Robert Cosgrove Greenlease Jr. was a six-year-old from Kansas City, Missouri, who was the victim of a kidnapping and homicide on September 28, 1953. His father Robert Greenlease Sr. was a multi-millionaire auto dealer, and the demanded ransom payment was the largest in American history at the time.
Greenlease Jr.'s kidnappers, despite the ransom, had no intention of returning him to his family. Before the ransom demand was issued, he had already been murdered by Carl Hall and Bonnie Heady. Heady and Hall were condemned to death and executed in Missouri's gas chamber in December 1953.
Heady was the third woman ever to be executed by US federal authorities.