1935 Kidnapping Revealed 9-Year-Old Timber Heir’s Mettle, Led to ‘Greatest Manhunt in History of Northwest’

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The same day his 9-year-old son disappeared, Tacoma timber baron John Weyerhaeuser received a ransom note.

Little George had been kidnapped, the letter said, and the perpetrators wanted $200,000 for his safe return. The typed note warned the family to keep law enforcement and the newspapers out of it.

“Remember to follow the rules,” the letter stated. “All of them. A slip on your part will just be bad for someone else.”

It was signed, perhaps in a vague nod to the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder in Chicago, “Egoist. Egoist.”

Problem was, the rules already had been broken, if inadvertently. The police were summoned before the instructions arrived, when George didn’t turn up as usual after school. And a gaggle of reporters now milled about the Weyerhaeuser front lawn.

It was 1935 — the height of the kidnapping era.

Three years earlier, the 20-month-old son of renowned aviator Charles Lindbergh had been snatched and killed, and a carpenter named Bruno Hauptmann had been found guilty of the murder. The federal “Lindbergh Law” followed, with a life sentence for kidnappers. But, during the Great Depression, the new law wasn’t much of a deterrent, because many lower-profile abductions had brought in serious money with no repercussions.

The George Weyerhaeuser case, however, would not be low-profile.

George’s kidnappers — career criminals William Dainard, a.k.a. William Mahan, and Harmon Waley — thought they were pretty clever. They took the boy into the Washington forest and stuck him in a deep hole in the ground, covering him up with tree branches. Then they used classified ads in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to deliver instructions to George’s desperate parents.

The hunt for George and his kidnappers became front-page news across the country and led to intense speculation. The Oregon Journal published the mugshots of a former local bootlegger and two other ex-cons. The Portland newspaper headlined the photos: “Snatchers?” There was no evidence the men had anything to do with the crime, and, sure enough, they weren’t involved.

The brazen abduction inspired noir-worthy journalistic prose for weeks as the events unfolded. And now, more than 85 years later, comes a new book, “Deep in the Woods: The 1935 Kidnapping of Nine-Year-Old George Weyerhaeuser, Heir to America’s Mightiest Timber Dynasty,” by author and former Seattle TV producer Bryan Johnston.

Johnston made the ill-considered decision to invent conversations — “representative dialogue,” he calls it in an author’s note. This undercuts the book’s credibility as a reliable work of nonfiction, which is a shame, for “Deep in the Woods” is a well-researched story, full of surprising details.

Foremost among those details is the revelation of young George’s courage throughout his ordeal, as well as his clear thinking under pressure.



Eventually, John Weyerhaeuser followed the kidnappers’ convoluted directions to a remote spot and abandoned his car with the ransom money in it.

“When he’d walked about a hundred yards back down the road, he heard a crashing in the bushes from behind him,” Johnston writes. “He spun back around toward the car just in time to see a shape rush out of the bushes, leap into his automobile and drive off.”

Dainard and Waley released George shortly thereafter. The boy, who’d been packed into a cardboard box for transit, suddenly found himself alone in the woods near Issaquah. It was the middle of the night. He walked for four hours in the pitch-black forest until he found a small house and knocked on the door.

Next came what The New York Times called “the greatest manhunt in the history of the Northwest.”

The FBI caught Waley quickly. When his 19-year-old wife Margaret purchased a cigarette case at a Woolworth’s in Salt Lake City, a diligent salesclerk noticed that the serial number on a $5 bill matched one on a list circulated by the FBI.

The more careful Dainard stayed on the lam for a year, until a series of sightings finally allowed agents to catch up to him in San Francisco.

“I’ve known for a long time it couldn’t last,” he said upon his arrest.

Dainard and Waley ended up at the federal prison on California’s Alcatraz Island, where Chicago mob boss Al Capone reportedly tried to bite Waley. Margaret, Waley’s wife, landed at a Michigan work farm.

George, meanwhile, returned to school, his parents refusing to dwell on the trauma. It appears he was essentially unaffected by the kidnapping.

“It’s not a sensitive subject for me,” the then-93-year-old told Johnston in 2019. “It happened a long time ago.”

The timber heir grew up, served in the Navy at the end of World War II and joined the family business, starting out on a logging crew. He became company president in 1966, and he was still running the Fortune 100 operation 14 years later when Mount St. Helens’ eruption wiped out some 68,000 acres of Weyerhaeuser Co. forestland.

Despite financial risks, George began to replant the devastated acreage immediately; a World Forestry Center report called it an “unprecedented reforestation project.”

The decision apparently wasn’t a hard one for the company’s president. George Weyerhaeuser’s determination to press on was simply part of his character. It helped save his life in 1935, and it guided him as a business executive more than 40 years later.