Kidnapping of Bobby Greenlease

Since the federal government did not have any execution facilities, Missouri's state facilities—and thus the then-legal gas chamber—were used to carry out the executions. This was the case for all federal executions in the 20th century, before the first executions at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 2001. Heady is the only woman executed by the federal government by gassing. Heady grew up and is buried in Clearmont, Nodaway County, Missouri.

After the murder, Hall and Heady sent Bobby's father messages in the mail and phone calls demanding a ransom of $600,000 ($6.1 million today). Greenlease, desperately trying to save his son, held off the authorities and paid the money. At that time, it was the largest ransom ever paid in American history, and remained so until the 1972 kidnapping of Virginia Piper. Hall became convinced that police would trace him and Heady to St. Joseph, so he randomly decided to drive to St. Louis. The couple collected the ransom and fled.

Greenlease Jr.'s kidnappers, Carl Hall and Bonnie Heady, had no intention of returning him to his family, the child having been murdered before the ransom demand was even issued. Both perpetrators were sentenced to death and executed in Missouri's gas chamber in December 1953. Heady was the third woman ever to be executed by U.S. federal authorities.

In September 1953, Carl Hall (34) and Bonnie Heady (41), kidnapped Bobby from Notre Dame de Sion, a Catholic pre-school located in Kansas City, Missouri. The kidnappers were drug-addicted alcoholics then living together in nearby St. Joseph. In the early 1930s, Hall had attended Kemper Military School in Boonville with Paul Robert Greenlease, Bobby's adopted older brother. Hall had planned for years to victimize his former classmate's wealthy family.

Bobby's kidnapping and murder scandalized the nation. Because he had been taken over state lines, the crime became a federal case under the Federal Kidnapping Act. Hall and Heady both pleaded guilty to kidnapping. The jury deliberated an hour and eight minutes before recommending a death sentence. The two were executed together in the Missouri gas chamber on December 18, 1953. Only eleven weeks and four days passed between the time the crime was committed and the executions.

Heady is one of only four women to have ever been executed by federal authorities, as of 2021. The others being Lincoln assassination conspirator Mary Surratt in 1865 and Ethel Rosenberg, who, along with her husband Julius, was convicted of being a Soviet spy and executed by electric chair on June 19, 1953, just months before Heady. The fourth woman is Lisa Montgomery of Kansas, who was executed by lethal injection on January 13, 2021, for the 2004 murder of Bobbie Jo Stinnett.

Robert Cosgrove Greenlease Jr. (February 3, 1947 – September 28, 1953) was a six-year-old from Kansas City, Missouri, United States, who was the victim of a kidnapping and homicide on September 28, 1953. His father, Robert Cosgrove Greenlease Sr., was a multi-millionaire auto dealer, and the demanded ransom payment was the largest in American history at the time.

Robert "Bobby" Cosgrove Greenlease Jr. was born to Robert Greenlease Sr. (1882–1969) and Virginia Pollock (Greenlease) (1909–2001), his second wife, on February 3, 1947. (They were married in 1939. Greenlease's first wife was Betty "Bessie" Rush (1890–1950), whom he married on March 3, 1913.) The elder Greenlease was a multi-millionaire car dealer and entrepreneur, having made his fortune by introducing General Motors vehicles to the Great Plains in the early 20th century, owning dealerships from Texas to South Dakota. He was 65 years old when Bobby was born in 1947. The Greenleases were said to have been devoted to Bobby.