CRIME: Dead or Alive?

Behind the drawn blinds and chain-locked doors of his mansion in suburban Mission Hills, Kans., an old man last week waited in anguish. He was wealthy and respected, but Robert C. Greenlease. 71. felt the poverty of the helpless. His young son had been kidnaped.

A pioneer in the automotive industry, with a prosperous General Motors distributorship based in Kansas City, Mo., Robert Greenlease was 65 when his 39-year-old wife bore him a son. The boy, Bobby, grew into an alert six-year-old who always knew what he wanted and usually got it. His kiddie car was a battery-powered jeep, scaled to his size, and his pets included a green parrot and a French poodle.

At 11 o'clock one morning last week, a chunky woman with red-tinted hair walked into the reception room at Kansas City's fashionable French Institute of Notre Dame de Sion. where Bobby Greenlease was a first-grader. She was Bobby's aunt, she said, and she had come for him because his mother had suffered a heart attack. Could the boy be released from school to go to his mother's bedside? A nun went to get Bobby, while the woman entered the school's tranquil chapel and knelt in prayer. Down from his classroom, Bobby gave her a long, slow look but, trusting in the wisdom of adults, accompanied her without protest. "I'm not a Catholic," said the woman on leaving, "but I hope He heard my prayers." Replied the nun: "I am sure He heard them." Then woman and child got into a waiting cab, whose driver let them out several blocks away. From there, so far as family and police were concerned, they stepped into nowhere.

An hour later, another nun called the Greenlease home. Mrs. Greenlease, supposedly ill, answered. How was she feeling? Just fine, she told Mère Marthanna. "And then," recalled the nun, "my heart sank way down and I realized what had happened."

The kidnaping had the earmarks of a smoothly professional job. Item: A telephone call to the home ten days earlier from a phony "representative of the public schools" who asked Bobby's age. where he attended school, even about his pets. To the cloistered Sisters of Notre Dame de Sion. the crime was symptomatic. Said Mère Marthanna: "The world is much closer to falling apart than we sometimes realize." Robert C. Greenlease took a more specific view. He offered a "blank check" for the return of his son—alive.