Imperial Valley Press

Sunday Morning, August 29, 1937

Kidnapers Peril Wallace Beery's Adopted Daughter

HOLLYWOOD, Aug. 29. (UP)—Latest Hollywood kidnap threat—promising an unthinkable fate for the tiny blonde adopted daughter of Wallace Beery—sent another wave of fear through emotional movieland today.

Stalwart blue coats and private detectives in sport patrolled the magnificent Spanish hacienda, which Beery built in Beverly Hills, and in which six-year-old Carol Ann slept oblivious to the furore sweeping the town.

Guards were redoubled at many another mansion of the stars. Police patrol cars skittered through the palm-lined drives, as if in a gesture of reassurance to the actors and actresses whose lives have been made miserable the last three years by kidnap plots—which never have materialized.

"Dyer case," the Beery note said in letters clipped from a magazine.

These two words horrified Mrs. Beery, at home with her foster daughter and servants, while her big, homely husband was on location in Kanab, Utah, playing the part of a rumbling desperado in the film, "Bad Man of Brimstone."

The phrase struck with fiendish cruelty at Mrs. Beery's heart. Only yesterday had she read in the newspapers that Albert Dyer was to be hanged for the ravishment-murder of three girls no older than her own.

Beery phoned her frequently from the set in the Utah badlands and she tried—like the police—to regard the letter as that of a crank, of which there are so many on the fringes of the movie capital.

Postal inspectors, who must scrutinize many a strange-looking letter coming to Hollywood, still were attempting to run down the mailer of the threat, who dropped it in a mail box at Culver City—across the street from Beery's studio and then went into hiding.

In letters of varying sizes, clipped laboriously from a magazine, the note said:

Demand $10,000. (Payable not later than Thursday. R. Kelly, general delivery, Culver City."

Below these lines were the words "Dyer case" cut from newspaper headlines.