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CHAPTER 5

THE RAGE OF ARTHUR ROSS BROWN

On August 4, 1955, Ross Brown – a mentally ill, twenty-nine year old ex-convict from San Jose, California – kidnapped, robbed, raped, and murdered a woman named Wilma Allen. She was the mother of two boys that were eleven and eight years of age and the thirty-four year old wife of the president of the Allen Chevrolet Company of North Kansas City, Missouri, William R. Allen, Jr.. Brown was in the midst of a nationwide crime spree, when he killed her. Brown, like Carl Hall and Bonnie Heady, abducted his victim from Kansas City, Missouri, and murdered her in a field in rural, Johnson County, Kansas. [1] He kidnapped her in the upscale Brookside shopping district in south Kansas City. Then he degraded and murdered her and disposed of her body less than three miles west of the intersection of U.S. Highway 69 and Tibbetts Road in Johnson County. The crime scene was due west of a small town called Stilwell, Kansas, which was a burgeoning suburb at the southwest periphery of Kansas City in late 2000. [2]

On November 14, 1955, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrested Brown in San Francisco, California, on felony charges unrelated to the Allen slaying. Later that day, he confessed to the Allen murder, but waited sixteen more days to confess the rape. The confessions came at a critical time for FBI agents in Kansas City, who had followed numerous dead leads and written stacks of procedural reports from August 4 to November 14, until the public lost almost all confidence in the Bureau. On January 23, 1956 – on what would have been Wilma Allen’s 35th birthday – Ross Brown appeared for his sentencing hearing in the federal district courthouse in Kansas City, Missouri. United States District Attorney Edward L. Scheufler presented physical evidence and read Brown’s confessions to the jurors. The case became yet another Lindbergh show trial for the famous district attorney, who had prosecuted Hall and Heady over two years earlier. The jury recommended death two days after the commencement of the hearing, and Judge Charles E. Whittaker sentenced Brown accordingly. The responsibility of levying the punishment of death bothered Whittaker, but he kept his feelings largely hidden. On February 24, 1956, Brown died in the same gas chamber in which Hall and Heady previously died. The editors of the Kansas City Star and no doubt most Kansas Citians believed that Brown received his just due. [3]  

On August 3, 1955, Ross Brown entered Union Station in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, on a train from Sheridan, Wyoming. Sometime after 7:30 a.m., he rode a streetcar to the intersection of 40th and Main Streets and waited there until dark, when he walked to the residence of his estranged wife, Jeanne, and baby daughter, Terry, at 3210 Jefferson Street. That evening, he slept in her apartment in the house and left there around 10:00 a.m. the next day (August 4). [4]

Brown made a decision that morning to rob someone. Under his belt, he carried a concealed .38 caliber Smith and Wesson Police Special; he boarded a streetcar and rode it to Katz Drug Store at 40th and Main Street. (Oddly, this was the same place where Hall waited in the parking lot for Heady and Bobby Greenlease in 1953). Forty-five minutes later, he boarded another streetcar to Brookside Plaza and Meyer Boulevard, approximately four miles to the south and west. He spent around one hour in a parking lot on the corner of Brookside and Meyer “looking for a good prospect that looked wealthy.” Around 12:30 p.m., he spotted “an expensive looking woman” walking toward a new, blue and white, 1955 Chevrolet Convertible. She had its top closed, because she had just finished getting her hair done. When she reached the driver’s side door, Brown walked up to the passenger side and pulled out his weapon. At that moment, he ordered her to “start driving and behave.” [5]

Brown commanded the woman to drive west on Meyer Boulevard and then south on Wornall Road. In addition, he asked her if she had any money, and she told him she had $50. At that moment, he decided he would have to kill the woman to avoid

identification and ruled out any possibility of ransoming her, but he did not tell her what he had in mind. As they drove, she started to weep and offered him her money and her car in exchange for allowing her to return home to her children. Nevertheless, he ignored her and then demanded that she drive to 85th Street and west to State Line Road, the Kansas-Missouri boundary, where he ordered her to drive south. The terrified woman told him the names of her two boys, Billy and Bobby, and said her husband was the owner of Allen Cheverolet. In response, Brown pulled out a picture of his daughter and showed it to Allen, and she told him the girl was “cute.” Subsequently, the kidnapper made her drive south to Highway 150, otherwise known as Martin City Road, and then west, across the state line, to Highway 69. Thereupon, he ordered her to drive south past Stanley, Kansas, as he looked for a secluded location. A gravel road, Tibbetts Road, seemed adequate; he made her pull off and drive west for two-and-a-half miles. In a minute, he “realized that time was running out for me because I had to get back to my wife’s home before she got off from work.” After spotting some farmhouses, he made Allen turn the car back east. Almost instantly, he “noticed a gap in a row of trees … which led into a vacant field,” [6] where he forced her to drive into the pasture.

She unceasingly begged for her freedom, but he ignored her pleas. He ordered her to stop the car and forced her into the backseat. Then he bound her wrists with her pink scarf and stripped her of her jewels and rings; he placed them in her purse. At that moment, he decided he wanted to rape her. Although she told him she was menstruating, he raped her anyway. He tore her blouse, because that was the only way to remove it with her hands secured behind her back. After the rapist satisfied himself, he made Mrs. Allen place her forehead on the back floorboard and told her to relax; instead, she went into hysterics. The rapist closed the car doors, to muffle the noise, and he shot her in the base of the skull. After the first shot, her eyes were still moving, so he dragged her out on the grass by her ankles and shot her again in the head. Finally, he used her ripped clothing to clean himself off and soaked up the pool of blood and flesh in the backseat of the car.

Brown hastily fled the murder scene in her convertible heading north up I-69 in the direction of Kansas City, Missouri. First, he stopped in Stanley, Kansas, to fuel up and cleaned himself more thoroughly in the bathroom. Then, he kept the $50 and stolen rings and jewels from Mrs. Allen’s purse, which he tossed out on the side of the highway. He threw other items, including her silk stockings, out of the moving car too. By 4:30 p.m., Ross Brown was back at his estranged wife’s apartment. In about four hours, he went to the bus terminal and boarded a Greyhound to St. Joseph, Missouri. [7]

At 10:00 p.m., William Allen alerted the police, the Jackson County Sheriff, and the Missouri Highway Patrol, when his wife failed to return home. Authorities established that J. David Connell, the owner of David’s Shears ‘n Tears Beauty Shop (6313 Brookside Plaza, Kansas City, Missouri), and two of his employees last saw Mrs. Allen around noon, when Connell fixed her hair. The police and sheriff surmised Allen was the victim of a kidnapping due to the peculiar circumstances. [8]

At 2:10 in the morning on August 5, Kansas City Missouri Patrolman Ronald Ehrhart discovered Mrs. Allen’s abandoned Chevrolet Convertible beneath the Broadway viaduct in downtown Kansas City. Brown had abandoned the car in a parking lot near both Union Station and a bus depot. Patrolman Ehrhart shined his flashlight inside the car where he noticed blood on the back seat and floorboard, and he called for backup. Investigators feared something worse than a simple kidnapping, so the police department immediately sent twenty officers. They found more alarming clues as they looked more deeply into the automobile. The key was in the ignition in the “on” position, but someone had locked the doors to the vehicle. Police cut away the rear window and found a bloody washcloth. The door appeared to have been wiped clean. Officers opened the trunk and discovered the white blouse Allen had worn the previous morning, torn at the shoulders and soiled with blood. They also located her blue skirt, brown and white high heels, and undergarments. The bloodstains were three to six hours old, when police located the car.

The police issued a bulletin asking the public for help, and the editors of the Kansas City Star put a picture of Mrs. Allen on page one. They described her as willowy and slender: 5 feet 7 inches tall and 110 pounds, and they asked anyone with information about the lost woman to come forward. Three missing items not found in Mrs. Allen’s automobile were important, because she carried or wore them on August 4. They were her blue straw purse, her pink scarf, and her silk hose. On August 6, law enforcement officials in Clay County, Missouri, Johnson County, Kansas, and Wyandotte County, Kansas, joined the search. Progress was excruciatingly slow. The editors of the Star printed Christmas photographs of the Allen family to highlight the tragic story.

At first, the media alert caused a panic, predisposing the public to provide police with a series of bad tips. For instance, officers interviewed a Sibley, Missouri, man that reported seeing Allen’s car in Eastern Jackson County. Officers also examined a “bloody towel” a passerby found near downtown Kansas City, Missouri, at the “23rd Street Viaduct over the Blue River.” A seventy-three-year-old farmer from Shawnee Township in Johnson County, Kansas, claimed he heard a woman scream, “Help! Murder!” [9]

On August 7, a Johnson County sheriff’s deputy discovered Wilma Allen’s purse in a field near I-69 just south of Stanley in Johnson County, Kansas. Soon afterward, the Kansas City Police and a team of Johnson County sheriff’s deputies combed the area for clues. The next day, a farmer, Richard A. Taylor, got the credit for finding the purse. [10]  

At the request of the police, William Allen and the family minister, A.W. Lassiter from the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd (4947 NE Chouteau Drive, Kansas City, Missouri), searched the Allen family vacation cabin at Lake Lotowana, Missouri. Allen examined his wife’s dresser drawers and closets to see if any of her clothes had disappeared and discovered that they had not. The two men combed the yard area all the way down to the lakeshore, finding no evidence of Mrs. Allen. On the way home, William Allen stopped and talked to a Missouri highway patrolman as he searched the roadside at Highway 71 and Kentucky Avenue. Grasping at straws, Allen described some toy cars his son played with that were possibly in the convertible.

Starting around 5:00 A.M. on August 8, a hundred and fifty enlisted men from the Grandview Air Base voluntarily joined the search. They combed an eight-mile stretch of land along I-69 from Stanley to the Miami County, Kansas, [11] border; Kansas City Missouri Police Chief Bernard C. Brannon and Johnson Country Kansas Sheriff Norman Williams praised the men for their thoroughness. Detectives later confirmed the importance of items the airmen found. At first, they uncovered fingernail clippers and worn out clothing not belonging to Allen. However, by 9:00 a.m. they recovered one of her silk stockings. Thirty-five minutes later they recovered the other stocking. [12]

Around 10:00 a.m., Clifford Erhart and his son, Milton, discovered the nude body of Wilma Allen, where Ross Brown had left her, in one of their fields. The Erharts had been in pursuit of stray cattle, when they noticed the gate ajar and accidentally stumbled upon the body. They were understandably caught off guard with what they discovered and were not sure at first if it was a human body; yet, they wisely did not damage the crime scene by getting out of their automobile. Instead, they went to a nearby farmhouse and telephoned Sheriff Williams. [13]

Someone leaked the news of the gruesome discovery to the general public, and several hundred spectators converged upon the intersection of Tibbets Road and I-69. The Johnson County Sheriff’s Department, to their credit, prevented the crowd from converging upon the crime scene. In contrast to other high level kidnapping and murder investigations, the grounds remained relatively uncontaminated. [14]

Mrs. Allen’s body was severely decomposed. There was evidence – scuffs and cuts on her hands, defensive wounds – that she fought off her attacker, described by the Star’s staff writer as a probable “sex fiend.” [15] Police carefully searched for a murder weapon but did not find one. Johnson County Coroner David S. Long performed an autopsy that confirmed that two bullets had gone through her skull. Three days earlier, detectives found fragments of metal on a floor mat of the back seat of her car. Dr. Long could not determine what else Mrs. Allen endured due to the advanced state of bodily decomposition.

Federal law barred the FBI from officially taking charge of the investigation until August 11, but federal agents helped local police in lesser capacities before that date. For instance, they scoured the grounds near the crime scene for clues. In the meantime, Special Agent Percy Wyly in Kansas City formally determined that the crime fell within federal jurisdiction. The FBI began to interview relatives, domestic servants, employees of Allen Chevrolet, stylists at David’s Tears ‘N Shears Beauty Shop, and other associates of the family; investigators inquired about Wilma Allen’s personal habits and her acquaintances but found nothing useful.

Agent W. Harold Skelly compiled voluminous stacks of typewritten reports. Agents considered several theories, including the possibility of a ransom kidnapping gone wrong. The FBI was especially interested in those with prior sex crime convictions, although investigators had no direct physical evidence of rape (e.g., semen or alien pubic hairs). In the days long before DNA evidence, the bound, nude corpse was the only data they had. [16]  In his report Agent Skelly noted, “[d]ue to the decomposed condition of body, evidence that victim was raped could not be established.” [17] On August 10, William Allen, Jr., and his sons buried Wilma Allen. [18]

Skelly’s report on August 19 and August 26 details the activities of the FBI during the earliest stages of the criminal investigation. Agents questioned people near David’s Tears ‘N Shears and talked to farmers in the farmhouses surrounding the murder scene. Early in the investigation, agents assumed the case was not a ransom kidnapping, because the Allen family failed to receive a ransom demand. Agents examined the victim’s Chevrolet convertible and found “vegetation … consist[ing] of hairy chess, foxtail grass, timothy, sweet clover, and manure particles.” [19] Type O blood stained her clothing; agents confirmed that it was her blood type rather than the blood of another. Moreover, they examined a mysterious set of fingerprints not belonging to Allen that police found on her car comparing them to those of twenty Allen Chevrolet salesmen. The FBI investigated more suspects including some federal prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, that William R. Allen, Sr., her father in law, had known from the past.

Some citizens that provided tips to the FBI demonstrated a marked tendency to assess blame for the rape-murder on African-American males with little or no regard for the evidence. Nevertheless, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI took these tips seriously. For instance, one of the suspects was Herman L. O’ Neal, described as having a “dark” complexion possibly with “negro blood.” [20]

The reports for September 2 and September 23 provide two notable suspects, Frank Richard Gay and Robert George Fixley, and very little new information. In the early 1950s, Fixley, the proprietor of ABC Neon Sign Company in Kansas City, Missouri, had allegedly intended to kidnap one of the Allen children; the FBI searched for him for an interview. Agents questioned Peggy Hooker in Locust Grove, Oklahoma, who identified a photograph of Gay and said that he was the man who attempted to strangle her on August 10. [21] Laboratory specialists uncovered more “seminal stains on [the] victim’s half-slip and on [a] wash cloth found with [her] clothing.” [22] Special agents used ultraviolet light to search the interior of the car for seminal stains and found none. Skelly wrote, “Various suspects [were] investigated without indicating that they are implicated in the disappearance and murder of [the] victim.” [23]

On September 26, Special Agent Malcolm R. Williams interviewed a dirt mover and bulldozer operator named L. G. Nelson of Rich Hill, Missouri. From July 25 to August 9, Nelson dug a pond for Otis Bryan on his farm – located about a half-mile east of I-69 on Tibbets Road. The earthmover claimed that he had “observed a car possibly identical with victim’s car on Tibbetts Road east of U. S. Highway 69 about 6:00 p.m., on date believed to be 8/4/55. [The] car was occupied by a man possibly of [the] negro race.” Nelson thought it was peculiar that a black man would own a nice car, so he allegedly accosted the driver. The “not … black but … dark brown negro” supposedly sped away, when he saw Nelson lunging toward him. Of course, Nelson did not inform the police when this “incident” occurred. [24]

By October 7, the Bureau was ready to consider almost anyone a suspect. One of the more reasonable ones was an unfriendly ex-neighbor named Ona Merrit, who was a former resident of Lake Lotawana, Missouri – the location of the Allen summer home. Although it seems absurd, agents quizzed the Brown’s minister, the Reverend Lassiter, because a domestic servant wondered if the clergyman had visited the family’s main residence at 3619 Vivion Road, North Kansas City, Missouri, a little too frequently before the abduction. [25]

On October 10, a $10,000 reward fund that the Kansas City Crime commission had offered a month earlier officially expired, because of the lack of progress in the case. [26] The report for October 14 states that the investigation continued without any new leads of substance. Laboratory Agents reexamined the unidentified, latent fingerprints they had found on the convertible two months earlier. They also zeroed in on a “dent in left front door and on front bumper which was not known to have been there before 8-4-55.” [27] Bureau agents had volumes of evidence, but they could not connect any of it to a plausible suspect. For all intents and purposes, the investigation reached a complete standstill.

Then everything changed. On November 14, FBI agents arrested Ross Brown in San Francisco on a string of felony charges not associated with the Allen murder. They collared him as he slept in a stolen 1955 Chrevrolet Bel-Aire near the home of one of his relatives. He had two loaded handguns in the car: a .380 Baretta pistol and a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson revolver. The FBI had a warrant for his arrest on a string of federal crimes including a Dyer Act charge for transporting stolen automobiles across state lines. On August 31, he stole a car in Sheridan, Wyoming, after shooting Sheriff Willard Marsh. Three days later, Brown abandoned the car and stole another one in Rapid City, South Dakota. On the road during an erratic cross-country spree, he robbed liquor stores in Pensacola, Florida (September 15), Evansville, Indiana (October 15), and El Paso, Texas (October 20), netting over a thousand dollars. [28]

On September 30, Ross Brown made a collect telephone call, long-distance, to his wife’s Kansas City, Missouri, residence threatening to kill her. The police put her under protective surveillance for a few weeks because of the call but soon decided she was safe. They were mistaken. On November 9, he forced her at gunpoint to ride with him as he drove up and down Southwest Boulevard in Kansas City, Missouri, in a stolen car. Part of the time, he begged her to flee to Mexico with him, but the rest of the time he threatened to kill her and himself. Finally, she jumped out of the car at 32nd Street and Kearnes Boulevard and ran to the nearest telephone, where she called the FBI.

As California FBI agents questioned Brown about the Wyoming shooting, the suspect blurted out his first confession to the murder of Wilma Allen with no prompting. He said, “I’m really wanted in Kansas City.” [29] Ross Brown gave a total of three confessions; he did not “lay all his cards on the table” until the third and final confession.

On the day of his arrest, Brown gave his first confession to federal agents in San Francisco. It was long and ridden with untruths. For instance, he said he murdered Allen in Missouri near Highway 71 not in Kansas near I-69; he said he shot her just south of Grandview, Missouri. [30] After that, he said he drove west on Martin City Road with her body in the car, until he reached the pasture off Tibbett’s Road in Johnson County, Kansas. Then, he dragged her feet first from of the automobile and shot her again, after she was deceased to make sure she was dead. Finally, he left her body in that spot. Of course, this was crucial information. If the murder occurred in Missouri, the FBI had no jurisdiction. FBI agents in the Kansas City office wanted Brown moved to Kansas City, where they would have him retrace his route. [31]

Federal investigators in San Francisco asked Brown a series of questions related to tips the public forwarded to the FBI in Kansas City. For instance, they asked him if anyone saw him driving in Allen’s Chevrolet convertible. He answered in the negative. They also asked him if he wore any make-up to conceal his identity, and he answered “no” again. They probably questioned him about the face paint, because L. G. Nelson, the contractor from Rich Hill, Missouri, claimed he witnessed a black man driving around in a new convertible.

Brown was honest about a few things. For instance, he told the FBI that he buried some of Allen’s jewels and valuables in a secluded spot in Johnson County, Kansas, so he could return and get them later. This turned out to be correct. The FBI eventually recovered these items.

At first, Brown vehemently denied sexually assaulting Allen, but it was obvious that he raped her. There were glaring inconsistencies in his statement. First, why did he strip her nude if he was just robbing her? Second, why did he say Mrs. Allen felt the need to tell him that she was menstruating, if he expressed no intention of sexually assaulting her? Third, he claimed that simply viewing her nude body caused him to involuntarily ejaculate, but he was twenty-nine years old – long beyond adolescence when such behavior might have been more common. Finally, why did he insistently deny the rape? What was he trying to hide?

On November 15, Ross Brown gave his second confession clarifying some inconsistencies in his first statement. Primarily, he clarified that the shooting occurred in Kansas off 69 Highway not off Highway 71 in Missouri. Furthermore, he admitted that he pulled her dead body out of the car in the same field where he killed her, rather than driving across the state line with the body in the car. [32]

Brown arrived in Kansas City around 7:00 AM on November 16. He stayed in the Jackson County Jail until the day of his sentencing. Federal agents also indicted him on another Dyer Act charge for taking a stolen car across a state line, because his palm prints matched the ones the FBI Laboratory Agents found on Allen’s Chevrolet. For good measure, Jackson County Prosecutor Richard K. Phelps charged Brown under Missouri law for kidnapping, which also carried the sentence of death. [33] On November 17, United States District Attorney Scheufler filed a federal kidnapping charge and asked United States District Judge Charles E. Whittaker to reconvene the grand jury on November 28. [34]

On November 30, Brown submitted his third and final confession to FBI agents in Kansas City. In that confession he fully disclosed the gory details of Allen’s kidnap-rape-murder for the first time. At last, he admitted sexually assaulting the weeping, defenseless mother, as she had begged for her life and pleaded just to be able to see her children again. The crime was much worse than he had admitted sixteen days earlier. [35]

On November 18, the FBI turned over the stacks of reports to Scheufler. Special Agent Percy Wyly II wrote, “It will be noted that numerous pages in these reports reflect results of investigations concerning suspects and other inquiries made in an effort to identify the subject in this case, which as of this date, are not pertinent in view of the identification of Brown as the subject. Generally speaking, the pertinent portions … are indicated in the Table of Contents.” [36]

On November 28, Ross Brown went before the grand jury at the United States Courthouse in downtown Kansas City. He faced them in the same courtroom where another federal grand jury had charged Hall and Heady two years earlier. The grand jurors indicted Brown for violating the capital clause of the Lindbergh Act; Judge Whittaker offered him no bail. [37] On December 1, the judge asked Brown if he had legal counsel, and if not, could he afford it? He answered both times in the negative. Whittaker gave the defendant maximum consideration under the law and appointed Martin B. Dickinson, the President of the Kansas City Lawyers Association, and the future Missouri Supreme Court Justice Charles B. Blackmar [38] as defense lawyers. On December 16, Dickinson and Blackmar, unlike Hall and Heady’s lawyers, sought the advice of a panel of three mental health experts to ascertain if Brown was fit to stand trial. The panel said that the accused was mentally competent. On December 30, he told his lawyers he did not want to fight and entered a plea of guilty. [39] At that time, Judge Whittaker set the date for the sentencing hearing as January 23, 1956. [40]

On December 23, 1955, United States Attorney Scheufler received Ross Brown’s long criminal and psychiatric record from the FBI. [41] Ross Brown first ran into trouble with the law in the early 1940s. During that period, he faced sentencing for burglary and kidnapping at the Alameda County California Juvenile Court. His legal problems caused him to drop out of high school. On December 27, 1941, he abducted Bertha Thomas of Harward, California, at gunpoint and released her only after she promised not to turn him in. From 1942 to 1944, he committed several burglaries “finding articles of women’s clothing, which he used for the purpose of sexual stimulation.” [42] Psychiatrists did not find him afflicted by any specific mental disease, just a severe case of sexual fetishism and neurosis. One psychiatrist found Brown “sexually immature, and probably on the homosexual side.” [43] In 1945, a judge sentenced Brown to the California Youth Authority Corrections Facility in Lancaster for burglary. [44] Released in 1947, Brown escalated his criminal activities. This time he committed arson and landed in San Quentin for a sentence of two to twenty years. In November 1952, the parole board agreed to allow Ross Brown back into society. Mary Brown, his mother, said he was “a good boy who has been a mental case all his life.” [45]

On January 20, 1956, Jeanne Brown won an uncontested divorce suit against Ross Brown in the Jackson County Missouri Court. Since at least the date of her own abduction on November 9, she was in a nervous condition. She found out about her husband’s atrocities on the television news, and it caused her to go into serious shock, to the point of fainting, and put her into the hospital. [46]

The defense lawyers, the United States district attorney, and the judge conducted the sentencing hearing in just three days – January 23 to January 25, 1956. The jury had to recommend the sentence Brown received, because he already admitted his guilt. [47] The twelve jurors were mostly from small towns, unanimously white, and all males, just like the jurors in the Barker, Stokes, and Hall and Heady trials. [48] Judge Whittaker dismissed five eligible jurors because of their stated aversion to the death penalty. One of these removed jurors was a white, Kansas City housewife named Florence Roddis. Another one was an African-American male porter from the eastside of Kansas City named Samson Kirkpatrick. The jurors took their oaths, and everyone had a short recess. Court resumed around 2:00 p.m. Whittaker explicitly wanted an objective jury not automatically predisposed to do anything without first hearing all the evidence. The judge was not sure what punishment was the best one; he reminded them of options outside of the death penalty if fit and proper.

Scheufler’s opening statement summarized the events from the third and final Brown confession and stated, “It is because of the aggravation in this case the government felt it necessary to ask for the death penalty.” [49] The defense waited to offer their remarks until the conclusion of the government case. The district attorney brought in several courtroom exhibits and put seven witnesses on the stand. The first witness was William R. Allen, Jr. The prosecutor asked Allen to identify government exhibit 18. Allen struggled and then gave the answer, “[I]t’s her wedding ring.” [50] Mrs. Frank Myers, the manager of the Coach House clothier in Brookside, identified the pink scarf she sold to Wilma Allen many weeks prior to her abduction. Kansas City Police Laboratory Supervisor Herman Davis told how he later cut the same scarf from the wrists of Allen’s corpse. J David Connell the owner of David’s Tears ‘N Shears beauty shop in Brookside testified that he finished styling Mrs. Allen’s hair around noon on August 4, 1955. Scheufler recalled Mrs. Myers who stated Allen entered her store at 12:30 p.m. that same afternoon to do some additional shopping. William C. Schoenhardt testified that Allen entered his store at 12:50 p.m. and left heading toward the parking lot at Brookside Plaza and Meyer Boulevard at about the time Ross Brown said he kidnapped her. Scheufler recalled Davis, who testified at length about the articles police removed from her convertible. Kansas City Police Sergeant Albert Morton identified photographs of Ross Brown’s palm prints taken from her car. The last witness, Robert V. Harman, Jr., identified the floor mat from the rear of the convertible. [51]

On the second day, Scheufler entered the initial November 14, 1955, confession of Brown into the evidence and questioned a few more witnesses. Curtis P. Irwin, Jr., of the San Francisco FBI read Brown’s first confession of November 14 to the jury. Scheufler then asked Johnson County Kansas Sheriff Williams to identify photographs of the crime scene. The Johnson County coroner, David Long, and another doctor, David Gibson, M.D., explained the cause of death and the examination of the body. Two FBI agents, Finis W. Sims and Robert B. Harmon Jr., testified about the recovery of Mrs. Allen’s buried personal items found in a culvert where Ross Brown buried them off the Aubrey-Oxford Road, south of Stanley, Kansas. Finally, Scheufler asked George Strasser, one of the FBI Agents that arrested Ross Brown in San Francisco, if he pulled a gun on agents when arrested. [52]

Blackmar objected to this question as immaterial. That was about the most animated the defense team became during the first three days of the government’s case. Ross Brown told them he did not want them to fight for his life, because he preferred death to prison. Brown even barred Blackmar and Dickinson from conducting effective cross-examinations. By doing nothing, the defense team simply followed the wishes of their client. [53]

On the third day, the government finished entering evidence. Scheufler introduced Brown’s second confession of November 15, 1955, and his third and final confession of November 30, 1955. Several in the crowded courtroom audibly gasped as Kansas City an FBI agent, Elmer Parrish, read the final confession into the record. They especially recoiled at the mention of the brutal rape and the description of the movement of her eyes, after the first bullet entered her brain. Scheufler stated, “We have no hesitancy whatever in demanding the death penalty for this crime the horribleness [sic.] of which reeks to high heaven.” [54]

Ross Brown, unlike Hall and Heady, had no one to speak on his behalf. Brown did not want any mercy. The editors of the Star found him totally devoid of any outward display of emotion. In accordance with Brown’s wishes, Dickinson read, “The defendant offers no evidence and rests his case.” [55]

Judge Whittaker offered the final instructions to the jury after reminding the twelve jurors that Brown had received every right to which the law entitled him. He reminded them that they could recommend prison for a certain number of years to be determined by the court, a life sentence, or capital punishment. Whittaker released them at 2:40 p.m. The jurors returned in just fifteen minutes, about as short a time as they could possibly have taken, with a recommendation of death. Judge Whittaker then sentenced Brown to die on February 24, 1956. The jurist asked the condemned if he had anything to say in his behalf; Brown shook his head a little indicating he did not. [56] Judge Whittaker, in contrast to Judge Reeves, felt depressed about sentencing Ross Brown to the gas chamber; nonetheless, cases alternated among district court judges in the Western District of Missouri, so trying the case became his “luck of the draw.” Still, Whittaker clearly felt uncomfortable with the awesome responsibility of condemning a man, no matter how guilty, to death. [57]

The lawyers on both sides submitted brief final arguments. Blackmar, going against the wishes of his client, asked the court why psychiatrists should not study Brown rather than killing him. Dickinson said that Brown was the first criminal defendant convicted of a capital crime that he, as an attorney, had ever defended. Perhaps, he sensed the judge’s unease and asked the court not to play God. In stark contrast, Scheufler spoke for the rights of Wilma Allen with the fervor of a present day advocate of “victim’s rights.” [58]

In the wee hours of Friday, February 24, 1956, Brown died in the same manner as Hall and Heady – in the gas chamber at the Missouri State Penitentiary, Jefferson City. The execution warranted a short paragraph on page 17 of the New York Times, [59] but it was by no means the international sensation the Hall and Heady executions had been two and a half years earlier. On Monday, February 20, Brown had written his mother and admitted, “I can’t blame my wife for turning against me. ... There is only one person to blame for that – myself. I had a clear mind that day and I knew right from wrong.” [60] He was adamant about wanting to die “because I couldn’t live in prison with this on my mind.” [61] All day Thursday, February 23, he had paced around his cell praying and meditating; he refused any special entree for his last meal. Around 11:40 p.m., the United States marshal for the Western District of Missouri, Burke Dennis, read Brown the official execution order.

At 12:01 a.m., two Catholic priests, Rodney Crewse and Roy Dyer (the prison chaplain), followed the hooded, handcuffed Brown into the gas chamber. As the guards unfettered him and strapped him to the chair, he nervously perspired. He made no statements or final requests before death. At 12:07 a.m., “Col. James D. Carter, director of penal institutions, pulled the lever which dropped sodium cyanide powder into a crock of sulfuric acid beneath the death seat and released the whitish, cyanide vapors.” [62] Dr. William McKnelly, the same physician present during the Hall and Heady double execution, pronounced Brown dead three minutes later. Although almost one hundred fifty people requested to see the execution, only five people actually observed. One of these witnesses was Johnson County Kansas Sheriff Williams, who had supervised the policemen in the pasture on the day that Clifford and Milton Erhart found Allen’s corpse. At Brown’s request, his mother was not in Missouri for the execution. She buried her son in San Jose, California. [63]

In the 1950s, Congress revised a section of the Lindbergh law due to an increasing number of high profile cases including the kidnap-murders of Allen and Greenlease. On August 6, 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a bill proposed by Representative Kenneth B. Keating (Republican, New York) that lowered the FBI waiting period from seven days to twenty-four hours. Congress passed the legislation in less than a month with little debate. It is unknown precisely to what degree the crimes against Bobby Greenlease and Wilma Allen influenced the votes in Congress, yet, Attorney General Herbert Brownwell believed the Allen case was important enough to put in his annual report to Congress for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1956. He called it “an infamous case of widespread interest.” [64]

Brownwell’s report also mentions another notorious rape kidnapping that occurred in 1956. Although it clearly was a Lindbergh case, federal prosecutors did not seek death on the interstate kidnapping charge. On February 24, 1956, a federal jury convicted both George and Michael Krull (aged 33 and 31) on four separate violations of the US Code. On April 14, 1955, the Krull brothers committed a series of abuses against a 53-year-old Tennessee woman in the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Park in Georgia. A federal district judge gave George and Michael Krull life imprisonment for kidnapping, five years for interstate transportation of a stolen vehicle, and death for rape. Both men died in the electric chair at Georgia State Prison, Reidsville. [65]

Senator Keating had initially proposed his bill on January 5, 1955; nonetheless, it gained no real momentum until July 11, 1956. The abduction of the Weinberger baby (Peter Weinberger) in Westbury, New York, on Independence Day spurred recalcitrant Southern Congressmen [66] into action. Keating expressed the shock that a seven-day waiting period was in the original Lindbergh law, because he said it allowed the mishandling and loss of vital clues. Furthermore, he pointed out the impeccable record of Hoover’s FBI – 514 out of 516 Lindbergh cases solved. On July 30, 1956, the House and the Senate passed the Keating bill and sent it to President Eisenhower. [67]

Ross Brown was not a self-described “misfit” like Carl Hall or Bonnie Heady. Instead, Brown was a clean cut Californian with sandy blonde hair, a slender frame, and a boyish face. [68] In a superficial sense, he was a snapshot of the vivacious manhood of 1950s America, but the extent of his homicidal madness shattered many stereotypes. Behind his azure eyes there was a sadistic rage no one had fully comprehended, until after had he raped and executed an innocent wife and mother. In the end, a jury in the federal district court in Western Missouri recommended death for this “boy next door,” and Congress modified the Lindbergh Act. American society purged itself of Ross Brown, because he betrayed their confidence.