Stolen Away

Helpful in depicting Ellis Parker were The Cunning Mulatto and Other Cases of Ellis Parker, American Detective (1935), Fletcher Pratt, and a 1938 Liberty magazine series, “Whatever Happened to Ellis Parker?” by Fred Allhoff. Helpful in depicting Gaston Means was Spectacular Rogue: Gaston B. Means (1963), by Edwin P. Hoyt, and “Gaston Means, King of Swindlers,” a three-part serial in Startling Detective Adventures (1933) by Judson Wyatt.

Frank J. Wilson is the subject of two books, both of which were useful in determining the role of the federal government in the Lindbergh case: Special Agent: A Quarter Century with the Treasury Department and the Secret Service (1956) by Wilson himself with Beth Day, and The Man Who Got Capone (1976), by Frank Spiering. Similarly useful were The Tax Dodgers (1948), a memoir by Elmer L. Irey with William J. Slocum; Secret File (1969) by Hank Messick, a thorough study of the IRS Intelligence Division with Messick’s usual unsubstantiated, gratuitous smearing of Eliot Ness; Treasury Agent—The Inside Story (1958) by Andrew Tully, which explores the Capone, Lindbergh and Waxey Gordon cases; and Where My Shadow Falls (1949), a memoir by FBI man Leon Turrou, who calls into doubt the reliability of Jafsie Condon as an eyewitness.

The portrayal of Edgar Cayce is based on material in Edgar Cayce—Mystery Man of Miracles (1956) by Joseph Millard; also consulted were My Life with Edgar Cayce (1970), David E. Kahn as told to Will Oursler, The Psychic Detectives (1984), Colin Wilson, and A Prophet in His Own Country—The Story of the Young Edgar Cayce (1974), Jess Steam. Cayce’s involvement in the Lindbergh case is drawn from the aforementioned Theon Wright book and The Outer Limits of Edgar Cayce’s Power (1971), by Edgar Evans Cayce and Hugh Lynn Cayce, as well as photocopies of transcripts of his actual psychic “readings” and related correspondence. (Although I report only one, Cayce did several readings on the Lindbergh case.)

The story of the fictional character Harlan Jensen’s search for his identity is patterned upon that of Harold Olson, as reported in Wright and Scaduto, including Mr. Olson’s latter-day tracing of the route Edgar Cayce described.

Hundreds of newspaper articles (from the Tribune, Daily News, Herald-American and other Chicago papers, as well as the New York Times and the Virginia Pilot and the Ledger Star) served as source material for Stolen Away. A number of “true detective” magazines of the day proved helpful, including Daring Detective, Startling Detective Adventures and True Detective Mysteries. Among magazine articles that proved useful were “Did They Really Solve the Lindbergh Case?” by Craig Thompson, Saturday Evening Post, March 8, 1952; “The Baby Is Found…Dead!” by Allan Keller, American History Illustrated, May 1975; “The Story of the Century” by David Davidson, American Heritage, February 1976; and “Did the Evidence Fit the Crime?” by Tom Zito, Life, March 1982.

I am also indebted to the anonymous authors of the Federal Writers Project guides on the states of Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Michigan and Virginia, as well as the massive volume on Washington, D.C.; all of these appeared in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

A number of books dealing with organized crime were helpful: The Don (1977), William Brashler; Captive City (1969), Ovid Demaris; Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (1971), John Kobler; Roemer: Man Against the Mob (1989), William F. Roemer, Jr.; The Mobs and the Mafia (1972), Hank Messick and Burt Goldblatt; The Legacy of Al Capone (1975), George Murray; Barbarians in Our Midst (1952), Virgil W. Peterson; Encyclopedia of American Crime (1982), Carl Sifakis; The Mafia Encyclopedia (1987), Carl Sifakis; Syndicate City (1954), Alson J. Smith; and Murder, Inc. (1951), Burton B. Turkus and Sid Feder.