Published in Arizona Daily Star (September 5, 2014):
June Birt, 87, of Tucson, Arizona, passed away peacefully on September 2, 2014.
She is survived by her husband of 64 years, Dan; four children, James (Teresa), Thomas, Bruce (Candy), and Barbara (David); five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
A funeral Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated at 10:00 a.m. Saturday, September 6, 2014, at St. Cyril's Catholic Church, Tucson, followed by interment at Holy Hope Cemetery.
Always missed . . . never forgotten.
Arrangements by Adair Funeral Homes, Dodge Chapel.
— June Robles Birt, Whose Abduction at 6 Gripped the Nation, Is Dead at 87.
Article written by Sam Roberts.
By 1934, Tucson figured its Wild West days were behind it. The legendary gunfight at the O.K. Corral, down the road in Tombstone, had occurred fully a half-century before, and Tucson was blooming as a desert mecca for tourists and respiratory patients.
True, John Dillinger and his bank-robbing gang had been captured at the Hotel Congress there that January, but they were holed up in Tucson only because they had decided that the city, population 32,000, was so removed from the nation's mainstream violence that they would never be noticed there.
So when 6-year-old June Robles, the granddaughter of a prosperous cattle baron and real estate magnate, vanished in broad daylight just after leaving her Tucson school on a spring day in 1934, news of her disappearance shattered the city's calm and swept across the country in terrifying front-page headlines, stoking Americans' already prevalent fears about the lucrative — and sometimes deadly — crime of child abduction. Only two years earlier, the 20-month-old son of the aviator Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. had been snatched from his New Jersey home, held for ransom and murdered.
The Robles abduction had a happier, if bizarre, ending, however. Nineteen days later, June was found bewildered but alive in a makeshift wood-and-sheet-metal cage buried in the broiling desert. Americans could heave a collective sigh of relief.
For months, her disappearance had remained the only open case among more than 30 abductions that the F.B.I. had investigated since kidnapping was made a federal crime in response to the Lindbergh case.
June Robles's disappearance was never solved, and as decades and generations came and went, the case became a mostly forgotten footnote in the annals of crime. The headlines disappeared, and so, too, did June Robles — at least from public view. For the next 80 years she led a reticent if not obscure life, never leaving the city where she was born.
She died in Tucson on Sept. 2, 2014, apparently of complications of Parkinson's disease. She was 87.
At the time, her family placed a paid death notice in The Arizona Daily Star under her married name, June Birt, but apparently no news obituary — no coda to a spectacular case — was ever written. The New York Times learned of her death late last month in an emailed inquiry from a writer who was researching another child abduction for a book.
"Little June" Robles, as she was invariably called, spoke to news reporters immediately after her rescue, but in subsequent years she never sat for a full-fledged interview. She wrote no memoirs. On anniversaries of the kidnapping, the case might be reprised in newspapers and magazines and on television news programs, but there was scant information about what had happened to her since. A lengthy wedding announcement in 1950 made no mention of her ordeal in the national spotlight 16 years earlier. What had happened, according to a forthcoming book by Paul Cool for the Arizona Historical Society, was that after the tumult of her brief national celebrity, Ms. Robles was determined to remain inconspicuous from then on.
"That was the way she wanted it," her son James Birt said in a telephone interview this week. "That was the way she wished it. That was the way it was meant to be."
He added: "Most of the people who know about this are all dead, and I don't know why it's even news now. Most everyone connected with the case just wanted it to go away."
June Cecilia Robles was born in Tucson on June 11, 1927. Her mother was the former Helen Mauler, from Kansas. Her father, Fernando Robles, was a former railway clerk who owned an electrical supply store. He was the son and a presumptive heir of Bernabe Robles, a Mexican-born descendant of Spanish conquistadors. Bernabe was 7 when he immigrated to the United States with his mother on a burro in 1864. By 1934 Bernabe Robles had amassed a fortune as a cattle baron and entrepreneur. He had acquired vast tracts of Arizona real estate, initially to provide scarce water for the horses that powered a stagecoach line he also owned. As Tucson developed beyond its original borders, the value of his property had multiplied. That led some Tucsonians to speculate that the kidnappers had been enticed by his wealth.
The abduction occurred on the afternoon of April 25 as June was walking alone from the Roskruge public school to visit an aunt, according to court testimony. She was trailing behind her 6-year-old cousin, who had gone on ahead. A man approached her. He said her father had asked him to give her a lift to his store. After some cajoling, she got into his car, a black Ford sedan.
Later that day, a local boy handed her father a ransom note. The boy said an unidentified man had given him 25 cents to deliver it. The note demanded $15,000 (about $300,000 in today's money). Mr. Robles scribbled a reply — its text was not reported — and gave it to the boy to carry back to the kidnapper. According to the testimony, however, when the boy looked for the man, he was gone.
The next day, a second ransom note, signed "Z," was delivered to June's grandfather. The ransom demand had been reduced to $10,000. Fernando Robles and his twin brother, Carlos, the assistant Pima County prosecutor, scraped together the money, apparently after their father, Bernabe, had declined to contribute.
Meanwhile, a posse of hundreds of gun-toting cowboys, ranchers and Apache scouts scoured the rugged terrain on horseback. Bernabe Robles secretly consulted a psychic in Mexico. A plane scouted the 70 miles to the border and beyond.
"We have run down clue after clue, which has faded into nothing," Tucson's police chief, Gus Wollard, said.
Fernando Robles asked law-enforcement officials to suspend their search and to cancel a $1,500 reward so that he could deal with the kidnapper directly.
"Only one thing now is left," he said in an appeal published on April 30. "I must get in touch with these people. I want my baby back."
To prove that June was still alive, Fernando Robles urged her captors to send him the answers to four questions addressed to his daughter. One question was "What do you do with your bunnies in the morning?" On Monday night, May 7, a third ransom note was slipped under the door of the county prosecutor's office in the Pima County Courthouse.
"If you had listened to us, your child would be with you," the note said. It was signed "XYZ."
A week later, Gov. B. B. Moeur received an airmail letter postmarked Chicago. Inside was a crude map and directions to a site in the remote desert, about nine miles from downtown Tucson, where the sender said the Robles girl's "body" could be found.
That prompted a search by June's uncle Carlos Robles and his boss, Clarence Houston, the county attorney. It was Mr. Houston who, after more than three fruitless hours, stumbled over a mound of dirt covered with sagebrush, mesquite and cholla cactus. Beneath it, he discovered a perforated sheet of metal, which proved to be the top of a narrow, coffinlike underground cage.
"I was sure June was dead," Carlos Robles told The New York Times. Inside, Little June looked up, dazed by the sudden sunlight and by her surprise liberator.
"Hello, June, do you know me?" Mr. Houston asked. "Are you afraid of me?"
"No, I'm not afraid of you," she replied. "I want my mama."
The girl was filthy, blistered by prickly heat and bitten by ants, her ankles chafed by chains attached to an iron stake. She said she had subsisted on fruit, bread and jam, potato chips and graham crackers that the kidnappers had left. She had made do with a ceramic pot for a toilet.
Immediately after her rescue, as she was escorted away, all she seemed concerned about was her report card, which she had left behind in her underground cell. "I went back and got it," she told The Tucson Daily Citizen. "I wanted my mama to see it."
Describing her abduction to British Pathé News, June said one kidnapper had threatened her. "He was going to spank me if I was going to cry," she said. Her grandmother was quoted as saying, "The kidnappers said they would put a knife in her back if she cried." June's rescue was trumpeted around the world. The New York Times reported the story as its lead article on the front page under a three-line headline stretched across four columns.
The kidnappers were never found. A local dance-hall operator, a friend of June's father, was charged after his handwriting was found to be similar to that used in one of the ransom notes, but the case against him collapsed.
Tucsonians were filled with questions: Why had a ransom note been delivered to the prosecutor? Could June really have survived 19 days underground? Why didn't her wealthy grandfather front the ransom? What was the Chicago connection?
In December 1936, after several suspects had been interrogated, a federal grand jury concluded that there was not enough evidence to accuse anyone. It described June's baffling disappearance as an "alleged kidnapping."
J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the F.B.I., apparently shared the grand jury's skepticism. "We have had 36 kidnappings listed, and all of them are solved on our records," he said.
Seeking to capitalize on the publicity, June's parents hoped to send the girl on a vaudeville tour to raise $1,500 in reward money for the arrest of the kidnappers. But when they sought more, to pay for her education, Hollywood promoters balked.
June was enrolled in a Roman Catholic school, where she was escorted daily under guard. "I simply cannot bear to leave my children alone for a minute," Helen Robles told The Tucson Daily Citizen.
June earned a degree in business administration from the University of Arizona in 1948 and, after graduation, worked for the school's registrar.
The last time Little June was interviewed, in 1936, she said that all she had wanted was "to be a mother like my mother." And that was what she became.
Her marriage in 1950 was to Dancey Birt, an aircraft factory supervisor at the time. He survives her. Besides her son James, she is also survived by three other children, Thomas, Bruce and Barbara; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Published by The New York Times on Oct 31, 2017.
June Birt, 87, of Tucson, Arizona, passed away peacefully on September 2, 2014.
She is survived by her husband of 64 years, Dan; four children, James (Teresa), Thomas, Bruce (Candy), and Barbara (David); five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
A funeral Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated at 10:00 a.m. Saturday, September 6, 2014, at St. Cyril's Catholic Church, Tucson, followed by interment at Holy Hope Cemetery.
Always missed . . . never forgotten.
Arrangements by Adair Funeral Homes, Dodge Chapel.
— June Robles Birt, Whose Abduction at 6 Gripped the Nation, Is Dead at 87.
Article written by Sam Roberts.
By 1934, Tucson figured its Wild West days were behind it. The legendary gunfight at the O.K. Corral, down the road in Tombstone, had occurred fully a half-century before, and Tucson was blooming as a desert mecca for tourists and respiratory patients.
True, John Dillinger and his bank-robbing gang had been captured at the Hotel Congress there that January, but they were holed up in Tucson only because they had decided that the city, population 32,000, was so removed from the nation's mainstream violence that they would never be noticed there.
So when 6-year-old June Robles, the granddaughter of a prosperous cattle baron and real estate magnate, vanished in broad daylight just after leaving her Tucson school on a spring day in 1934, news of her disappearance shattered the city's calm and swept across the country in terrifying front-page headlines, stoking Americans' already prevalent fears about the lucrative — and sometimes deadly — crime of child abduction. Only two years earlier, the 20-month-old son of the aviator Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. had been snatched from his New Jersey home, held for ransom and murdered.
The Robles abduction had a happier, if bizarre, ending, however. Nineteen days later, June was found bewildered but alive in a makeshift wood-and-sheet-metal cage buried in the broiling desert. Americans could heave a collective sigh of relief.
For months, her disappearance had remained the only open case among more than 30 abductions that the F.B.I. had investigated since kidnapping was made a federal crime in response to the Lindbergh case.
June Robles's disappearance was never solved, and as decades and generations came and went, the case became a mostly forgotten footnote in the annals of crime. The headlines disappeared, and so, too, did June Robles — at least from public view. For the next 80 years she led a reticent if not obscure life, never leaving the city where she was born.
She died in Tucson on Sept. 2, 2014, apparently of complications of Parkinson's disease. She was 87.
At the time, her family placed a paid death notice in The Arizona Daily Star under her married name, June Birt, but apparently no news obituary — no coda to a spectacular case — was ever written. The New York Times learned of her death late last month in an emailed inquiry from a writer who was researching another child abduction for a book.
"Little June" Robles, as she was invariably called, spoke to news reporters immediately after her rescue, but in subsequent years she never sat for a full-fledged interview. She wrote no memoirs. On anniversaries of the kidnapping, the case might be reprised in newspapers and magazines and on television news programs, but there was scant information about what had happened to her since. A lengthy wedding announcement in 1950 made no mention of her ordeal in the national spotlight 16 years earlier. What had happened, according to a forthcoming book by Paul Cool for the Arizona Historical Society, was that after the tumult of her brief national celebrity, Ms. Robles was determined to remain inconspicuous from then on.
"That was the way she wanted it," her son James Birt said in a telephone interview this week. "That was the way she wished it. That was the way it was meant to be."
He added: "Most of the people who know about this are all dead, and I don't know why it's even news now. Most everyone connected with the case just wanted it to go away."
June Cecilia Robles was born in Tucson on June 11, 1927. Her mother was the former Helen Mauler, from Kansas. Her father, Fernando Robles, was a former railway clerk who owned an electrical supply store. He was the son and a presumptive heir of Bernabe Robles, a Mexican-born descendant of Spanish conquistadors. Bernabe was 7 when he immigrated to the United States with his mother on a burro in 1864. By 1934 Bernabe Robles had amassed a fortune as a cattle baron and entrepreneur. He had acquired vast tracts of Arizona real estate, initially to provide scarce water for the horses that powered a stagecoach line he also owned. As Tucson developed beyond its original borders, the value of his property had multiplied. That led some Tucsonians to speculate that the kidnappers had been enticed by his wealth.
The abduction occurred on the afternoon of April 25 as June was walking alone from the Roskruge public school to visit an aunt, according to court testimony. She was trailing behind her 6-year-old cousin, who had gone on ahead. A man approached her. He said her father had asked him to give her a lift to his store. After some cajoling, she got into his car, a black Ford sedan.
Later that day, a local boy handed her father a ransom note. The boy said an unidentified man had given him 25 cents to deliver it. The note demanded $15,000 (about $300,000 in today's money). Mr. Robles scribbled a reply — its text was not reported — and gave it to the boy to carry back to the kidnapper. According to the testimony, however, when the boy looked for the man, he was gone.
The next day, a second ransom note, signed "Z," was delivered to June's grandfather. The ransom demand had been reduced to $10,000. Fernando Robles and his twin brother, Carlos, the assistant Pima County prosecutor, scraped together the money, apparently after their father, Bernabe, had declined to contribute.
Meanwhile, a posse of hundreds of gun-toting cowboys, ranchers and Apache scouts scoured the rugged terrain on horseback. Bernabe Robles secretly consulted a psychic in Mexico. A plane scouted the 70 miles to the border and beyond.
"We have run down clue after clue, which has faded into nothing," Tucson's police chief, Gus Wollard, said.
Fernando Robles asked law-enforcement officials to suspend their search and to cancel a $1,500 reward so that he could deal with the kidnapper directly.
"Only one thing now is left," he said in an appeal published on April 30. "I must get in touch with these people. I want my baby back."
To prove that June was still alive, Fernando Robles urged her captors to send him the answers to four questions addressed to his daughter. One question was "What do you do with your bunnies in the morning?" On Monday night, May 7, a third ransom note was slipped under the door of the county prosecutor's office in the Pima County Courthouse.
"If you had listened to us, your child would be with you," the note said. It was signed "XYZ."
A week later, Gov. B. B. Moeur received an airmail letter postmarked Chicago. Inside was a crude map and directions to a site in the remote desert, about nine miles from downtown Tucson, where the sender said the Robles girl's "body" could be found.
That prompted a search by June's uncle Carlos Robles and his boss, Clarence Houston, the county attorney. It was Mr. Houston who, after more than three fruitless hours, stumbled over a mound of dirt covered with sagebrush, mesquite and cholla cactus. Beneath it, he discovered a perforated sheet of metal, which proved to be the top of a narrow, coffinlike underground cage.
"I was sure June was dead," Carlos Robles told The New York Times. Inside, Little June looked up, dazed by the sudden sunlight and by her surprise liberator.
"Hello, June, do you know me?" Mr. Houston asked. "Are you afraid of me?"
"No, I'm not afraid of you," she replied. "I want my mama."
The girl was filthy, blistered by prickly heat and bitten by ants, her ankles chafed by chains attached to an iron stake. She said she had subsisted on fruit, bread and jam, potato chips and graham crackers that the kidnappers had left. She had made do with a ceramic pot for a toilet.
Immediately after her rescue, as she was escorted away, all she seemed concerned about was her report card, which she had left behind in her underground cell. "I went back and got it," she told The Tucson Daily Citizen. "I wanted my mama to see it."
Describing her abduction to British Pathé News, June said one kidnapper had threatened her. "He was going to spank me if I was going to cry," she said. Her grandmother was quoted as saying, "The kidnappers said they would put a knife in her back if she cried." June's rescue was trumpeted around the world. The New York Times reported the story as its lead article on the front page under a three-line headline stretched across four columns.
The kidnappers were never found. A local dance-hall operator, a friend of June's father, was charged after his handwriting was found to be similar to that used in one of the ransom notes, but the case against him collapsed.
Tucsonians were filled with questions: Why had a ransom note been delivered to the prosecutor? Could June really have survived 19 days underground? Why didn't her wealthy grandfather front the ransom? What was the Chicago connection?
In December 1936, after several suspects had been interrogated, a federal grand jury concluded that there was not enough evidence to accuse anyone. It described June's baffling disappearance as an "alleged kidnapping."
J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the F.B.I., apparently shared the grand jury's skepticism. "We have had 36 kidnappings listed, and all of them are solved on our records," he said.
Seeking to capitalize on the publicity, June's parents hoped to send the girl on a vaudeville tour to raise $1,500 in reward money for the arrest of the kidnappers. But when they sought more, to pay for her education, Hollywood promoters balked.
June was enrolled in a Roman Catholic school, where she was escorted daily under guard. "I simply cannot bear to leave my children alone for a minute," Helen Robles told The Tucson Daily Citizen.
June earned a degree in business administration from the University of Arizona in 1948 and, after graduation, worked for the school's registrar.
The last time Little June was interviewed, in 1936, she said that all she had wanted was "to be a mother like my mother." And that was what she became.
Her marriage in 1950 was to Dancey Birt, an aircraft factory supervisor at the time. He survives her. Besides her son James, she is also survived by three other children, Thomas, Bruce and Barbara; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Published by The New York Times on Oct 31, 2017.
Published in Arizona Daily Star (September 5, 2014):
June Birt, 87, of Tucson, Arizona, passed away peacefully on September 2, 2014.
She is survived by her husband of 64 years, Dan; four children, James (Teresa), Thomas, Bruce (Candy), and Barbara (David); five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
A funeral Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated at 10:00 a.m. Saturday, September 6, 2014, at St. Cyril's Catholic Church, Tucson, followed by interment at Holy Hope Cemetery.
Always missed . . . never forgotten.
Arrangements by Adair Funeral Homes, Dodge Chapel.
— June Robles Birt, Whose Abduction at 6 Gripped the Nation, Is Dead at 87.
Article written by Sam Roberts.
By 1934, Tucson figured its Wild West days were behind it. The legendary gunfight at the O.K. Corral, down the road in Tombstone, had occurred fully a half-century before, and Tucson was blooming as a desert mecca for tourists and respiratory patients.
True, John Dillinger and his bank-robbing gang had been captured at the Hotel Congress there that January, but they were holed up in Tucson only because they had decided that the city, population 32,000, was so removed from the nation's mainstream violence that they would never be noticed there.
So when 6-year-old June Robles, the granddaughter of a prosperous cattle baron and real estate magnate, vanished in broad daylight just after leaving her Tucson school on a spring day in 1934, news of her disappearance shattered the city's calm and swept across the country in terrifying front-page headlines, stoking Americans' already prevalent fears about the lucrative — and sometimes deadly — crime of child abduction. Only two years earlier, the 20-month-old son of the aviator Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. had been snatched from his New Jersey home, held for ransom and murdered.
The Robles abduction had a happier, if bizarre, ending, however. Nineteen days later, June was found bewildered but alive in a makeshift wood-and-sheet-metal cage buried in the broiling desert. Americans could heave a collective sigh of relief.
For months, her disappearance had remained the only open case among more than 30 abductions that the F.B.I. had investigated since kidnapping was made a federal crime in response to the Lindbergh case.
June Robles's disappearance was never solved, and as decades and generations came and went, the case became a mostly forgotten footnote in the annals of crime. The headlines disappeared, and so, too, did June Robles — at least from public view. For the next 80 years she led a reticent if not obscure life, never leaving the city where she was born.
She died in Tucson on Sept. 2, 2014, apparently of complications of Parkinson's disease. She was 87.
At the time, her family placed a paid death notice in The Arizona Daily Star under her married name, June Birt, but apparently no news obituary — no coda to a spectacular case — was ever written. The New York Times learned of her death late last month in an emailed inquiry from a writer who was researching another child abduction for a book.
"Little June" Robles, as she was invariably called, spoke to news reporters immediately after her rescue, but in subsequent years she never sat for a full-fledged interview. She wrote no memoirs. On anniversaries of the kidnapping, the case might be reprised in newspapers and magazines and on television news programs, but there was scant information about what had happened to her since. A lengthy wedding announcement in 1950 made no mention of her ordeal in the national spotlight 16 years earlier. What had happened, according to a forthcoming book by Paul Cool for the Arizona Historical Society, was that after the tumult of her brief national celebrity, Ms. Robles was determined to remain inconspicuous from then on.
"That was the way she wanted it," her son James Birt said in a telephone interview this week. "That was the way she wished it. That was the way it was meant to be."
He added: "Most of the people who know about this are all dead, and I don't know why it's even news now. Most everyone connected with the case just wanted it to go away."
June Cecilia Robles was born in Tucson on June 11, 1927. Her mother was the former Helen Mauler, from Kansas. Her father, Fernando Robles, was a former railway clerk who owned an electrical supply store. He was the son and a presumptive heir of Bernabe Robles, a Mexican-born descendant of Spanish conquistadors. Bernabe was 7 when he immigrated to the United States with his mother on a burro in 1864. By 1934 Bernabe Robles had amassed a fortune as a cattle baron and entrepreneur. He had acquired vast tracts of Arizona real estate, initially to provide scarce water for the horses that powered a stagecoach line he also owned. As Tucson developed beyond its original borders, the value of his property had multiplied. That led some Tucsonians to speculate that the kidnappers had been enticed by his wealth.
The abduction occurred on the afternoon of April 25 as June was walking alone from the Roskruge public school to visit an aunt, according to court testimony. She was trailing behind her 6-year-old cousin, who had gone on ahead. A man approached her. He said her father had asked him to give her a lift to his store. After some cajoling, she got into his car, a black Ford sedan.
Later that day, a local boy handed her father a ransom note. The boy said an unidentified man had given him 25 cents to deliver it. The note demanded $15,000 (about $300,000 in today's money). Mr. Robles scribbled a reply — its text was not reported — and gave it to the boy to carry back to the kidnapper. According to the testimony, however, when the boy looked for the man, he was gone.
The next day, a second ransom note, signed "Z," was delivered to June's grandfather. The ransom demand had been reduced to $10,000. Fernando Robles and his twin brother, Carlos, the assistant Pima County prosecutor, scraped together the money, apparently after their father, Bernabe, had declined to contribute.
Meanwhile, a posse of hundreds of gun-toting cowboys, ranchers and Apache scouts scoured the rugged terrain on horseback. Bernabe Robles secretly consulted a psychic in Mexico. A plane scouted the 70 miles to the border and beyond.
"We have run down clue after clue, which has faded into nothing," Tucson's police chief, Gus Wollard, said.
Fernando Robles asked law-enforcement officials to suspend their search and to cancel a $1,500 reward so that he could deal with the kidnapper directly.
"Only one thing now is left," he said in an appeal published on April 30. "I must get in touch with these people. I want my baby back."
To prove that June was still alive, Fernando Robles urged her captors to send him the answers to four questions addressed to his daughter. One question was "What do you do with your bunnies in the morning?" On Monday night, May 7, a third ransom note was slipped under the door of the county prosecutor's office in the Pima County Courthouse.
"If you had listened to us, your child would be with you," the note said. It was signed "XYZ."
A week later, Gov. B. B. Moeur received an airmail letter postmarked Chicago. Inside was a crude map and directions to a site in the remote desert, about nine miles from downtown Tucson, where the sender said the Robles girl's "body" could be found.
That prompted a search by June's uncle Carlos Robles and his boss, Clarence Houston, the county attorney. It was Mr. Houston who, after more than three fruitless hours, stumbled over a mound of dirt covered with sagebrush, mesquite and cholla cactus. Beneath it, he discovered a perforated sheet of metal, which proved to be the top of a narrow, coffinlike underground cage.
"I was sure June was dead," Carlos Robles told The New York Times. Inside, Little June looked up, dazed by the sudden sunlight and by her surprise liberator.
"Hello, June, do you know me?" Mr. Houston asked. "Are you afraid of me?"
"No, I'm not afraid of you," she replied. "I want my mama."
The girl was filthy, blistered by prickly heat and bitten by ants, her ankles chafed by chains attached to an iron stake. She said she had subsisted on fruit, bread and jam, potato chips and graham crackers that the kidnappers had left. She had made do with a ceramic pot for a toilet.
Immediately after her rescue, as she was escorted away, all she seemed concerned about was her report card, which she had left behind in her underground cell. "I went back and got it," she told The Tucson Daily Citizen. "I wanted my mama to see it."
Describing her abduction to British Pathé News, June said one kidnapper had threatened her. "He was going to spank me if I was going to cry," she said. Her grandmother was quoted as saying, "The kidnappers said they would put a knife in her back if she cried." June's rescue was trumpeted around the world. The New York Times reported the story as its lead article on the front page under a three-line headline stretched across four columns.
The kidnappers were never found. A local dance-hall operator, a friend of June's father, was charged after his handwriting was found to be similar to that used in one of the ransom notes, but the case against him collapsed.
Tucsonians were filled with questions: Why had a ransom note been delivered to the prosecutor? Could June really have survived 19 days underground? Why didn't her wealthy grandfather front the ransom? What was the Chicago connection?
In December 1936, after several suspects had been interrogated, a federal grand jury concluded that there was not enough evidence to accuse anyone. It described June's baffling disappearance as an "alleged kidnapping."
J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the F.B.I., apparently shared the grand jury's skepticism. "We have had 36 kidnappings listed, and all of them are solved on our records," he said.
Seeking to capitalize on the publicity, June's parents hoped to send the girl on a vaudeville tour to raise $1,500 in reward money for the arrest of the kidnappers. But when they sought more, to pay for her education, Hollywood promoters balked.
June was enrolled in a Roman Catholic school, where she was escorted daily under guard. "I simply cannot bear to leave my children alone for a minute," Helen Robles told The Tucson Daily Citizen.
June earned a degree in business administration from the University of Arizona in 1948 and, after graduation, worked for the school's registrar.
The last time Little June was interviewed, in 1936, she said that all she had wanted was "to be a mother like my mother." And that was what she became.
Her marriage in 1950 was to Dancey Birt, an aircraft factory supervisor at the time. He survives her. Besides her son James, she is also survived by three other children, Thomas, Bruce and Barbara; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Published by The New York Times on Oct 31, 2017.
June Birt, 87, of Tucson, Arizona, passed away peacefully on September 2, 2014.
She is survived by her husband of 64 years, Dan; four children, James (Teresa), Thomas, Bruce (Candy), and Barbara (David); five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
A funeral Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated at 10:00 a.m. Saturday, September 6, 2014, at St. Cyril's Catholic Church, Tucson, followed by interment at Holy Hope Cemetery.
Always missed . . . never forgotten.
Arrangements by Adair Funeral Homes, Dodge Chapel.
— June Robles Birt, Whose Abduction at 6 Gripped the Nation, Is Dead at 87.
Article written by Sam Roberts.
By 1934, Tucson figured its Wild West days were behind it. The legendary gunfight at the O.K. Corral, down the road in Tombstone, had occurred fully a half-century before, and Tucson was blooming as a desert mecca for tourists and respiratory patients.
True, John Dillinger and his bank-robbing gang had been captured at the Hotel Congress there that January, but they were holed up in Tucson only because they had decided that the city, population 32,000, was so removed from the nation's mainstream violence that they would never be noticed there.
So when 6-year-old June Robles, the granddaughter of a prosperous cattle baron and real estate magnate, vanished in broad daylight just after leaving her Tucson school on a spring day in 1934, news of her disappearance shattered the city's calm and swept across the country in terrifying front-page headlines, stoking Americans' already prevalent fears about the lucrative — and sometimes deadly — crime of child abduction. Only two years earlier, the 20-month-old son of the aviator Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. had been snatched from his New Jersey home, held for ransom and murdered.
The Robles abduction had a happier, if bizarre, ending, however. Nineteen days later, June was found bewildered but alive in a makeshift wood-and-sheet-metal cage buried in the broiling desert. Americans could heave a collective sigh of relief.
For months, her disappearance had remained the only open case among more than 30 abductions that the F.B.I. had investigated since kidnapping was made a federal crime in response to the Lindbergh case.
June Robles's disappearance was never solved, and as decades and generations came and went, the case became a mostly forgotten footnote in the annals of crime. The headlines disappeared, and so, too, did June Robles — at least from public view. For the next 80 years she led a reticent if not obscure life, never leaving the city where she was born.
She died in Tucson on Sept. 2, 2014, apparently of complications of Parkinson's disease. She was 87.
At the time, her family placed a paid death notice in The Arizona Daily Star under her married name, June Birt, but apparently no news obituary — no coda to a spectacular case — was ever written. The New York Times learned of her death late last month in an emailed inquiry from a writer who was researching another child abduction for a book.
"Little June" Robles, as she was invariably called, spoke to news reporters immediately after her rescue, but in subsequent years she never sat for a full-fledged interview. She wrote no memoirs. On anniversaries of the kidnapping, the case might be reprised in newspapers and magazines and on television news programs, but there was scant information about what had happened to her since. A lengthy wedding announcement in 1950 made no mention of her ordeal in the national spotlight 16 years earlier. What had happened, according to a forthcoming book by Paul Cool for the Arizona Historical Society, was that after the tumult of her brief national celebrity, Ms. Robles was determined to remain inconspicuous from then on.
"That was the way she wanted it," her son James Birt said in a telephone interview this week. "That was the way she wished it. That was the way it was meant to be."
He added: "Most of the people who know about this are all dead, and I don't know why it's even news now. Most everyone connected with the case just wanted it to go away."
June Cecilia Robles was born in Tucson on June 11, 1927. Her mother was the former Helen Mauler, from Kansas. Her father, Fernando Robles, was a former railway clerk who owned an electrical supply store. He was the son and a presumptive heir of Bernabe Robles, a Mexican-born descendant of Spanish conquistadors. Bernabe was 7 when he immigrated to the United States with his mother on a burro in 1864. By 1934 Bernabe Robles had amassed a fortune as a cattle baron and entrepreneur. He had acquired vast tracts of Arizona real estate, initially to provide scarce water for the horses that powered a stagecoach line he also owned. As Tucson developed beyond its original borders, the value of his property had multiplied. That led some Tucsonians to speculate that the kidnappers had been enticed by his wealth.
The abduction occurred on the afternoon of April 25 as June was walking alone from the Roskruge public school to visit an aunt, according to court testimony. She was trailing behind her 6-year-old cousin, who had gone on ahead. A man approached her. He said her father had asked him to give her a lift to his store. After some cajoling, she got into his car, a black Ford sedan.
Later that day, a local boy handed her father a ransom note. The boy said an unidentified man had given him 25 cents to deliver it. The note demanded $15,000 (about $300,000 in today's money). Mr. Robles scribbled a reply — its text was not reported — and gave it to the boy to carry back to the kidnapper. According to the testimony, however, when the boy looked for the man, he was gone.
The next day, a second ransom note, signed "Z," was delivered to June's grandfather. The ransom demand had been reduced to $10,000. Fernando Robles and his twin brother, Carlos, the assistant Pima County prosecutor, scraped together the money, apparently after their father, Bernabe, had declined to contribute.
Meanwhile, a posse of hundreds of gun-toting cowboys, ranchers and Apache scouts scoured the rugged terrain on horseback. Bernabe Robles secretly consulted a psychic in Mexico. A plane scouted the 70 miles to the border and beyond.
"We have run down clue after clue, which has faded into nothing," Tucson's police chief, Gus Wollard, said.
Fernando Robles asked law-enforcement officials to suspend their search and to cancel a $1,500 reward so that he could deal with the kidnapper directly.
"Only one thing now is left," he said in an appeal published on April 30. "I must get in touch with these people. I want my baby back."
To prove that June was still alive, Fernando Robles urged her captors to send him the answers to four questions addressed to his daughter. One question was "What do you do with your bunnies in the morning?" On Monday night, May 7, a third ransom note was slipped under the door of the county prosecutor's office in the Pima County Courthouse.
"If you had listened to us, your child would be with you," the note said. It was signed "XYZ."
A week later, Gov. B. B. Moeur received an airmail letter postmarked Chicago. Inside was a crude map and directions to a site in the remote desert, about nine miles from downtown Tucson, where the sender said the Robles girl's "body" could be found.
That prompted a search by June's uncle Carlos Robles and his boss, Clarence Houston, the county attorney. It was Mr. Houston who, after more than three fruitless hours, stumbled over a mound of dirt covered with sagebrush, mesquite and cholla cactus. Beneath it, he discovered a perforated sheet of metal, which proved to be the top of a narrow, coffinlike underground cage.
"I was sure June was dead," Carlos Robles told The New York Times. Inside, Little June looked up, dazed by the sudden sunlight and by her surprise liberator.
"Hello, June, do you know me?" Mr. Houston asked. "Are you afraid of me?"
"No, I'm not afraid of you," she replied. "I want my mama."
The girl was filthy, blistered by prickly heat and bitten by ants, her ankles chafed by chains attached to an iron stake. She said she had subsisted on fruit, bread and jam, potato chips and graham crackers that the kidnappers had left. She had made do with a ceramic pot for a toilet.
Immediately after her rescue, as she was escorted away, all she seemed concerned about was her report card, which she had left behind in her underground cell. "I went back and got it," she told The Tucson Daily Citizen. "I wanted my mama to see it."
Describing her abduction to British Pathé News, June said one kidnapper had threatened her. "He was going to spank me if I was going to cry," she said. Her grandmother was quoted as saying, "The kidnappers said they would put a knife in her back if she cried." June's rescue was trumpeted around the world. The New York Times reported the story as its lead article on the front page under a three-line headline stretched across four columns.
The kidnappers were never found. A local dance-hall operator, a friend of June's father, was charged after his handwriting was found to be similar to that used in one of the ransom notes, but the case against him collapsed.
Tucsonians were filled with questions: Why had a ransom note been delivered to the prosecutor? Could June really have survived 19 days underground? Why didn't her wealthy grandfather front the ransom? What was the Chicago connection?
In December 1936, after several suspects had been interrogated, a federal grand jury concluded that there was not enough evidence to accuse anyone. It described June's baffling disappearance as an "alleged kidnapping."
J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the F.B.I., apparently shared the grand jury's skepticism. "We have had 36 kidnappings listed, and all of them are solved on our records," he said.
Seeking to capitalize on the publicity, June's parents hoped to send the girl on a vaudeville tour to raise $1,500 in reward money for the arrest of the kidnappers. But when they sought more, to pay for her education, Hollywood promoters balked.
June was enrolled in a Roman Catholic school, where she was escorted daily under guard. "I simply cannot bear to leave my children alone for a minute," Helen Robles told The Tucson Daily Citizen.
June earned a degree in business administration from the University of Arizona in 1948 and, after graduation, worked for the school's registrar.
The last time Little June was interviewed, in 1936, she said that all she had wanted was "to be a mother like my mother." And that was what she became.
Her marriage in 1950 was to Dancey Birt, an aircraft factory supervisor at the time. He survives her. Besides her son James, she is also survived by three other children, Thomas, Bruce and Barbara; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Published by The New York Times on Oct 31, 2017.
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