The Death of an Heir by Philip Jett

Author:Philip Jett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CHAPTER 13

Joe Corbett was now the strongest suspect, but the FBI believed he might have a confederate. After all, the ransom note did say “kidnapers” (the common spelling in 1960), and Corbett had sometimes been seen with another man in his car.

Arthur C. Brynaert was a twenty-five-year-old, five-foot-eight, 145-pound, brown-haired man with a shady past. Though young, he’d already amassed an arrest record that included felony warrants for passing bad checks and vagrancy. He’d also deserted his wife and three children just a year earlier and was heavily in debt to several loan companies. But that didn’t interest the FBI.

The down-on-his-luck Brynaert had ascended to the top of the FBI’s suspect list principally because he’d worked with Corbett each night at Benjamin Moore & Co. In fact, they had been the only two in the entire plant during the night shift. Not only had they been coworkers, they had been drinking buddies, frequently going out after work. But the most interesting fact (among all facts concerning Brynaert set out in the FBI’s investigation report) was that on February 16, 1960, one week after Ad Coors’s disappearance, Brynaert quit his job at Benjamin Moore and went into hiding for three days. Then Brynaert and his new wife and baby caught a 2:45 a.m. Greyhound bus to Omaha, Nebraska. The FBI understandably viewed his movements as suspicious. His car, a 1946 Chevrolet, resembling a Dodge that had been spotted near Ad Coors’s house and Turkey Creek Bridge, had also disappeared.

The FBI caught up with Brynaert and his new family in Omaha on March 17. Brynaert was at work at the Peter Pan Market when agents interviewed his wife, Frances, at their residence in the Chief Hotel.

“What kind of car does your husband drive?”

“He did drive a 1946 four-door Chevrolet that he bought back in January.”

“Where is it now?”

“I don’t know. Art said it blew up and wouldn’t run.”

“When was the last time you saw it?”

“Let me think back. It would have been on Monday, the fifteenth of February, the day after Valentine’s. He called me the next day and told me it’d blown up on ’im.”

“Would your husband have loaned it to anyone?”

“I don’t know if he did, but he would, I think, if somebody needed it.”

“Did you notice anything unusual about the car the last few times you saw it, like was it muddy, did it have stains on the seats, an unusual odor, anything?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Can you account for your husband’s whereabouts after the fifteenth?”

“No, ’cause he was hiding out from collectors, especially the Liberty Loan Company that was looking for him. They came by once, so he left home.”

Brynaert’s wife went on to explain how her husband frequently gambled his Benjamin Moore paycheck away, which caused them to fall behind in their payments to various finance companies. He’d also written two bad checks in February and was behind on the rent. They’d skipped out on their Denver landlord in the middle of the night when they absconded to Omaha.

“Did

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