Carl Hall and Bonnie Heady

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Carl Hall (1 July 1919 - 18 December 1953) and Bonnie Heady (15 July 1912 - 18 December 1953) were the perpetrators of the 1953 kidnapping and murder of six-year-old Bobby Greenlease, the son of multi-millionaire Robert Greenlease Sr. Both were executed by gas chamber on 18 December that same year.

Murder

On 28 September 1953 Heady arrived at Bobby Greenlease's St. Joseph school pretending to be his aunt and claiming that she had been sent to take him home after his mother suffered a heart attack. The staff believed her and allowed her to take Bobby away in a taxi. Heady and Hall then took Bobby over state lines to Johnson, Kansas, where Hall shot him in the head. They then returned to St. Joseph, where Heady buried him in her backyard.

After killing Bobby, Hall and Heady called the Greenlease family and demanded a ransom of $600, 000 for Bobby's release. Greenlease Sr. paid the money, at which point Hall and Heady fled to St. Louis in order to contact some of Hall's criminal associates for help to avoid detection. One of these associates, a prostitute named Sandra O'Day, was ordered to fly to Los Angeles and mail another ransom note from their in order to distract the police from St. Louis; however O'Day caught a glimpse of the ransom money and reported this to the police. Hall was arrested and soon confessed, implicating Heady in the process. Heady was arrested and Bobby's corpse was dug up in her yard.

Hall and Heady pleaded guilty and were sentenced to death by a federal court. Both were executed by gas chamber on 18 December 1953.

Trivia

• Bonnie Heady was one of the only four women executed by the US federal government (the other three being Mary Surratt, Ethel Rosenberg and Lisa Montgomery) and the only one to have been executed by gas chamber.