They rocked the town. They gave us goosebumps. They generated questions that persist to this day. They are St. Louis’ most audacious, interesting and wacky cases—those that set a precedent, drew the attention of the nation or marked a significant turning point in St. Louis history.
By Traci Angel
It was considered a bold move in 1847 when a slave named Dred Scott, living in St. Louis, filed a lawsuit for his freedom. Court officials found themselves in a quandary. Nothing in the U.S. Constitution seemed to deny Scott this privilege, but in the end the slave business proved to carry more weight than human rights. After 10 years and many appeals and court reversals, the United States Supreme Court heard Scott’s case, deciding that people of African ancestry—slaves as well as those who were free—could never become U.S. citizens and, therefore, could not sue in federal court. This was perhaps St. Louis’ earliest, and arguably most famous court case. Even though Scott’s argument for freedom was lost and it was years before African-Americans were granted citizenship, the slave’s effort paved the way for the civil rights movement.
Other St. Louis cases were less about social injustice and more about gruesome crimes and psychological perversion. For instance, there was the chilling case of pathological rapist Dennis Rabbitt. The Jefferson County man broke into homes on St. Louis’ South Side and in Illinois, attacking 14 women during his 10-year spree. Many women across the bi-state area slept with the lights on and methodically secured windows before he was caught and sentenced to several life sentences in 2000. There was also the political corruption case of Missouri House Speaker Richard J. Rabbitt (no relation to Dennis), who was convicted in 1977 of taking money from auto dealers hoping to influence state lawmaking. Then there was the consumer awareness case convicting Chrysler, the auto company, of fraud in 1986, after it was proved that cars’ odometers were rolled back to boost selling prices. Recently, Charter Communications’ chief operating officer and two senior vice presidents pled guilty to conspiracy charges involving a scheme to inflate subscriber numbers in order to please Wall Street. The company also settled 18 investor lawsuits for $144 million (involving accounting practices). The remaining defendant is set to go to trial this month.
The list of malfeasance goes on and on. We can’t include them all, but here are 10 of St. Louis’ most interesting, important and notorious cases.
The Greenlease Kidnapping
In 1953, a well-dressed woman claiming to be Bobby Greenlease’s aunt came to pick him up at his private Kansas City school. She told the nuns there that Bobby’s mother had collapsed while shopping at Country Club Plaza, and that she was there to retrieve him. A few hours later, Bobby was dead.
His kidnappers knew Bobby’s dad was a Cadillac distributor and wealthy businessman. The architect of the kidnapping-for-ransom plot, Carl Austin Hall, had gone to military school with Bobby’s half-brother, Paul Greenlease. Hall and Bonnie Heady, the woman who posed as the aunt, demanded $600,000 for the return of the 6-year-old boy—the largest ransom request in U.S. history at the time. Hall shot the boy and buried him in the back yard of Heady’s St. Joseph, Mo., home, but led the Greenleases to believe their son was still alive. After receiving the ransom, Hall and Heady fled to St. Louis to hide out in an apartment. Hall eventually left Heady, taking a few thousand dollars in cash and holing up at the Coral Courts Motel on Highway 66. The cabdriver who drove Hall to the motel turned him in. Both Hall and Heady were eventually convicted and received life sentences. A little less than half the ransom, or $298,000, was recovered and given back to Mr. Greenlease. What happened to the rest of the money remains a mystery. James Deakin chronicles the kidnapping in his book, A Grave for Bobby.
Kidnapping, Babies and Blackmail
Never is a crime more sensational than when a member of the upper crust sinks low enough to commit it.
In this case, it all started in 1931, when Dr. Issac Dee Kelley was kidnapped after making a house call to a home on Davis Place in Clayton. He was released after eight days, but the culprit responsible for his temporary disappearance was unknown.
Three years later, tavern owner Adolph Fiedler gave the Post-Dispatch an exclusive story: he claimed the kidnapping was the work of ex-cons, gangsters and a woman he called Mrs. N. She was later identified as auburn-haired beauty Nellie Muench, a resident of Westminister Place and a prominent member of St. Louis society. She was the daughter of the Rev. William Tipton, sister to Judge Ernest Tipton, wife of Dr. Ludwig Muench and manager of a boutique in the Central West End called The Mitzi Shop.
Muench developed a habit of sending bills to widows for lingerie their late husbands may have (but probably hadn’t) purchased from her shop. Even though her track record was sullied with hints of jewelry theft and fraternization with gangsters, Muench’s affluent image kept her free of trouble for many years.
She was finally charged with the doctor’s kidnapping. Her trial had a change of venue to Mexico, Mo., a town near Columbia, Mo., where her father had his church, and Jefferson City, Mo., where her brother sat on the Missouri Supreme Court. Believing that the jury would not convict her if she was a new mother, she concocted a plan to get a baby to claim as her own. Working with her lawyer Vern Lacey, she located a baby in Chicago and brought him to St. Louis. That baby died and she found a second child, the son of Anna Ware, an unwed domestic servant in Pennsylvania who had come to St. Louis to deliver her child. Muench’s plan worked: she was acquitted of the kidnapping. At the same time, Nellie Muench also blackmailed one of her husband’s colleagues, Dr. Marsh Pitzman, claiming the baby was his. When Ware went to court to get her child back, Pitzman (who had been Muench’s lover) gave her $16,000 for her defense.
Nellie Muench was sentenced in 1936 to 10 years for mail fraud (for blackmailing Pitzman); her husband was sentenced to eight years, accomplices Wilfred (Skinny) Jones received 10 and Muench’s friend Helen Berroyer got five years.
The Car Bomb Caper
Perhaps one of the most legendary feuds in St. Louis’ recent history was between the Leisure and Michaels families. In 1980, as James A. Michaels drove south on Interstate 55, his car exploded, blowing his body apart and sending the vehicle three feet in the air. Authorities didn’t have to look far for a suspect. The Michaels and Leisure families were bitter rivals wrestling for control of a St. Louis labor union. An escalation of the enmity between the families resulted in the car bombing and Michaels’ death. A year later, Paul Leisure’s car exploded outside his South City home. He lost his right leg and left foot.
Leisure and his cousin David Leisure were convicted in connection with Michaels’ murder. Authorities say David Leisure rigged the bomb underneath Michaels’ car while Michaels lunched at St. Raymond’s, and Paul Leisure detonated the bomb after he drove away. Paul Leisure is serving a life sentence. David Leisure was executed by the state of Missouri in 1999.
James A. Michaels III, grandson of James A. Michaels, was convicted and served prison time for the bomb that crippled Paul Leisure.
Murder in the Bathtub
“No husband draws his wife’s bathwater,” investigator Dee Vossmeyer said when she was first assigned the case of Ed Post, whose wife was murdered while on a business trip in St. Louis in 1986.
Ed Post’s story seemed believable at first. He claimed he went jogging and returned to his St. Louis Union Station hotel room to find his 39-year-old wife, Julie, unconscious and face down in the bathtub. He told authorities she must have fallen and hit her head. He produced a towel ring he said he found on the floor, explaining it must have come off the wall.
Though they initially ruled the death an accident, St. Louis detectives dug a little deeper, traveling to New Orleans to investigate the Posts’ marital history. There they learned of discord in the marriage, Post’s attraction to another woman and suspicious details such as the fact that Post increased Julie’s life insurance before her death.
Post’s calm, almost pleasant demeanor following his wife’s death raised eyebrows. A doctor testified that he found bruises on Julie’s head during an autopsy, which prosecutors argued were proof that Ed Post held her head under the water. The St. Louis medical examiner still wouldn’t classify the death as a homicide, but after a day of deliberation, the jury found Post guilty and he was sentenced to life in prison.
A year later, a sheriff’s deputy came forward to admit that the jury (which had been sequestered during the Post trial) had a party in which a police detective stopped by to talk with jurors and another deputy had sex with a juror. A new trial was granted. Julie’s parents and the Posts’ two daughters had stood behind Post during the first trial, but this time the oldest daughter talked about her parents’ fighting and drinking. The second jury also found Post guilty. He is serving a life sentence at Potosi Correctional Center.
“It was a case that looked accidental,” says Assistant United States Attorney Dean Hoag, who handled the prosecution in the second trial. “With a lot of hard work by some detectives, they took a circumstantial case and made it stick.”
Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan tells the Post murder story in Evidence of Murder.
The School Desegregation Suit
Students who grew up in multiracial classrooms can thank Minnie Liddell, a concerned African-American mother who wanted a better education for her children. Liddell was the catalyst for the 1984 St. Louis desegregation decision, Liddell v. Board of Education, which resulted in a federal court order requiring the St. Louis public school district to provide better opportunities for students wishing to seek an education in another district. Meanwhile, many lawmakers and state officials, including Missouri Attorney General John Ashcroft, were adamantly and vocally opposed to desegregation.
“For the first time, this region and the state had to address education inequity, even though they claimed they had met their constitutional obligations,” says Susan Uchitelle, who served as director of the council for implementing the program allowing black students from the city of St. Louis to transfer to county schools and white students from the county to transfer to city schools. “As a result [of this case] we can honestly say that in this region the schools are not segregated by law,” Uchitelle says. “They might possibly be by housing pattern, but we are guaranteed that at least there is equal access.”
Uchitelle co-authored a book with Judge Gerald W. Heaney of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals called Unending Struggle: The Long Road to Equal Education in St. Louis. Judge Heaney began working on the case in early 1980.
To date, most St. Louis City public schools continue to be predominantly black. The Missouri Legislature has approved a law to allow inter-district transfers but will phase out state funding for such purposes, leaving many concerned for the future of St. Louis school integration.
Censorship at Hazelwood High School
When journalism students at Hazelwood High School wanted to report on teenage pregnancy, school officials didn’t think the information was appropriate, so they killed the story. Invoking the First Amendment rights of freedom of the press, attorneys representing the students took the district to court.
Since it was a school-sponsored student newspaper, the 1988 Supreme Court, in Hazelwood District vs. Kulmeier, concluded that the educators did not violate First Amendment rights and were allowed to control both the style and content of student speech in school-sponsored activities “as long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.”
The decision has been called controversial because of its ambiguous parameters, and because it allows school authorities to effectively censor the contents of a student newspaper.
The Flight of the Lieberman Brothers
Alan and Harold Lieberman became St. Louis’ international fugitives when they hid out in Santiago, Chile, after fleeing town with nearly $25 million copped through real estate fraud.
The brothers’ company, Lieberman Corp., went under unexpectedly in 1989, owing many companies, banks, homebuyers and contractors thousands of dollars. Three years and hours of investigation later, the two were about to be indicted on fraud charges.
“The story is not about the indictment, but about the persistence of detectives and inspectors in getting them back into the country,” says First Assistant United States Attorney Mike Reap, who led the prosecution. Because of the U.S. extradition policy with Chile, authorities found themselves in a challenging situation. “In that treaty, it stated that extraditable crimes included piracy and slavery, but not money laundering or false bank book applications,” Reap says. The policy has since been updated, but at the time, the process of bringing the brothers to face criminal charges took creativity and multiple attempts. In one case, an undercover agent attempted to befriend Phyllis Lieberman, Alan’s wife, in an effort to find out where the brothers were hiding. In a stroke of luck for the authorities, Phyllis was arrested for cocaine possession. “There was no planning and this was better than our wildest dreams,” Reap says. “We were able to get her to call her husband and appeal to his higher nature to come and save his wife.” Lieberman was met at the airport and transported to St. Louis to face charges.
Facing eminent deportation, Harold Lieberman reportedly jumped to his death off a sixth-floor apartment balcony in Santiago. Of the money laundered, about $2.5–$3 million, or 10 percent, was recovered. Alan Lieberman is serving a 10-year prison sentence for his part in the fraud.
The Kinky Sex Case
He seemed to be the perfect catch. Julie Miller met Dennis Bulloch through a newspaper ad and fell hard. Approaching her 30th birthday, Miller, an executive at a phone company, was ready to get married. Bulloch seemed like the all-American guy—good-looking and described as soft-hearted by former girlfriends. But he had a fetish—he liked to tie up his sexual partners.
A mere four months into their marriage, emergency personnel responded to a fire at the Bullochs’ home in Ballwin. Amid the charred debris was the body of Julie, duct-taped to a rocking chair, her face burned beyond recognition. Prosecutors claimed Bulloch murdered his wife. The defense argued she died accidentally following drinking and a sexual bondage ritual.
The state charged Bulloch with first-degree murder and sought the death penalty. The trial was filled with salacious details about kinky sex acts and bondage, which the defense argued resulted in the accidental death of Julie. When the jury handed down its decision, Bulloch was charged with involuntary manslaughter.
Bulloch served four years on the manslaughter charges and was later found guilty of arson for the fire set the night of Julie’s death. He was released from prison in 1993.
Local writer Ellen Harris tells the story in her book Dying to Get Married.
The Interminable Trial
Jerry Lewis-Bey and his band of grizzled gangsters were defendants in the longest criminal trial in St. Louis history, taking more than seven months to present and 12 days of jury deliberations. In the end, Lewis-Bey and six cronies were found guilty for their involvement with a drug ring that ran for more than a decade. They are now serving life without parole. Two other defendants were acquitted.
Lewis-Bey was the leader of the Moorish Science Temple, which also served as a front to a large heroin trafficking operation that claimed to control nearly half the local cocaine trade. During the troupe’s heightened crime rampage, Lewis-Bey’s contingency terrorized neighborhoods and were linked to a dozen drug-related murders.
But if the trial took a long time, the investigation to catch Lewis-Bey and his drug buddies took even longer. Authorities have alleged the drug ring began in 1978 and didn’t disband until around the fall of 1992, with the trial extending from late 1992 into 1993. Assistant United States Attorney Mike Fagan followed the case closely for years before the group was actually charged and convicted.
The Hockey Player, the Agent and the Ingenue
Mike Danton of the St. Louis Blues had a reputation of being a little wild when he was off the ice. Some say Danton’s agent David Frost, who was also a youth hockey coach in Canada, would argue with him about his promiscuous behavior and alcohol consumption. Authorities say Danton decided to have his agent killed when Frost threatened to expose his behavior to the Blues.
Danton’s not-so-well-thought-out plan included his choice in accomplice: a smitten 19-year-old girl from Florissant named Katie Wolfmeyer. She introduced Danton to an acquaintance, Justin Levi Jones. Prosecutors say Danton asked Jones to kill Frost for $10,000. As it turned out, Jones was a police dispatcher who told his bosses about the plot. They brought in the FBI, who wired Jones. Danton pleaded guilty in July 2004 to murder conspiracy charges and will serve seven and a half years in prison in his home country of Canada. The question remains whether he will be readmitted into the U.S. after finishing his sentence. Wolfmeyer, who argued she did not know Danton was trying to hire a hit man, was acquitted of charges last September.
Gambro’s Bad Gamble
Late last year, Gambro Healthcare, an international renal dialysis clinic, agreed to pay more than $350 million in the city’s largest health fraud case—the sixth largest health-fraud payout in U.S. history. Jim Martin, the U.S. Attorney here, argued that for more than two decades the company overbilled Medicare and Medicaid.
Gambro operates 20 clinics in Missouri. Dr. Steven Bander of St. Louis filed a whistle-blower lawsuit three years ago, alleging fraudulent billing went on from 1995 to 2000 while he was Gambro’s chief medical officer. An investigation discovered that the company set up a shell company, Gambro Supply Corp., to boost billings illegally, and that it also invoiced the government for unnecessary medical tests and procedures, as well as gave kickbacks to physicians and clinic directors.
The settlement includes a $310.5 million civil penalty as well as $15 million to resolve potential liabilities with 44 states, including Missouri and Illinois. Federal investigation of the company continues.
