About this item
On a July afternoon in 1972, two masked men waving guns abducted forty-nine-year-old Virginia Piper from the garden of her lakeside home in Orono, Minnesota. After her husband, a prominent investment banker, paid a $1 million ransom, an anonymous caller directed the FBI to a thickly wooded section of a northern Minnesota state park. There, two days after her nightmare began, Ginny Piper--chained to a tree, filthy and exhausted, but physically unharmed--awaited her rescuers. The intensely private couple lived through a media firestorm. Both Bobby and Ginny Piper herself -- naturally reserved and surprisingly composed in the aftermath of her ordeal -- were subject to FBI scrutiny in the largest kidnap-for-ransom case in bureau annals. When two career criminals were finally indicted five years after the abduction, the Pipers again took center stage in two long trials before a jury's verdict made headlines across the nation.
About the Author
William Swanson is a journalist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is the author of Dial M: The Murder of Carol Thompson, Black White Blue: The Assassination of Patrolman Sackett, and, most recently, Stolen from the Garden: The Kidnapping of Virginia Piper.
