The last time a woman was executed for a federal crime, a kidnapping riveted the nation Samantha Schmidt, The Washington Post Jan. 10, 2021 FacebookTwitterEmail The judge called it the most "coldblooded, brutal murder" he had ever tried. News articles described it as the most horrible kidnapping in decades, or as the St. Louis Dispatch wrote, a "tale of evil, stupidity and corruption." On September 28, 1953, Bonnie Brown Heady walked into Notre Dame de Sion, a Catholic school in Kansas City, Mo., and posed as the aunt of Bobby Greenlease, the 6-year-old son of one of the city's richest men. She and her boyfriend, Carl Austin Hall, kidnapped the boy and demanded ransom from his parents. They picked up a duffel bag of $600,000, the largest ransom ever paid at that point, and promised to return the boy safely to his family.