KIDNAPPING

KIDNAPPING. Powerful stories about abduction predate the history of the United States. Biblical, mythological, and historical tales recount the fates of prominent people—Joseph, the Sabine women, Helen of Troy, and various members of royalty—taken from their homelands. During the Middle Ages, peripatetic Jewish merchants talked of abduction as just another business risk, and contributing to a ransom fund for a landsman qualified as a substantial mitzvah.

The conquest and colonizing of the Americas generated new abduction tales. The slave trade, the business of abducting and enslaving millions of Africans (and lesser numbers of Indians), took shape during the early seventeenth century. As European diseases exacted a heavy toll on indigenous people, Indian warfare increasingly aimed at abducting members of other tribes to replenish populations. At the same time, stories of Indians carrying off European women, "captivity narratives," such as that of Mary Rowlandson, formed one of the earliest Euro-American literary genres. The term "kidnapping," which joined two English slang terms, emerged toward the end of the seventeenth century. It first denoted abducting young people from Britain and transporting them to North America as indentured laborers. Consequently, Sir William Blackstone, the eighteenth-century common-law jurist, characterized kidnapping, then a misdemeanor rather than a felony, as the crime of carrying someone away from their homeland and depriving them of their "personal liberty."

Stories about other kinds of kidnapping, many with an ethnic dimension, proliferated during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The antislavery movement characterized the capture of runaway slaves, authorized by the Constitution and the FUGITIVE SLAVE ACTS of 1793 and 1850, as a pernicious form of kidnapping. Drawing on Blackstonian legal terminology, many Northern legislatures passed "personal liberty laws" that unsuccessfully interposed state power against slave hunters. Other ethnically charged situations, such as the 1904 "rescue"—by Anglo-Protestant vigilantes—of forty Catholic orphans who had been placed with Mexican American families in Arizona could legally excuse abductions that might otherwise have been seen as cases of kidnapping.

Meanwhile, a much-publicized 1874 abduction in Philadelphia, in which several career criminals abducted for ransom (and later killed) four-year-old Charley Ross, inaugurated a growing emphasis on urban kidnapping stories. In response to the Ross case, Pennsylvania enacted a stiff antikidnapping law that made kidnapping a serious felony offense and became an early model for other states. As kidnapping for ransom became a highly publicized underworld enterprise, some perpetrators avoided the stigma attached to child abduction by making wealthy adults their target of opportunity. George "Machine Gun" Kelly became J. Edgar Hoover's "Public Enemy Number One" after kidnapping an Oklahoma City business leader in 1933. Around the same time, a brazen, daylight kidnapping of a wealthy businessman by gangsters in an up-scale neighborhood of St. Paul ended a police-gangster arrangement that had long made Minnesota's capital city a haven for interstate fugitives such as John Dillinger.

Two other widely publicized incidents, though, reinforced the connection between kidnapping and young children. The 1924 case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who abducted and killed a young boy in Chicago, focused attention on cases involving sexual motives, while the 1932 kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh Jr., son of the fabled aviator, dramatized abduction for ransom. These cases produced lengthy, controversial "trials of the century" and sparked debate over broader issues including the insanity defense and the death penalty in the Leopold-Loeb case. In the aftermath of the Lindbergh case, Congress passed the "Lindbergh Act" of 1932, which expanded federal authority over kidnapping with its presumption that any abduction of more than twenty-four hours involved transportation across state lines. Many states adopted their own tougher, new antikidnapping measures called "Little Lindbergh laws."

During the last half of the twentieth century, kidnapping stories encompassed an ever wider array of fictive and real-life scenarios. The 1974 abduction of Patricia Hearst, the daughter of a prominent media mogul, by the Symbionese Liberation Army, recalled politically motivated kidnappings in other countries. Several years later, when an anti-American faction in Iran seized nearly one hundred people at the American Embassy in Tehran, the media proclaimed "America Held Hostage," and the incident played a key role in the 1980 presidential election of Ronald Reagan and the defeat of incumbent Jimmy Carter. The kidnapping of U.S. businesspeople and diplomats remained a prominent concern overseas, while abductions that accompanied carjackings and other crimes attracted considerable attention in the United States.

Still, cases involving young children attracted the most intense interest. Bitter controversy over child custody laws, for example, publicized a form of abduction in which one parent resorted to kidnapping in order to circumvent a court order granting custody to the other. In 1980, Congress responded with the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act, which mandated greater state-to-state cooperation in custody-related abductions. Advocates for children, though, insisted on a clear distinction between parental kidnappings and "stranger abductions," which became firmly associated with the specter of sexual exploitation. Several tragic cases of stranger abductions prompted new legislation, such as "MEGAN'S LAW," which aimed for the registration and monitoring of "sexual predators." Other prominent kidnappings produced new nationwide organizations, including the Adam Walsh Children's Fund and the Polly Klaas Foundation for Missing Children.

KIDNAPPING

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