Death After Dark

One still dusk fortnight ago a small closed car sped along the highway between San Jose, Calif, and San Mateo. Inside were two kidnappers and their victim, Brooke Hart, 22. son of San Jose's wealthiest department store owner. On the San Mateo bridge across a corner of San Francisco Bay, the car stopped. The three men got out. One of them from behind smashed Brooke Hart's skull with a brick. Together they bound his limp body with baling wire, stole his wallet, lifted him over the bridge railing, heaved him into San Francisco Bay.

Three hours later the telephone rang in the Hart home in San Jose. To Brooke Hart's sister a voice said: "Your brother is being held for $40.000 ransom, and if the family notifies the police, they will never see Brooke Hart again." A printed card and two letters arrived later from the kidnappers: "Your son is o.k. and treated well. ... Be ready to take a week's trip on an hour's notice. . . . Brooke is not with the writer but is held at a remote point. ... He is being treated as well as possible but the case is getting too much publicity for us to hold him any longer."

For six tense days the family waited while police hunted. One night last week the kidnappers again telephoned the Hart home. Police intercepted the call, traced it to a garage near San Jose City Hall. At the garage they found a husky man in a faded blue sweater still talking in the telephone booth. They dragged him out. He said his name was Thurmond. At a nearby hotel they caught his accomplice, one John Holmes, unemployed oil worker.

From the pair police sweated a full confession. They described the crime even down to the detail that Hart "struggled slightly" as they hoisted him over the rail. Their explanation of the murder: "We didn't want to bother lugging him around the countryside."

After the kidnappers had been deposited in the San Francisco jail to escape mob violence, police continued to drag the waters around San Mateo bridge for Brooke Hart's body. Even without a corpus delicti the State was primed to hang Thurmond and Holmes under California's brand new kidnapping statute.

*With the repeal of Prohibition, big bootleggers are turning to the gasoline racket. This week in Manhattan officials of nine Eastern States will meet to discus? the bootleg menace, try to coordinate tax collecting efforts.

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