Long Island’s Vanished Heiress: The Unsolved Alice Parsons Kidnapping

By Steven C. Drielak

Alice McDonell Parsons was the heir to a vast fortune among Long Island's wealthy elite when she was kidnapped from Long Meadow Farm in Stony Brook in 1937. The crime shocked the nation and was front-page news for several months. J. Edgar Hoover personally assigned his best FBI agents to the case, and within a short time, Parsons's husband and their live-in housekeeper, Anna Kupryanova, had become prime suspects. Botched ransom attempts, clashes between authorities and romantic intrigue kept the investigation mired in drama. The crime remained unsolved and has captivated Long Island audiences ever since. Former Suffolk County detective Steven C. Drielak reveals previously classified FBI documents and pieces together the mystery of the Alice Parsons kidnapping.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Aug 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781439670330

Steven C. Drielak

Steven C. Drielak is an internationally recognized expert in the area of Hot Zone Forensic Attribution. He received his master's degrees from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He has more than thirty years of law enforcement experience. Steven was responsible for the establishment of the Suffolk County Environmental Crime Unit in New York and commanded that unit for sixteen years. Steven has served as a director within the EPA's Office of Criminal Enforcement, Forensics and Training in both the Homeland Security and Criminal Enforcement national programs. As the director of the EPA's National Criminal Enforcement Response Team, he was responsible for deploying environmental forensic evidence collection teams to BP Alaska's Prudhoe Bay oil pipeline failures and the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. Steven has served as a senior forensic attribution instructor and program developer for the Department of Homeland Security's Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia, and served for seventeen years as a National Academy Instructor for the EPA's criminal enforcement program. He has also provided environmental forensic attribution training for the FBI's Hazardous Materials Response Unit. He has provided international training to numerous countries within the European Union. He has authored and coauthored six textbooks in the areas of environmental crimes, weapons of mass destruction and forensic attribution. He has also authored two historical fiction novels. He has served as an appointed member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police Environmental Crimes Committee and served on the President's Interagency Microbial Forensics Advisory Board.