William Swanson - Stolen from the Garden. The Kidnapping of Virginia Piper

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For Jack McKeon

Orthodox kidnapping [is] a savage

enterprise managed for profit.

GEORGE V. HIGGINS

Ive just been through a terrible ordeal.

My dear friend and neighbor Virginia Piper

was kidnapped and held for two days.

KENNETH H. DAHLBERG

PART ONE

Those Men

JULY 27, 1972

She lookswell, like a million bucks.

Even alone in the backyard, picking deadheads off the pansies on a summer afternoon, she looks terrific. She has just returned home after having her hair and nails done, and she is wearing the blue blazer, sleeveless T-shirt, cotton slacks, and flat thong sandals she wore to the appointment, but that is neither here nor there. Ask anyone who knows her. At any time, in any season and situation, Virginia Lewis Piper, four months shy of her fiftieth birthday, is a drop-dead beautiful woman.

What might she be thinking? An issue that she will put before the hospital board at its meeting this afternoon would be a reasonable guess. She takes her board membership very seriously and is always well prepared. She has already had lunchthe customary peanut-butter sandwich standing at the kitchen counterand exchanged pleasantries with the cleaning ladies who come every Thursday and do such a wonderful job. At any rate, she has time to kill before changing clothes for the hospital meeting, so, as usual, she will spend that time tending to her flowers on the terrace behind the house.

The two-story, five-bedroom gray colonial is perched on a rise off Spring Hill Road in the tony Minneapolis suburb of Orono. City people get confused out here. Orono, Wayzata, Long Lakeit is difficult to know where one municipality ends and another begins, much less how to locate a particular address, which, more than one resident has slyly observed, is exactly the point. Old money dwells here, a great deal of it in the hands of a few dozen venerable families, on multiacre wooded lots overlooking the lawns and ponds of private preserves.

Barely visible from Spring Hill Road, the Piper residence is handsome and spacious, though not nearly as grand as many in the vicinity. From the terrace out back, Ginny looks down past the flowers and the swimming pool and a wide, grassy field to Lake Lydiard, a small blue jewel inaccessible to all but the handful of families who live around it. Ginny has visited many of the loveliest and most exciting places in the world, but nowhere on earth is she happier than on this spot.

Now, at about a quarter to one, she looks up and sees Bernice, one of the cleaning ladies, rushing out the sliding door. Bernice Bechtold, who never rushes, is visibly upset about something.

Oh, those men! she says in a panicky voice.

Those men ? Ginny is nonplussed. What men ?

Ginnys first thought is the family. The kids and the grandkids. Has something happened to one of them?

Stepping past Bernice into the sun-dappled porch the Pipers call the gallery, Ginny sees a man dressed in dark clothing coming toward her. Behind the first man is a second man, similarly dressed, standing with Vernetta Zimmerman, Bernices helper, in the dining room just beyond the gallery. The two men wear black hoods of some kind over their heads, covering their faces. Each, incredibly, is waving two guns.

The Pipers gallery. Responding to her cleaning womans alarm, Ginny entered the house from the garden and pool area at the left. The dining and living rooms are through the doors at the right. Courtesy Harry Piper III

Get that woman! the first man says, and Ginny steps out the door and calls to Bernice, tells her to come back, that everything is all right. Bernice, trembling, returns to the house. Bernice is still clutching the rag saturated with Dutch cleanser that she was using to scrub one of the bathtubs upstairs.

Back inside, the women stare at the two men with guns. The men are thickset and lumbering and almost comically dressed like twins. They both wear long-sleeved shirts, working-mens twill trousers, and leather gloves. Their identical headgear is unlike anything Ginny has ever seen, even in the movies. As best she can tell, the hoods comprise a black nylon stocking with some kind of red border around the face, black felt on top, and a swatch of cloth that buttons at the neck.

Ginny believes the men are here to steal something. But without another word, the men produce rolls of clear strapping tape, sit Bernice and Vernetta down on a pair of dining-room chairs, and tape their arms to the chair backs.

Are you Mrs. Piper? one of the men asks her.

She tells him she is.

Wheres your old man? he asks.

She tells him her husband is at the office. Where else would he be? she might have asked the man. Of course, it is Thursday, and once a month, on a Thursday, Bobby Piper flies to New York for a stock exchange board of governors meeting. On other Thursdays Bobby often attends one of his theology classes in New Brighton. But how would these men know that?

In any event, the men are unhappy about the news. Why, that goddamn Chino, that son of a bitch, one of them says. Hes fucked up again.

One of the men asks where the Pipers keep the safe.

We dont have a safe, Ginny replies. That is the truth, but she is afraid of further angering the men, so she tells them she has three pieces of jewelry upstairs in the master bedroom and theyre welcome to that or anything else they see. She tries not to look at the guns.

But that is not why the men are here. No, Mrs. Piper, one of them says. Youre going with us.

And with that one of the men puts a pair of shiny handcuffs on Ginnys wrists. He turns her around, sticks a pistol in her back, and directs her toward the front door. As they walk through the living room, the man spots Ginnys purse on a sofa. He grabs it, removes a billfold, and pockets the six dollar bills he finds inside. The other man has already gone outside, because now he comes back through the front door holding a white envelope, which he sets on top of the secretary that stands next to the living-room door.