With the kidnapping of Savannah Guthrie’s 84-year-old mother in Tucson, several commentators have mentioned previous kidnappings of prominent people. Will Rogers had a close connection with Charles Lindbergh’s baby. He also was friends with the grandfather of Patty Hearst.

Charles Lindbergh, Jr., 20 months old, was kidnapped on March 1, 1932 from the home of Ann Morrow Lindbergh’s mother in New Jersey. Here’s Will Rogers the next day, “Why don’t lynching parties widen their scope and take in kidnappings? They are ten times more premeditated and performed by more normal people… What a shock to everybody…Two weeks ago Sunday Mrs. Rogers and I spent the day with them. The whole family interest centered around him. He had his father’s blonde curly hair… His face is more of his mother’s. He has her eyes exactly…He crawled up in the back of the Morrow automobile that was going to take us home, and he howled like an Indian when they dragged him out. I wish we had taken him home with us and kept him.” (DT #1749, March 2, 1932)

Five days later, “Remember it was (Lindbergh’s) judgement that first suggested ‘get the baby back at any cost,’ and then start worrying what the punishment would be if they caught ‘em.” (DT #1753, March 7, 1932)

Will wrote in a Weekly Article, “This young Bill Hearst, Jr. is a mighty promising young fellow, and looks like he is going to pick up W. R.’s [William Randolph Hearst] trail and keep the ink smearing over half the pulp wood of Canada. Then when he says, ‘The Lindbergh baby has been kidnapped,’ well, that put a different complexion on life… It was then five-thirty in the morning in New York, and he said they had been up all night working on the case. He said that [Arthur] Brisbane wanted him to get me, that I was the last newspaper man to have seen the child… So I told him what little I knew over the phone, which didn’t take me long. It’s as I have told you in my little daily blurb, we had spent the day out there.” (WA #482, March 20, 1932)

The body of the Lindbergh baby was found May 12, after a $50,000 ransom had been paid. Bruno Richard Hauptmann was tried and convicted in 1935 and executed by electric chair in 1936. During that trial Will and Betty had the Lindbergh’s stay at their Pacific Palisades ranch home where they could escape from the media.

Back to the Hearst family… “Up here at Mr. Hearst’s ranch [at San Simeon, CA]… If you have missed anybody from any part of the United States and can’t find ‘em, they are guests of this ranch.” (DT #1746, Feb. 28, 1932) (When Will was invited to a huge event, he spent the afternoon on horseback with the ranch foreman checking on the Hereford cattle instead of hobnobbing with other guests.)

Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. In a weird turn of events, she was brainwashed and coerced and joined her captors in robbing a San Francisco bank. She served almost 2 years in prison and was fully pardoned by President Clinton.

Now, the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, has dominated the News all week. Officials are not sure the untraceable messages about her, one demanding $6,000,000 in Bitcoin by tomorrow, are even from the person’s who took her from her house in the middle of the night. There is no proof she is still alive. Pure agony for Savannah Guthrie of NBC News, and her brother and sister.

I’ll make one comment about the “ransom demands.” The person who sent the messages knows a lot about how to hide his identity and receive money in an untraceable way. But he needs to be reminded that our FBI and CIA just found and brought to Washington a man who helped murder four Americans at Benghazi, Libya, 14 years ago.

While we join the family in praying for Nancy Guthrie’s return home, we are confident the perpetrators will be caught. They should meet the same fate as Bruno Richard Hauptmann.

In the Super Bowl tonight, the Seattle Seahawks defense dominated the New England Patriots even more than the final score indicated, 29-13.