Thank you to Linda High Thompson for contributing this old image of the McCall home. This was obviously before Dade County was practically defoliated of pine trees.
This is the story of the national news kidnapping from the New York Daily News:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2008/06/21/2008-06-21_hoover_and_the_child_snatcher-1.html?print=1&page=all
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Hoover and The Child Snatcher
BY DAVID J. KRAJICEK, SPECIAL TO THE NEWS, Saturday, June 21st 2008, 6:30 PM
J. Edgar Hoover needed a crime - a big crime, a headline-grabbing whopper.
Times were hard in 1938. Congress was stingy with the $7 billion in tax money it had to play with as the Great Depression held fast and war loomed.
The FBI was smarting from a budget cut, and the agency's cantankerous director made an I'll-show-you move by furloughing half of his 670 agents and shuttering five bureaus.
Congress was considering a Deficiency Bill that May to restore the agency to its full girth. But Hoover had little charm as a Capitol Hill beggar.
His instinct was to find a crime that would restore the FBI's eminence - like the 1934 "Public Enemy" publicity bonanza when John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde got their comeuppance.
The Teletype Hoover had hoped for arrived at FBI headquarters on May 28, 1938. James B. Cash Jr., a plump blond 5-year-old known as "Skeegie," had been kidnapped from his bed in Princeton, Fla., a farming hamlet set amid orange groves and tomato fields on the Miami-Key West highway.
The 1932 Lindbergh Law had given the FBI dibs on kidnappings, and Hoover and 14 agents were on a charter flight to Miami before the Teletype stopped clattering.
Ransom demand
Skeegie Cash's parents operated a store connected to their home. Mrs. Cash had tucked in her son about 9:30 that Saturday night and went to the store to help her husband lock up.
They discovered the boy missing when they returned to the house. A rear screen door had been sliced open.
Shortly, a local black man named John Emanuel arrived at the Cash home with a ransom note. Emanuel explained that he had been ordered to deliver the note by a man who came to his home and stood outside in the dark. He said he did not recognize the man's voice.
The note, written on brown butcher paper, directed Cash to a second note at the home of Cash's brother, also in Princeton.
The kidnapper wanted $10,000 for the safe return of Skeegie. Cash was instructed to drive his car to several spots in the Everglades. He was to flash his lights. If he got no return flash, he was to go on to the next location.
As word spread, some 2,000 farmers assembled in Princeton. They were split into nearly 50 posses and assigned to comb half-mile sections. But for days they searched and found nothing.
Horse sense told Dade County Sheriff D.C. Coleman that the kidnapping was a local job. The kidnapper must have known that both of Skeegie's parents would be busy in the store at closing time, and he obviously was aware that James Cash's brother lived in Princeton.
Another curiosity: James Cash Sr. was not wealthy, but he worked hard at his business and lived a frugal life. He had just over $10,000 in the bank.
It was as though the kidnapper had seen the Cash balance sheet.
For two nights after the kidnapping, Cash Sr. drove to the assigned ransom locations but got no reply to his flashing lights.
Cash finally made the ransom drop - $10,000 in a shoe box - a few days later after a third note with new locations was found on the floor of a Princeton filling station.
A customer pointed the note out to an attendant who hadn't noticed it.
"What customer found the note?" Sheriff Coleman shrewdly asked.
"Frank McCall," the attendant said.
Franklin Pierce McCall, 21, an evangelical preacher's son from north Florida, had moved to Princeton with his young wife a couple of years earlier, looking for work as a tomato picker.
Coleman learned that the McCalls had boarded with the Cash family during two tomato seasons.
Frank McCall had been an avid member of the Skeegie search posse, and he had annoyed other searchers with odd comments about how easy it would have been to snatch the child.
Coleman hauled him in for "acting mysteriously." Hoover big-footed the sheriff and took charge of the interrogation.
McCall denied all. But under relentless grilling, he went through the customary changes in his story: He didn't do it, but he might know who did; he was there, but he didn't participate; the boy was dead, but he didn't kill him.
Finally, 10 days after the disappearance, McCall admitted everything and led Hoover and Coleman to a sandy grave in a palmetto thicket near Princeton.
The safe-return promise had been a lie. The boy was dead within minutes of the kidnapping. Hoover said McCall snatched Skeegie, covered his face with a hankie and carried him to his house, 15 minutes away.
"McCall said the child did not move at any time he held it, and he thought it was asleep," Hoover said. "He tried to awaken the child but found it to be dead."
He buried the boy and went ahead with his ransom plan.
Devil's work
Why had McCall done it? His preacher-father must have recoiled at his progeny's reply: It was greed, with a Depression-era twist.
Hoover said, "He claimed he wanted the better things of life for his wife and himself and had been unable to get steady employment."
The good life was fleeting. McCall spent just $5 from the ransom money. Cash got the rest back.
McCall had considered two other victims from wealthier families before settling on Skeegie. He said he knew from his time as a Cash boarder that the family had a five-figure bank balance.
The Skeegie kidnapping was front-page news from New York to Los Angeles, and Hoover was hailed as the investigative hero, despite the sad conclusion. Just days later, "friends in Congress" - as Time magazine put it - amended the Deficiency Bill to restore the FBI to its full manpower.
Down in Dade County, authorities fought off a vigilante mob that wanted to lynch Frank McCall. He pleaded guilty, was condemned to die and was electrocuted on Feb. 24, 1939.
