Police Zero In on Kidnapper, but Where’s His Victim?

All night, SWAT team members crouched in a snowy embankment, sniper scopes trained on Reinier Ravesteijn’s small yellow house on a remote country road six miles from Elkhorn.

There wasn’t even a tree to hide behind, just frozen fields and the roadside ditch.

Lights flickered on and off, and shadows moved through different rooms. Finally the house went dark and the SWAT team made its move.

In the moonlight, a couple of agents crept up the drive. They placed two infrared beacons near a trailer at the back of the house -- spotters for aerial surveillance. Then they slipped a transmitter underneath Ravesteijn’s white van.

It was Friday, Feb. 7.

They would wait through the night and leave before sunrise.

*

Saturday morning, around 9 a.m.

“Suspect is mobile.”

At the police command center, all eyes latched onto the little red dot as it moved across the computer screen -- the transmitter attached to Ravesteijn’s van.

First Ravesteijn drove to the Ace Hardware store and bought a kerosene tank. Then he drove to McDonald’s and bought a couple of hamburgers.

He’s onto us, Sheriff David Graves thought, watching the red dot as Ravesteijn drove home. He’s pretending to be normal. He’s not going to lead us to Heddie.

For the next agonizing hour and a half, police debated what to do.

Then the cry went up again.

“Suspect is mobile!”

Again the red dot moved across the screen. This time, Ravesteijn was heading north. Another few miles and he would cross county lines.

Graves’ head was pounding. He prayed that he was making the right call.

“Stop him,” Graves cried. “Take him now.”

It was 11:15 a.m.

Along I-43, the scene was surreal -- 30 unmarked police cars trailing the suspect’s white Dodge van. The two lead cars swept past Ravesteijn’s van and another two screeched up behind, barricading him at the side of the road.

Sirens blared. Flashbangs -- small popping devices used to disorient suspects -- exploded. Officers leaped from their cars, dragged Ravesteijn from his van and shoved him face-down onto the road. Guns were pointed at his head. Everyone was yelling.

“Where’s Grandma?”

“Tell us where she’s at? Where’s Heddie?”

Ravesteijn looked terrified.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” he cried.

The screaming just got louder.

Det. Michael “Bambi” Banaszynski watched from a distance. Slowly he got out of the car.

“Bambi!” Ravesteijn cried, spotting his old friend. “I’ll talk to Bambi.”

Banaszynski looked him in the eye. “Is she alive?”

“Bambi ... I was desperate.”

Is she alive?”

Ravesteijn nodded furiously. “She’s alive.”

*

In the police car, Ravesteijn confessed how he had concocted the kidnapping scheme in desperation after losing his $32-an-hour job. Banaszynski had no sympathy. He just prayed that Heddie Braun was still alive.

Ravesteijn directed police to the small white trailer behind his house. Banaszynski peered inside. There was an eerie whooshing sound from the kerosene tank in the corner, and the dank smell of urine. All he could see was a pile of filthy blankets, some McDonald’s containers and some kind of plastic sheet underneath.

“Heddie!” he called.

Banaszynski heard a muffled moan. He pulled off one blanket.

Heddie’s huge blue eyes gazed up at him.

Banaszynski put his arms around the old lady, all skin and bones and frozen. Her feet were bruised and swollen. Ice coated the chains around her ankles.

“You’re safe now,” Banaszynski said.

“What took you so long?” she whispered.

*

At first, doctors told Heddie that she might lose her left foot, it was so damaged by frostbite. She had blood clots in her legs. Her heartbeat was irregular. Doctors didn’t think that she could have survived another day.

Today, Heddie just smiles when asked how she remained so strong.

“I’m Norwegian,” she said.

Her foot was saved, and she went home from the hospital after two weeks.

She has rarely talked about her ordeal, other than the required interviews with police.

“I forgive him,” she told her daughter. “You have to, too.”

But forgiveness was hard as the family listened in court to the rambling apology of the man they had once considered a friend.

It was galling to hear his wife, Karen Ravesteijn, plead for leniency. She had, after all, taken part in a botched plan to help him escape by smuggling saw blades in a Bible into the jail. She got two years’ probation.

In letters to the judge, in speeches in court, Braun’s family told of how the kidnapping had robbed them of their sense of safety, peace and trust. They have security systems in their homes now, they said. They worry about someone trying to kidnap their children.

But the worst was the betrayal.

“How do you tell your grandchildren that a ‘friend’ kidnapped Grandma, and tortured her like she was prisoner of war?” daughter Joan Wolfram said.

At the back of the courtroom, Heddie Braun clutched the hand of her wheelchair-bound husband, Eddie, and listened. She didn’t feel any joy, she said later. She was curious about what her kidnapper looked like without his black face mask. But mostly she felt sad for his wife and children.

Not Eddie. For Eddie, life in prison was not punishment enough for the monster who had taken his wife.

So he smiled grimly when the judge sentenced Ravesteijn to 45 years for kidnapping, burglary and false imprisonment. Heddie gasped.

Forty-five years? For kidnapping her?

But I’m just a nobody, she protested.

“No ma’am,” the sheriff said.

Her family thinks that she may have suffered a mild stroke, brought on by the ordeal. Heddie says the pain in her foot wears her down, and that is why she seems so frail and tired.

She sleeps a lot these days, more than she used to.

She locks the door now. And she always leaves the lights on.

This story is based on interviews with nine members of the Braun and Mann families, including Hedwig and Edward Braun, Joan Wolfram and Robert Mann; with Sheriff David Graves, Capt. Dana Nigbor, Det. Michael Banaszynski and two other members of the Walworth County Sheriff’s Department; with Walworth County Dist. Atty. Philip Koss and three members of his staff; with David Mitchell, the FBI special agent in charge of Wisconsin; and with Reinier Ravesteijn’s attorney, Larry Steen. It is also based on Walworth County Circuit Court criminal records, sheriff’s department reports, a videotaped sheriff’s department interview with Hedwig Braun and transcripts of Ravesteijn’s confession to police.