Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease by John Heidenry

(St. Martin’s, 230 pages, $25.99)

In late September 1953, 6-year-old Bobby Greenlease was removed from his Kansas City, Mo., classroom and led to a waiting cab by a middle-aged woman who claimed to be his aunt. When ransom letters followed, so did press coverage. Bobby’s father was little more than a successful auto dealer, but not since the Lindbergh kidnapping 20 years earlier had a crime so captured the nation’s attention, says John Heidenry, a contributing editor at The Week. The chase ended nine days later, when Bobby’s body was found in the garden of a St. Joseph, Mo., home. It belonged to Bonnie Heady, a prostitute who’d been talked into the kidnapping by her ex-con lover, Carl Hall. Tracked down quickly, Hall and Heady were tried and executed before Christmas.

This story truly was a sensation, said Harry Levins in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The first crime “given continuing national coverage” by network television, it had citizens across the Midwest on the lookout for the fleeing kidnappers. Hall and Heady, meanwhile, “were living out a tale that beggared Mickey Spillane’s most remorseless dreams,” said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. Just an hour after abducting Bobby, Hall shot the boy in the head. But because Hall hoped to collect a $600,000 ransom, he led the Greenleases to believe the boy was still alive. Such horrific details need little embellishment, and Heidenry eschews “backhanded noir glamour” in favor of a “cool, clinical” style reminiscent of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

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There’s “considerable fascination in watching these two losers bungle their way to the gas chamber,” said George H. Gurley in The Wall Street Journal. Hall and Heady’s boozing and “breathtaking aptitude for incompetence” was their undoing. Days after the pair went into hiding in St. Louis, Hall’s loud mouth attracted the attention of a mob boss, who sent crooked cops to seize the duo—and half the ransom money. A bit more about “the kidnapping’s impact on Kansas City” might have softened the narrative’s sometimes “boilerplate” feel. But for a murder tale “without much mystery,” Zero at the Bone has an uncanny capacity to “summon a sense of horror.”