Virginia Piper kidnapping


Virginia Piper, the wife of Harry "Bobby" Piper, the chairman and CEO of the Minneapolis, Minnesota investment firm Piper, Jaffray and Hopwood, Inc., was kidnapped on July 27, 1972, while gardening outside her home in Orono, Minnesota. She was held chained to a tree for two nights in Jay Cooke State Park near Duluth. After receiving a ransom payment of $1 million from her husband, the kidnappers called an unconnected person and told them her location. Shortly afterward, Piper was found and released by the FBI.
The kidnapping received national attention because of the prominence of the victim and her husband, the time and location of her kidnapping, the time of the arrest of the two men eventually charged with the kidnapping, their acquittal on appeal in 1979, and the fact that only $4,000 of the ransom the kidnappers received was ever recovered.

In popular culture

Both the book All the President's Men and its 1976 film adaptation reference Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's The Washington Post article "Bug Suspect Got Campaign Funds", which reports that Piper's friend and neighbor Kenneth H. Dahlberg, the Midwest finance chairman of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, mentioned the kidnapping to Woodward.