1950 – The Doctor Makes a House Call

I ran across Allen Stamm’s obituary the other day. If you’re from Santa Fe, you know the name. In fact, if you’re from Santa Fe, you may very well have lived in an Allen Stamm subdivision. Me, I lived on Sombrio Drive in the Casa Solana subdivision as a kid and, when I bought my first home, I bought one on Caminito Alegre, just a few blocks away in the same neighborhood.

But this story isn’t about me. It starts with Allen Stamm, a true Santa Fe legend. Allen Stamm’s fame and fortune came from a career as Santa Fe’s premier land developer and homebuilder. Originally from Albuquerque, Stamm excelled as an athlete –- he was a state high school tennis champion -- and trained as a civil engineer. By the mid 1930’s, he was working as an engineer for state government –- mostly water projects – and he ran a side business remodeling homes in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Then, he turned to home building full-time.

In 1938, he bought empty lots (at $210 each) in the Escalante area in Santa Fe and built a subdivision he called Lovato Heights, south of Cordova Road. It was a solid success with homes selling as fast as they could be built. Stamm was already planning his next subdivision when Pearl Harbor was attacked and everyone’s plans were put on indefinite hold. Stamm spent the war in the Navy.

When he returned to Santa Fe after the war, Stamm again bought cheap land and built the Casa Linda subdivision – the one around Kaune School. After that, he built the Casa Alegre subdivision, on either side of Osage Avenue between Cerrillos Road and Agua Fria Street. The most noted was his Casa Solana subdivision, 1956–1963, featuring a community building and pool, with pleasant sturdy homes boasting oak floors and vigas, set on wide streets curved around a shopping center, off West Alameda Street. Ultimately, Allen Stamm built nearly 2,800 homes in the Santa Fe area.

Anyway, in 1950, when this story takes place, Stamm was already a rich man, living in a gated home in posh Sol y Lomas. By then, Stamm had a wife and kids, including nine-year old Linda Stamm.

She’s the one who answered the door in early November 1950 to an oddly dressed man – he was wearing a stocking cap and dark glasses. He told the maid he was there to take Linda to her mother who was at a bridge party. Without hesitation, Linda left with the caller. The man also left a letter with the maid to deliver to the Stamms.

Hours later, when Mrs. Stamm returned home, she opened the letter and this is what she read:

“Your child has been kidnapped . . . The amount is $20,000 cash or negotiable bonds. Put same in envelope on top of your Sol y Lomas gate tonight if you can. If not until tomorrow night put a red rag as sign ... If not at all—your kid will die of cold and hunger. New Mexico is an easy place to lose a body. Do not talk about this to police, FBI or friends. Any effort to interfere with our messenger, the child dies.”

The Stamms put out a red rag on their front gate to buy time and promptly called police. Thus, the next night, when the “messenger” reached to retrieve the planted envelope of cash, the thirty law enforcement officers hidden in the wooded area around the house pounced on the ”messenger.” Two agents tackled the man, one administering a punch or two, only to discover it was not a man at all, but a woman carrying a .25 caliber automatic pistol.

And not just any armed woman, it was Dr. Nancy D. Campbell, 43, a Yale-educated gynecologist and obstetrician. She was a prominent Santa Fe physician with what everyone thought was a flourishing medical practice in the City for nearly 14 years. She had an office in the Coronado building, across from the new hospital and she enjoyed a reputation as an excellent doctor.

In her first year in Santa Fe (1943), along with the Catholic Medical Mission Sisters, Campbell opened a maternity institute and was credited with dramatically reducing the infant mortality rate in Santa Fe County. She was a popular speaker on medical matters before local women’s clubs. Personable and confident, the stylish doctor favored a “mannish” bob. And she had a penchant for brand new yellow Buick convertibles.

In custody, Dr. Campbell quickly confessed to being the “oddly-dressed man” and to tricking little Linda -- whom she knew personally – into her car, drugging the child with Seconal and tying her up in a drafty abandoned ranch house on the road to Madrid. Leaving the bound child in the cabin, the doctor then went on to dinner with friends in Las Vegas. The next day, she returned to Santa Fe to collect the ransom from the Stamms.

Upon learning the location of the ranch house, the police quickly recovered the child. According to the Santa Fe New Mexican, nine-year old Linda Stamm was cold and a little hungry, but was otherwise in good health. Time magazine reported rather more dramatically that Linda was found filthy, wrapped in rags, but nonetheless alive. Either way, her parents, Allen and Marty Stamm, were mad as hell, calling for the full penalty of the law for kidnapping. In 1950, that meant the death penalty.

Over the next several weeks, Campbell’s story emerged. Dr. Campbell confessed she did it for the money. She wanted to buy a big house, the one at 1120 Canyon Road, and pay off “domestic expenses” with the $20,000. In fact, the police found two more notes in her yellow convertible addressed to other prominent Santa Fe families whose children she had targeted for kidnapping.

While the kidnapping plot sounded carefully calculated, Dr. Campbell’s lawyer, A.L. Zinn, announced he would plead insanity as Campbell’s defense. His client, Zinn declared, suffered from something he called “brain deterioration.” He promised to produce national experts to prove it.

The trial was brief and brutal. Campbell’s insanity defense quickly fell apart and she was convicted of the kidnapping. But Campbell escaped the death penalty. Instead, she was sentenced to the New Mexico State Penitentiary.

The kidnapping excited and troubled Santa Fe. Residents took to locking their doors and writing angry letters to the editor bemoaning the decline of public morals. The few citizens who stood up in the beginning for Dr. Campbell, mostly former patients, grew silent as Campbell’s guilt and fate became clear. No one who witnessed this story unfold in 1950 ever forgot it. To this day, you can ask any Santa Fe old-timer about the kidnapping of Linda Stamm by Nancy Campbell and their memories are sharp on the point, many adding personal footnotes proving their connection to this decades old story.

But when I ask them whatever happened to Linda Stamm or Nancy Campbell, no one knew. So I undertook to find out .

Linda Stamm was sent off to live with relatives in Arizona, away from the curious, to grow up in relative calm. But, as a young woman, she returned to Santa Fe and took up life as a sculptor under her married name -- Linda Strong -- working out of a studio at her horse ranch in rural Santa Fe. In 1979, she produced a memorable sculpture group of young children having a water pistol fight, installed in a riverside park in Santa Fe, using her own children as models. The bronze children frolicked in the city park for over twenty years.

But in 1999, after the massacre at Columbine High School, the sculptures of children wielding guns -- albeit water pistols -- worried Santa Fe citizens, many of whom wrote letters to the editor of the New Mexican in protest. Linda Strong happily provided a replacement sculpture in which the children brandished water hoses, not water pistols.

Nancy Campbell went to prison, serving six years for the kidnapping. She was released in 1957. She was met at the prison gates upon her release by a small mob of eager reporters, each hoping to write the last chapter in what the typically hyperbolic New Mexican called “ one of the most sensational and contradictory crimes in the history of the Southwest.” But she refused to say where she would go or what she would do. Then, Nancy Campbell simply disappeared.