A Visit from the Doctor

When an odd-looking man in a stocking cap and dark glasses stopped at Allen Stamm's home near Santa Fe, N. Mex., nine-year-old Linda Stamm went to the door to see what he wanted. He wanted to take her to her mother, who was at a bridge party. He also had a letter for Linda's parents. Linda obediently gave the letter to the maid and went off with the visitor.

Linda's mother returned, heard the maid's story and anxiously opened the letter. Clumsily lettered, it read: "Your child has-been kidnaped . . . The amount is $20,000. cash or negotiable bonds. Put same in envelope on top of your Sol y Lomas gate tonight if you can. If not until tomorrow night put a red rag as sign ... If not at all--your kid will die of cold and hunger. New Mexico is an easy place to lose a body. Do not talk about this to police, FBI or friends. Any effort to interfere with our messenger, the child dies."

The Stamms put out a red rag, then notified police. The next night 30 policemen and FBI agents, equipped with walkie-talkie radios, were hiding in the vicinity of the Stamms' wooded estate, on the road to Las Vegas, when a figure shuffled past and reached under a rock by the gate. As police pounced, their captive protested: "I'm just a go-between."

The prisoner, who was carrying a .25 caliber automatic, looked and was dressed like a man. But to the cops' astonishment, the prisoner not only turned out to be a woman, but a person well known and respected in the neighborhood. The prisoner, wearing a coarse red jacket, and a stocking cap over a mannish bob, proved to be Dr. Nancy D. Campbell, 43, Phi Beta Kappa, graduate of Yale's Medical School and for the past 14 years a prominent Santa Fe physician.

Near by in a parked yellow Buick convertible, cops found the kidnaped girl. Drugged with seconal, filthy, wrapped in rags, she was nonetheless alive. The doctor had taken Linda to her office, drugged her, left her tied up in an abandoned ranch house, while she herself spent the night some 70 miles away at Las Vegas. In the yellow convertible were two other notes addressed to other well-to-do Santa Fe parents, whose children Dr. Campbell apparently planned to kidnap if she had failed to snatch Linda.

Confronted with the letters, Dr. Campbell confessed, said she needed the money for "domestic expenses" and to build a new house. Shocked friends of Dr. Campbell declared her financial woes were purely imaginary. She had a substantial income, often gave free treatment to poverty-stricken Spanish-Americans.

Said Linda's mother: "I hope she gets the maximum:" The maximum is death.

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