Lindbergh Read online

  Lindbergh

  The Crime

  Noel Behn

  For Bob,

  whose dare set me to writing.

  And for Jay,

  who took it from there.

  Contents

  1 Moth to Flame

  Book One LINDBERGH: THE HOME FRONT

  Prelude

  2 What the Police Were Told

  3 Crowded Idols

  4 The Eaglet

  5 Old Enemies and Friends

  6 Colonels

  7 Sleight of Hand

  8 Noble Gangsters

  9 Go-Betweens

  10 Jafsie

  Book Two EXPANSION

  Prelude

  11 Juggling

  12 Open Secrets

  13 Payoff

  14 A Star Is Born

  15 A Matter of Johns

  16 Eagles Depart

  Book Three HOUSE OF CARDS

  Prelude

  17 Money Trails and Old Doubts

  18 Money Chase

  19 The Most Hated Man in the World

  20 Hullabaloo

  21 Trial of the Century

  Book Four THE FORTY-FIRST GOVERNOR

  Prelude

  22 Harold Giles Hoffman

  23 Bold Strokes and Bruno

  24 The Bubble Bursts

  25 The Rocky Road to Reprieve

  26 Countdown

  Book Five AUTHOR’S VIEW

  Prelude

  27 An International Spy

  28 Family Affairs

  29Endgame

  30Destinies

  Image Gallery

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  The important thing is to start;

  to lay a plan, and then follow it

  step by step no matter how small

  or large each one by itself may seem.

  CHARLES A. LINDBERGH,

  The Spirit of St. Louis

  1

  Moth to Flame

  Celebrated crime, steeped in the warp of passing decades, can become more fiction than fact. Small matter that the illicit act went unsolved or was duly prosecuted and punished; partisans emerge to champion lore regarding its commission. This is the stuff from which legends are spawned, not to mention culture and entertainment. Fresh data need not be unearthed to set theorists of a certain offense—say, the John F. Kennedy assassination—at the throats of counter-theorists.

  I, for one, become shamelessly intrigued by the discovery of new information concerning almost any classic American case, which is what occurred on a sunny April morning in 1986. The material contained in a black wooden box that was resting on my literary agent’s table dealt with the most infamous perpetration in this country’s history: the 1932 kidnapping-killing of twenty-month-old Charles Lindbergh, Jr. One document in particular, I was assured, named the true slayer of the child—and it was not the person who had been convicted of the crime and died in the electric chair.

  The black box measured two and a half feet by two feet by one and a half feet and had been discovered hidden away between two rafters in the attic of a house on Belgrove Drive, Kearny, New Jersey. The owners of the residence took the find to their lawyer, who brought it to the executor of the estate of the home’s previous owner, Doris A. Pelletreau. Doris had died on October 6, 1976. Her husband, Jesse William Pelletreau, had passed away on December 3, 1958, and there was no doubt that the contents of the black box belonged to him. What to do with the material was solved when an independent television-commercial maker learned of its existence. She teamed with a pair of prestigious play and movie producers. The documents were purchased—and now rested on my agent’s desk, where I had my first look at them.

  Bill Pelletreau, I soon learned, was a private investigator who had been called into the Lindbergh kidnapping case in late 1934 by the attorney for a thirty-five-year-old illegal German alien named Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Hauptmann, a carpenter living with his wife and baby son in the Bronx, was being held at the Bronx County jail, charged with extorting ransom money from Lindbergh. At the time Pelletreau joined the case, New Jersey officials were trying to have Hauptmann extradited so they could try him for the murder and kidnapping of the child, crimes the German avidly denied committing.

  The kidnapping had occurred some two and a half years earlier, on March 1, 1932, at the rural Lindbergh estate near tiny Hopewell, New Jersey. A series of twelve written messages demanding ransom were received before money was paid. A thirteenth message, which said where the child could be found, alive and healthy, proved a lie. The missing infant’s corpse was discovered in a shallow grave within earshot of the family home. It was estimated he had been dead since the night of his disappearance.

  The first marked bill from the ransom appeared two days after the payment was made. Ransom currency continued to surface, mainly in the New York City area, for two and a half years, until September of 1934, when Hauptmann was picked up for passing a ten-dollar note. Another small-denomination bill from the ransom was found on his person; several more were recovered at his home. They were gold-certificate currency that had been taken out of circulation over a year earlier. Hauptmann confessed to having horded gold notes and spending several with full knowledge that to do so was illegal—a minor and common offense in America.

  Bruno Richard Hauptmann not only lived near the Bronx cemetery where one moonless night back in 1932 a Lindbergh intermediary had paid fifty thousand dollars in ransom to a supposed member of the kidnapping gang named John, but the German carpenter also resembled artists’ sketches of John. However, there had been no reliable eyewitness who could place Hauptmann or anyone else near the Lindbergh home at the time of the kidnapping. The German also had a group of friends and associates who claimed he was with them in New York City, over sixty miles away from the abduction scene, that fateful evening.1 After subjecting Hauptmann to a “foolproof” test, the police department’s handwriting experts were certain the immigrant carpenter had not authored the thirteen ransom messages received by Lindbergh and his designees.

  The New York Police Department was in favor of releasing Hauptmann; the New Jersey State Police, which had jurisdiction if the kidnapping-murder ever went to trial, wanted him held longer. Law officers, dismantling Hauptmann’s garage, discovered another fourteen thousand dollars in ransom loot. The gaunt, lanky carpenter shifted his story. Now he claimed the money had been left by a friend who had returned to Germany and since died—left in a shoe box that Hauptmann had stored on an upper shelf in a kitchen closet and forgotten. A recent rainstorm caused a ceiling leak that inundated the closet. Not until taking down and opening the wet shoe box had Hauptmann discovered what it contained—fourteen thousand dollars. Because the dear departed friend owed Hauptmann approximately seven thousand dollars, Bruno appropriated that amount for himself and left the rest for the dead man’s relatives. To safe-keep the money, he devised a series of hiding places in the garage. The dead friend’s name was Isador Fisch. No one bought what became known as the Fisch story.

  After being held incommunicado for thirty-six hours and with still nothing to link him to the actual kidnapping-murder, Dick Hauptmann, as he preferred to be called, was finally arrested—for the crime of extortion—and remanded to the Bronx County jail at the Bronx County Courthouse. A relative of his German-born wife, Anna, contacted a Brooklyn lawyer, James M. Fawcett, who agreed to defend him.2 Though the Bronx grand jury indicted Hauptmann for extorting ransom money from Charles A. Lindbergh, Fawcett realized the real legal battle would occur over New Jersey’s well-publicized intent to extradite Hauptmann and try him for the murder of Charles Lindbergh, Jr., in the county where the death had allegedly occurred.

  Priva
te detective Bill Pelletreau was one of several handwriting specialists engaged by Fawcett to prove that Hauptmann had not written the ransom messages. As the defense attorney suspected would happen, the Bronx DA bowed to New Jersey’s request for an extradition hearing at the Bronx courthouse. Fawcett was ready, or at least thought so. He had records and witnesses to prove that Hauptmann had been at work as a carpenter in New York City the day of the kidnapping; he had other witnesses to establish Bruno was with them in the Bronx that night. The employment records disappeared along with the employment witnesses. Alibi witnesses for the night either couldn’t be found or informed the defense lawyer they were afraid to testify. The presentation by New Jersey’s fiery attorney general was dramatic and persuasive. So was Charles A. Lindbergh’s presence in the courtroom. Bill Pelletreau never testified as to his handwriting findings. Hauptmann was extradited to New Jersey in October of 1934 to await prosecution for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. James M. Fawcett was replaced as his lawyer. Pelletreau was also let go.

  The trial of the century began January 2, 1935. The proceedings took thirty-two-days and ended on Wednesday, February 13, with the jury finding Hauptmann guilty of murdering Charles Lindbergh, Jr. The judge sentenced him to die in the electric chair. A round of appeals began that would last more than a year.

  Back in April of 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as part of his policy to remove the depression-racked United States from its monetary gold standard, proscribed the private ownership of gold bullion, gold coins, and gold-certificate currency. Since a majority of bills in the ransom payment were gold certificates, the list of their serial numbers was reissued to banks and businesses. On May 1, 1933, more than a year before Hauptmann would be apprehended, the final day for the turn-in, $2,980 in ransom-loot notes was exchanged for legal currency at the New York City branch of the Federal Reserve Bank. The teller handling the transaction could not recall who had deposited the listed bills but believed it was a man. The signature on the deposit slip was J. J. Faulkner; the address he wrote in, 537 West 149th Street, New York. No one by that name could be found on West 149th Street, or anywhere else. The $2,980 deposit and photographs of Faulkner’s signature made world headlines. One year and five months later, with Hauptmann in custody and awaiting extradition to New Jersey to stand trial for the kidnapping-murder, experts who had sworn under oath that Bruno was the author of the ransom messages also conceded that the J. J. Faulkner signature had not been written by him. William Pelletreau went further. He found that key letters, especially the k’s in the Faulkner signature and ransom messages were identical and that none, in his opinion, had been written by Hauptmann.

  Pelletreau had discussed his findings with Erastus Mead Hudson, a New York doctor and fingerprint expert who had been a prominent defense witness at Hauptmann’s New Jersey murder trial. Dr. Hudson had found some five hundred fingerprints on the kidnapping ladder, none of them Hauptmann’s, after the New Jersey State Police had failed to produce even one latent print. Offended that his testimony had been so thoroughly disregarded, and feeling that the prosecution had publicly tried to discredit him, Dr. Hudson readily volunteered to assist in the secret reinvestigation of the case undertaken by New Jersey’s young bombastic governor, Harold G. Hoffman. At Hudson’s suggestion, Governor Hoffman invited Pelletreau in for a chat. It was now November of 1935, and Bruno Hauptmann was running out of legal appeals. Impressed by Pelletreau’s presentation, which showed that someone other than Hauptmann had written both the ransom notes and the J. J. Faulkner signature, the governor recruited the Jersey City private eye as one of his covert fact finders. Not long after, the balloon burst.

  Americans believed in Charles Lindbergh. He was their supreme hero and remained so through the darkest years of the ongoing Great Depression. The death of his son was a national tragedy and disgrace. Hauptmann the German had been proved guilty and sentenced to die by a legal system that the public trusted as much as it did Lindbergh or the flag. Justice had been pronounced, and the nation wanted it served—wanted Hauptmann dead and the matter over with. Then word leaked out that Governor Hoffman had not only reopened the Lindbergh investigation but had secretly gone to the state prison in the middle of the night and interviewed Hauptmann in his death row cell. The resulting furor was instantaneous, international, and unanimous in its condemnation of the governor’s actions. When the Lindberghs suddenly fled America and took up exile in England, pointing a silent finger at Harold Hoffman, a movement was mounted for the governor’s impeachment. Hoffman, in the course of a year, went from being one of the country’s most popular young politicians to being the second most hated man in the land—second only to Bruno Richard Hauptmann.

  One of Pelletreau’s first assignments for the governor-under-siege came in mid-December of 1935. Dr. Hudson had received a letter from J. J. Faulkner, saying that Bruno Hauptmann was innocent. After analyzing the writing, Pelletreau was certain it was composed by the same hand that had left the signature on the bank deposit and penned the ransom notes. On January 1, 1936, the governor himself received a letter from J. J. Faulkner—in the same handwriting as the Hudson letter, the bank-deposit slip, and the ransom notes, according to Pelletreau. Governor Hoffman allowed the press to reproduce the message. In two pages of scrawling text, J. J. Faulkner stated that Bruno Hauptmann was completely innocent, that his only crime was being a victim of his own greed. The embattled governor told reporters that he placed great importance on the Faulkner letter—and for good reason. He thought he knew the identity of Faulkner. William Pelletreau began to home in on the “true” author of the ransom notes—and killer of the Lindbergh baby, based on the material in the box.

  On January 11, 1936, the same day New Jersey’s court of pardons refused to commute Hauptmann’s death sentence to life imprisonment and confirmed January 17 as the date of his electrocution, two New York City prison inmates were telling the governor’s investigators about a man they were sure had committed the crime. Five days later Pelletreau heard the story for himself. The prime informant was Wally Stroh, a perpetual petty crook who related that back in 1931, while serving time in New York’s Hart’s Island jail, he befriended a fellow inmate named Jacob Nosovitsky, also known as the Doc, or Doctor. According to Stroh, Nosovitsky was a certified physician who had been a famous international spy—famous enough to have the New York American print weekly installments of his life story. Stroh claimed Nosovitsky had gone to Mexico to perform an espionage mission for Lindbergh’s father-in-law, who was a partner of the great financier J. P. Morgan, Jr. Nosovitsky had delivered what he said he would, but the Morgan people refused to make their final payment to him—a payment of fifty thousand dollars. When Nosovitsky pressed them for his money, they had him arrested on a morals charge of taking an underage girl across state lines. This prompted him to marry the girl so she couldn’t testify against him—thereby committing bigamy, the crime for which he served time on Hart’s Island. Doc Nosovitsky swore to seek revenge on Lindbergh’s father-in-law.3

  After their release from jail, Nosovitsky invited Stroh to participate in a sure-bet kidnapping of a famous person’s baby. Stroh declined but recalled that Nosovitsky had told him that “babies can’t identify you.”4 The Doc also boasted of having devised a method of dissolving human bones in an acid solution and flushing them down the toilet. Just prior to the Lindbergh kidnapping, Stroh received a card from Nosovitsky, postmarked Cleveland, in which the international spy said everything was fine. That was the last Stroh heard from Doc.

  Pelletreau’s black box provided extensive samples of Nosovitsky’s handwriting as well as copies of all thirteen ransom notes, the Faulkner bank receipt, and the Faulkner letters to Dr. Hudson and Governor Hoffman. Blowups of the k’s indicate they were the same in every document. So were other key letters. The physical description of Nosovitsky fit those published on John. Pelletreau and several other of the governor’s investigators were convinced that Nosovitsky was John, the killer of the
Lindbergh baby. But where was he?

  A deal was offered Hauptmann for life in prison rather than death if he would name an accomplice. He refused. In a move that prompted worldwide public and media denunciation, Governor Hoffman granted Bruno a thirty-day reprieve. Pelletreau and other investigators went all out to track down Nosovitsky. The international spy was nowhere to be found. The thirty days ran out. On death row Bruno Richard Hauptmann was made ready for execution. A last-minute confession by another man delayed the process for a day. At 8:41 P.M., Friday, April 3, 1936, Hauptmann left his cell and walked the few steps into the adjoining room, where he was strapped into the electric chair. The current was turned on at 8:44 P.M. Three minutes later the voltage was cut off. As the fifty-seven guests who were crammed into the tiny chamber could see, Hauptmann was dead.

  Pelletreau continued in his efforts to convince officials that the wrong man had been executed. He went as far as to get an arrest warrant for Nosovitsky. What came of these efforts was not included among the documents he left behind.

  Several days were required to read through the black box information and get back to the owners of the material, who asked if I thought Pelletreau’s revelations were true, and if so, was I willing to write a book on them. I replied there was no way of judging the validity of the information until I knew more about the Lindbergh case. An interim agreement was reached in which the owners agreed to underwrite the research by which I could better estimate the accuracy of Pelletreau’s documents and assertion that Nosovitsky, not Hauptmann, stole and murdered Charles Lindbergh, Jr.

  I read three books on the kidnapping. The first, Kidnap, had come out in 1961 and was written by George Waller, who found fault with the New Jersey State Police participation in the investigation and parts of the trial but had no doubts that Bruno Hauptmann was guilty. The second book, The Airman and the Carpenter, was written in 1985 by the award-winning BBC investigative journalist Ludovic Kennedy. Kennedy also faulted the state police and made a persuasive argument for Hauptmann’s being totally innocent. Nosovitsky was not mentioned in either book. Scapegoat, written by newsman Anthony Scaduto in 1976, maintained that Hauptmann was framed by the New Jersey State Police, and he provided the confession of the man he considered the true kidnapper-murderer: Paul Wendel. Again no reference was made to Nosovitsky. I did cursory checks of local New York newspapers. Nosovitsky appeared, but not in any way that directly linked him to the crime—not yet, at least.