Zero at the Bone

In this riveting account, John Heidenry crafts a haunting narrative of the 1953 kidnapping and murder of Bobby Greenlease by two grifiters. Bobby, son of Robert Greenlease, a wealthy automobile dealer, turned up in a geranium patch with a bullet in his head after the $600,000 ransom - the highest U.S. ransom ever paid up to that point - was met. The kidnappers were Carl Austin Hall and Bonnie Heady. Hall inherited $200,000 at the end of WWII, losing it all in six years, and spent more than a year in the Missouri State prison. After his release he met Heady, an alcoholic supporting herself as a prostitute. When they met it was like rubbing two flints together. Little did they know that mobster Joe Costello would steal half the ransom and that they would both be executed, strapped together in the gas chamber. Like a combination of "True Confessions" and the murder of Jon Benet Ramsey, John Heidenry has written a story of grifters and stalwart citizens of the American heartland that has all the lurid detail of the greatest film noir classics.