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Stolen from the Garden: The Kidnapping of Virginia Piper
Stolen from the Garden: The Kidnapping of Virginia Piper
Stolen from the Garden: The Kidnapping of Virginia Piper
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Stolen from the Garden: The Kidnapping of Virginia Piper

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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.

Drawing on closely held government documents and exclusive interviews with family members, investigators, suspects, lawyers, and others intimately connected to the case, William Swanson provides the first comprehensive account of the sensational Piper kidnapping and its long, eventful aftermath––and makes a case for the most plausible explanation for what really happened on that July afternoon.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 15, 2014
ISBN9780873519489
Stolen from the Garden: The Kidnapping of Virginia Piper
Author

William Swanson

William “Bill” Swanson was born in August 1924 in Taft, California. His parents, William E. and Helen Sall, were first generation children of Swedish immigrant farmers. Helen died tragically a couple of weeks after the birth of their second son, Glen, in 1926. Then in Glendale, California, a single father with an infant and young son, William tried desperately to provide for his boys and keep his job, hiring housekeepers and neighbors to watch the boys. Ultimately raised by their loving grandmother, Bill and Glen remained there until the outbreak of WWII and Bill’s enlistment in the United States Marine Corps. After the war, Bill returned to Glendale where he met his future wife Rita Dolores Rockefeller. They married in Santa Barbara and took their honeymoon along the coast to San Francisco. They bought a small house in the orange grove suburbs of L.A., raised two children, and later had two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Bill retired from the City of Los Angeles Water & Power Dept. in 1986. In retirement, they enjoyed 3rd Marine Division reunions where they made many close friends. They had a wonderful life together. Rita passed away in 2013 and Bill now lives near his family in Imperial Beach, California.

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    Stolen from the Garden - William Swanson

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