A Talent To Deceive E-Book

William Norris

• Herausgeber: CamCat Books
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 525

Beschreibung

The Search for the Real Killer of the Lindbergh Baby

Leseprobe

A Talent to Deceive

The Search for the Real Killer of the Lindbergh Baby

William Norris

CamCat Publishing, LLC

Brentwood, Tennessee 37027

camcatpublishing.com

Although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure that the information in this book was correct at press time, the author and publisher make no representations or warranties, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability, usefulness or timeliness of the information contained in this book for any purpose. The author and publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.

© 2020 by CamCat Publishing

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address 101 Creekside Crossing Suite 280 Brentwood, TN 37027.

Paperback ISBN 9780744300727

Large-Print Paperback ISBN 9780744300260

eBook ISBN 9780744300734

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020935496

Cover Design by Mimi Bark

5 3 1 2 4

Also by William Norris

Nonfiction:

Snowbird

The Man Who Fell from the Sky

Willful Misconduct

Fiction:

The Badger Game

Make Mad the Guilty

A Grave Too Many

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. A Malicious Prank

2. Aid from Unsavory Quarters

3. More Harm than Good

4. What Happened to Baby Charles

5. The Doctor’s Convoluted Defense

6. Justice, One Way or Another

7. The Craig House Escapee

8. Who Tipped Off the Kidnapper?

9. At a Loss for Words

10. What Rosalind Russell Overheard

11. The Morrow Family’s Secret

12. The Family Attempts to Move On

13. An Unlikely Scapegoat

14. What Began as the American Dream

15. Friends and Frauds

16. “We’ve Got the Right Man At Last.”

17. The Shaky Identification of “Cemetery John”

18. Anti-Hauptmann Hysteria

19. World Champion Liars

20. Bolstering a Shoddy Case

21. A Return to the Morrow Hypothesis

22. One Rumor Laid to Rest

23. The Hauptmann Trial

24. A Prosecution Mired in Lies

25. Evidence Built to Suit the Crime

26. “I Know I Am Innocent.”

27. The Final Arguments

28. Elusive Clemency for Hauptmann

29. Governor Hoffman Intervenes

30. An Undelivered Letter

31. Other Lindbergh Victims

32. “This Man Is Dead.”

33. Media-Driven Conspiracy Theories

34. Lingering Questions

Epilogue

For Further Discussion

About the Author

More from William Norris

The Man Who Fell From the Sky

Snowbird

A Grave Too Many

The Badger Game

CamCat Books

O what a tangled web we weave,

When first we practise to deceive!

Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, 1808

On doit des égards aux vivants; on ne doit aux morts que la verité.

We owe respect to the living; to the dead we owe only truth.

Voltaire, Oeuvres, 1785

Introduction

On the night of March 1, 1932, a small child was taken from his bedroom in a lonely house near Hopewell, New Jersey. A ransom note was discovered, and a demand of $50,000 paid by the distraught parents. But the little boy never came home. His body was later found some two miles away, decomposed almost beyond recognition.

There was nothing terribly unusual about this tragedy. Kidnapping was rife in America at the time. In the three years prior to 1932, there had been at least 2,500 such cases. Only the identity of the parents transformed this event from the banal to the sensational: They were Charles A. Lindbergh and his wife, the former Anne Morrow. Hence, it became labelled the Crime of the Century in the popular press, to be followed in due course by the Trial of the Century. It also became The Case That Will Never Die.

Charles Lindbergh, as every child knows, was the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic in May 1927 at the age of 28. He was the Great American Hero, lauded wherever he went. Young, handsome, shy, and reserved, Lindbergh was the epitome of everything America wanted to be (but rarely was). If it had been in the power of his countrymen to award him sainthood, he would have been beatified in an instant. As it was, they worshipped him and touched the hem of his garment whenever they could. Even now, to suggest that this idol might have had feet of clay verges on blasphemy in some quarters.

Lindbergh had met his future wife, Anne Morrow, when he accepted an invitation to travel to Mexico City for Christmas 1927. She was the second daughter of Senator Dwight W. Morrow, then U.S. ambassador to Mexico, who was being widely tipped as the next U.S. president. He was also enormously wealthy, a brilliant lawyer who had made his fortune as a partner in the banking firm of J.P. Morgan. It was a slow-burning romance—though she claimed to have fallen in love with him at first sight—but Lindbergh finally descended from the clouds to pursue the courtship, and the couple were formally engaged on February 12, 1929. The public adulation and media frenzy, which had followed Lindbergh ever since his flight to Paris, now engulfed them both. They were married privately in front of a few close friends and relatives at the Morrows’ new home in Englewood on May 27 of that year.

There was one notable absentee from the wedding: Anne’s only brother, twenty-one-year-old Dwight Jr. The two had always been close—she was his favorite sister—but her engagement to Lindbergh had brought to a head an affliction that had begun in Dwight Jr.’s teenage years. He suffered from schizophrenia and was destined to have recurring bouts of the mental disease for the rest of his life. On hearing of Lindbergh’s engagement to his sister, he is said to have flown into a jealous rage and become quite uncontrollable. This upstart airman had not only stolen his favorite sister but also threatened to become the male head of the Morrow family should his father die. Dwight Jr. was sent away for psychiatric treatment, and it was judged unsafe to permit him to attend the wedding ceremony.

The newlywed couple were to be given no peace. They were hounded by the press on their honeymoon, spent on board a cabin cruiser off the coast of Maine, and pestered incessantly as they later flew together on trips all over the United States and the Caribbean. Anne became pregnant in October 1929, but the constant flights continued unabated until Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. was born, at the Englewood house on June 22, 1930.

The need for privacy now became paramount, and by the end of September the couple had bought 500 acres of remote woodland in the Sourland Mountains of New Jersey and started to build themselves a house. They had begun to live there, though only at weekends, when the kidnapping occurred.

The events that followed were quite extraordinary. Suffice for the moment to say that, more than two years later, an illegal German immigrant named Bruno Richard Hauptmann was arrested and charged with kidnapping and murder after some $14,600 of the ransom money was found in his garage. After a sensational trial lasting more than six weeks, he was convicted, sentenced to death, and finally executed in the electric chair at the State Prison in Trenton, New Jersey, on April 3, 1936.

Hauptmann protested his innocence to the last. To this day, intense controversy rages over the case. A plethora of books have been written, some affirming his guilt, others equally passionate in claiming that his conviction was a travesty of justice. The problem with the latter has been that not one, so far as I am aware, has identified the true culprit with any degree of certainty or any supporting evidence. Some have blamed “the mob;” others have even suggested that Charles Lindbergh himself killed his son by accident or even murdered him because he had a slight genetic defect. Many claim that he obstructed the police investigation. The last, at least, is certainly true—as we shall see. But the motive for Lindbergh’s actions may have been entirely different from those ascribed to him.

The basis for all investigative journalism is the five Ws: Who? Why? What?When? and Where? The When and the Where and the What, we know. This book is an attempt to answer the Who and the Why.

1

A Malicious Prank

It was, to quote a famous phrase, a dark and stormy night in the Sourland Mountains of New Jersey on March 1, 1932. It had rained heavily in the afternoon. By evening the rain had ceased, but there was a cold and blustery east wind. In the newly built Lindbergh house, still uncurtained, there were five people in addition to the baby: Charles and Anne Lindbergh; Ollie and Elsie Whately, the English butler and maid; and Betty Gow, the child’s nursemaid. There was also a young fox terrier named Whagoosh, a notoriously noisy dog, whose name means “fox” in the Chippewa language.

Much of what happened that evening is open to doubt, but what follows—for what it is worth—is the officially accepted version.

Anne and Betty Gow began preparing the baby for bed at about 6:15 p.m. Young Charlie was recovering from a cold, but they rubbed his chest with Vicks VapoRub and decided to make him a flannelette shirt to wear beneath his night clothes. This was quickly sewn up by Betty, an accomplished seamstress, from a piece of scrap material. Over this the baby wore a sleeveless woollen shirt, which was pinned to his nappies under a pair of rubber pants. And on top of it all, Charlie wore a grey sleeping suit—size two, manufactured by the Dr. Denton company. His bedcovers were fastened to the mattress of his cot by two large safety pins, and on his hands he wore two shiny metal “thumb guards” to stop him sucking his thumbs. Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. was not going anywhere or doing anything, at least, not under his own volition. One of the thumb guards, which were attached to the baby’s wrists by lengths of half-inch tape, was later to pose one of the unexplained puzzles of the kidnapping. It was discovered, still bright and shining, at the entrance to the property some twenty-nine days after the crime. The thumb guard lay in full view in the middle of the road; somewhat flattened—possibly run over—but not trodden into the mud. And yet none of the hundreds of people who had passed that way over the previous four weeks had noticed it until Betty Gow and Elsie Whateley picked it up. It was, to say the least, curious. Had it lain there all that time? Or had the perpetrator, finding it in his possession, casually dropped it when making a later visit to Hopewell? If the latter were true, a totally different list of suspects would be opened up. But the lead was never explored.

The two women tried to close the shutters of the window in the east wall, which lay directly over the window of Lindbergh’s study, but they were warped and refused to latch. There was a second window in the south wall, away from the wind, and they left this slightly open to let in some air. The whole putting-to-bed process took more than an hour, and it was 7:30 before Anne left the room and went into the living room to await her husband’s return. He had telephoned earlier to say he would be a little late. (In fact, he should have been much later because he was supposed to be speaking at a dinner given by New York University at the Waldorf-Astoria that night, but there had been a secretarial mix-up over his calendar and he forgot the appointment.) Betty Gow stayed a few minutes longer; then she, too, put out the light and left the nursery. The baby was sleeping. If the accepted accounts of those in the house that night are correct, this was the last time any of them saw him alive.

Charles Lindbergh arrived home at about 8:25, parked his car in the large garage that lay beneath the Whateleys’ quarters in the west wing, and entered the house through the connecting door into the kitchen. He joined his wife for dinner ten minutes later. A little after nine o’clock, while they were sitting by the fire in the ground-floor living room, Charles heard a sharp crack that he later described, rather oddly, as “like the top slats of an orange box falling off a chair.” He thought the noise came from the kitchen. It has since been assumed that what Lindbergh said he heard was the kidnapper’s ladder breaking outside the nursery window, but the kitchen was in the opposite direction. Anne apparently heard nothing. In any case, as we shall learn later, Lindbergh’s hearing was not something to be relied upon.

The couple decided to have a bath before going to bed. Charles went first, using the upstairs bathroom, which was directly adjacent to the child’s nursery. It was then about 9:15. He dressed again and went downstairs to the library to read, sitting next to the uncurtained window that was directly beneath the southeast window in the nursery. Anne drew her own bath, then discovered she had left her tooth powder in the baby’s bathroom. She went in without turning on the light, retrieved the powder, and returned to the main bathroom. Then she rang for Elsie Whateley and requested a hot lemonade. It was almost ten o’clock.

Betty Gow and the Whateleys, meanwhile, were in the servants’ sitting room, which was on the ground floor at the western end of the house. Whagoosh the terrier, who had shown no sign of hearing the odd noise Lindbergh said he heard earlier, was with them. Ten o’clock was the regular hour when the baby would be lifted and invited to use his potty, and Betty Gow went upstairs, passing through the kitchen, the pantry, and the foyer en route and apparently noting nothing amiss. She thought of getting Anne Lindbergh to join her, but Anne was still in the bath, so she entered the nursery alone, first turning on the light in the adjacent bathroom.

Betty Gow, according to her own account, first went to close the south window, which had been left partly open when they put the child to bed. Then she turned on the electric heater before moving toward the cot. She could not hear the child breathing. “I thought that something had happened to him,” she said later. “That perhaps the clothes were over his head. In the half light I saw that he wasn’t there and felt all over the bed for him.”

Panicking, the nursemaid ran down the corridor to the Lindberghs’ bedroom and found Anne leaving the bathroom. “Do you have the baby, Mrs. Lindbergh?” she asked. Anne Lindbergh was puzzled. “No,” she said, and went to look in the child’s room while Betty Gow raced downstairs to the library to see, if by any chance, Lindbergh had him. The answer, of course, was no.

Ever the man of action, Lindbergh ran upstairs to the main bedroom, opened the closet, and loaded the rifle he kept there. Then he told his wife that the baby had been kidnapped. In the nursery, he discovered that the southeast corner window was open a crack, that the cold wind blowing through it, and that on top of the radiator case forming the sill was a white envelope. Assuming that it contained a ransom note and might bear fingerprints, he did not touch it. Instead, he took his rifle and ran out into the night, having first told Whateley, the butler, to telephone the sheriff at Hopewell.

Lacking a flashlight, Lindbergh could see nothing but the woods around the house. Whateley, having made the telephone call, brought the car round and shone the headlights on either side of the road. But it was clear that the kidnappers were long gone. Whateley was instructed to drive into Hopewell to buy a flashlight (though where he would find one at that hour was unclear), while Lindbergh returned to the house and telephoned the New Jersey State Police in Trenton and his lawyer, Colonel Henry Breckinridge, in New York.

The call to the State Police was made at 10:25 p.m. The delay of almost half an hour is interesting. The call was answered by Lieutenant Daniel Dunn, who was surprised to hear the voice at the other end say: “This is Charles Lindbergh. My son has just been kidnapped.” Startled, Dunn asked what time the child had been taken. “Some time between 7:30 and 10 o’clock,” Lindbergh replied. “He’s twenty months old and wearing a one-piece sleeping suit.” Then he hung up. This had to be a hoax call, thought Dunn, but on the advice of a colleague, he telephoned the Lindbergh house. The same voice answered him. “This is Lieutenant Dunn, sir,” the policeman replied quickly. “Men are on their way.”

The State Police reacted swiftly. At 10:46, a teletype alarm was sent out across the state, requesting that all cars be investigated by police patrols. By 11 o’clock, checkpoints had been established at the Holland Tunnel, the George Washington Bridge, and all ferry ports along the Hudson River. New Jersey streets had road blocks, and hospitals were alerted to report the admission of any children matching the Lindbergh baby’s description. Police were notified in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Connecticut.

The first police to arrive on the scene at the Lindbergh house were Harry Wolfe and Charles Williamson of the Hopewell force, who turned up at 10:35, ten minutes after the alarm had been raised. They made a quick inspection of the nursery, where they found small particles of yellow clay on the carpet and on a leather suitcase beneath the southeast window. The window itself was closed, the left-hand shutter also closed, and the right one open. Lindbergh, asserting an authority he was never to relinquish, ordered them not to touch anything. The policemen then went outside and discovered holes in the mud on the right-hand side of the study where a ladder had evidently been placed, and the ladder itself some seventy-five feet from the house. They left everything where it was and went back to the house.

The police were now beginning to gather in droves. There were State Troopers Wolf and Cain from Lambertville; State Troopers de Gaetano and Bornmann from the Training School at Wilburtha; State Trooper Kelly, the fingerprint expert from Morristown Barracks; Captain Lamb and Lieutenant Keaten; Major Schoeffel, deputy to Colonel Schwartzkopf, head of the New Jersey State Police, and, a little later, Col. Schwartzkopf himself. Wolf, who was one of the first to arrive, went out to look for footprints. And found some. “The kidnappers consisted apparently of a party of at least two or more persons,” he reported. “Apparently two members of the party proceeded on foot to the east side of the Lindbergh residence and assembled a three-piece home-made extension ladder. . . . Two sets of fresh footprints led off in a south-east direction. . . . Kidnappers arrived in a car which was left parked some distance from the house, either in Lindbergh’s private lane or in a rough road known as Featherbed Lane.” Trooper de Gaetano reported: “We traced rubber boots or overshoe impressions from the ladder down an old road towards the chicken coop. The footprints went across the road and appeared to stop alongside impressions from an auto.” There was one very clear print in the dirt beneath the nursery window, which measured 12 to 12-1/2 inches long by 4 to 4-1/2 inches wide. This discovery was never mentioned at the trial because, inconveniently, these measurements did not match the shoes of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Nor, of course, did the existence of two sets of footprints conform to the prosecution theory that Hauptmann had acted alone. These were details best forgotten. More favorable for the ultimate prosecution was another find by the police: a Buck’s chisel, about thirty years old, with a three-quarter-inch blade and a wooden handle, lying near the ladder. That was all right because Hauptmann was a carpenter.

At this time, kidnapping was not a federal crime but was dealt with at the state level (things were to change as a direct result of the Lindbergh case). This meant that the FBI, which had immense experience in the solving of complex crimes, had no authority in the case, though they could have been called in. Colonel Norman Schwartzkopf, on the other hand, had no experience in this field whatever. Nevertheless, persuaded by Lindbergh, he was determined to keep the FBI out of it. And did.

Schwartzkopf—the father of “Stormin’ Norman” of first Gulf War fame—was thirty-seven years old at the time, a handsome man with a crewcut hairstyle and a waxed blond moustache. He was a veteran of the First World War and a graduate of West Point, who had once worked as a “floor walker” at Bamberger’s department store in Newark. This meant that he was supposed to be watching out for shoplifters. He had never patrolled a beat or arrested a criminal in his life, but he was determined not to let this deter him. Besides, he worshipped the ground Lindbergh walked on and was once quoted as saying that he would “break any oath for that man.” In retrospect, he may have done just that. At all events, there was no doubt about who was in charge of the investigation from very outset: It was not Colonel Norman Schwartzkopf; it was Charles Lindbergh.

With the arrival of fingerprint expert Trooper Frank Kelly soon after midnight, the ransom note could at last be opened. “I put on a pair of gloves,” said Kelly later, “picked the letter up by the edges, and brought it over to a small table in the centre of the room where I conducted a latent print examination of the outside surface of the envelope. Black powder was used in an effort to obtain any possible prints, but without results. I then opened the letter with a nail file and powdered the note and the inside of the envelope for possible prints, but none were obtained.”

The ransom note was written in pencil in a clearly disguised hand. It read:

Dear Sir!

Have 50.000 $ redy 25.000 $ in 20 $ bills 1.5000 $ in 10 $ bills and1000 $ in 5 $ bills. After 204 dayswe will inform you were to deliverthe Mony.We warn you for makinganyding public or for notify the Policethe chld is in gute care.Indication for all letters areSingnatureAnd 3 holds.

There was a symbol consisting of two interlocking circles, and within the interlock an oval. The circles were colored blue, the oval red, and at the centre of each in a horizontal line were square holes. What did it mean? This symbol has remained an unsolved mystery in this case. Was it intended to identify the kidnapper to Lindbergh? If so, he never disclosed the fact. Was it the recognition symbol of some secret society? This raises a possibility; no more. For it is known that certain college fraternities, rather like the Masons, employed such symbols on their correspondence. One such was Beta Theta Pi, which had (but no longer has) a chapter at Amherst College. Dwight W. Morrow was a member of Beta Theta Pi at Amherst. More to the point, so was his son, Dwight Jr., in 1932. The archivist at Beta Theta Pi’s headquarters confirmed to the author that the fraternity employed a secret recognition symbol at the time of the kidnapping and still did so today. Asked to confirm or deny whether it matched the symbol found on the ransom note, he declined. “That’s a secret,” he said.

Not only did Trooper Kelly fail to find any fingerprints on the ransom note, he failed to detect any prints whatever in the entire nursery. Nothing on the window sill, nothing on the cot, nothing on the various objects in the room. This seems rather extraordinary. It might be reasonably supposed that the kidnapper would be wearing gloves, but the nursery was frequented by Betty Gow, Anne Lindbergh, the Whateleys, possibly Lindbergh himself, and certainly the child. And it is unlikely that they were wearing gloves. How could it be possible that none of them, not one, had left a single fingerprint inside the nursery? Unless, of course, someone had wiped it clean before the police arrived. And who could that be? Not the kidnapper, in my opinion. He was working in the dark and under great stress, and would hardly have taken the time, with so many people in the house, to risk discovery by spending ten minutes or more to wipe off every single surface in the room. Besides, if he was wearing gloves, there would have been no need. I cannot come up with an answer other than this: The room was wiped clean by Lindbergh himself or by someone acting under his orders.

So why was it done? Did Lindbergh know the identity of the kidnapper perfectly well, or at least suspect it? Did he wish to prevent his or her identification in order to avoid scandal? And if that were so, who could that person possibly be? The most obvious candidate had to be a member of the prestigious and enormously wealthy Morrow family into which Lindbergh had married. I’d be hard pressed to think of any stranger who would inspire Lindbergh into launching an instant cover-up operation. Perhaps he thought that this was no more than a malicious prank, that the child would be returned unharmed very soon by the person he suspected. Perhaps he reasoned that to blurt out his suspicions now would bring needless shame on the family of which he had recently become the male head. It may well be that in the ensuing days and weeks, when the child was not returned, Lindbergh regretted his actions. But by then it was too late. He would have had to face some very awkward questions and possibly prosecution for obstruction of justice. The absence of fingerprints in that room remains one of the most mysterious and most significant aspects of the whole case. Even odder, perhaps, is the fact that, as far as is known, Charles Lindbergh was never questioned about it.

Perhaps Trooper Kelly had merely been incompetent? This was the thought of a former justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, James F. Minturn, when he heard the news. Minturn contacted his friend Dr. Erastus Mead Hudson, an amateur fingerprint specialist who had been experimenting for years with a silver nitrate process that had proved very successful. Hudson was invited down to Hopewell to use his method and did succeed in revealing several of the child’s fingerprints on his books and toys. But as far as adult prints were concerned, the room remained clean as a whistle. This was all the more extraordinary because Betty Gow had rubbed the child’s chest with a vapor rub when putting him to bed and her fingers would have been greasy when she closed the window. Yet there were no prints on the window frame.

Hudson then inspected the ladder, on which Kelly had also failed to reveal prints, and found between thirty and forty examples other than those of the policemen known to have handled it. Ultimately, none of these proved to belong to Hauptmann. Hudson suggested that the prints should be sent to Washington for comparison with the FBI’s huge fingerprint collection of known criminals, which was the most comprehensive in the country. Remarkably, Schwartzkopf refused to permit such a move. He also refused Hudson’s offer to subject the ransom note to a special iodine-gas process he had invented.

Why should the New Jersey police chief turn down such an opportunity to clear up the case? Was he merely protective of his turf, or was he, as so often in later stages of the investigation, acting under the instructions of Charles Lindbergh?

The ladder turned out to be an extraordinary construction, crudely made in three sections and composed, according to one police report, of “old, nondescript lumber which has been lying around for some time.” One officer suggested that it might have been made from timber left over from the building of Lindbergh’s house, but this possibility was never explored. Perhaps it should have been.

Fully extended, the ladder was twenty feet long, tapering from a width of fourteen inches at the bottom to eleven inches at the top, with each section being joined by dowel pins. The rungs, which were merely nailed across the side pieces, were eighteen to nineteen inches apart, as opposed to the standard twelve inches, which would have made it much more difficult to climb and descend—especially when carrying a thirty-pound baby in a sack. When found, only the bottom two sections of the ladder were joined together, suggesting that only these had been used, and one of the lower rails was broken near the joint.

If the theory that the ladder was employed in the kidnapping is correct, the kidnapper must have had considerable athletic prowess. Placed as it was to the right of Lindbergh’s study window—presumably to avoid being seen—the ladder would have been well to the side of the nursery window above, and, if only the bottom two sections were employed, some thirty inches below it. The kidnapper would have had to stand on the topmost rung, bridge the gap, balance on the narrow sill somehow as he manipulated the shutters and opened the window, and then climb through an opening which measured, at most, 30-1/2 by 26 inches. He would then have had to repeat the process in reverse, carrying a heavy and possibly struggling load, and contrive to close the window behind him. All of this in a howling gale—which, curiously, failed to dislodge the ransom note left propped upright on the interior windowsill. If, as was alleged at his trial, Hauptmann had managed to do all this single-handed (despite the evidence of dual foot marks), he must have had the nerve of a steeplejack, the agility of a circus performer, and the strength of a weightlifter. Tests on a duplicate ladder constructed by the New Jersey Police showed that it would not bear a weight of more than 155 pounds. The actual ladder was so flimsy that this is probably a very generous estimate. Hauptmann weighed rather more.

It was the contention of the prosecution that the ladder broke as the kidnapper descended, causing him to fall and/or drop the baby, which caused the latter’s death. There was no sign of such a fall on the muddy ground, however; at least, none that was mentioned in the official reports. There is a much more likely explanation of what happened.

As anyone who has ever tried to erect a long ladder will know, it is an unwieldy object, and the high wind would have added greatly to the difficulty of putting it against the wall. This may have been why only two sections were used. Having put it up, however, the kidnapper(s) must then have seen that getting through the window was a near-impossible task and changed their plan. This would explain why the ladder was found some distance away (why bother to move it if the objective was to make a rapid getaway?). There was a much easier way to get in and snatch the baby: through the front door. This theory is supported by another oddity about the ladder: In spite of the mud that must have been adhering to the shoes of the kidnapper, there were no traces of mud on the rungs.

There was a staircase leading from the front foyer straight up to the child’s nursery. It would have taken no more than a couple of minutes for the kidnapper to remove his boots, tiptoe up the stairs, pick up the sleeping baby, and escape by the same route. Assuming that the sound heard by Lindbergh was the ladder breaking as it was being taken down, this would put the time of the kidnapping at around 9:15, when Lindbergh was running his bath. Perfect (if fortuitous) cover for any strange noises. Even if the kidnapper had not been in the house before—which he may have been, even if he were not a family member who had been there before, because the Whateleys were in the habit of giving impromptu guided tours while the Lindberghs were not present. Also, the plans had been widely published in several newspapers.

2

Aid from Unsavory Quarters

Lindbergh lost no time in instructing Schwartzkopf that his priority should be the payment of the ransom and the return of his child. The identification and arrest of the kidnappers, he said, was of no immediate importance. Schwartzkopf, whose job was catching criminals, seemed powerless to resist. He was quoted as saying, “I would do anything he asked of me.” Anne Lindbergh admitted to an interviewer many years later that her husband was not really a leader, but because of the awe in which everyone held him he was led to believe that he was. He never listened to advice, believing with some justification that if he had taken notice of what people advised him at the time of his Atlantic flight, he would never have flown to Paris.

Law enforcement duly fell into line, not only in New Jersey but across the United States. Instructions went out to all police forces that the objective of any search was to be the return of the baby. According to General Order No. 18 of the District of Columbia Police Department: “The arrest of the kidnappers is a subordinate consideration, and any member of the Force is authorized to enter into personal and confidential negotiations for the safe return of the infant without responsibility for the detection or arrest of the kidnappers.”

The direction of the search was now in the hands of a “Committee of Four Colonels.” In addition to Lindbergh himself, who took the chair, there were Schwartzkopf, Col. Breckinridge (Lindbergh’s lawyer), and Col. “Wild Bill” Donovan, who was then preparing to run for governor of New York. They began sitting on the day after the kidnapping, March 2, and met daily at Hopewell. Their first action was to issue instructions to the kidnappers on the baby’s diet. He was to be given, they said, half a cup of orange juice on waking, the yolk of one egg daily, and half a cup of prune juice after his afternoon nap. Every newspaper in the country published the menu on its front page the next day.

On March 3, a further statement was issued in which Lindbergh declared that any representatives of his whom the kidnappers found suitable would be prepared to meet their representatives “at any time and in any place they may designate.” He promised that all arrangements would be kept strictly confidential, “and we further pledge ourselves that we will not try to injure in any way those connected with the return of the child.” Breckinridge took the responsibility of handing this statement to the press, adding that Lindbergh himself would be prepared to meet the kidnappers “under any conditions they may wish to lay down.”

This did not go down well with New Jersey’s then Attorney General William A. Stevens, who issued his own statement. Neither Lindbergh nor the New Jersey State Police, he said, had the authority to grant the kidnappers freedom from prosecution. If the Lindberghs were not prepared to prosecute, the State of New Jersey would.

Lindbergh and his committee now decided to seek the help of the criminal underworld. They were encouraged by a message from the notorious gangster Al Capone, then serving an eleven-year prison sentence for tax evasion, saying that if Lindbergh could arrange his release from jail, he would achieve the boy’s release within days. In addition, he offered $10,000 for information that would lead to the recovery of the child and the capture of the kidnappers. The offer came to nothing, probably because not even Lindbergh could spring Capone, but it was a fact that various gangs in New York and other eastern cities were beginning to feel the heat from police engaging in the search and were as keen as anyone to see the baby returned. Kidnapping the Lindbergh baby was not something that any professional criminal would contemplate—they were making too much money by other means without excessive police attention—and one suspects that Lindbergh knew this perfectly well. However, even without Capone, he decided to go down this unorthodox route.

The chosen instrument was one Morris (Mickey) Rosner, a diminutive gangster said to have abundant contacts in the New York underworld, including “Legs” Diamond, Owney Madden, and Waxey Gordon. The committee had been urged to contact him by Congresswoman Ruth Pratt, and the arrangement was made through a partner in Wild Bill Donovan’s law office, Robert Thayer. Thayer was a habitué of speakeasies and gambling joints, who had the good or ill fortune to have Rosner as a client.

Rosner duly turned up at Hopewell. He was prepared to help, but not without conditions. He laid down that he was to receive $2,500 for expenses; he was not to be followed by the police or Secret Service; and he was to be given a free hand, reporting only to Breckinridge or Thayer. Abjectly, the committee agreed to everything.

There followed what may have been Lindbergh’s greatest blunder in the whole affair, or perhaps his greatest triumph of obfuscation. Rosner was given a copy of the ransom note to take to New York, and there he showed it to Owney Madden.

In any other kidnapping case, the exact content and format of the kidnapping note, let alone the handwriting, would have been a closely kept secret by the authorities. How else could they know whether subsequent demands were genuine or merely the products of enterprising extortionists? Lindbergh had now blown that strategy out of the water. When a second letter arrived two days later, on March 5, it bore the same symbol of interlocking circles and the syntax was similar, though both symbol and handwriting had some subtle differences. But did it come from the kidnappers, or from one of Rosner’s friends who had copied these things? No one could now be sure. The letter read:

We have warned you note (sic) to make anyding Public also notify the Police now you have to take the consequences . . .

It was interesting that the writer, whoever he was, had made the same spelling mistakes with simple words as appeared in the original ransom note, but appeared to have no trouble with words like “consequences.” This phenomenon was repeated in subsequent letters. Perhaps he was not as uneducated or as foreign as he wished to appear.

At all events, Lindbergh was told that they would now have to keep the baby until everything had quieted down, and the ransom payment would be increased to $70,000. The kidnappers (who always referred to themselves in the plural) said they would not accept any intermediary chosen by Lindbergh. The letter assured him the baby was in good health, was being cared for night and day, and would be given the prescribed diet. In a postscript, the writer said that the kidnapping had been in preparation “for years”—a somewhat surprising claim since the baby was only twenty months old and the Hopewell house only recently completed. Given all that time, it was surprising that they could not construct, or even buy, a better ladder!

Lindbergh now persisted in his policy of pursuing the underground route. He gave the second ransom note to Rosner, who took it to New York, where it was read by Col. Breckinridge and Owney Madden. Rosner then enlisted the aid of two more unsavory friends, Salvadore Spitale and Irving Bitz, and introduced them to Lindbergh.

These were top-flight gangsters, strongly suspected of the murder of Legs Diamond, for whom Spitale had organized and committed multiple killings in the 1920s. In late 1930, Spitale had approached Bitz on Diamond’s behalf to raise $200,000 in seed money to finance a major drug purchase in Germany. The money was delivered, but Diamond never repaid the loan. Instead, he paid with his life.

Spitale, prior to his association with Legs Diamond, had been a bootlegger and speakeasy owner who had begun his career as a bouncer in a Williamsburg dance hall. Bitz, who owned several speakeasies, had been to jail ten times between 1922 and 1927 and had done time in Atlanta for peddling drugs. He had a reputation as a vicious criminal.

Incredibly, these were the people enlisted by Charles Lindbergh—rather than the police or FBI—to help recover his son. He issued a statement appointing them as go-betweens with the kidnappers. Soon after Lindbergh appointed them, both men were charged with landing a cargo of liquor at a beach in Brooklyn, but thanks to their newfound status, they were acquitted.

There was widespread outrage at Lindbergh’s decision, not least on the part of New York Police Commissioner Mulrooney. It also transpired that Rosner, who had described himself as “a former government agent,” was under indictment for grand larceny in a stock-selling promotion in which the public had lost more than $2 million and was awaiting trial on bail of $20,000. (The charge was subsequently dismissed in April 1933, possibly due to Rosner’s other occupation as a police informant.)

Rosner, Spitale, and Bitz got nowhere. Unhampered by surveillance, they followed up every underworld contact they could think of, but gangsterdom remained firmly in denial. Rosner said at one point that he knew with certainty that the baby was alive and would soon be returned to its parents, but he was whistling in the dark. Finally, Spitale called a press conference to admit defeat. “If it was someone I knew,” he said, “I’d be God-damned if I didn’t name him. But I been in touch all round, and I come to the conclusion this one was pulled by an independent.” That is, it was the work of an amateur, not a professional.

A third note was received on March 8, this time addressed to Col. Breckinridge at his office. Breckinridge was at Hopewell at the time and had an assistant bring the note to Princeton Junction, New Jersey, where he and Rosner read it. The note advised that the kidnappers would not accept any intermediary appointed by the Lindberghs, but that they would arrange one. Lindbergh was instructed to insert the following advertisement in the New York American of March 9:

Letter received at new address. Will follow your instructions. I also received letter mailed to me March 4 and was ready since then. Please hurry on account of mother. Address me to the address you mentioned in your letter. Father.

That same day, while the underworld was still being churned fruitlessly, a new figure entered the scene: Dr. John F. Condon. From this point on, Condon was to become the pivotal character in the case. Bombast, chauvinist, sycophant, liar, egotist supreme: Condon was all of these and then some. This was the man who, according to the actress Rosalind Russell and numerous other correspondents (see Chapter 6), had been responsible for looking after the illegitimate son of Dwight W. Morrow. It was possible to believe anything of the good doctor (of pedagogy, not medicine).

But there was more to John Condon than all that, as the FBI was to discover when they borrowed two of his scrapbooks in the summer of 1934. There they found not only press cuttings giving laudatory accounts of his athletic prowess and abilities as a teacher, but also stories of considerable heroism. In 1886, Condon had saved a boy from drowning when he fell through the ice at Zeltner’s Lake in the Bronx, an act for which he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Two years later, he saved another skater, this time on a lake in New York’s Central Park, earning the award of a pair of silver ice skates. Then, in 1900, he rescued a nine-year-old boy, Walter Hoy, who had been ice skating in Crotona Park. It was becoming a habit, and he had not finished yet. Shortly afterwards, the Bronx Home News carried the following story:

There was great excitement at Lake Teednyiskung Tuesday of last week over the upsetting of a canoe. In the boat were Jessie, Lloyd and Ward Brown, sons and daughter of Mrs P. Brown of Brooklyn. There were no swimmers in the party and the entire trio was in danger of drowning. Had it not been for the timely action of Mr John Condon of Morrisenia, who notwithstanding the fact he was heavily encumbered with clothing, swam to the rescue and succeeded in keeping the Browns above water until Dr. Tanner Hawley rendered able assistance, there would undoubtedly have been loss of life. It is needless to say that the heroic New Yorker won the gratitude of Mrs Brown and a just measure of praise from all the witnesses of his brave act.

Condon was becoming a veritable Superman, always on hand when a life needed to be saved. At Staten Island, on an unrecorded date, he jumped from Doyle’s Pier and saved a boy after he sank beneath the surface for the third time. And in 1903, he rescued a teenager, David Lickefberg, when he fell through the ice at Van Cortland lake. It almost seemed that Condon had spent several years patrolling frozen lakes just in case an opportunity for life-saving should present itself. One wonders whether he pushed them in before saving them.

Age had undimmed his heroism, whatever else it might have done to him. In March 1934, he was among several hundred people in a Bronx theater when it caught fire. In the ensuing panic, with everyone rushing for the exits, Condon stood up on a seat, reasoned with the audience, and restored calm. He was given a testimonial by the theater management.

None of this made the FBI like Condon any better, but the cuttings did go a long way to explain why Charles Fay, Dwight Morrow’s lawyer, might have selected him as a suitable candidate to look after his client’s illegitimate son, if such a child existed. In the early 1900s, he was clearly seen as a person of courage, integrity, and ability.

Condon, according to his own account, had been incensed by the fact that Lindbergh, whom he idolized, should resort to criminals in order to retrieve his son. He decided to act and sent a letter to his local newspaper, the Bronx Home News, in which he offered to act as an intermediary between Lindbergh and the kidnappers, and even to add his savings of $1,000 to the ransom money. He also promised not to testify against them.

To the editor of the Bronx Home News, circulation 150,000, Condon was no stranger. He had been a regular contributor for many years, writing poems and occasional articles that were signed “P.A.Triot,” “J.U.Stice,” or “L.O.Nestar.” The editor decided to print Condon’s letter as a front-page article, though it seemed unlikely that anyone would take any notice.

Dr. John F. Condon Offers to Add One Thousand

Dollars of His Savings Ransom Lindbergh Child

An offer to act as ‘go-between’ in negotiations for the return of 20 months-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., with the promise of absolute secrecy as to the identity of the kidnappers and an additional $1,000 to any ransom which may be arranged by Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, was made today by Dr. John F. Condon, 2974 Decatur Ave, near 201stSt, educator, author and lecturer.

The added ransom represents the major portion of Dr. Condon’s savings, yet he asserted that he is willing to part with it in order to restore the child to his anguished parents.

In his appeal to the abductors, Dr. Condon said, “I offer all that I can scrape together so that a loving mother may again have her child and that Colonel Lindbergh may know that the American people are grateful for the honor that he bestowed upon them by his pluck and daring.

“Let the kidnappers know that no testimony of mine or information coming from me will be used against them.

“I offer $1,000 which I have saved from my salary as additional to the suggested ransom of $50,000 which is said to have been demanded of Colonel Lindbergh.

“I stand ready at my own expense to go anywhere, alone, to give the kidnapper the extra money and promise never to utter his name to any person.

“If this is not agreeable then I ask the kidnappers to go to any Catholic priest and return the child unharmed, with the knowledge that any priest must hold inviolate any statement which may be made by the kidnappers.”

Dr. Condon is one of the best known educators of the Bronx. He retired in 1930 after serving for 46 years as a school teacher and principal and since has devoted much of his time to giving lectures at Fordham University. In offering to act as ‘go-between’ for the return of the Lindbergh baby, Dr. Condon said that he was doing so on his own initiative and would be responsible to no person for information which he might obtain from the abductors.

Despite this glowing reference, Condon’s reputation as a local eccentric was in fact well established. He was seventy-two years old at this point, a retired school principal and part-time professor at Fordham University; a commanding figure with his six-foot-two, two-hundred-pound frame, mane of white hair, and a large white walrus moustache. With his habitual black bowler hat, Condon could have been mistaken for an archetypal English gentleman, but his passion was for America, which, he would repeat ad nauseum, was the finest country in the world. (Ironically, it was discovered after his death in January 1945 that his patriotism did not extend to paying his taxes, of which he owed a considerable amount.) He was garrulous, sycophantic, histrionic, patronizing, and pseudo-humble by turns. Opinion in the Bronx was more succinct: Dr. John F. Condon was a nut.

Remarkably, given the limited circulation of the Bronx Home News, the article produced immediate results. Condon returned from a lecture on the following evening, March 9, at about 10 p.m. to find an envelope waiting for him at his home, 2974 Decator Avenue. Inside was a note and another envelope. The note said:

Dear Sir:

If you are willing to act as go between in Lindbergh case please follow stricly instruction. Handel incloced letter personaly to Mr Lindbergh. It will explan everyding. Don’t tell anyone about it. As son we find out the Press or Police is notifyd everyding are cansell and it will be a further delay. After you gett the money from Mr Lindbergh put these 3 words in the New York American Mony is redy

After that we will give you further instruction. Don’t be affrait we are not out fore your 1000 $ keep it. Only act stricly. Be at home every night between 6-12 by this time you will hear from us.

Condon ignored the instruction to keep the letter secret. He took it to Max Rosenhain’s restaurant on 188th Street and Grand Concourse to get the opinion of his friend Al Reich, a former professional boxer. Reich was not there, so he showed it instead to Rosenhain and a clothing salesman named Milton Gaglio. They advised him to call Hopewell immediately, which he did.

The telephone was answered by Robert Thayer, who, in his role as mobsters’ contact, had taken up residence at Hopewell. Condon read out the letter, having been refused permission to speak to Lindbergh directly, and Thayer then asked him to open and read what was in the accompanying envelope.

The second letter bore the now-familiar signature symbol:

Dear Sir,

Mr. Condon may act as go-between. You may give him the 70,000 $ make one packet, the size will bee about [there was a drawing of a box with its dimensions--seven by six by fourteen inches] we have notifyt you allredy in what kind of bills. We warn you not to set any trapp in any way. If you or someone els will notify the Police ther will be a further delay, affter we have the mony in hand we will tell you where to find your boy. You may have a airplane redy it is about 150 mil awy. But befor telling you the adr. a delay of 8 houers will be between.

On hearing a description of the signature, Thayer was convinced that the letter was genuine. He asked Condon to come to Hopewell straight away, and the three men set off by car, arriving shortly before 3 a.m. to be welcomed by Breckinridge and Lindbergh. By Condon’s account, as soon as he had read the letter, Lindbergh appointed him as the go-between with the kidnappers and promptly invited him to stay the night in the child’s nursery. (There was no room for Gaglio and Rosenhain, who had to get back in their car and drive to New York.)

The scenario is hard to credit. With no enquiry whatever, Lindbergh had apparently accepted a total stranger as someone to be trusted with $70,000 in cash and potentially the life of his only son. Even on first acquaintance, Condon can hardly have seemed a stable character, yet it happened. Unless, of course, the teacher told him something that went unreported, something concerning his connection with a certain young man whom Lindbergh already suspected of being the culprit. That would have done it. It is interesting to note that in an interview with the FBI on March 6, 1934, Condon disclosed that he had been for several years the principal of a school for homeless children, which was partly maintained by charity. This might well have made him an ideal choice for Morrow’s lawyers when seeking someone to oversee the child’s education.

Events that night became even more bizarre when Condon asked if he could see Anne Lindbergh before retiring to bed. Perfectly normal behavior: to request a meeting with the wife of one’s distinguished host at three-thirty in the morning. Lindbergh must have thought so. Without hesitation, he showed Condon to the marital bedroom. Condon later described the encounter in his book Jafsie Tells All.

She stretched out her arms towards me instinctively in the age-old appeal of motherhood.

“Will you help me get back my baby?”

“I shall do everything in my power to bring him back to you.”

As I came closer to her I saw the gleam of tears in her soft dark eyes . . . I smiled at her, shook a thick reproving finger at her. With mock brusqueness I threatened Anne Lindbergh: “If one of those tears drops, I shall go off the case immediately.”

She brushed away the tears. When her hands left her face she was smiling, sweetly, bravely. “You see, Doctor, I am not crying.”

“That is better,” I said. “That is much, much better.”

Did it really happen? Who knows? Condon was more than capable of inventing the whole scene. It is generally accepted that he spent that night in the nursery, where Lindbergh gave him a pair of army blankets. There, once again according to Condon, he heard voices:

“Condon?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you need help?”

“Yes.”

I got out from beneath the warm blankets. I put my hands around the rung of the Lone Eaglet’s crib. On my knees I prayed.

Next morning, Lindbergh and Breckinridge gave Condon a signed statement authorizing him to act as intermediary. Breckinridge took him back to New York and placed the “Money is ready” advertisement in the New York American. To avoid press attention, at Condon’s suggestion, it was signed with a phonetic version of his initials. Jafsie was born.

3

More Harm than Good

Events now began to move swiftly. Breckinridge, probably with a view to keeping an eye on the old man, asked if he could stay as a houseguest with Condon until negotiations were completed. Condon said he would be delighted, but neither of them was at home when Condon’s telephone rang at noon on March 11, the day the advertisement appeared. The call was answered by Condon’s wife, who said the caller had “a thick, deep, guttural accent,” and told him to call back later, which he did. During this second call, which instructed Condon to stay in from six to twelve for the rest of the week and wait for further instructions, Condon said he heard Italian voices in the background and a man shouting “Statti zitto!” which he recognized as Italian for “Shut up!”

At 8:30 the next evening, March 12, a taxi driver arrived with an envelope addressed to Dr. Condon. His name was Joseph Perrone, and he was somewhat surprised to be ushered inside and quizzed by Breckinridge and Condon. The note, he said, had been given to him by a man who hailed his cab at the junction of Knox Place and Gun Hill Road. The man, who was wearing a brown topcoat and brown felt hat, gave him a dollar for the job and took Perrone’s license number before leaving. Milton Gaglio, who had turned up at the house with Al Reich a short time before, also took it. Finally, Perrone was allowed to leave, looking more than a little bemused.

The letter, with the familiar misspellings and signed with the usual emblem, directed Condon to drive to the Woodlawn subway station on Jerome Avenue. One hundred feet beyond, on the left-hand side, he would find a vacant hot-dog stand with an open porch surrounding it. In the center of the porch he would find a stone, and under the stone another note would tell him where to go next. He was told to bring the money with him.

This was a problem. The money was not yet ready, and Breckinridge said it would be several days before he could get it. Condon insisted that he must keep the appointment anyway and got into Al Reich’s Ford coupe. Breckinridge warned him to take care; these people were dangerous. But he did not go to the rendezvous himself; Condon and Reich were on their own.

The assigned spot was little more than a mile away, and the note was under the stone. It directed Condon to cross the road and follow the fence in the cemetery direction to 233rd Street, where he would be met. This was Woodlawn Cemetery, an historic four-hundred-acre tract that was separated from Van Cortland Park by a tall heavy iron fence along its western border. Condon, greatly daring, decided to ignore the kidnappers’ explicit instructions for once and asked Reich to drive him to the main entrance gate. There he waited. An Italian-looking man, wearing a cap with a handkerchief over his face, approached him on Jerome Avenue but walked right by. It was a cold night. After ten minutes Condon returned to the car, to be greeted by a demand from Reich that he should go with him and grab the kidnapper. Condon refused the offer. He was determined, he said, to “play it straight.” He returned to the gate, and five minutes later saw a white handkerchief being waved from inside the cemetery.

“I see you,” said Condon.

Three feet away stood a man in a dark overcoat and soft felt hat. He, too, held a handkerchief in front of his face. In a guttural voice that Condon recognized as belonging to the same man he had spoken to on the telephone, he asked: “Did you gottit my note?” (The pronunciation is according to Condon).