Daughter Gets 3 Years in Prison : Parents Out $200,000 in 2-Year Kidnaping Hoax

For two years and without a word to police, Louis and Grace Arnold paid ransom demands totaling more than $200,000 to people they believed were repeatedly kidnaping their daughter, Mary Beth Lara.

The ransom notes--as many as 150 of them between mid-1984 and August, 1986--were in the daughter’s handwriting and read much the same: Drug dealers to whom she owed money were holding her and would kill her if they were not paid, they said.

“I will not go into what will happen if he’s not paid off today,” one of the notes said. “I’m sure you will help me if possible. . . . I love you both so very much.”

Sometimes a line in someone else’s handwriting would be scrawled at the bottom. “We will blow her face off if you (mess) around with us,” one said.

The Los Alamitos couple were scared, Grace Arnold says now, and so they paid--cleaning out their savings, mortgaging their property, dipping into retirement funds and borrowing heavily from relatives. In July, 1986, Louis Arnold, clutching one of the last of the ransom notes, suffered a heart attack that disabled and eventually killed him.

It wasn’t until Aug. 5, 1986, that the police were called. Within two hours police had arrested three people--including Mary Beth Lara.

It all had been a hoax.

Lara, now 36, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and extortion in Orange County Superior Court this week, and Monday she is scheduled to begin a three-year prison sentence. She will be free on bail until then.

One of two friends who acted as messengers in the extortion scheme, Noreen F. Nickel, 34, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and extortion charges in July and is serving a two-year sentence. The other, Steven C. Hagen, 38, was convicted of conspiracy and extortion in a trial in July and is serving a three-year sentence.

None of the money paid by the Arnolds has been recovered.

Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher J. Evans, who prosecuted Lara and her two friends, speculates it all went for drugs.

‘Shot Up Their Arms’

“That money was shot up their arms and their noses,” Evans said. Several other attorneys and judges involved in the case agree.

West Orange County Municipal Judge William L. Mock, who presided at the preliminary hearing for Lara, Nickel and Hagen, suggested that they “had found the goose that laid the golden egg, and they were working it for what it was worth.”

Louis Arnold was hospitalized after his July, 1986, heart attack and died eight months later at the age of 70.

Grace Arnold, a 68-year-old homemaker, cannot talk about her long ordeal without crying. Sitting in her living room this week, her face red from tears, she said she is still not convinced that her daughter made it all up.

But if she did, Grace Arnold said, “she is still my daughter. Except on money, she has always been very kind to me.”

Lara, the mother of a teen-age daughter, split up with her husband several years ago, Grace Arnold said. Unable to hold down a steady job, Lara had lived off and on with her parents until mid-1984 when they told her they could no longer help her pay her bills. Lara’s daughter remained with the Arnolds.

Soon after that, Lara disappeared for the first time, and the ransom notes began.

Several times over the next two years, she returned home after a series of ransom demands were met--but each time she disappeared again within days. And the ransom notes resumed.

‘What Would Have Happened’

“My husband would not want to do it,” Grace Arnold said. “And I--how do we know that it wasn’t the truth when it comes right down to it?--I don’t know what would have happened if we hadn’t.”

Lara’s brother, 42-year-old Russell Arnold, a contractor in Daly City, sat near his mother in her living room during the interview, his head down. He is so grief-stricken and worried about his mother that he can barely talk about his sister.

They had been a close family, he said. His father, a retired Marine Corps officer, had been devoted to his only daughter. How does Russell Arnold feel about his sister now? He squeezed his eyes tight and thought a long time.

“I just don’t know,” he finally said.

The ransom notes, delivered to the Arnolds’ home by Hagen or Nickel, were always similar.

“I have been promised I will be brought home as soon as this is paid,” one of them said. “There are no more (debts). Please, help me, Dad.”

There would be mention of threats of violence against her, then the promise that no one would ever kidnap her again. Then there would be gratitude to her parents because “I know everyone is broke because of me. . . . As soon as this is over I will begin to show you a totally reborn Mary Beth.” The notes almost always ended with instructions on how to make out the check and an admonishment not to delay Hagen or Nickel.

In June, 1986, the demand notes were coming several times a week. On July 3, 1986, Louis Arnold sent back his own note with Nickel, saying he would not pay any more money unless he could deliver it in person and in exchange for his daughter. That demand was rejected in a return note. He paid the money.

‘Hang in There’

After her father’s heart attack, Lara wrote to her mother, saying if she would just pay this last drug dealer $400, he would free her to see her father in the hospital. “Tell Dad to hang in there,” she wrote.

It was Russell Arnold who brought down the hoax.

He had come to see his parents in July, 1986. His mother needed more money to meet the ransom demands. Russell Arnold had already given them about $20,000. But he came to help again.

On Aug. 5, 1986, Nickel came to the door with a new ransom demand: Pay $500 or they would cut off one of Lara’s ears. “Please, Mom, this is it,” the note from Lara said. “They say I’ll be freed one hour from now if this is paid.”

Russell Arnold left Nickel waiting with his mother for the money and headed secretly for the Los Alamitos Police Department.

The police immediately smelled a hoax, court records show. Lara was well known to them as a heavy heroin user.

A hidden microphone was strapped onto Russell Arnold, and he was sent back to the house to get evidence.

“Is this for real? Are they serious?” Russell Arnold asked Nickel, according to a court transcript.

“I don’t know,” Nickel answered. “I don’t know if they’re just bluffing, you know, I mean just to scare (the parents.)”

Nickel then said that one of the kidnapers had punched Lara for crying, adding, “He told her to shut up or else he was going to give her something to slobber about.”

Nickel was given the money, and she left, unaware that she was under police surveillance. She went directly to a commercial parking lot where Lara and Hagen were waiting in a car for her.

They eventually drove to Bauman’s Market on Beach Boulevard where most of the other checks from Lara’s parents had been cashed. When police approached the vehicle, Lara ran. Police caught her in an alley two blocks away.

Drug Paraphernalia Found

Police found drug paraphernalia in her purse. Other drug paraphernalia was found in Hagen’s car. Attorneys for Hagen and Nickel have acknowledged that their clients were heavy drug users.

Superior Court Judge Theodore E. Millard, who sentenced Hagen, calls the case “a real tragedy. In all my years in the law, I have never seen anything like it.”

Millard added that it is a classic example of “how gullible parents can be about their own children. It also goes to show just how far people will go when dope is involved.”

Hagen denied any involvement in the scheme when interviewed by a probation officer. Nickel admitted she was a messenger but claimed in police interviews that she did it because she believed Lara was really in danger.

Russell Arnold said his sister, “to my knowledge, has never shown any remorse for any of it.”

That is not right, his mother interjected: “She’s told me many times how sorry she is about everything.”

But that sentiment apparently was prompted purely by the pain her mother had suffered. Both Grace and Russell Arnold said Lara never has admitted that she set them up.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Evans, who has prosecuted a wide variety of felony cases, said he has never had one like this.

“I have never seen one family so devastated,” Evans said. “The father suffers a heart attack after yet another ransom note and dies. The brother is just destroyed by what has happened. And the mother--what must that poor woman be going through?”

Said Grace Arnold: “I guess she just went down the wrong road in life somewhere. Basically, she is a good girl.”