The Great Kidnapping Caper

In May 1985 Aberdeen, in Brown County in north-eastern South Dakota, was a town of about 28,000 people and a great deal of local pride. Michael Kinney, nineteen, lived a little west of town with his mother, Sandra McNeil, on the family's Quarter and Painted Horse ranch. His father, Jack Kinney, had retired as a captain with the South Dakota Highway Patrol and was working as a private investigator about half an hour away. Michael had graduated from Aberdeen Central High School in 1984 and was a student at Northern State College. He had money, a car, a girlfriend and no obvious troubles.

The weekend of May 8th, 1985, was to be his first turkey hunt, in the Black Hills with his father and his best friend, Barry Walther. The two friends had been planning it for about three months. That evening Michael ate half a pizza with pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms and olives at Barry's house, left at about 8.30, and went to his girlfriend Kelly Mewing's house, where they watched a movie for around three hours. He left at 11.30 p.m. and said he would call the next day.

He did not come home. At 11.30 the next morning his mother found his car parked on an abandoned gravel road on their own property, a quarter mile from the ranch house. The keys were in it and a hunting checklist lay on the front seat. Friends searched the ranch and the town, and by the afternoon Sandra McNeil called the police.

At nine o'clock on the morning of May 10th an unidentified man telephoned her and told her, in an odd voice, to collect an envelope from under a pay phone in an Aberdeen bar. The note inside demanded $200,000 in 50s and 100s, said no police and nobody else should know, and gave her until Saturday night or some time Sunday to produce most or all of it. It ended with a warning that if she went to the police her son would die. She took it straight to the police, who brought in the FBI, tapped the phones and borrowed $190,000 in cash from local banks. Agents moved into her house.

A second call came on May 13th, three days after the first. She was to leave the money near a statue in an Aberdeen park by Northern State College at nine that night. The caller said Michael was fine and was wearing Nike shoes and jeans, which satisfied her that he was alive. She begged to speak to him and was told, not until I get the money. At 9.04 p.m. she and an FBI agent dressed as her niece left a briefcase containing $190,000 and a tracking device. A young man in a blue Oldsmobile collected it and drove away.

Agents followed him across the state line into Minnesota. At 1.15 a.m. on May 14th, in heavy rain, they stopped the car near Starbuck. details of the account remain covered until revealed His seventeen-year-old sister Paula was with him. The briefcase in the car held $189,180, and $760 of the $862 in his wallet was traced ransom money.

the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it First he said a horse buyer called Bob Jacobs in Alexandria, Minnesota, had paid him travelling money. Then he said Jacobs had forced him to make the calls. Then came a story about two men, one white and one Indian, who pulled him into an alley, punched him and threatened his baby. this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed

the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it Four days later, on May 28th, a farmer named Charles Boulay was checking rain gauges on a farm seven miles west of Aberdeen. He bent to pull a weed by an old ice house and saw a white tennis shoe inside. Under a door laid over the body was Michael Kinney, partially mummified and maggot-ridden. He had been shot three times with a .22 and his head had been beaten with a square-edged instrument. The doctor who performed the autopsy thought a wound to the aorta was the actual cause of death. His stomach still held pizza with pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms and olives, eaten on May 8th at 6.30 p.m., which put his death between about 11.30 and 12.30 that night. Boulay, it turned out, was the brother of Nancy Mitchell, Sandra McNeil's business partner in the horse ranch.

this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed Blood of type AB was found in the trunk, and rayon fibres matching the trunk lining were on Kinney's clothes. A cheque for $25 from Kinney's account, number 239, had been written to an Aberdeen convenience store and predated to May 6th, two days before he vanished; the name Michael was misspelled, and the date was written in words rather than figures. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now

details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it The judge refused to admit the blood scrapings and photographs from the trunk because the testing had not been conclusive. The prosecution said the motive was money. this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it The judge imposed two consecutive life terms, plus fifteen years for the ransom money and five for forgery.

this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it

this part of the story is covered for now They wrote out a diagram for a cage to hold three people and a draft ransom demand that included pardons, $500 each and two new driving licences. details of the account remain covered until revealed A third party tipped off the authorities, and the supposed kidnapping was staged as a sting. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it