Cobb police chief recounts kidnapping; ransomed, beaten, threatened with death

As a 10-year-old boy growing up in Macon in 1971, Cobb Police Chief Michael Register survived a horrifying kidnapping and ransom. The chief shared his ordeal in a talk with the Kiwanis Club of Marietta on Thursday.

The abduction occurred when his mother took him to visit friends. Register asked if he could go to the store to get some chewing gum, and as he exited the store, two men pulled up in a car and asked if he wanted to make $5 raking a yard. When he said no, the two asked where he was going, offering to give him a ride if he got in the car.

“I took off running and just like a movie, if I would had stayed out on Riverside Drive where all the cars were at I probably would have never been abducted. But I ran behind this Chinese restaurant called the Golden Dragon,” he said.

Register knew of an alley behind the restaurant that led to a path through the woods taking him to where his mother was visiting. One of the men jumped out of the car and ran after him, tackling him in the alley. They handcuffed him, put him in the car and drove him to another spot, where he Michael Register met another man who was the leader of the group. His name was John Plummer and he had a history of abusing children, Register said. The group called themselves the 5-0 Club.

Register could see the interstate from where they took him. There had once been a house that appeared to have burned down, leaving the chimney.

“They took the handcuffs off me. Made me take my T-shirt off, my shoes, my socks and told me to hug a tree. I hugged a tree and they cuffed me again. Took the belt. Beat me with the belt,” he said.

The three grilled him for info on his parents and how they could be reached, information the young boy gave up. Then the two who brought him to the spot left, leaving him with 21-year-old Plummer, who marched him through the woods to an abandoned house. The house was locked from the outside so he had to take the locks off.

“I remember him making me lie down on the porch and turn my head, and as I turned my head, he stood on my face so I wouldn’t run. I had handcuffs on … He made me stand on a chair and he handcuffed this wrist to one (i-bolt), my other wrist to the other, and put handcuffs on my ankles, and pulled the chair out from under me, and I hung there for quite a while.”

Because he had been visiting an affluent neighborhood, the kidnappers thought his family was wealthy. They weren’t. Neither his mother nor father graduated high school. His dad worked at what was known as the sand pit and his mother at a cotton factory.

“So, he had the wrong guy. That wasn’t helping me any at the time,” he said.

His family was able to secure $5,000 for the ransom. The kidnappers had taken his clothes to mark a spot where it was to be dropped off.

With his father in the hospital, Register’s mother drove down I-75 with an FBI agent hiding on the floor board under a blanket.

When she saw her son’s clothes, she threw out the bag of money which had a tracker. Yet one of the kidnappers took the money out of the bag, and they lost the tracker.

Register said “a lot of other stuff happened” during his abduction. At one point, he was able to grab an ID card they had made with “5-0 Club” on it, and he hid it in his underwear, figuring if something happened to him, someone would know who did it.

“They had dug a shallow grave, and I lay there and they stood around discussing who was going to kill me,” he said.

By this point, Register said he had stopped responding when they would call his name. When they struck him, he wouldn’t cry, but simply call out, “Who are you and where are we?” How he knew to do that at such a young age, he doesn’t know, but he believes it saved his life. The kidnappers believed they had driven the boy crazy and that he wouldn’t turn them in, although Plummer warned that if he ever said anything, he’d kill him and his family.

Register said he escaped by running through the woods until he saw a road and flagged down a car to take him to the hospital. Wanting to find the kidnappers, he figured if he could locate the chimney, he could lead authorities to the house in the woods. They found the chimney and authorities placed him on a stretcher, carrying him up the path in the woods to the abandoned house where he’d been imprisoned. They kicked in the door and found the cuffs and a share of the money. With the help of a dog, they also found Plummer, who was hiding under the house in a hole he’d dug that was covered with dirt on top of plywood. Plummer was sentenced to life, while the other two were never found.

Register was given an honorary proclamation and made the chief of detectives. The event sparked his interest in law enforcement.

“The law enforcement community was so good to me back then. Even after the event, they would come by; they would check on me. They were very good to me and I’ll never forget that,” he said.