By 1934, Tucson figured its Wild West days were behind it. The legendary gunfight at the O.K. Corral, down the road in Tombstone, had occurred fully a half-century before, and Tucson was blooming as a desert mecca for tourists and respiratory patients.

True, John Dillinger and his bank-robbing gang had been captured at the Hotel Congress there that January, but they were holed up in Tucson only because they had decided that the city, population 32,000, was so removed from the nation’s mainstream violence that they would never be noticed there.

So when 6-year-old June Robles, the granddaughter of a prosperous cattle baron and real estate magnate, vanished in broad daylight just after leaving her Tucson school on a spring day in 1934, news of her disappearance shattered the city’s calm and swept across the country in terrifying front-page headlines, stoking Americans’ already prevalent fears about the lucrative — and sometimes deadly — crime of child abduction. Only two years earlier, the 20-month-old son of the aviator Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. had been snatched from his New Jersey home, held for ransom and murdered.

The Robles abduction had a happier, if bizarre, ending, however. Nineteen days later, June was found bewildered but alive in a makeshift wood-and-sheet-metal cage buried in the broiling desert. Americans could heave a collective sigh of relief.