Father Patrick Heslin was lured from his Colma rectory on the pretext of a “death call” by a mysterious stranger in a Model T Ford at around 9 pm on August 2, 1921. It appears that he was driven directly to a cliff overlooking the windswept beaches that lie southwest of San Francisco and there shot and clubbed to death. He may have been killed on the cliff top itself, or in the sandy alcove within the cliff where his body would later be uncovered in a shallow grave.
Sometime before 10am the next day a typed ransom letter was mailed to St. Mary’s Cathedral from downtown San Francisco. The prolix note was full of bombast and featured melodramatic descriptions of elaborate booby traps and a human chain of dope pushers recruited to handle the ransom payment. In a strange digression, originally withheld from the public, the kidnapper explained that his $6500 ransom demand was justified by an economic loss he had incurred due to the Catholic Church’s rules concerning divorce. A hand-written addendum indicated the priest, said to be tied up in a bootleggers’ cave, had been injured and was in a bad way. Still, the note promised a quick followup regarding arrangements for his release.
Another week passed with no further word from the kidnapper, while the police undertook a manhunt of the beaches and hills near Colma. Enter the San Francisco Bulletin. The scrappy paper, which had not yet been absorbed into the Hearst empire, hired a celebrated Los Angeles private detective, Nick B. Harris, as its expert on the Heslin story. Harris swung into action. His most recent claim to fame had been the cracking of a high-profile kidnap-for-ransom case in LA. He had conceived the ruse which flushed out the kidnappers and brought about the release of their hostage, a Mrs. Gladys Witherell. The scheme involved faking a ransom letter and publicizing this fake while derogating an earlier, genuine ransom demand. This provoked the kidnappers to reach out by phone, leading to their swift apprehension by a police flying squad once a preset team of phone operators had pinpointed their location.
Now, Harris recruited the Bulletin, SFPD chief of detectives Captain Mathewson, and Archbishop Hanna to a similar scheme. According to Harris’s account in his book, Famous Crimes, there was some concern over the proprietary aspect of the scheme, which would give the Bulletin a big scoop on its rivals. Still, Harris’s arguments won the day. On the morning of August 10 the Bulletin published the fake ransom note prepared by Harris, alongside a story quoting Archbishop Hanna and Mathewson that dismissed the original, bombastic ransom note as a forgery and a distraction while hailing the apologetically-toned new demand letter as the real deal.
Unbeknownst to Harris and his confederates at the SFPD and the archdiocese, over the preceding week itinerant baker William Hightower had undertaken multiple forays to the Salada Beach grave site, riding the bus or hitchhiking his way there from his cheap downtown hotel. The same day the Bulletin story hit the newsstands, Hightower showed up at Archbishop Hanna’s office, ready to lead the authorities to where he thought Heslin was buried and claim the advertised reward.
As it happened, the Bulletin’s scoop was instantly eclipsed and all but forgotten. One of Hearst’s men from the Examiner waylaid Hightower at the Archbishop’s office on a “hunch,” and talked him into leading a team of police and Examiner reporters directly to the priest’s sandy grave that very night. Right after he revealed the location of the body, Hightower was detained. He would never see another moment’s freedom until his parole in 1965, over forty years later. According to the Bulletin — but receiving little if any play from its rivals — the first thing police found in Hightower’s hotel room was “a copy of Wednesday’s Bulletin containing a facsimile of the decoy letter.”
After delving into the Bulletin coverage of the fake ransom letter ruse and reviewing Harris’s account in Famous Crimes, I am inclined to think this episode deserves more attention than it usually gets in retrospectives on the Heslin murder. Some issues that arise, to be addressed in a future post:
Is it likely that the hoax prompted Hightower to come forward? If so, is this inculpatory or exculpatory as far as his being party to the kidnapping?
If, as seems likely, Hightower was not the “small, dark foreigner” who called for Father Heslin, how did the ruse impact the real kidnapper’s situation?
Again as to the “small, dark foreigner,” what was the long-term impact of this bit of gamesmanship on his psychology after he got away with the crime?
Did the self-pitying fake ransom note inspire the “Rose” letter in the Aimee McPherson kidnapping hoax and/or the Hearst Family Letters written by an unknown party, possibly the Zodiac, after the kidnapping of Patty Hearst?