 and raised in Little Falls, in Morrison County in central Minnesota. He was the son of a congressman who, during his ten years in office, became an outspoken anti-war advocate in World War I and an early supporter of isolationism. Similarly, his son would become the leading speaker against American involvement in World War II as the titular head of the “America First” movement, which collapsed as the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Nearly a decade earlier, five years after his historic flight, the younger Lindbergh burst back onto the scene when his 20-month-old son was taken in the middle of the night on March 1, 1932. The child was snatched from the family’s home, which was still under construction in northern New Jersey; his body was found in a wooded area a few miles away ten weeks later.
In the interim and for quite a while thereafter, the media swarmed the home in an unprecedented frenzy. This began immediately after the abduction and continued through the ensuing search for the culprit, which lasted for three and a half years until the arrest of Bruno Hauptmann, a German immigrant. Denying his involvement despite a cache of $50,000 in ransom cash found stashed in his New York City garage, Hauptmann claimed the money had been left with him for safekeeping by a deceased German colleague and former business partner, Isidor Fisch, who was conveniently dead at the time.
But his “Fisch Story,” as it was described by the state prosecutor, failed. In a controversy that still exists today, he was convicted and ultimately executed on April 3, 1936, four years and one month after the kidnapping.
In addition to the aggressive media coverage, the abduction spurred changes in the law, including making kidnapping a federal crime and concurrently elevating the nascent Federal Bureau of Investigation to prominence along with its young director, J. Edgar Hoover.
Another consequence of the Lindbergh kidnapping was the effect of the raucous media coverage of Hauptmann’s trial, known as the “Trial of the Century,” which was highlighted by live radio broadcasting from the courtroom. The legal profession responded by clamping down on audio and visual coverage of trial proceedings, including an edict from the federal courts banning so-called “cameras in the courtroom.”
It took more than a generation, until the late 1970s, for courts in some states to start lifting these bans. Minnesota was among the last to jump on the bandwagon; on March 15, 2023, it allowed modest relaxations for limited audio-visual access. However, the prohibition still exists in the federal court system due to the Hauptmann trial, except for very limited experimental appellate court proceedings.
St. Paul Snatches
Hoover’s FBI was at the forefront of a pair of abductions in St. Paul while the Lindbergh case was still being investigated. The two victims were wealthy businessmen, both snatched in broad daylight off the streets of the city by the same gang, who lived in the capital city at a home still standing at 1031 Robert Street South.
The two abductees were William Hamm, the owner of the Hamm Brewing Company—taken for a four-day ordeal in June 1933, which yielded a $100,000 ransom—and Edward Bremer Jr., the scion of the owner of the Bremer Bank organization (which two years ago was acquired by Old National Bank out of Ohio).
Bremer was kept for three weeks before a $200,000 ransom was paid. The increased amount was probably attributable to the success of the prior kidnapping and a bout of inflation, as the nation started to recover from the Depression under the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt, a friend of the Bremer family, declared kidnapping to be “an attack on all we hold dear.”
The abductions of both Hamm and Bremer were the work of the Barker-Karpis gang, masterminded by Alvin “Creepy” Karpis and the two Barker brothers, Fred and “Doc” (Arthur), along with their matriarch, “Ma.” Fred was killed along with Ma in a shootout in Florida, but “Creepy” and “Doc” were ultimately apprehended, tried, and convicted at the federal courthouse, now the Landmark Center in downtown St. Paul, near where the two kidnappings occurred. Karpis, incidentally, was the longest-living gangster of the 1930s; he died in 1979 after being released from incarceration following 30 years in prison, most of it at Alcatraz.
Garden Grab
The fourth high-profile incident was the abduction of 49-year-old socialite Virginia Piper. She was grabbed from her garden by two masked, armed gunmen on July 27, 1972, and found two days later alive, chained to a tree in Jay Cooke State Park near Duluth. Her family had paid a $1 million ransom consisting of 50,000 twenty-dollar bills.
The case technically remains unsolved today. The two suspects who were charged four years later and convicted were later acquitted in a second trial at the federal courthouse in downtown Minneapolis after their initial convictions were overturned by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals due to the improper exclusion of a key witness. No one else has been charged, and only a smattering—about $4,000—of the $1 million ransom has ever turned up at a few banks in southern Minnesota.
Piper lived until 1988, when she died of cancer after contributing large philanthropic sums to healthcare. The Virginia Piper Cancer Institute was established at four sites in the Twin Cities metropolitan area to treat breast cancer patients.
Grundhofer Gambit
Another Minnesota man was the subject of a short-lived kidnapping gambit in 1990. The victim was John Grundhofer, the head of U.S. Bancorp, then known as First Bank System.
He was purportedly kidnapped from his Mercedes while parking it in a downtown Minneapolis garage by a tall, well-dressed man shortly before Thanksgiving. The 51-year-old bank executive later said that he was forced to drive into a rural area in Wisconsin, where he managed to escape before any payment of a $1 million ransom demand was made. Like the Piper case, it remains unsolved as no one was ever charged.
The occurrence was the second dangerous event his family encountered that fall. About six weeks earlier, in an apparently unrelated incident, his daughter, Karen, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, was wounded in a shooting spree at a hotel by a deranged man. Grundhofer later retired and was succeeded at the helm of the bank by his brother, Jerry, before moving to Palm Desert, California, where he died 31 years after the inexplicable incident.
These five abductions differ in some respects from the Guthrie case. The Minnesota-related ones all involved wealthy victims—there is little use kidnapping someone whose supporters cannot afford a ransom—and while Guthrie herself earns a reported $8 million annual salary with a high net worth, the targets were the individuals themselves.
The kidnappings had varied levels of success. All resulted in large ransom payments except for the Grundhofer episode, which fell apart before money could be exchanged. In all of them, the victims survived, except for the Lindbergh baby. It remains to be seen how the Guthrie episode will conclude, but it is worth looking back at how these Minnesota stories unfolded while awaiting a resolution.
Marshall H. Tanick and Cathy Gorlin, his wife, are Twin Cities attorneys.
