The Girl in the Iron Box: How an Arizona Kidnapping Stumped Hoover’s FBI by Paul Cool (review)

On April 25, 1934, six-year-old June Robles, granddaughter of the wealthy Mexican American cattle rancher, Bernabé Robles, was kidnapped in front of her elementary school. With the Lindbergh kidnapping still in the headlines, the Robles abduction garnered nationwide attention, and J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) descended on the small, dusty town of Tucson, Arizona. For the FBI, though, there was much more at stake than bringing June home; the reputation of Hoover’s agency hung in the balance. In The Girl in the Iron Box: How an Arizona Kidnapping Stumped Hoover’s FBI, Paul Cool expertly weaves the events that led up to the abduction, the subsequent botched investigation, and the eventual rescue of June Robles after being locked in an iron box for nineteen days in the Sonoran Desert. Cool’s study goes beyond true crime and reflects on the socio-cultural factors that bore heavily on the investigation by local and federal law enforcement. Interjected into the analysis of the crime, Cool contends that personal relationships, within the Robles family, the FBI, and the Tucson community, hampered the investigation. As Cool points out, though, June Robles’s kidnapping provides a window in which to examine the FBI’s “methods and culture in the mid-1930s including its struggle to operate within the Hoover-determined parameters of ‘scientific policing’ and what it meant for the future of FBI forensics” (p. 3). Hoover’s obsession with maintaining the public persona of professionalism and infallibility impeded not only the investigation but also the lives and careers of everyone involved.

While much of the historiography of the 1930s FBI focuses on the War on Crime, Public Enemies, and the Lindbergh kidnapping, Cool demonstrates that the Robles case fits into the overreaching federal atmosphere of crime fighting, but the distinctness of Tucson played a significant role in the methods and eventual failure of the investigation. One of the many elements that influenced the investigation was the demographics of the city and the Robles family itself. Tucson was home to a large population of Mexican Americans, including the patriarch, Bernabé Robles, June’s grandfather, and many of them distrusted local and federal law enforcement. In addition, the Anglo media contributed to the distrust between Anglos and Mexican Americans, and after June disappeared, the distrust grew with every sensational story and report. To add to the difficulties of the case, the Tucson Police Department and the Pima County Sheriff’s office were unaccustomed to the scientific, evidentiary methods of the FBI and contaminated the crime scene from the outset.

One of the strengths of Cool’s work is the research into and dissection of the different personalities that shaped the case from the beginning. Using FBI files from other kidnappings, bank robberies, and agents’ files, Cool describes the individual personalities of the agents and the control that Hoover exerted over those agents and the entire agency. Hoover would not accept any failure, from the investigation or any of his agents. On the other side, the Tucson community and local law enforcement remained suspicious and distrustful of the federal authorities. Cool maintains that the nature of the city, which in many ways resembled the Old West, altered the chances of success of finding the kidnappers. Almost immediately after the report of June’s disappearance, Pima County undersheriff Jake Farrar alerted local citizens. Within two hours of receiving the ransom note, scores of volunteers alongside law enforcement blocked roads, searched vehicles, and roamed the streets with very little organization or direction, hampering the investigation and evidence viability. Not long after June was found in an iron box, Sheriff John Belton displayed the box and crime scene in order to enlist citizens’ help in identifying the suspects. Tucsonans preferred to use their own resources and community to find one of their own and as Cool maintains, “Tucsonans took...