Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease - Hardcover

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John Heidenry is a contributing editor to The Week, the founding editor of St. Louis Magazine, and has written several books including "The Gashouse Gang." He lives in Hoboken, NJ.

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1. Kansas City Noir

A granite obelisk stands in the cemetery of Trading Post, the oldest continuously occupied settlement in Kansas, about seventy-five miles south of Kansas City near the Missouri border. The historical marker commemorates the slaughter of innocent civilians in the so-called Marais des Cygnes Massacre, one of the bloodiest incidents in the Kansas-Missouri border struggles in the years preceding the outbreak of the Civil War. On the morning of May 19, 1858, Georgia native Charles Hamelton led a band of pro-slavery Missourians to Trading Post, captured eleven Free State settlers, and marched them to a nearby ravine. Hamelton fired the first shot, and then ordered his men to execute the rest. Five men were killed, and five others were wounded and left for dead, though they survived. The eleventh man, Austin Hall, escaped injury by feigning death.

Word of the massacre horrified the North. Abolitionist John Brown arrived at the site a few weeks later, and built a rudimentary log "fort," where he and several of his followers remained throughout that summer, lusting for a return engagement and revenge. John Greenleaf Whittier, the abolitionist poet and Quaker, immortalized the dead in his poem "Le Marais du Cygne," published in the September 1858 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. He wrote:

A taint in the sweet air

For wild bees to shun!

A stain that shall never

Bleach out in the sun!

Austin Hall later became one of Trading Post’s most prosperous citizens. His son John grew up to become an attorney and a community leader in nearby Pleasanton, a town named after Union general Alfred Pleasanton, whose population of 1,300 made it the biggest in Linn County. Known for its hunting and fishing, the county lies midway between Kansas wheat country and the Missouri corn belt. John Hall married a judge’s daughter, Zella Cannon. They lived in a spacious, multistoried house on 311 West 10th Street. John Hall was regarded as an exceptional lawyer, but also as an uncompromising man of stern principles. He once successfully defended a client accused of murder, but his fee was the man’s entire six-hundred-acre farm. The Halls’ first child, a boy, sustained a brain injury during his birth and at age three was placed in a mental institution. He died two years later. The second son, born July 1, 1919, in Kansas City, Missouri, and baptized Carl Austin, grew up to be the wealthy couple’s spoiled only child.

Carl’s grades in elementary school were average, and he never attracted special attention. In 1932, just before Carl’s thirteenth birthday, his father died suddenly of a brain tumor. That summer, Zella arranged for her increasingly unruly son to stay for a time with Pansy McDowall, a childless elderly widow who lived on a fifteen-hundred-acre ranch and had a reputation for helping raise children who had lost one or both parents. One night, McDowall found Carl sobbing in his bed and took him in her arms. He told her that he missed his father, and also his mother and maternal grandmother, whom he called "Tomama," for "two momma."

McDowall later characterized Zella Hall as "the most cold-blooded and hardest-hearted mother I have ever known." Carl, she remembered, though always courteous, was "quite a problem."

In subsequent years, Zella ignored and doted on Carl by turns, but mostly busied herself in the town’s social life—women’s clubs and civic activities. She was also active in her local Presbyterian church. One summer, in a bid to keep her son occupied, she persuaded the manager of the local telephone company to hire Carl as a telephone lineman at her own expense. The company had no need of extra help, but Zella wanted him off the streets from Monday through Saturday, and reimbursed the company’s payroll department.

Most of his classmates went on to the local public high school. Carl wanted to go there as well, but Zella sent him to the Kemper Military School one hundred miles away in Boonville, Missouri. By now, the troubled teenager was frequently getting into mischief, going with friends to Fort Scott and other nearby towns to pick up girls and get drunk. Hall boasted frequently of his exploits with women and occasionally wound up in jail for disturbing the peace. But Zella had her own convenience to consider. Having a rebellious adolescent son to look after interfered with her social life.

Boonville, built on a limestone crest overlooking the Missouri River, marked the point where the Ozark upland trailed into the western plains. Named for Daniel Boone, who spent his last years and died in the state, the town prospered in the early nineteenth century when immigrants heading west disembarked on river ferries there, and then turned west in their prairie schooners for the overland journey. German immigrant Frederick T. Kemper had founded the Kemper Military School—initially known as the Boonville Boarding School—in 1844 with just five students. By the end of the academic year, enrollment had grown to fifty.

In 1899, the school officially changed its name to the Kemper Military School, and began advertising itself as the "West Point of the West." Students, both male and female, even wore West Point–style gray uniforms. Humorist Will Rogers, its most prominent alumnus, attended the school in the 1890s. By the time Hall enrolled as a freshman in September 1933, the student body numbered about 450, with dress parade held every Sunday afternoon if weather permitted. Despite the severe financial hardships brought on by the Great Depression, the school still managed to build a new stadium and football field during this period.

Hall remained at Kemper for three years. One of his classmates, though they were not close friends, was Paul Robert Greenlease, the adopted son of a wealthy Cadillac dealer in Kansas City. At first Hall’s academic record was good. Comments in his file, for his first year, included: "On honor roll one month. Member of rifle team. Member of company basketball team." In his second year: "Dependable, conscientious, promising cadet. Very likeable boy [but] slow developing. Good mind, willing to work, but temperamental. Honest and dependable. Fine youngster, dependable, capable and ambitious. A kid with [a] capacity for affection. Member of company basketball team."

In his third academic year, 1935–1936, Cadet Hall took a turn for the worse. File notes from instructors included: "None too straightforward. Has ability but must be observed constantly. A worthless streak at times . . . Tries to bluff; authority must be shown over him." He was also hospitalized during this period for an unspecified illness, and a note in his file observed that Hall "had attempted to have liquor brought into him."

It also so happened that, in 1935, the nation was in the grip of the sensational trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who was ultimately convicted of kidnapping and killing the twenty-month-old son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann was executed in April 1936. Like millions of other Americans, Hall almost certainly was familiar with the case—the most sensational crime ever committed in the United States. The nation’s newspapers and the still relatively new medium of radio covered it around the clock. Just seventeen years later, Hall was to take his place in the annals of crime as the principal figure in a kidnapping case second only to the Lindbergh as the nation’s most notorious.

Hall left the school in 1936 and returned to Pleasanton, where he attended a local high school in his senior year and was elected vice president of his class. In the fall of 1937 he enrolled at William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri, a coeducational institution run by the Missouri Baptist General Association and named after the wealthy physician who...