Grandmother’s Kidnapping Galvanizes a Community

It was cold the night that Grandma Braun was taken, that bitter dead-of-winter cold when the countryside is sheathed in ice and the stillness is broken only by great gusts of snow that swirl across the fields and back roads, erasing footprints, car tracks and all traces of life.

Hedwig Braun, 88, was in bed reading when the lights went out, but she didn’t pay much heed. In her tiny farmhouse miles from the nearest town, power outages were not uncommon. Pulling on her dressing gown, she lighted a candle and padded into the kitchen. She poured a glass of milk, settled at the table and continued her book about angels.

The clock had stopped at 12:50 a.m.

A sudden blast of wind. A shadowy figure in the doorway.

“Eddie!” she screamed as the intruder lurched toward her.

But her husband, 88, was asleep in the other room and didn’t stir.

At 5-foot-2, weighing 80 pounds, Braun was a slip of a woman whose toughness was all inside. She had no strength to fight off her abductor, and she didn’t try. She just prayed as she was flung into the trunk of her 1992 white Cadillac, prayed as they tore down the country road, screeching to a halt beside a ditch, prayed even harder as she was tossed into the trunk of another car that sped away again.

In the darkness, wedged against the spare tire, she wondered, “Why me? I’m just a nobody. What does he want with me?”

*

Nothing about the phone call made sense.

Robert Mann’s grandmother never called. She was almost deaf, so phone conversations were difficult for her.

It was Tuesday morning, Feb. 4, 2003. At his desk at Mann Bros. Inc. in Elkhorn, the family road construction company, Mann didn’t know what to think.

“Hi Grandma,” he began. “How are you?”

“I’m OK,” she said. “I’m not worried about dying. At my age, I thought I would have died a long time ago.”

Mann frowned. Aside from having to take heart medicine every day, his grandmother was healthy. She never rambled like this.

“Grandma, you’re not dying,” he said. “Where are you?”

“I’m in a dark place. I’m tied up. There’s a man.... He’s shining a light.... He says I’m going to die.”

“What man? Put the man on the phone.”

But the phone went dead.

Still puzzled, Mann phoned his aunt, Joan Wolfram, who lives a mile down the road from her parents. Wolfram immediately drove to their small green home. Her mother’s car was gone. Her father, who is blind, was sitting at the kitchen table.

He hadn’t heard his wife since they had gone to bed the night before, although at one point he thought he thought he heard her cry out. He assumed it was her leg cramps. When he didn’t hear her in the morning, he thought that she must have gone to visit one of their two sons, who live close by. But when Wolfram raced to their houses, neither was home.

Back at her parents’ house, Wolfram found her mother’s day clothes laid out in a neat pile. Missing were her nightclothes, along with the burgundy fleece gown that Wolfram had given her for Christmas.

Had her mother been in an accident? Was she lying in a hospital, unable to remember who she was? Was she frozen in a ditch or huddled in a barn?

“I’m calling the police,” Mann said when his aunt called him back.

Wolfram hung up. She opened the Yellow Pages and began dialing emergency rooms.

*

In the frigid, winter wilderness of rural Wisconsin, old people go missing all the time. They forget their medicine, get lost or confused, drive off the road.

When Heddie Braun’s car was discovered by a ditch about half a mile from her house, folks assumed the worst. The temperature was in the low 20s. An elderly woman couldn’t last long in her nightgown and slippers.

Little Prairie is just a dot on the map, 12 miles from Elkhorn, a place of wide open fields and scattered farms, a place where doors are left unlocked and car keys are left in the ignition.

Word spread fast that the woman everyone knew as Grandma Braun -- the tiny old lady with the snow-white hair and ever-expanding brood of great-grandchildren -- was missing.

Family members left their jobs in Elkhorn and raced to Little Prairie. Neighbors arrived with snowmobiles and dogs. Volunteer firefighters came from neighboring towns.

They fanned out over the frozen fields. They combed through the woods, knocked on doors and poked through barns.

“Heddie!” they cried, their calls echoing over the countryside. “Grandma Braun!”

Wolfram trudged the fields, calling and praying.

Mann stayed at his desk late into the night. He printed fliers with a picture of his grandmother and asked drivers for Mann Bros. to post them all over the state.

But the thought kept nagging him: What if there really was a man who had tied up his grandmother and was holding her hostage?

Walworth County Sheriff David Graves was uneasy too. Police found power and phone lines cut at the Braun house.

Graves, 50, a veteran police officaer, knew the Brauns and the Manns. He had been to Republican Party fundraisers at the home of Heddie’s eldest daughter, Judy, and her husband, Richard Mann. The Manns were among the wealthiest and most politically connected families in the region.

The money part was too troubling to ignore.

By Wednesday, Feb. 5, Graves was sure.

It was time to call the FBI.

*

Shackled in the darkness, praying for warmth -- and for strength -- Heddie Braun lost all sense of time.

At one point, she thought she heard helicopters and wondered if she was in a flight path or near an airport. Try to remember everything, she told herself, so when they find you, you can be of some help.

Briefly, she had glimpsed her masked abductor that first night as he carried her across a moonlit field and flung her inside a small, white utility trailer -- the kind used for snowmobiles. But she had no idea where she was or how long she had been there.

In one corner, a sputtering kerosene tank cast an eerie orange glow on the dirty mattress on which she was lying. A few blankets were thrown over her.

She prayed and dozed fitfully and tried not to think of the pain. Every now and then, he came with food -- orange juice and a hamburger.

Heddie tried to engage him in conversation, remembering her training from the home for mentally disabled where she had worked years ago. No matter what he has done, he is a person, just like me, she thought.

So she thanked him politely for the food, asked if everything was going according to plan. But her abductor never said a word.

She knew that her family would be searching for her. She knew that she couldn’t last much longer in this cold. She worried about not taking her heart medicine. She worried about Eddie.

The first day, her kidnapper had shone a flashlight on a note, demanding that she read it to her grandson, Robert, 33, on a cellphone. But Heddie was too deaf to understand what Robert was saying, and it was clear when the kidnapper yanked the phone from her that he was unhappy with the way the conversation had gone.

“Why me?” she asked, over and over.

He never said a word.

*

The ransom note was discovered by Robert Mann’s cleaning lady in his mailbox early on the morning of Thursday, Feb. 6.

Remove all posted missing person flyers

If not, death will be the end result

$3 million (in black sports bag) is the sum of life.

Staring at the note, Capt. Dana Nigbor, the sheriff’s department chief of detectives, could almost hear her own heart thumping.

“Oh my God,” she thought. “We’ve never worked a kidnapping before.”

There were so many questions: Where was the victim? Who was holding her? How would the kidnapper contact them again?

And the most haunting question of all: How long could an elderly woman, dressed only in her nightclothes, survive the trauma and the bitter cold?

Next week: The ransom, the nightmare and the cold.