All That Money | Author's Note

Author's Note: All That Money

This book I wrote under unusual circumstances. I was helping to renovate an apartment in Louisville, Kentucky in the spring of 2006 when one Thursday afternoon I got a telephone call offering me a job I'd applied for, to start a week from the following Monday. I needed that job, but I also wanted to write this book. So, after a day or two of making notes, I began writing and had the first draft finished by the time the job started. For a moment I thought I was Georges Simenon! But of course the time it took to rewrite it undid any time saved in writing at such speed.

All That Money is based on an event, now forgotten, that was a national sensation in its day: the 1934 Louisville "kidnapping" of Alice Speed Stoll (1906-1996), a young married woman, heiress to a prominent family, by Thomas H. Robinson, Jr. (1906-1994).

But was it really a kidnapping or, as Rumor insists, Alice Speed Stoll's scheme to gain early access to part of her inheritance, a scheme carried out with her lover?

Self-portrait, Alice Speed Stoll

Self-portrait, Alice Speed Stoll (ca. 1985?). Oil on panel, 16" x 24". Private Collection.

I had the opportunity to ask several Speed family members, cousins who knew her well, what the family version of her "kidnapping" is. "We were always taught," one told me carefully, "that she was in on it." "I never heard that!" declared her sister. In later years, they agreed, whenever someone had the temerity to ask her about the kidnapping, Alice Speed Stoll would grandly sweep a full 180 degrees; effective despite her petiteness. At her death in 1996 she left the Speed Art Museum more than $50 million.

Robinson, a college graduate from a good family in Tennessee, pleaded guilty to the kidnapping and was sentenced to life imprisonment at Alcatraz. He later appealed, however, saying he'd agreed to a plea deal under duress, was granted a trial, convicted and sentenced to death. He came within a few hours of his date with the electric chair before President Truman commuted his sentence to life imprisonment (he was freed in 1970, which I didn't know when I wrote the book). His case was legally notable in leading to a change assuring that appeals cannot lead to worse results than the original conviction.


Thomas H. Robinson, Jr.

Trivia: Two of the F.B.I.'s best-known agents were involved with the case. Melvin Purvis escorted the victim home, and soon thereafter retired from the Bureau (my novel suggests a possible reason why). And Robinson, after a year and a half of living it up in Los Angeles, was apprehended by John Bugas, who, after retiring from the Bureau in 1944, was for a quarter century second in command at the Ford Motor Company.