Fine Boy's Return

At 4 o'clock one morning last week, just before he was going out to milk his cows, John Bonifas, a chicken farmer of Issaquah, Wash., heard a knock on his door. He opened it and there stood a dishevelled child wrapped in a dirty white blanket.

"I'm the little boy who was kidnapped," said 9-year-old George Weyerhaeuser (TIME, June 3). "I want to go home."

Farmer Bonifas and his large family took George in, fed him, dried his stockings, gave him a pair of girl's shoes. Then Farmer Bonifas got out his old automobile, drove George to the telephone office at Renton. He was told it was too early to make a call. He then drove to a filling station, called the Weyerhaeuser home in Tacoma, 20 miles away. No one answered. At last, after the filling station man had shut off his noisy air compressor, Farmer Bonifas made the police of Tacoma understand that he had on his hands the most sought-after person in the U. S. What should he do with him? Bring him home at once, barked the frantic police. Meantime, in the automobile outside, George heard newsboys yelling that his uncle had paid his kidnappers $200,000 night before, that apparently arrangements had thereafter become confused, for George had not been delivered at the appointed place. Farmer Bonifas came out of the filling station and he and George chugged off toward Tacoma.

For eight frantic days, George's parents, members of the multi-millionaire Weyerhaeuser lumber family whose domain stretches from Wisconsin to Washington, had been dickering with "Egoist" for the boy's return while Federal and local police had reputedly kept hands off. The Weyerhaeusers had got little sleep.

Another who had been sleepless was a corpulent, 59-year-old police reporter named John H. Dreher of the Seattle Times, one of a flock of 75 newshawks which alighted at Tacoma to cover the Northwest's biggest snatch. Oldster Dreher justified his 40 years in the business with an oldtime scoop. Somehow he got word of Farmer Bonifas' early morning call to the Tacoma police. "On one of those hunches that come like a royal flush," wrote Reporter Dreher afterward, "I started out in a taxicab to meet the farmer's automobile." Meet it he did. He commandeered the child, dragged him down on the floor of the taxi in case any of his rivals might have had a similar "hunch," got the whole exciting tale first hand.

George said that on the day he was kidnapped last fortnight he had grown tired of waiting for his Sister Anne to come out of her school, where the Weyerhaeuser chauffeur was to meet them and take them home to lunch. He had wandered into the grounds of the Tacoma Lawn Tennis Club. As he was emerging on the other side he saw a man standing on the curb beside a "tan sedan." "He asked me where Stadium Way was. I told him I didn't know and he came over toward me and grabbed me and put his hand over my mouth and pulled me into the tan sedan." After that George remembered riding a long time, sometimes in the tan sedan, sometimes in the trunk of a "big, grey Buick." One night he and his captors slept by a river. George asked if they were going to drown him. Another night they slept in a stand of timberland. "That made me think, well, I believe it belongs to my father." His last three nights in captivity were spent in a house near Issaquah, bundled in his blanket and imprisoned in a closet by a man sleeping just outside its door. He said he was well fed, and when they finally released him on a lonely road just before dawn the men told George: "You've been a fine boy."

Reporter Dreher wanted to know if George could identify his kidnappers. George said they wore masks and "the men told me there were six of them in the kidnapping. But I never saw more than three. They called one another Bill, Harry and Allen." Up pricked Reporter Dreher's ears. Was George sure the name was Allen or Alvin? George thought it might have been Alvin. Thus fresh impetus was given to the report that Alvin Karpis, current Public Enemy No. 1 and supposedly the leader in the Bremer kidnapping in St. Paul last year, had engineered the Weyerhaeuser abduction.

Federal agents, who queried George after he had returned home and had a nap, were not disposed to accept the Karpis theory, pointed out that Karpis is known to intimates as Ray, not Alvin. It was suggested that a local gang had borrowed Karpis' name to mislead police. Whoever had done the $200,000 job was still free as the week ended.

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