Stolen from the Garden
The Kidnapping of Virginia Piper

William Swanson

In the Media:

KSTP Feature: Million Dollar Mystery
Star Tribune
Pioneer Press
Minnpost
WCCO Radio with John Hines (10/14/14 10 am)
Lakeshore Weekly News
Garage Logic, 1500ESPN with Joe Soucheray (10/29/14 Hour 1)
MPR
KUMD’s MN Reads
Twin Cities Live Book Club Pick!

Available in paperback, August 2015!

The inside story of the shocking Piper kidnapping: from the abduction and recovery, through the grueling investigation and trials, and into the Pipers’ haunted final years.

“The kidnapping of Virginia Piper, a crime that combined incredibly brilliant planning with unaccountably foolish mistakes, remains among the most complex and baffling cases in Minnesota’s history. In Stolen from the Garden, Bill Swanson tells the story of the crime with his usual sleek expertise while presenting many inside details never before made public. It would be hard to find a better crime thriller than this real-life tale of a case that even after forty years has not lost its power to astonish.” –Larry Millett, author of Strange Days, Dangerous Nights and Murder Has a Public Face

“In Stolen from the Garden, William Swanson artfully combines the wonderful writing of an authentic prose stylist with the shoe-leather grit of an investigative reporter. With his brilliant telling of the infamous Piper kidnapping, Swanson continues his reign as the maestro of mayhem in the supposedly peaceful Midwest.” –Neal Karlen, author of Augie’s Secrets: The Minneapolis Mob and the King of the Hennepin Strip

On a July afternoon in 1972, two masked men waving guns abducted forty-nine-year-old Virginia Piper from the garden of her lakeside home in Orono, Minnesota. After her husband, a prominent investment banker, paid a $1 million ransom, an anonymous caller directed the FBI to a thickly wooded section of a northern Minnesota state park. There, two days after her nightmare began, Ginny Piper––chained to a tree, filthy and exhausted, but physically unharmed––awaited her rescuers.

The intensely private couple lived through a media firestorm. Both Bobby and Ginny Piper herself—naturally reserved and surprisingly composed in the aftermath of her ordeal—were subject to FBI scrutiny in the largest kidnap-for-ransom case in bureau annals. When two career criminals were finally indicted five years after the abduction, the Pipers again took center stage in two long trials before a jury’s verdict made headlines across the nation.

Drawing on closely held government documents and exclusive interviews with family members, investigators, suspects, lawyers, and others intimately connected to the case, William Swanson provides the first comprehensive account of the sensational Piper kidnapping and its long, eventful aftermath––and makes a case for the most plausible explanation for what really happened on that July afternoon.

William Swanson is the author of Dial M: The Murder of Carol Thompson and Black White Blue: The Assassination of Patrolman Sackett. Follow him on Twitter @WilliamSwanson3.

$22.95 cloth, available October 2014
288 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, 24 b&w photos, index, 978-0-87351-947-2

$11.99 e-book, 978-0-87351-948-9

Available October 2014 from Minnesota Historical Society Press

Pre-order on amazon, bn.com, Powell’s

VIDEO: Press conference for Virginia Piper in which she describes her kidnapping and release.
KSTP-TVArchive, Minnesota Historical Society