The abduction is presumed to have taken place while Brooke L. Hart was driving to the Elhart

department store at Santa Clara and Market Street, San Jose, of which his father is owner.

The father had asked the youth to drive him to the San Jose Country Club where he had a dinner

engagement, and the latter is known to have left the lot, presumably headed for the store,

at about 6 o'clock.

When he had failed to arrive by 6.10,

the father assumed he had had trouble with the car and went to the club in a friend's car.

But Young Hart also failed to arrive home for dinner

and at 8 o'clock to keep an appointment with a friend. The father by this time had

become worried and he telephoned the police to ask whether his son had met with an accident,

but there was no report of the kind. At 10 o'clock after the father returned home, he was called to the phone.

We have your son, said a strange and somewhat rough voice.

And we want $40,000 for him. If you notify the police, you'll never see him alive again.

The speaker abruptly hung up, before Hart could inform him that he had

already notified the police of his son's disappearance. The call was immediately traced and led to a

phone booth at the San Francisco Hotel. But there, the trail ended. But the booth was in a position in which it could not easily be observed, and no one, it appeared, had noticed anyone telephoning at the time the call was made.

At 6 o'clock last evening, about the time that the youth's father was telling Perry Belshaw, manager of the San Jose Country Club, that he was

worried over his son's absence. Mrs. Belshaw noticed a car parked with its lights burning in front

of the Belshaw home on Eden Lane about three miles east of Milpedus. Belshall's wife, Edna, was disturbed by the lights of the auto when it parked on the road

150 feet away from their home.

She pulled down a shade, thinking it probably contained petters.

Mrs. Belshaw did not pay any attention to the auto after she had pulled down the shade,

...