Irene Seale of Lebanon, New Jersey, got out of jail this week. She had been in federal prison for 17 years. You don’t get that much time for stealing hub caps. Irene and her husband Arthur had been in deep financial debt. The solution for the couple was to kidnap the president of Exxon Oil.
As Sidney Reso struggled with them, he was shot in the arm. Still alive, he was put in a box and stashed in a storage facility on Route 31. He died in the box in a few days.
For the next two months, the Seales left messages demanding $18.5 million in ransom for Reso’s return. It was one of the highest ransoms ever demanded in the United States.
Finally, after leading FBI agents on a four-hour trail of ransom notes and phone calls, they were arrested in Hackettstown, NJ. Now Irene has paid her debt to society and is free. Her husband will be free eventually too – in 2075.
This was a high ransom, but not the biggest. The biggest was the ransom Jesus gave for you.