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Ever been in the city or a town when the National Press Corps descends upon it?

It makes a three-ring circus seem like a calm retreat to reason.

In Western Washington, those instances have been few and far between.

But it happened in Tacoma back in 1935 when the nation was gripped by the kidnapping of a nine-year-old boy named George Weyerhaeuser, the heir to one of the world's largest timber companies.

Deep in the Woods is an in-depth recounting of that tale, and local author Bryan Johnston is here to talk about it next on Northwest Now.

[ Music ] The world was a different place in 1935.

In the aftermath of the Great Depression, bank robbing gave way to kidnapping as a frequent scheme for gangsters and criminal down and outers.

Most kidnappings came and went with little fanfare because there were so many, an estimated 3,000 in 1932, alone.

But the Lindbergh kidnapping brought the problem to national prominence as gangsters and crooks tried to find a way to supplement their ill-gotten incomes lost to the repeal of prohibition.

The Lindbergh case was called the story of the century and it prompted congress to pass a federal kidnapping law.

Well-to-do families were frequent targets all across the United States and it's in that context that nine-year-old George Weyerhaeuser was snatched off the streets of Tacoma in 1935.

That case is the subject of Deep in the Woods, the latest book by Bryan Johnston.

Bryan Johnston, thanks so much for coming to Northwest Now to discuss a very interesting book.

And I have to tell you, a book that describes a crime I don't think a lot of people are aware of who have maybe come in the '80s, and the '90s, and the 2000's.

This may be a real surprise to them.

Let's start, though, with a little biography.

How did you come up and how did you get into writing books?

>> Well, I worked in television for many, many years in the Pacific Northwest and but also a writer.

I love to write books and I try to write books that are Northwest-centric.

I wrote the J.P. Patches book and I wrote a book about the TV show Almost Live.

And after I finished those, I was looking for some new content, and so I just started searching for something interesting, and I stumbled across this story.

And the further I dug, the more fascinating it became.

And I went, okay.

This is the most fascinating story that I've ever stumbled across.

>> Talk a little bit about kidnapping in the 1930s.

We think of kidnapping as something that, you know, isn't really a crime around here.

Maybe a noncustodial parent or happens in other countries.

But in the 1930s, it was a different story here.

Tell me a little bit about that.

>> Yeah.

Kidnapping, at this time, was the crime du jour.

In the late '20s, there was, you know, the criminals were as famous as the movie stars, okay?

You had, you know, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Machine Gun Kelly, and Bonnie and Clyde, and John Dillinger.

All these really famous criminals, but their crimes were bank robbery, shooting people, things like that.

They didn't do a lot of the kidnapping game.

That was usually reserved for the Karpis Gang and the Barker Gang, which came a little later.

When the FBI decided to finally crack down on the big criminals, that's when it started shifting over to kidnapping.

Because the kidnappers came to the realization, "This is a lot safer, okay?

We can make some good money without getting shot."

And that's kind of when it, you know, it really came big, especially with the Lindbergh kidnapping, which was two and half years, almost three years before the Weyerhaeuser kidnapping.

>> There's a phenomena during this time period where the criminals are the heroes.

Now I'm not sure if that's true with kidnapping.

When I read your book, it really looks like people had a lot of hatred for the kidnappers, but the bank robbers were heroes.

Why is that and talk a little bit about that dynamic.

>> That they were really popular because they were looked at almost like Robin Hood characters.

They were heroic characters.

This was during the Depression, okay?

1929, 1930's.

People were broke.

They had - didn't have a lot of money.

And so they saw these criminals as sticking it to the man, okay?

And they kind of rooted for them until two major crimes took place.

And one of them, I can't remember if it was Machine Gun Kelly, but they ambushed some cops, killed them in cold blood.

That turned the public against criminals.

And then the Lindbergh kidnapping and murder really, really turned people against these big criminals.

>> Now the Lindbergh case, of course, I think even people who weren't really familiar with true crime back in that era probably have heard of that story.

Ended tragically with the death of the child.

But it also sparked Congress to action.

Talk a little bit about some of the outfall from the Lindbergh kidnapping.

>> Yeah.

Before the Lindbergh kidnapping, which can be - the Lindbergh Law came into effect as a result of that.

Before the Lindbergh kidnapping, if criminals just would zip across state lines to escape federal prosecution, okay?

And this is when J. Edgar Hoover said, "Enough of this.

I'm tired of this.

We need to put a stop to this."

And so for after the Lindbergh kidnapping, if you took a kidnapping victim across state lines, all of a sudden, it became a federal offense.

The FBI could get involved and bring all of their weight down upon them, as well.

And that came into play during the Weyerhaeuser kidnapping, as well.

>> And there's nothing J. Edgar Hoover liked better than a big case with a lot of media attention.

>> A lot of publicity.

>> A lot of publicity for his G-men.

>> Yep.

>> And this really fits the narrative.

>> Absolutely.

He had ghost writers writing articles all over, you know, newspapers across America making it sound like it's him when it really wasn't.

Touting, you know, the G-men, and their guys with the white hats, and bringing, you know, bring lawlessness to an end.

And it was a great marketing campaign.

>> A lot of characters in the book, but introduce us to the major ones.

We've got the criminals and the family.

Who were the players in this?

>> Okay, so George Weyerhaeuser, nine years old, George Weyerhaeuser.

He was the kidnap victim.

The kidnappers.

There was three, technically, but really two and a half.

There was Bill Mahan.

He was kind of the mastermind.

He was a career bank robber.

There was Harmon Waley, who was kind of a small-time criminal, and his 19-year-old wife, Mormon, 19-year-old Mormon wife, Margaret, who'd never been in trouble in her life.

She didn't really participate that much in the kidnapping.

She went along with it once she discovered that George had been kidnapped, and that was an interesting story in and of itself.

But she really didn't do anything, you know, participate really other than not say anything because she was afraid that Bill Mahan was going to shoot her.

>> He was a hardened criminal, Mahan was.

Waley wasn't an angel, but he's - he was petty crimes.

>> He was a sidekick.

>> Yeah, a sidekick.

He wasn't the bad guy in this like Mahan was.

Talk a little bit about the snatch.

George Weyerhaeuser was a kid going to Annie Wright, or no, he - was it Annie Wright?

>> No, his sister went to Annie Wright.

>> His sister.

>> Yeah.

He went to - it escapes me, off the top of my head.

If I had the book, I could tell you, but it was only like three blocks away.

>> But schoolboy -- >> Schoolboy.

>> That age, and talk a little bit about the - what happened during the snatch.

>> All right, so first off, a little back story.

George, you know, he was part of the Weyerhaeuser family and the Weyerhaeuser family was a very wealthy family.

George's great grandfather, Frederick, the guy who established the Weyerhaeuser dynasty, to this day is still considered about the 12th richest man in American history.

Bill Gates being about 11th, okay?

So they had a lot of money and this is also at the time of the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Carnegies, things like that.

But Weyerhaeusers, like they are, like to just quietly sit in the Pacific Northwest and keep a low profile.

That was the way their family was, still is.

So George is walking home from school because even these rich people wanted their kid to be like everybody else and so they just say you can walk to school and walk home.

Sometimes he'd get a ride.

On this day, he was supposed to catch a ride halfway home.

He was stopping off at Annie Wright Seminary to meet his sister and then catch a ride home from there.

He waited for a few minutes.

Said, "I don't want to wait.

I'm just going to walk home.

It's only a half-mile, five, six blocks, whatever."

He starts walking.

Little does he know that he's being followed by these two kidnappers.

They've been watching him for a couple of days, just like in the movies.

And he cut through this hedge, and he's in this parking lot, and there's nobody around except this one car.

And a guy jumps out of the car, "Hey, kid.

Can you tell me how to get to Stadium Way?"

George is like, "Oh, well," and that's about as far as he got.

Kidnapper grabs him, hand over the mouth, puts him under his arm, throws him in the back of the car, [whistles], he drives away.

And now the kidnappers have George Weyerhaeuser.

>> Now I'll use the nice word, heck, but all heck then breaks loose.

>> Yeah.

>> The national media, at the time, which is guys with things that said -- >> Press.

>> -- press on their hats and big flashbulbs, you know, just right out of the old Movietone newsreels.

>> Yes.

>> Descends like a swarm of locusts on Tacoma and the Weyerhaeuser family.

>> Yeah.

>> You know, things haven't, you know, I was at O.J.

Simpson and have done some national stories, the Loma Prieta earthquake and a bunch of others.

The media pack was the media pack even in 1935, wasn't it?

>> Yeah, absolutely.

In fact, the Weyerhaeuser family's house became pretty much the biggest tourist attraction in the state.

Cars were lined up for blocks to drive by and look at the Weyerhaeuser house.

People would sneak into their yard and steal their flowers as souvenirs and the media are camped out.

They are camped out.

Police, FBI, reporters.

The reporters combined wrote on average 40,000 words a day, which is equivalent of half of a novel, every single day.

So they were writing about anything.

They wrote about the dog.

They wrote about anything at all.

It was remarkable.

>> And that was during the time of, "Extra, extra.

Read all about it."

Newspapers were the driving media, but also some radio there, as well, I'm sure.

>> Absolutely.

When this kidnapping hit, it was big news.

It was on the front page of just about every major newspaper in America.

It was on the front page of the New York Times.

The London Times actually sent a correspondent, a foreign correspondent, across the pond to cover this story.

It was a big, big deal.

>> And a lot of yellow journalism, too.

Not a lot, I mean, facts be damned, is one of the quotes I think you have in your book here.

>> Yeah.

>> They would just make stuff up out of whole cloth or if somebody told them something, and boy, that was good enough for a headline and to base an entire story on.

It may have no basis in truth, whatsoever, and, you know, that's pretty stunning for people who do this profession.

You read about that, but no doubt, it was true.

>> They never used the word allegedly, okay?

No.

They - there were articles that I read that they simply flat out acted as judge and jury.

[Inaudible] saying that Alvin Karpis, Creepy Karpis, who was a big criminal at the time, obviously it was him and his gang.

They are the criminals.

They're the ones that kidnapped George.

They didn't say, "We think."

It was, "Alvin Karpis is the criminal.

He's the kidnapper.

They need to catch him."

There was stuff like that all the time.

It was - it blew my mind reading it how just they would just play fast and loose with the facts.

They'd, like you said, if they heard a rumor, they ran with it.

>> Yeah, and this drove J. Edgar Hoover crazy -- >> Crazy.

>> -- who was an early practitioner really of staying on message, branding, very image conscious.

He was probably ahead of his time, to some degree, when you really think about it, in terms of image crafting for a government agency.

>> Like I said, he was the master of his marketing campaign of making the FBI look like the saviors of law and order.

>> So what happened to George Weyerhaeuser?

Where did he spend his time and how did they - and this is a long story.

It's a thick book, but at the end of the day, how did they end up making this arrangement to do a trade to try to get the kid back?

>> So when the kidnappers grabbed George, they took off for Issaquah, the forest of Issaquah.

And ironically, it wouldn't surprise me if where they kept him stashed was actually owned by the Weyerhaeuser family.

Because at that time, actually to this day, I believe, the Weyerhaeuser family either owns or is the steward of about 4% of the entire state of Washington.

And they kept George stashed away in a hole in the forest about the size of a grave.

And they kept him chained up in there in the - out in the forest of Issaquah, a nine-year-old kid, in the dead of night, chained in a pit in the ground.

And this was after they dropped off the ransom note that had 21 demands, the first one saying, "We want $200,000 in small, unmarked bills."

They also said, "Don't alert the cops."

Ha, ha, ha.

They also said, "Don't alert the media."

Double ha, ha, ha.

>> Yeah.

>> Well, here's the classic irony.

They said, "Don't alert the media."

So what did the Seattle Times do?

They posted the ransom note on the front page of the newspaper.

And so then the Weyerhaeusers had to try to come up with $200,000 in small bills, 10s, 20s - 5s, 10s, and 20s, and they had a week to do it, or else.

And so after a couple of days in the pit, they moved him to another pit.

Then they moved him across the state and kept him hidden in a closet in Spokane, Washington.

And so during all of this week time, they did the money drop.

And what was interesting about the money drop, a lot of things interesting about the money drop, was the FBI agreed to sit back and not do a thing.

>> Mm-hmm.

>> So George's dad is going off driving into the night with a suitcase full of $200,000, which is the equivalent of 133 years of the average person's salary in 1935.

And there wasn't a cop in sight, not an FBI agent in sight.

And the money drop is something straight out of a Dashiell Hammett novel.

>> Yeah, following these notes and these bread crumbs around -- >> Yeah, it was awesome.

>> -- the forest, yeah.

When I was reading that book, you mentioned that area out there by Hobart Issaquah Road in the Maple Valley area and up Tiger Mountain.

It's very strange.

Fifty years later, it too, would become the center of another major criminal investigation that, you know, is in the lore of the Pacific Northwest with the Green River Killer.

>> Mm-hmm.

>> And I just remember, being local to that area, I was just kind of like, wow, you know, it was just kind of strange to be in that.

I don't know if there's any meaning there but it just struck me as I was reading this book.

They're on the lam now trying to evade police.

Like you said, they moved across the state.

I was also impressed with how easily they moved across the state before I-90, before the interstate highway system was built.

>> Yeah.

>> They really did some miles.

>> They did a lot of miles.

They drove from Spokane, to Seattle, to Hoquiam, to Seattle, To Spokane, to Seattle, to Tacoma, to Seattle, to Spokane, and back to Issaquah.

They got a lot of miles in.

>> Yeah, and how did this end up being resolved?

They made the drop.

They were in possession of that money for a good while.

And then like a lot of crime stories, when the bad guys seem like they've won, things start to fall apart.

>> Well, because them being criminals, they weren't the sharpest tools in the shed.

>> Right.

>> They made the classic blunder of not having money set aside to live on.

So eventually, they had to dip into their ransom money.

And the FBI, they, well, they said, you know, "We don't want these to be marked bills."

"Fine.

We won't mark the bills.

However, we will track down every serial number."

So to get the serial number of all 20,000 bills, it took them 4,500 man-hours of work to do this and they did it in like three days.

So they have huge teams working around the clock to do this and they printed up basically a book that had all the serial numbers.

And they just started sending them out, train stations, to stores, to, you know, any place where people might be exchanging money.

And that's eventually how they caught the bad guys.

>> Yeah.

A read a good chunk of this book in the Salt Lake City airport.

>> Oh, did ya?

>> Yeah.

>> [Inaudible] place.

>> And so as I'm reading it, "Oh, gosh, they're coming right here."

>> Yes.

>> So Waley and his wife end up getting popped and then Mahan does.

Timeline that a little bit.

>> Yeah, so they all went their separate ways and Harmon and Margaret went back to where they were from, Salt Lake City.

And they were living there until Margaret bought a 20-cent cigarette case for her dad with a $5 bill.

It was a hot bill and they - the woman at the cash register, "Oh, my gosh.

This is a ransom bill."

Called the cops, police show up, and they capture them.

Then that - either that same day or the next day, Mahan, he came down to Salt Lake City, also, separately.

I think he wanted to get some of the money or something.

And he finds out that they've been captured, so he takes it on the lam.

Interesting thing happens then.

He drives up to Butte, Montana and this is the next day.

This is the day after Harmon and Margaret get arrested.

And he's standing on a street corner, 7:00 in the morning, and he looks across the street.

There's a cop.

The cop's staring at him.

He's staring at the cop.

The cop's staring at him.

He's like, "Okay, something's wrong here.

I think he knows that I'm a kidnapper," and he takes off running.

Cop doesn't realize that he's the kidnapper.

He has no idea.

He recognizes him because he arrested him three years earlier in a different city for a different crime, pure coincidence.

>> Yeah.

>> And then some really interesting things happen where if he had - he had the opportunity to capture the criminal but he chose not to kill a dog, but by not killing the dog, the bad guy got away.

>> Yeah, and stayed away for a good year.

>> Another year.

So I don't know how many thousands of dollars and man-hours got lost because the cop refused to be a dog killer.

>> Yeah, so how does Mahan eventually - the real bad guy in this thing, eventually end up getting popped and where?

>> He eventually got captured down in San Francisco.

He took it on the lam.

And, again, he - because he started spending the money.

He kept spending the money, and his other love was cars, and that's what, you know, he would buy a car, and he'd buy another car, and he spent the money, he got caught, and that was how it happened.

>> One of the tidbits in this book, you don't make much of it, but I - and, again, it struck me having worked in Northern California for quite a while and doing cops and courts.

Was the fact that one of the characters here spent some time in prison with Charles Manson.

>> Yes.

Yes, yes, yes.

How would that - how did that work out?

That was at McNeil Island when Manson was like a car thief and he was like doing - he was doing like guitar lessons with - was it with Mahan or it was with somebody connected to the case.

But yeah, with - and then also, a side note, when Mahan and Waley both went to Alcatraz, and this was when Alcatraz was brand new.

I mean, the paint was still probably wet.

But Al Capone was there at the same time and Harmon Waley was getting into fistfights with Al Capone.

>> They had beef, yeah.

>> Yeah, they got in a fight in the band room.

>> Yeah.

It's some of these weird coincidences and that I think are some of the really interesting facts in this.

They're really not online with the narrative, the main narrative of the story, but I read them and I'm like, wow, really, isn't that, you know, there's just weird stuff.

>> There were so many cool things that I discovered.

Like I said, this, in my opinion, this is if not the most, it's one of the most fascinating crimes in Northwest history because there's so many layers.

There's so many little bits of information that most people aren't aware of and I wouldn't have been aware of except that I had 2,500 pages of FBI documents.

I had over 200 newspaper articles.

I had court documents and I got to talk to George.

>> Yeah.

I was going to say, let's do two things.

Let's talk about the ultimate ends for the bad guys and then talk about your conversation with George.

So briefly, what ended up having everybody ended up in prison, right?

>> Yeah.

So Mahan got 60 years.

It started at McNeil Island, went to Leavenworth, went to another place, also, and ended up at Alcatraz.

Harmon Waley got 45 years, again, McNeil Island, Alcatraz.

Margaret, the whole saga of Margaret is a great story.

It's so fascinating.

She was such a tragic figure.

What a sap.

But she got 20 years on a work farm in Kansas, I think, or something like that.

No, Michigan, I believe.

So, yeah, they all went away for a good long time.

But, yeah, that was just, like I said, the Margaret situation is such an amazing thing because she wanted to plead guilty even though she really didn't have anything to do with the crime.

>> Right.

>> But the judge wouldn't allow her to.

>> Yeah.

>> And forced her, because she said, "I can't imagine being in prison - or not being in prison while my Harmon is in prison."

>> Yeah, yeah.

Please, give me a break.

>> Exactly.

>> The guys a conniver.

Any lasting legacy in Western Washington here?

It's something that a few older people may remember, but it's well into the past now.

You had a conversation near the end of his life with George.

Talk a little bit about that conversation and what, if any, legacy, what were - was there any result or echoes of this into the future of Tacoma?

>> Boy, that's a good question.

George, I talked with him two years ago and he was 94 years old.

He's still alive.

>> Oh, he is still alive.

>> He's still alive.

>> Okay.

I got that wrong.

>> Yeah, he's still alive.

He's 96, and but when I spoke with him, he - everybody always said George doesn't like to talk about the kidnapping.

>> Mm-hmm.

>> George doesn't like to talk about the kidnapping.

So I was really surprised when I called, and left a message, and he called me back, and said, "I'm happy to talk with you.

It happened a long time ago.

It's not a sensitive subject."

Blew my mind.

So I went to him, and we sat down, and chatted, and his daughter was there, and we had a really nice time.

He was funny.

He was curious.

He loved seeing old photos of himself in the newspaper when he was nine years old.

And my favorite quote when I was talking with him was, he said, "Bryan, how long is going to take you to write this book?"

And I said, "Well, to write it, and find an agent, and find a publisher, and da da da da, two years."

He said, "Bryan, I'm 94.

Write fast."

>> Good.

There's a lot of interesting detail in this book.

There's a lot to this story, and frankly, you don't deal with it too much in the end, so I'm not afraid to ask you about the last couple of paragraphs in the book.

How did the Weyerhaeuser family and the bad guy in this story meet in the future?

>> You want me to give that away?

Spoiler alert, but, you know.

>> I think there's enough.

>> Okay.

>> It's not the meat of the book.

>> All right.

Well, I guess, my attitude is when I went to go see the movie, Titanic, I knew the boat was going to sink.

I still enjoyed the movie.

>> Right.

>> So 25 years after the kidnapping, George is about 33 years old and he's three years short of becoming the, you know, the head guy of this massive corporation.

And he gets a phone call and it's - because evidently, you can just pick up the phone and call those famous, powerful people.

>> Yeah.

>> It was Harmon Waley and he said, "George, this is Harmon Waley, your old kidnapper.

I just got out of prison after 25 years and I could sure use a job."

And George hired him.

George hired his kidnapper.

And I asked George, I said, "Why would you do that?"

And he said, "I just thought he might appreciate it."

>> That is a brief insight into this book that is filled with a lot of interesting facts and a very unexpected ending.

Bryan Johnston, thanks for coming to Northwest Now.

>> My pleasure.

>> I love reading about history because it gives you so much perspective.

In the '20s and '30s, being down and out had a much different meaning than it does now and it's hard to believe things could have been the way they were in this country.

The bottom line, Northwest Now is one of the few media outlets you'll ever encounter that encourages you to seek out other media.

Be it journalism, public affairs, or books, when you can find the time.

Our thanks to Bryan Johnston for walking us through Deep in the Woods.

I hope this program got you thinking and talking.

To watch this program, again, or to share it with others, Northwest Now can be found on the web at kbtc.org and be sure to follow us on Twitter @NorthwestNow.

Thanks for taking a closer look on this edition of Northwest Now.

Until next time, I'm Tom Layson.

Thanks for watching.

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