List of kidnappings: 1900–1949

The following is a list of kidnappings in the first half of the 20th century, summarizing the events of each case, including instances of celebrity abductions, claimed hoaxes, suspected kidnappings, extradition abductions, and mass kidnappings.

Date	Victim(s)	Abductor(s)	Location	Age of victim(s)	Outcome	Notes
18 December 1900	Edward Cudahy Jr.	Pat Crowe (accused)	Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.	15	Released	Son of a business magnate who was kidnapped and held for $25,000 ransom, with his abductor, Pat Crowe, releasing him after the ransom was paid. After being found not guilty at trial, he made a living as a lecturer and author.
18 May 1904	Ion Perdicaris	Bandits sent by Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli	Tangier, Morocco	64	Released	Perdicaris and his stepson, Cromwell Varley, were kidnapped by Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli in Tangier. US Secretary of State John Hay declared, "This government wants Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead." The two men were released alive upon payment of a ransom.
	Cromwell Varley			Unknown
1909	George Cove	Unknown	The Bronx, New York, U.S.	unknown	Released	Canadian inventor who was kidnapped by unknown assailants, who offered him $25,000 in exchange for him to stop promoting his devices. He refused and was later released without harm. Cove accused a former investor of orchestrating the kidnapping, but nothing came out of it and his business soon flunked.
28 June 1910	Bernardo Parra	Francisco Leona	Gádor, Almería, Spain	7	Murdered	Parra was abducted by local healer Francisco Leona at the request of Francisco "the Moor" Ortega. At the time, it was believed that drinking the blood of a child could cure tuberculosis, prompting Ortega to pay Leona 3000 reales to find him a child. Leona and another man abducted Parra and carried him away in a gunny sack, giving rise to the term El Sacamantecas, and murdered him.
8 April 1911	Elsie Paroubek	Unknown	Chicago, Illinois, US	5	Murdered	Paroubek was a Czech-American girl who disappeared while walking alone to her aunt's house nearby in Chicago. Her body was found a month later in a drainage ditch. Several people, including Paroubek's father and the police in charge of the investigation, suspected Roma (who had several camps in the area at the time) were involved.
23 August 1912	Bobby Dunbar	Unknown	St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, US	4	Unknown	Bobby Dunbar disappeared at age 4 near Swayze Lake. After an eight-month nationwide search, investigators found a child, claimed by Dunbar's parents as their son, in the household of William Cantwell Walters of Mississippi. He was convicted of kidnapping. Walters told the police the boy was given to him by his mother, and that his name was Charles Bruce Anderson, known as Bruce. The boy's mother, Julia Anderson, affirmed Walters' account. In 2004, further investigation by "Dunbar's" granddaughter led to conclusive DNA proof that the child in Walters' custody was not Dunbar's son. Walters had been wrongfully convicted for taking care of Charles Bruce Anderson. Dunbar was never found and his disappearance has never been conclusively solved.
17 August 1915	Leo Frank	Knights of Mary Phagan	Milledgeville State Penitentiary, Georgia, U.S.	31	Murdered	Jewish man wrongly convicted of raping and killing a 13 years old white girl named Mary Phagan. After Frank's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, a group of vigilantes calling themselves "The Knights of Mary Phagan" abducted him from prison and summarily hanged him.
15 May 1916	Jesse Washington	A lynch mob	Waco, Texas, U.S.	17	Murdered	Washington, an African-American farmhand, was accused of murdering a white woman named Lucy Fryer. After pleading guilty to the crime, he was dragged from the courthouse by a crowd of angry observers who paraded him across town in chains and beat and stabbed him before hanging him from a tree, cutting off his fingers, castrating him, and finally burning him alive over a period of two hours.
1923	Mei Zhanchun	Unknown	Hankou, China	58–59	Murdered	Zhanchun (born Father Pascal Angelicus Melotto) was a Roman Catholic priest of the Franciscan Order. He was kidnapped for ransom in 1923 and murdered three months later. Zhanchun is one of the earliest Martyrs in China.
21 May 1924	Bobby Franks	Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb	Chicago, Illinois, US	14	Murdered	Franks was abducted and beaten to death by Leopold and Loeb, two wealthy students who wished to commit the perfect crime. The two killers were sentenced to life imprisonment after a sensational trial at which they were defended by Clarence Darrow. Loeb was killed in prison, but Leopold was released after serving 33 years.
15 March 1925	Madge Oberholtzer	D. C. Stephenson	Indianapolis, Indiana, US	29	Released, but died from assault-related injuries	White woman who was abducted and forcefully raped by a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, which later led to her dying from injuries received during the assault. The case led to a steep decline in KKK memberships in the state of Indiana.
1927	Lea Niako	Unknown	Portugal	19	Escaped	German dancer and actress who was abducted by a stalker while filming the film Fátima Milagrosa (1928). She was taken to the Boca do Inferno chasm in Cascais, but escaped upon arrival.
15 December 1927	Marion Parker	William Hickman	Los Angeles, California, US	12	Murdered	Parker, the daughter of a Los Angeles banker, was kidnapped and killed by William Hickman. A few days after receiving a small ransom, Hickman was arrested and tried. He was convicted and sentenced to death. On 19 October 1928, he was executed for his crime.
February - 16 May 1928	Wineville Chicken Coop murders	Gordon Stewart Northcott	Los Angeles, California, US		Murdered	At least three children – Lewis and Nelson Winslow and an unnamed Mexican boy (possibly Alvin Gothea) – were abducted by Gordon Northcott and accomplices, who sexually abused and killed them on Northcott's chicken farm in Wineville. One of Northcott's accomplices also claimed responsibility for the abduction and murder of Walter Collins, a 9-year-old boy who disappeared in 1928, and Northcott confessed to five more murders, but none of these claims were proved.
28 May 1928	Grace Budd	Albert Fish	New York City, U.S.	10	Murdered	Fish, a sadomasochistic serial killer and pedophile, tricked the Budd family into allowing him to take their 10-year-old daughter Grace to a party that evening. He then drove her to his rented cottage in the Irvington neighbourhood, where he strangled her and dismembered and ate her body.
26 January 1930	Alexander Kutepov	Joint State Political Directorate agents	Paris, France	47	Died during apprehension	Russian anti-communist and leader of the Russian All-Military Union during the Russian Civil War, who suffered from a heart attack when he was abducted by OGPU agents, dying on the spot.
15 May 1930	Mary Agnes Moroney	Unknown	Chicago, Illinois, US	2	Raised by a person with an unknown connection to the abductor	Moroney was taken from her home by a woman who identified herself as "Julia Otis" and claimed to have been sent by a social worker. In 2023, it was determined through DNA testing that Jeanette Burchard, who died in 2003, was Moroney. Her kidnapping was the oldest unsolved case of this nature in the files of the Chicago Missing Persons Bureau.
4 June 1930	Asser Salo	Anti-communist Lapua Movement activists	Vaasa, Finland	28	Released	Asser Salo, a Finnish lawyer and politician, was kidnapped in Vaasa by activists of the anti-communist Lapua Movement on 4 June 1930. Salo was forced under threat for his life to make a public promise to never again engage in communist activities on the territory of Vaasa Province. Soon thereafter, Salo went into exile, first to Sweden, then to the Soviet Union.
July 1930	Väinö Hakkila	Lapua Movement members	Finland	48	Released	Finnish SDP politician and speaker for Parliament who was kidnapped and beaten by Lapua Movement members. He survived the assault, and later resumed his career.
5 July 1930	Eino Pekkala	Lapua Movement members	Ostrobothnia, Finland	43	Released	Finnish socialist politician who, together with Jalmari Rötkö, was kidnapped by fascist Lapua Movement members while they were attending the Constitutional Law Committee. Both were handed over to authorities the next day, and Pekkala was sentenced to 3 years imprisonment for treason.
3 September 1930	Samuel Irby	Huey Long (alleged)	Shreveport, Louisiana	40	Released	Former Louisiana State Department official who, together with James Terrell, disappeared from his hotel room. Irby brought to Grand Isle, Louisiana just before an important election, then forced on a radio broadcast to deny having been abducted. Later in 1932 published Kidnapped By The Kingfish about the incident. Died in 1933.
14 October 1930	K. J. Ståhlberg and Ester Ståhlberg	Lapua Movement members	Helsinki, Finland	65 / 60	Released	Former President of Finland and his wife who were abducted near their home and taken to Joensuu, from where another group was supposed to take them to the Soviet Union. Because the second group never showed up they were released.
14 December 1931	Vera Page	Unknown	Kensington, London, UK	10	Murdered	Page was abducted, raped and strangled by an unidentified man in December 1931. The only suspect, Percy Rush, was never charged due to lack of evidence, and the case remains unsolved.
1 March 1932	Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr.	Richard Hauptmann	East Amwell Township, New Jersey, US	1	Murdered	Charles was the son of American aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh. On 1 March, the 20-month-old child was taken from his crib at home in what was called "the crime of the century". Ransom negotiations were unsuccessful, and his remains were found on 12 May. Hauptmann was found and arrested in September 1934, and was convicted of the crime on 13 February 1935, sentenced to death, and electrocuted on 3 April 1936. Congress passed the "Lindbergh Law", formally known as "The Federal Kidnapping Act of 1932", on 13 June 1932. The law made kidnapping a federal crime if the victim was taken across state lines, enabling investigation and other actions by federal law enforcement.
3 July 1932	Unidentified 4-year-old girl	Robert David Bennett	Carlton North, Melbourne	4	Released	Bennett, a convicted child molester, enticed a young girl into an empty house he was renovating under the pretext of giving her sweets before raping her. He allowed her to leave through the back door after a group of adults came looking for her in the hope of concealing his crime, but was found out and executed, making him the last person to hang in Australia for a crime other than murder.
27 May 1933	Mary McElroy	George McGee, Walter McGee, Clarence Click, and Clarence Stevens	Kansas City, Missouri, US	25	Released	McElroy, the daughter of City Manager Henry F. McElroy of Kansas City, was kidnapped and held for ransom. She was released unharmed after the ransom was paid. The four kidnappers were later apprehended, convicted at trial, and given life sentences.
22 July 1933	Charles F. Urschel	Machine Gun Kelly	Oklahoma City, U.S.	34	Released	Urschel, an oil tycoon, was carjacked at gunpoint by gangsters led by George "Machine Gun" Kelly, who drove him to a farmhouse in Paradise, Texas and held him prisoner for a week before releasing him after being paid a $200, 000 ransom. Urschel memorized details about his location and deliberately left forensic evidence at the farmhouse, which enabled the FBI to track down and arrest the kidnappers relatively quickly.
9 November 1933	Brooke Hart	Thomas Harold Thurmond and John M. Holmes	San Jose, California, US	22	Murdered	Hart, the son of a San Jose, California businessman, was kidnapped. His body was later found. His two alleged kidnappers were arrested and, before trial, lynched by a mob.
25 April 1934	June Robles	Unknown	Tucson, Arizona, US	6	Released	Robles was abducted and held for ransom. After negotiations between her parents and her captors, she was found unharmed on a highway after nineteen days in captivity. Only one arrest was made in connection with her abduction.
19 September 1934	Dorothy Ann Distelhurst	Unknown	East Nashville, Tennessee, US	5	Murdered	Distelhurst disappeared while walking home from school. After media coverage, her parents received multiple ransom notes, but the police were unable to determine their veracity. The child's remains were found on 13 November 1934, buried under a flower bed at the corner of the Davidson County Tuberculosis Hospital. Her killer is unknown.
26 October 1934	Claude Neal	A lynch mob	Brewton, Alabama, U.S.	23	Murdered	Neal, an African-American farmhand, was accused of raping and killing a white woman named Lola Cannady in Jackson County, Florida. The authorities attempted to protect him from lynching by having him covertly transferred to the local jail in Brewton, Alabama, but Jackson County locals found out where he was, removed him from the jail and took him back to Florida, where a group of six men tortured and castrated him before hanging him to death. His body was then driven to the home of Lola Cannady's father to be disfigured further.
26 November 1934	R.N. Baker, H.R. Marks	Arthur Gooch, Ambrose Nix	Paris, Texas, U.S.		Released	Police officers Baker and Marks were kidnapped by Gooch and Nix, a pair of criminals who they had tried to apprehend. In the course of the kidnapping Baker was shoved into a glass cabinet by Nix and deeply wounded. The two officers were released by their captors the following day after being driven up to Pushmataha County, Oklahoma. They then notified local law enforcement, who shot and killed Nix and arrested Gooch.
26 December 1935	Tito Minniti	Ethiopians	Degehabur, Somali Region, Ethiopia	25–26	Murdered	Italian pilot Tito Minniti was captured, killed, and allegedly tortured by Ethiopians during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War on 26 December 1935. What happened to Minniti after he was captured varies depending on the source; in one version, Minniti was forced to surrender after running out of ammunition, after which he was tortured, mutilated, and killed by Ethiopian forces. In another version, Minniti was killed by Ethiopian civilians angered by the bombing of their villages.
12 December 1936	Chiang Kai-shek	Zhang Xueliang	Xi'an, China	49	Released	Chiang Kai-shek, leader of China, was kidnapped by a warlord in an affair known as the Xi'an Incident. He was released.
27 December 1936	Charles Mattson	Unknown	Tacoma, Washington, US	10	Murdered	Mattson was abducted from his home and held for $28,000. He was found dead in January 1937.
27 December 1936	Lojze Bratuž	Italian fascists	Gorizia, Italy	35	Murdered	Slovene choirmaster and composer who was kidnapped by Italian Fascists and forced to drink a fatal mixture of castor oil, gasoline and motor oil. He was unable to recover, and died in a hospital half a month later.
5 January 1937	Mona Tinsley	Frederick Nodder	Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, U.K.	10	Murdered	Mona Tinsley was lured by her parents' former lodger, Frederick Nodder, while leaving her school. Nodder then took her up to his home in Hayton where he strangled her to death, possibly after molesting her. Nodder was convicted of kidnapping Mona, then tried again, convicted for her murder and sentenced to death after her body was found eight miles from his house.
22 September 1937	Yevgeny Miller	Nikolai Skoblin and NKVD officers	Paris, France	69	Murdered	Miller, an anti-bolshevik Russian general, was kidnapped by NKVD agents. The NKVD successfully smuggled him back to Moscow, Russia. He was tortured during interrogation and executed by gunshot nineteen months later, in 1939.
25 September 1937	Charles Ross	John Henry Seadlund, James Atwood Gray	Franklin Park, Illinois, U.S.	72	Murdered	Ross, a wealthy greeting card executive, was held for ransom by criminals John Seadlund and James Gray, who managed to negotiate a ransom payment of $50, 000. Two days after receiving the ransom, Seadlund fought with Gray over the money and ended up shooting both Gray and Ross and throwing them into a pit.
14 September 1942	Helen Lynch	Edward Haight	Bedford Village, New York, U.S.	8	Murdered	Two sisters abducted and murdered by 16-year-old Edward Haight. Both were murdered and discarded in separate locations near Bedford Village, with the older sister also being raped prior to her murder. Haight was executed for the sisters' murder at Sing Sing Prison on 8 July 1943. He was the youngest person to be executed via the electric chair in New York history.
	Margaret Lynch			7
27 September 1943	Norma Cossetto	Yugoslav communists	Vižinada, Croatia	23	Murdered	Istrian Italian student and alleged Fascist sympathizer who was detained by Yugoslav communists after allegedly refusing to join the resistance. Over the next few days, while the German forces were invading the area, Cossetto was repeatedly raped and tortured by her captors, before they finally threw her and two other women in a foiba on 4 to 5 October.
3 January 1944	Pappy Boyington	Imperial Japanese Navy	Pacific Ocean	31	Released	Boyington, an American combat pilot, was shot down into the Pacific Ocean in January 1944 while serving as a United States Marine Corps fighter ace during World War II. He was captured by the crew of Japanese submarine I-181 and held as a prisoner of war until August 29, 1945, shortly after the surrender of Japan. Boyington returned to the U.S. at Naval Air Station Alameda on September 12, 1945.
29 April 1944	Lena Baker	Ernest Knight	Cuthbert, Georgia, U.S.	43	Escaped (later judicially executed)	Baker, a black woman, was a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of Knight, her white employer, who regularly held her captive overnight. Baker was repeatedly threatened by townsfolk to end the "relationship", but on 29 April Knight forcibly took her up to his mill, where he beat and raped her. Baker managed to escape and shot Knight dead; she was later executed for murdering Knight, but the verdict was overturned posthumously in 2005.
9 June 1944	Helmut Kämpfe	Georges Guingouin Brigade	Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat, France	34	Murdered	Waffen SS Sturmbannführer who was taken prisoner by a Maquis unit under the command of Georges Guingouin while heading anti-resistance activities in southern France. The day after his abduction, Kämpfe was burned alive under Guingouin's orders. SS troops carried out the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre in retaliation.
3 September 1944	Recy Taylor	Herbert Lovett and others	Abbeville, Alabama, U.S.	25	Released	Taylor, a black woman, was kidnapped at gunpoint by seven white men led by Herbert Lovett who drove her out into the woods and raped her at knifepoint. The attackers were identified, but due to the racism of the time none of them were prosecuted.
11 September 1944	Richard P. Keirn	Nazi Party	Leipzig, Germany	20	Released	A fighter pilot in the United States Air Force. Keirn was taken prisoner in September 1944 after his aircraft was shot down during World War II. He was later repatriated to the United States.
c. 30 September 1944	Ștefan Foriș	PCR paramilitary forces	Romania	52	Released	A Hungarian and Romanian communist journalist who served as general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) between December 1940 and April 1944. He was kidnapped by PCR paramilitary forces in September 1944, but released from captivity in January 1945.
2 November 1945	Thora Chamberlain	Thomas McMonigle	Campbell, California, U.S.	14	Murdered	Thora Chamberlain was last seen getting into a car with a man wearing US Navy uniform and medals after accepting an offer to babysit for him. The man was later identified as Thomas McMonigle, who had stolen the uniform and medals in order to better attract women, who initially admitted to abducting Chamberlain and then killing her after trying to rape her; however, he told several different stories about what happened, and recanted all his confessions before his execution in 1948. Chamberlain's body was never found.
19 December 1945	Oto Iskandar di Nata	"The Black Troop"	Tangerang, Indonesia	48	Murdered	Indonesian politician who was supposedly killed on a beach by a group identifying themselves as 'The Black Troop'. As his body was then dumped into the sea, it was never located.
7 January 1946	Suzanne Degnan	William Heirens	Edgewater, Chicago, U.S.	6	Murdered	Suzanne Degnan was taken from her home by an intruder who claimed in a letter to be targeting her father, an executive in the OPA. Her dismembered remains were found in storm drains around the neighborhood. William Heirens pled guilty to her murder and two others, although his actual guilt has been questioned.
29 December 1946	Paddy Brett, Terence Gillam, two others	Irgun	Mandatory Palestine		Released	In retaliation for the judicial flogging of an Irgun member, Irgun squads abducted four British soldiers in Netanya, Rishon LeZion and Tel Aviv and lashed them eighteen times each before letting them go.
30 July 1947	Sergeants Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice	Irgun guerrillas	Mandatory Palestine	19 (Martin)	Murdered	Martin and Paice were both British Army Intelligence Corps non-commissioned officers. Both were murdered by Irgun militants in reprisal for the execution of three of their members by the British Army.
				20 (Paice)
22 January 1948	Alice Meza	Caryl Chessman	Greater Los Angeles Area, California	17	Released	Forced out of a car her boyfriend was driving when they stopped at a red light. The boyfriend drove off, before the kidnapper drove Alice to a secondary location and orally and anally raped her under the threat of killing her boyfriend. Despite reported beatings and torture in interrogation, Caryl Chessman was identified by the Ford Coupe at the scene and by Alice in a lineup. Chessman was executed under the statute of the Federal Kidnapping Act making kidnapping with bodily harm a capital crime.
15 May 1948	June Anne Devaney	Peter Griffiths	Blackburn, England	3	Murdered	Inpatient at Queen's Park Hospital who was abducted, raped and killed by a man who had been to the hospital. The case is considered a milestone in British forensics, being the first case to be solved by mass fingerprinting.
15 June 1948	Florence Sally Horner	Frank La Salle	Camden, New Jersey, U.S.	11	Rescued	11-year-old Sally Horner was caught shoplifting by La Salle, a convicted child molester, who convinced her that he was an FBI agent and she had to come with him to avoid being arrested for the theft. La Salle held Horner captive for 21 months and sexually abused her until he was arrested by the FBI in 1950 after Horner managed to call her sister. The case is thought to have inspired Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel Lolita.
20 July 1949	Shirley Gretzinger	Ray Dempsey Gardner	Ogden, Utah, U.S.	17	Murdered	Gretzinger was the second victim of serial killer Ray Gardner, who picked her up under the guise of a babysitting job and drove her to a gulch outside the city limits before making sexual advances on her. When Gretzinger fought back, Gardner suffocated her by stuffing wadded paper down her throat and raped her body.
5 August 1949	Thelma Taylor	Morris Leland	Portland, Oregon, U.S.	15	Murdered	Thelma Taylor was accosted at a bus stop by Morris Leland, who forced her to come with him to a secluded area where he tried to rape her, but stopped when he realized she was a virgin. Leland kept Taylor captive overnight before killing her the following day when she tried to call out for help. Leland was sentenced to death for the murder.