If he heard a funny noise or something in the woods. He only chained me up to the tree, when he left to go. I sat up straight and one of the kidnappers was in my attendance all of that time. And we just sort of sat there for two days. Fortunately I had on a pair of slacks, and a blazer. Ginny didn't know it, but they had taken her to Jay Cooke State Park near Duluth.Īnd they told me to sit down. She said at that point, they laid some kind of tarp down. It was raining as they began to walk her through the woods, through some deep grass. After driving for a couple of hours, they took her out of the car, and taped her eyes shut. But it's often the way they work.” Chained to a treeīut Ginny was still alive. That's usually the way these things work, which isn't necessarily true. “I think they felt that Ginny Piper was probably dead, she was a goner. These people were serious and dangerous, and he wasn’t going to mess around with them,” Swanson said. These were not some buffoons who were just playing around. When he read that note, he had no doubt in his mind that these guys meant business. The family ran in the same circles of other prominent Minnesota families including the Daytons and the Pillsburys. Swanson said Bobby was the one to discover the cleaning ladies tied up and the note laying on the table.Ī map of the Pipers' suburban neighborhood in Orono. There were other large ones, but none in the United States as large as this $1 million.” “It was the single largest kidnapping for ransom in FBI annals. “That, of course, is this extraordinary ransom note,” Swanson said. Swanson says before they left the house, they did one other thing: They left an envelope addressed to “Family” on a desk by the front door. Ginny went on to explain that they put a gun to her back and led her to their car where they put a pillowcase over her head and made her lay down in the back seat. He's at the office," and they said "Okay Mrs Piper, you're coming with us." "Where's the jewelry?" And I said, "you may have three of my pieces that are upstairs, that's all I had." And they said, "Where's your old man?" And I said, "He is not here. and I had two cleaning ladies there that day because they always come on Thursday, and one of them came running out the terrace and said, "Oh, those men," and I couldn't imagine what she was talking about, so of course I went inside and here are these two gunman masked.īoth each one of them had two guns in their hands, and they said, "Go get the cleaning woman, the one who ran away," he said "get her back" and they tied them up, handcuffed me and asked me where the safe was and I said we didn't have one. Thursday afternoon about five minutes of one, I was out picking some dead pansies off one of my plants.