Lindbergh Read online

  It was now July of 1986, and the more I learned about the crime, investigation, and trial, the less sense any of them made to me. In part this was due to the monumental documentation regarding the case. Before the year was out, I had my answer. The black box contained material Pelletreau had collected for an article he sold to True Detective magazine, in which he names the mysterious Mr. X—Nosovitsky—as the kidnapper-killer. Nothing in the article, as had been true with the black box documents, could corroborate that Nosovitsky was the culprit. Pelletreau’s claims were unsubstantiated speculation. But I knew this. Information had already been discovered by me that showed Nosovitsky was in the Midwest at the time of the kidnapping.

  The notion of writing a book on Nosovitsky as the kidnapper-killer self-destructed. But the lure of the Lindbergh case persisted. I knew I had gone through only a fraction of the existing material on the matter. Then, too, additional avenues of data were now open that had not been available to the investigators of yesterday. The Freedom of Information Act would produce over two thousand never-seen-before pages of data on Nosovitsky alone.

  Of the many lingering bits of information I had picked up during the protracted research into the case were two theories regarding the ransom messages. The first held that the person who wrote the first note also wrote the next twelve. The second theory was that two people were involved. One had written the original note, found in the baby’s nursery; the next twelve messages were penned by a different person, forgeries done in the style of the first message.

  Months after the project was laid aside, inquiries made earlier continued to be answered—and I grew ever more confident that Nosovitsky had written the J. J. Faulkner letters and signed the bank receipt. When it came to the ransom notes, I differed with Pelletreau. He accused Nosovitsky of writing all thirteen messages. I came to believe that Nosovitsky had written only the last twelve; his motive: simple extortion. The question that loomed largest for me was: Who had written the first one, the original message that Lindbergh found in the nursery after discovering that the baby was missing from his crib?

  As fetching as the answer to this might prove, I had steadfastly turned my back on the project. No more Lindbergh—and no more funds for research. Not that I didn’t continue to speculate on aspects of the case. I had become convinced, for example, that Hauptmann’s trial was a raucous travesty, that with few exceptions prosecution witnesses had either distorted the truth or committed flat-out perjury, that the state police had tampered with physical evidence and, in many cases, suppressed vital information. But enough. No more Lindbergh!

  Eight months elapsed, and I was explaining my decision for abandoning the Lindbergh project to a young television journalist by the name of John Miller. Miller pondered for a time before saying, “I heard something about the kidnapping not long ago.” Then with a snap of his fingers and a thumb hitched toward Westchester County, he recalled, “From up in Westchester, by this woman who’s an artist for NBC News.” The next day I was at NBC, chatting with Libby Dengrove, who related that she and her husband knew the lawyer for Governor Harold Hoffman. His name was Harry Green, and he was still alive, living somewhere in L.A. As I listened to what Green had told the Dengroves, nagging questions about the case were answered, and a new overview began to form. If Harry Green was right, Hauptmann was innocent of the crime—and I knew the identity of the child’s killer. So had Lindbergh. The death seems to have occurred three days earlier than reported, and no kidnapping was involved.

  The allegation left no doubt as to who had purposely altered the truth and perpetrated the cover-up: Charles Lindbergh. But was he masterful enough to have done so? Had I, like everyone else, been sent looking in the wrong direction by the Lone Eagle?

  I flew to California. At first ninety-three-year-old Harry Green refused to see me. Finally he did but declined to be taped while recounting in far greater detail the story the Dengroves had told me. I took Harry and his eighty-six-year-old girlfriend to lunch the next day at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Present to witness the old lawyer’s statements was Irene Webb, my literary agent, from the Los Angeles office of the William Morris Agency. Walking ninety-three-year-old Harry through the Beverly Hills lobby was a wondrous sight. He relished every moment of it. What he had to say, haltingly, added an amazing new dimension to the Lindbergh case while also explaining why Governor Harold Hoffman became involved. If Harry was a liar, he was the most satisfying one I’ve come across. The book project was revived. And here we are, seven years later.

  No smoking gun will be offered regarding the Lindbergh case. The account to be presented constitutes a personal, ergo biased, portrait of a criminal happening and its time. The path to be followed is often intricate and contradictory, but with the reader’s indulgence the author hopes to illustrate how his conclusion was reached. Central to the saga is Charles Lindbergh himself, who I suspect may have acted as the coconspirator in a possibly humane ruse gone awry.

  I believe it possible that Charles Lindbergh, Jr., was not kidnapped on the night his father led us to believe.

  I think it likely that there never was a kidnapping.

  I do believe the child was killed—murdered or accidentally killed three days before his father announced to the world the tot was missing.

  I believe the culprit was most likely a member of the Lindberghs’ immediate family circle—which means an innocent man was executed.

  Ultimately, this becomes a story of how it was possible for one man, in fact or hypothetically, to delude a nation, the circumstances that allowed it to happen—and the fate of the solitary person who tried to challenge him, Harold Hoffman.

  Book One

  LINDBERGH THE HOME FRONT

  Prelude

  The section that follows presents the Home Front Phase of the infamous kidnapping: the actions that occurred within the Lindbergh estate. Evidence introduced and reevaluated here will corroborate the author’s subsequent speculations and conclusions. Since the combined archives regarding the Lindbergh crime are enormous and the case for this book’s premise relatively meager, close attention to detail will be appreciated.

  The supposition of the book, as well as of each section, is simple enough: If there is a possibility that the official explanation of what happened during the official investigation of the child’s disappearance and the Hauptmann trial are flawed, and if Charles Lindbergh may have committed some stripe of deception, how does this play out in the events under examination?

  Few people had estimated their fame better, and used it more efficiently, than thirty-year-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh. From the moment his celebrity exploded on the world—May 21, 1927, after flying the Atlantic Ocean—he instinctively understood the potential powers bequeathed an idol of his stature. By the evening of March 1, 1932, he had honed the possibilities into an awesome reality. As much as any man of his time, Lindbergh was a masterful self-promoter who knew that less is more, that aloofness makes the public’s heart grow fonder. He was too insensitive to be insecure, too observant not to be humble and charismatic when it served his ends. Limited in formal education, awkward and squeaky in conversation—but with an amazing gift for the written word—he managed to impress many of the personages of his day and bend them to his will. Regionally bigoted, he was able to hold his more radical beliefs in check, without premeditation, thereby sustaining the public’s adoration of him. An unmitigated egoist, it never occurred to him that he could be wrong. There was no malice involved, mind you. If Lindy said it, Lindy knew it had to be. That was the way of the Eagle.

  Charles Lindbergh trusted no one but his wife, and perhaps his mother and his wife’s parents. Obsessed with what he considered a perpetual invasion of his privacy, he was forever concocting plots to outwit the unwanted. In and of itself, there was a joy to besting adversaries, real or imagined, a challenge that stirred the blood, let the white knight mount his great steed and do battle. The media was his supreme hobgoblin, the snorting dragon who had quested him from the m
oment of his apotheosis. Their battles had been ceaseless. Bitter experience, at long last, had taught him how to keep the beast in check on important matters—or so he thought.

  Now, on March 1, 1932, his son was gone, a fact that the fourth estate would communicate with its own zealous gusto. If Lindbergh wanted to deceive the world press, he was better qualified to do so than nearly any man on earth. But did he deceive? If his intent was bending the truth and protecting the guilty party, he must manipulate the media into believing the events as he presented them—send the hounds packing off in the wrong direction. Despite his awesome public relations skills, was this possible?

  If a subterfuge had indeed been devised, had it taken more time than expected? It was already Tuesday, and Lindbergh was still at the house he and Anne were building near Hopewell. The family had never been here on a Tuesday before. Because construction was incomplete, they only spent the weekends—always arrived on Saturday morning with the baby, always departed Monday morning. There was no secret that Lindbergh was a creature of habit, an automaton when it came to maintaining patterns he had set.

  Tuesday or not, had a plan of action been put at the ready? Was false evidence in place and the three-person staff rehearsed? Were they to make it appear that a kidnapping had taken place when it hadn’t?

  Would it work? Could the world be made to look in the wrong direction? Gaze off into the future rather than glance back at the fateful Saturday of February 27?

  Lindbergh gave the go-ahead.

  2

  What the Police Were Told

  The telephone company in Hopewell occupied a single room over the post office, across the street from the tracks of the Reading Railroad. Hopewell’s population was barely nine hundred, and after sundown there was so little activity that the night switchboard operator was provided with a couch on which she could sleep. At approximately 10:20 P.M., Tuesday, March 1, 1932, she was awakened by a call from one of the few phones in the region not sharing a party line and the only one with an unlisted number, HOpewell 303. On the wire was Ollie Whateley, the butler-chauffeur for the town’s most prominent citizen, Charles Augustus Lindbergh. Whateley asked to be put through to the police. The operator plugged him in and rang. Constable Charles W. Williamson picked up. Whateley, an Englishman, spoke in a calm voice, “Colonel Lindbergh’s son has been stolen. Will you please come at once.”

  This, more likely than not, was the launching of a conspiracy to obscure details of the disappearance of twenty-month-old Charles Lindbergh, Jr.

  It was a cold, dark, wind-wrapped night, and the roads being traveled by Constable Williamson, who had picked up his chief, Harry H. Wolfe, were narrow, unlighted, and partially unpaved. The Lindbergh estate was isolated and new—360 wooded acres at the base of the forbidding Sourland Mountain, along the Werstville-to-Hopewell road, with a house that had recently been constructed and was not completely furnished and with grounds that were only partially cleared and still being landscaped. Even so, everyone in the area knew the exact location. It had become a major tourist attraction, overshadowing a spot on the nearby Delaware River where George Washington had made his historic crossing. Charles A. Lindbergh was not only New Jersey’s foremost celebrity, but he was, quite literally, the most famous man in the world.

  Though less than four miles from tiny Hopewell, which is in Mercer County, the Lindbergh estate stretched across both Mercer and Hunterdon counties. The house itself was in a corner of East Amwell Township, Hunterdon County, thereby giving the jurisdiction to investigate the missing-child complaint to the New Jersey State Police. Since the state police had not been notified, it was Hopewell PD’s Chief Wolfe and his constable who were the first to arrive. As they turned off the road to Werstville and started up the estate’s curving half-mile-long cinder drive, they met Ollie Whateley, who was motoring to Hopewell to purchase a flashlight. The policemen had a flashlight. Ollie returned with them to the home at the top of a rise called Sorrel Hill—a two-and-half-story-high French-manor-style house that was constructed of whitewashed fieldstone and whose windows, though fitted with outside shutters, did not all have curtains or shades. Charles Lindbergh was standing in the doorway, holding a Springfield rifle and wearing an open leather flying jacket. The time was approximately 10:35 P.M.

  Lindbergh took charge—as would be his wont throughout the investigation. Using Chief Wolfe’s flashlight, he brought the two Hopewell police officers around to the side of the house where the nursery was. Portions of the ground were so muddy that the daytime workers had put down wooden planks, which Lindbergh and the policemen now used. Approximately seventy-five feet from the house they came across a section of a wooden ladder. Close by and still attached to each other were two more ladder sections. On the ground not far away lay a dowel pin and a chisel. A search of the soft earth beneath one of the two second-floor nursery windows revealed a pair of imprints that could have been made by the base of the ladder. Seen leading off in a south-west direction were fresh footprints that appeared to have been made by a man. They retrieved the double section of ladder. Its legs fit into the mud imprints under the nursery window.

  Lindbergh escorted Wolfe and Williamson into the house and up to the nursery, where he granted them a brief inspection. They were shown the empty crib and an open window—the window below which, in the mud, were the two ladder holes. Lindbergh directed their attention to an envelope that rested on the sill. It was left by the kidnappers, he told them—even though the envelope was sealed and contained no writing on the front or back.

  Downstairs the two officers were allowed short conversations with the other four people who had been in the residence throughout the evening: the missing infant’s mother, twenty-six-year-old Anne Morrow Lindbergh; the baby’s English nursemaid, Bessie (“Betty”) Mowat Gow, twenty-seven; Aloysius (“Ollie”) Whateley, forty-seven; and Whateley’s forty-seven-year-old wife, Elsie Mary, who was also English and was employed as the family cook. Elsie Mary was crying. It appeared to Williamson that Mrs. Lindbergh was very nervous and restless; Whateley, nervous and depressed; Colonel Lindbergh, collected; and Gow, “the coolest of the lot.”1 With two exceptions, these truncated interviews of the staff and his wife by the Hopewell officers were the only ones permitted by Lindbergh for the next ten days.

  Chief Wolfe asked if Lindbergh suspected anyone of taking the baby. The answer was in the negative. Harboring no doubts that the missing child had been stolen, the chief suggested the state police be notified.

  If Charles Lindbergh was playing a game of deception, his initial ploy had convinced the two-man constabulary of Hopewell that a kidnapping had occurred. The next hurdle was the New Jersey State Police, who were more sophisticated than the Hopewell duo. Since the state police also had the legal jurisdiction to investigate the matter, their validation of Lindbergh’s claim would make kidnapping the crime of record.

  The phone call received at the New Jersey State Police training school at Wilburtha, near Trenton, was from Colonel Lindbergh himself.2 He reported that his son, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., had been kidnapped from his nursery between 7:30 P.M. and 10:00 P.M. The training school telephoned the information to a state-police post at Lambertville, the station nearest the Lindbergh home, and then called the trooper barracks at Morristown, where a Teletype alarm was issued for New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. The Lambertville station left phone messages for its troopers on patrol to call in immediately. Corporal Joseph A. Wolf responded and was ordered to the scene.

  Lindbergh was ready and waiting when Corporal Wolf reached the estate at 10:55 P.M.—and found that the two local Hopewell policemen had a twenty-minute head start on him. Lindbergh repeated for the corporal, and for the record, that his twenty-month-old son, Charles Jr., had been taken from his crib and carried away by an unknown person. Betty Gow had placed the infant in the crib for the night at 7:30 P.M. She checked the bed again at 10:00 P.M., discovered he was gone, and notified Lindbergh, who went to the nursery and saw that the rig
ht window in the east wall was unlocked and that the right half of the outside shutter was open. On the windowsill of the nursery rested a sealed envelope, which Lindbergh believed had been left by the person or persons who had carried off his child. He told the state policeman that he had not touched the letter or disturbed anything else in the room, and he related what he had found on the ground outside the nursery window and beyond—ladder segments and fresh footprints.

  Trooper Wolf posed the same question Chief Wolfe had asked earlier: Did Colonel Lindbergh have any suspicions who committed the crime? Lindy again answered that he did not. The trooper asked if he could recall any incident, such as strange noises or actions of the family dog, that might give an indication of when the kidnapping had occurred. Again Lindbergh answered no. Corporal Wolf phoned the Lambertville station, confirming that the child was gone, and asked one of the men there to make sure that headquarters and the state-police boss, Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, had been notified. Then he followed Lindbergh up to the nursery.

  The room measured twelve feet by fourteen feet and was covered by a drab-colored rug. Directly in the center of the floor were a low table and two children’s chairs. The door through which they had entered was in the middle of the north wall. To the right of it was a bureau, on top of which were toilet articles. The wall above the bureau supported three small shelves for toys. To the left of the door stood a small wooden table bearing a white tray containing antiseptics, powders, and other pharmaceuticals. In the middle of the south wall was a French-style window that opened in from the center. Directly beneath the window was a built-in chest that extended out into the room. On top of the chest were a toy dog and a number of children’s picture books. A toy ark rested on the floor to the left of the chest. One end of the west wall contained a door that led into a bathroom; the other end, a door opening into a clothes closet. Set between the doors was a four-poster wooden baby’s crib. Alongside the foot of the crib, which was flush with the wall; was a cream-colored portable baby’s toilet chair. At the other end was a sunlamp. The head of the bed and the lamp were cut off from the rest of the nursery by a pink and green screen with pictures of farmyard animals on it. Across the room, in the center of the east wall, was a fireplace, on whose mantel were three toy birds. A three-wheeled Kidicar was on the floor to the right, and to the left were a small chair and a reflector-type electric heater. On each side of the fireplace was a regular up-and-down-sliding window. The catches on the window to the left and on the outside shutters were securely fastened. It was the window to the right of the fireplace that Lindbergh seemed certain the kidnapper had used.