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 personall

A new look at the 1937 abduction of a wealthy wife and mother, based on previously classified FBI documents—includes photos. When she was kidnapped from Long Meadow Farm in Stony Brook, New York, in 1937, Alice McDonell Parsons was the heir to a vast fortune among Long Island’s wealthy elite. 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. Now, in this book, former Suffolk County detective Steven C. Drielak reveals previously classified FBI documents—and pieces together the mystery of the Alice Parsons kidnapping.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 On June 9, 1937, the four inhabitants of a small farmhouse in Stony Brook, New York, began their day. William Parsons, the owner of Long Meadow Farm, put his trousers on over his pajamas and a sweater over his shirt before leaving the house to feed the pigeons and other poultry livestock. #2 In the fall of 1936, the three of them jointly tried to increase sales. They had thought at first to arrange a display of their canned squab with Macy’s department store in New York City, but they abandoned the idea because the market price for squab was low. They believed that there was more of a market for the squab paste than there was for the canned squabs. #3 On her return to the farm, Alice parked the Dodge at a slight angle at the rear of the house. Inside, she and Anna talked about the flowers that were to be taken to the flower exchange at the Three Village Garden Club in Stony Brook. #4 Anna observed a woman and a man visit the farmhouse. The woman was wearing a plain blue dress and a blue straw hat with a low crown. The man was wearing a dark felt hat and a gray suit. They did not notice that they were being observed by Alice and Anna from the farmhouse’s kitchen.

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Begun as a pork-barrel project by the federal government in the early 1900s, the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians (also known as the Hiawatha Insane Asylum) quickly became a dumping ground for inconvenient Indians. The federal institution in Canton, South Dakota, deprived many Native patients of their freedom without genuine cause, often requiring only the signature of a reservation agent. Only nine Native patients in the asylum’s history were committed by court order. Without interpreters, mental evaluations, or therapeutic programs, few patients recovered. But who cared about Indians in South Dakota? After three decades of complacency, both the superintendent and the city of Canton were surprised to discover that someone did care, and that a bitter fight to shut the asylum down was about to begin. In this disturbing tale, Carla Joinson unravels the question of why this institution persisted for so many years. She also investigates the people who allowed Canton Asylum’s mismanagement to reach such staggering proportions and asks why its administrators and staff were so indifferent to the misery experienced by their patients. Vanished in Hiawatha is the harrowing tale of the mistreatment of Native American patients at a notorious asylum whose history helps us to understand the broader mistreatment of Native peoples under forced federal assimilation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.