Following the Plot

"Dear Mother: I have fallen into the hands of kidnapers. Don't let me be killed! Make sure that the police do not interfere. You must absolutely not take this as a joke ... Don't give publicity to my kidnaping." In most respects, the disappearance of a 16-year-old American living in Rome was little different from the dozens of other kidnapings that have plagued Italy in the past two years. This time, however, the boy's name was Eugene Paul Getty II, the grandson of perhaps the richest man in the world.

Rome police were at first highly skeptical that young Getty had been kidnaped at all. Independent and partial to hippies, Getty rarely even slept in the apartment of his mother, former Actress Gail Getty Jeffries, 39, who divorced the boy's father, Eugene Paul Getty, and has since been remarried and separated. Instead, he would find a bed in the apartment of an artist friend or, more recently, in the flat of two 24-year-old German twins, Martine Zacher and Jutta Zacher Winkelmann.

Some of his friends reported that he was habitually short of cash. Though other friends denied it, the story interested suspicious Roman police when they learned that he had even joked about solving his financial problems by arranging his own "perfect kidnaping," which police noted was curiously similar in plot to the one in the movie Travels with My Aunt, currently playing in Rome. The night he disappeared he was seen having an argument with a blonde Belgian go-go dancer in the Piazza Navona, where hippies gather. She resisted his passes and he stormed away, yelling back an Italian obscenity.

Much of the police skepticism vanished when the boy's mother received his letter and two phone calls, apparently from one of the kidnapers. "At first I thought it might be a stupid joke," she said, "but then I understood it was serious." To prove that the kidnaping was not a hoax, the caller said he would send the mother one of her son's fingers. Grandfather Getty, meanwhile, said that he would not pay a ransom. Although he sees his grandson infrequently and is not particularly close to him, Getty said he loves him nonetheless. Yet love, in Getty's view, takes second place to principle. "I'm against paying any money," he said. "It only encourages kidnapers." Afraid that such reports would anger the kidnapers, the mother told reporters that she would indeed be willing to negotiate a price for her son's return. At week's end she was awaiting further word.

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