When Melinda Worth Popham was growing up in the still-relatively new and seemingly manicured Mission Hills in the 1950s, she woke up every morning to a new edition of The Kansas City Star. It always sat in a newspaper rack in front of her father’s spot at the kitchen table.

Until one late September morning in 1953 when the newspaper disappeared. Popham, who was 9 years old at the time, knew this was an attempt by her parents to protect her and her two siblings from something.

“The absence of the paper was a tip-off that something bad had happened in my world,” Popham said.

When Popham found the newspaper later that day, at the foot of the housekeeper’s bed, she learned about the kidnapping and murder of another child in Mission Hills, 6-year-old Robert Cosgrove Greenlease Jr., known as Bobby.

Greenlease’s killing was one of four violent crimes that plagued the northeastern Johnson County area in the 1950s, during Popham childhood.

When she was 6 years old, her kindergarten classmate’s father was killed at gunpoint. When she was 11, a woman was abducted from the beauty salon Popham’s mother frequented and ultimately murdered.

In 1959, Popham’s sophomore classmate at Shawnee Mission East poisoned and killed her parents.

“These crimes happened as I was growing up, and so they became part of my sense of what the world was about,” Popham said.

These four violent crimes stuck with Popham for more than 70 years, so much so they finally inspired a book.

Earlier this year, at age 81, Popham released “Sweetness & Light: A True Crime Memoir.”

The memoir, Popham’s second, details the crimes that defined her childhood and reveals how they intertwined with her own memories and upbringing in mid-century Johnson County.

Kidnap-for-ransom and a poisoned family

In “Sweetness & Light,” Popham dives into four different crimes, including the 1950 killing of her kindergarten classmate’s father, Marshall Dean, and the 1955 killing of Wilma Allen, a 34-year-old woman who was abducted from a beauty salon in Brookside.

The most well-known of the four crimes Popham details is the kidnap-for-ransom of 6-year-old Bobby Greenlease.

In September 1953, Greenlease was kidnapped from his school, Notre Dame De Sion, by a woman named Bonnie Heady.

Heady walked into the school, gave a sister at the school a false identity and a story about being Greenlease’s aunt who needed to pick him up because his mother had just experienced a heart attack, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Heady and her partner-in-crime, Carl Hall, kidnapped Greenlease with the intent of demanding a ransom from his family. Robert Cosgrove Greenlease Sr., the 6-year-old’s father, owned a successful Cadillac dealership.

The kidnappers demanded $600,000 in $10 and $20 bills with the promise to return Greenlease, but they killed Greenlease shortly after taking him from school. They buried his body in St. Joseph, Missouri.

Following a cab driver leading authorities to Hall and Heady, the pair were taken into custody on Oct. 6, 1953. Greenlease’s body was found the following day.

After pleading guilty, Hall and Heady were executed on Dec. 18, 1953.

“I think the verdict fits the evidence,” Judge Albert L. Reeves, of a federal court in Kansas City, Missouri, said, according to the FBI’s history. “It is the most cold-blooded, brutal murder I have ever tried.”

The second major crime that “Sweetness & Light” details is how 15-year-old Diane Roberts, a Shawnee Mission East student, killed her parents in October 1959 in their Prairie Village home.

Roberts used roach poison on her parents, William and Evelyn. Then-Johnson County Sheriff Lynn Thomas quoted Roberts as saying she mixed the poison with grape juice, water, flour and sugar, The Parsons Sun reported.

Thomas said that Roberts told her parents that “it was a thrill powder.”

“I did it because Mom and Dad were always criticizing everything I do,” Thomas quoted Roberts. “Daddy beat me Sunday night and threatened to kill me. Since daddy threatened to kill me, I thought I would kill him first.”

Roberts was a Shawnee Mission East sophomore at the time. (The school had opened just a year earlier.)

The night before she killed her parents with roach poison, Roberts left rehearsal for the school’s play: “Arsenic and Old Lace,” which is “about two spinsters who routinely poison old men with arsenic-laced wine,” The Kansas City Magazine reports.

“Beyond unnerving”

All four crimes detailed in the memoir happened during Popham’s childhood.

Popham described herself as a “shy, stuttering child.” The four crimes compounded her shyness, she said, ultimately having a lifelong impact on her.

“It was the idea that violence had intruded on my beautiful, little protected world,” Popham said. “I think that was always the thing that got me: The world I was in was so protected, and yet these intrusions of violence could happen.”

Dean, an assistant hotel manager killed in 1950, was the father of Popham’s friend and classmate Julianne at Sunset Hill, a private all-girls school in Kansas City.

Popham, who had gone to Julianne’s birthday parties before, said she felt an urge to protect her after the killing.

Three years later, Greenlease was kidnapped and murdered.

Popham often biked down the cul-de-sac where the Greenleases lived. Greenlease was the same age as Popham’s younger brother Arthur.

Allen, the 34-year-old woman who was abducted and murdered, was taken from Shears and Tears, a beauty salon in Brookside where Popham said her own mother “spent half her life.”

In the case of the Roberts family, Popham attended Indian Hills and Shawnee Mission East with Diane as they were in the same grade.

These crimes “could just as easily have been” members of her family, Popham said.

“It was always kind of there but for the grace of God goes my little brother, my mother, my father,” Popham said. “It was beyond unnerving. Frightening.”

“Sweetness & Light: A True Crime Memoir” is available for purchase on Amazon.

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