Kidnappers are avaricious people, but they are rarely brave after their initial boldness.
The colossal total of £500,000 ransom has been demanded by kidnappers in America since the Lind-borgh crime. Of that £200,000 has been collected by them, but half of this has been recovered.
Kidnappers do not "get rich quick." They usually end up in jail or sitting in the electric chair.
The ransom notes they send are, without exception, crude.
A melodramatic "symbol—in ten cases it has been a skull and crossbones—is always used as a key for negotiations between the kidnapper and the parents or relatives.
Cheap note paper, or brown paper like that used by the Cash kidnapper, is their favourite stationery. Scrawled demands are generally made in pencil, for typewriters can be traced.
There is always a demand for old currency in small denominations, but there have been few parents who have not jotted down a number or iwo as a precaution before handing over the ransom. (The number of every.note handed to the man who kidnapped James Cash is in Hoover's possession.)
"There is always a failure to keep the first, generally the first two, appointments made between the nego-fiaters. The kidnapper is always a coward, frightened of a trap.
Murray Levine, the father of Peter, kept six appointments in vain, and his friends three. Many blind alleys bewildered Lindbergh and Doctor Jafsie Condon.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.