Jasper County Democrat, Volume 20, Number 77, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 December 1917 — KEET BABY POISONED [ARTICLE]

KEET BABY POISONED

Piersol Says Plotters Gave Child Drug. Twelve Others Implicated in Abduction Case—Planned to Seize Banker. Springfield, Mo., Dec. 24.—Claude G. Piersol, convicted kidnaper of Baby Lloyd Keet, has confessed to Sheriff Mackey, asserting the baby was killed by a drug administered by the “Mysterious Riley” to. keep it quiet. »= The signed confession, made public, implicates 12 other persons, including those now under arrest. Maxie Adams, seventeen years old, recently released on a charge of attempting to kidnap C. A. Clement, was rearrested as a result of Piersol’s confession. Other warrants have been Issued. Piersol, only twenty years old, who vowed, with a noose around his neck, that he was innocent, anil won mercy from a mob bent on lynching him, revealed a wholesale abduction plot. J. Holland Keet, the baby’s father, was to have been kidnaped when he mot the kidnapers to deliver the $6,000 ransom demanded. Ed. L. Sanford, vice -president of the Holland Banking company and chairman of the state highway commission, also was marked for abduction. He was to have been held for SIOO,OOO ransom.