Lindbergh Read online

  The window was closed but not locked. The right side of its shutter was also closed; the left lay open. On the sill was the unopened envelope. Under the window was a small wooden chest with a black leather suitcase resting on top. Lying on the suitcase was part of the roof that belonged to the toy ark. State Trooper Wolf took note of a small, muddy mark directly on the suitcase and a second muddy mark on the hardwood floor. He saw that the blankets on the crib were still pinned to the sheets at the top to prevent them from slipping off, and he was told that the stolen child was wearing a Dr. Denton sleeping suit.

  At 11:25 P.M. four more state policemen reached the Lindbergh estate. Troopers Cain and Sullivan were from the Lambertville station, and Corporal Wolf dispatched one of them to the main gate to give directions to arriving fellow officers. He also would claim that he detailed the second officer to protect the crime-scene area in the immediate vicinity of the house from being disturbed or destroyed. The other pair of officers had come from the state-police training school, and one of them, Trooper Lewis J. Bornmann, went to the nursery with Lindbergh, where he corroborated the evidence of the undisturbed crib, the suitcase with a smudge of “yellow” mud, and another smudge of mud on the floor “about in the center of the room.”3 Bornmann was still there at midnight, finishing a sketch of the room, when the state police identification expert from the Morristown barracks, Frank A. Kelly, arrived and began dusting for fingerprints.

  Lindbergh conferred with Major Charles A. Schoeffel and Lieutenant Arthur T. (“Buster”) Keaten of the state police, who were brought to the nursery by Corporal Wolf. Trooper Kelly had used a nail file to slit open the envelope on the windowsill and was now examining its contents for fingerprints. None were found on the envelope or on the message inside, or anywhere else in the nursery. (Later he would dust the sections of ladder, and again no prints would be detected.)

  Lindbergh’s restraint regarding the unopened letter had been Jobian, if not slightly bizarre, considering he was positive it contained a communication from the kidnappers—information that unquestionably dealt with the fate of his son. Now that it had been processed, he shared. Rather than reading it himself, as might be expected of the father of a stolen child, Lindbergh had Major Schoeffel read the text aloud. Corporal Wolf claimed he was not present for this. Unlike Wolf, Williamson stated he had not only been in the room but had also been obliged to raise his hand and take the vow of silence Lindbergh asked for regarding the message, a claim the state troopers would alternately ignore and refute.

  Lindbergh, accompanied by Lieutenant Keaten, Detective William F. Horn (who would later become Lieutenant Keaten’s principal assistant on the case), Corporal Wolf, and another trooper, toured the neighboring houses to learn if the occupants had heard or seen anything suspicious earlier in the evening. They returned at 4:30 A.M. By then other troopers had followed the footprints from the ladder sections to an old road on the property called Featherbed Lane, where they seemed to stop alongside impressions from automobile tires.

  What Corporal Wolf either didn’t notice or failed to mention in a later report was that perhaps as many as two hundred newspeople and untold numbers of official and unofficial sightseers were meandering unchecked about the grounds, sometimes surging from one discovery point to another, and destroying vital evidence.

  Sunrise allowed the searchers their first view of the surrounding terrain. The back of the Lindbergh house faced south and looked down on open fields that were dotted with small clumps of trees and bushes. The vista was much the same on the east, or nursery, side of the building, where the fields stretched to the Hopewell-Werstville road. Close to the house on the eastern side, and running parallel with the Hopewell-Werstville road, was Featherbed Lane. The front of the house faced north. Before it lay a circular driveway. On the western side of the driveway was a spacious, multicar garage. For approximately ninety feet the ground in front of the house and on the nursery side had been leveled and covered with fresh dirt, which was wet and often muddy. Beyond the clearings to the north and northwest rose the heavily wooded Sourland Mountain.

  With the breaking of dawn, Corporal Wolf joined four other troopers in a search of the woods, where nothing of relevance was discovered. From there he went to write his summary, which would be the official record of the event. It was now March 2, but he backdated the report to read March 1. Much of what he recorded paralleled what Constable Charlie Williamson had already told reporters. Due to this and to an ongoing antagonism between the press corps and the New Jersey State Police, accusations would be made that because they had failed to follow basic police procedures the night of March 1, and therefore botched the early aspects of the investigation, the troopers, trying to cover up and appear efficient, had appropriated as their own what had actually been done by the two Hopewell policemen.

  Wolf’s four-page Major Initial Report used a standard departmental form that began with him listing the disappearance as a kidnapping. The corporal described the victim, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., as white, twenty months and ten days old, twenty-nine inches tall, weighing twenty-seven to thirty pounds, and with a light complexion, dark blue eyes, and blond, curly hair. The report stated that “at this time” no one has been accused of the kidnapping and that no suspects exist. Wolf, who claimed not to have seen the contents of the envelope, had filled in the paragraph titled “Probable Motives” with “Avarice, kidnapped the child for payment.” In preparing the “List of Witnesses” Mrs. Anne Lindbergh is spelled “Mrs. Anna Lindbergh,” and Mr. and Mrs. Whateley are called “Whitely.” Under “Complete List of Evidence” he entered the ladder, the chisel, and “one plain letter envelop containing a note left on the window sill of the nursery by the kidnapers” but made no mention of the dowel.

  Though Wolf’s typewritten report had not given specifics regarding the footprints, his attached handwritten notes stated, “2 sets of fresh foot prints leaving off in a s.e. direction (i.e., from beneath the nursery).” Most of the prints were obliterated by the unrestrained crowd; however, one very clear impression survived. No photograph had been taken or ruler used, but by rough measurement it was twelve to twelve and a half inches long and four to four and a quarter inches in width. This did not appear in the report or notes, but the notes revealed what Trooper Nuncio De Gaetano had seen: “SOCK MARKS from foot of ladder to where ladder lay.”

  The “Description of Methods Employed” in the Wolf report stated:

  It is obvious that the kidnapers arrived in a car which was parked some distance from the house either in the vicinity of the Lindbergh’s private lane or a rough road known as Featherbed Lane which runs parallel to the Lindbergh lane about 1/4 mile south. Then they proceeded on foot to their object and assembled a three section extension ladder which was placed against the east side of the house. Apparently one person climbed the ladder and entered the nursery on the second floor, took the child from its crib, leaving in the same manner and carrying the victim back to the waiting automobile [and] escaped to an established hiding place. It is obvious that this crime had been carefully planned and the layout [and] routine of the Lindbergh home studied.4

  It would soon be discovered that the lower section of the ladder had a shattered riser and a broken rung—and Lindbergh would later recall hearing a “cracking” sound outside the house around 9:30 P.M. But to all intents and purposes, Corporal Joseph A. Wolf’s initial report contained most of what would be known and believed for two and a half years regarding the disappearance of Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr.

  An important physical element that had not been mentioned by Wolf were the thumb guards on the baby’s sleeping apparel. Something else Wolf, the state police, or Charles Lindbergh overlooked was Hopewell’s Constable Williamson, who was already recalling for reporters that Lindbergh—though claiming that the lack of a flashlight had kept him from examining the ground below the nursery until the policemen arrived—had led the way on their trek and seemed to know where everything was; that Lindbergh had disco
vered the ladder holes and footprints; that Lindbergh had found the ladder sections; that Lindbergh had been the first to spot the dowel and chisel.

  If a ransom note was the key to Lindbergh’s strategy for getting the world to look in the wrong direction, it had begun to work. The envelope had been opened and the text examined and accepted by authorities. The twelve-line message had been written in pencil in an exaggerated, uneven script on a single piece of paper. It read:

  Dear Sir!

  Have 50,000 $ redy 25,000 $ in

  20 $ bills 15,000 $ in 10 $ bills and

  10000 $ in 5 $ bills. After 2–4 days

  we will inform you were to deliver

  the Mony.

  We warn you for making

  anyding public or for notify the Police

  the child is in gute care.

  Indication for all letters are

  signature

  and three holds.5

  Three perforated holes in the lower right-hand corner of the page ran across a “signature” of a solid circle of red inside two larger, interlacing circles.

  If Lindbergh, for all his posturing of secrecy and confidentiality, desired to let the press and public know what the text said, he did it in a unique fashion—by simultaneously denying and confirming that the ransom note had been found.

  3

  Crowded Idols

  On learning of the kidnapping earlier in the evening, a stand-up comedian in a Chicago speakeasy suggested that President Herbert Hoover took the Lindbergh baby because he needed the ransom money to keep the White House from being repossessed. Other Americans would soon be accusing the president of the crime, not out of an attempt at black humor but from the frustration and enmity incurred by the severest economic crisis in the country’s history. America was in the grip of the Great Depression, and unemployment, which had been at 1.5 million before the stock market crash of 1929, shot up to 4 million in 1930, and by the time of the kidnapping in 1932 was heading for 13 million, nearly one third of the nation’s work force. The name Hoover, once synonymous with hope and humanitarianism, had become an obscenity for much of the country. A rash of ramshackle shantytowns slapped together by swelling armies of the disfranchised were called Hoovervilles; empty pockets turned inside out were Hoover flags; horse- or mule-drawn flivvers were Hoover carts; newspapers with which the legions of new poor covered themselves at night were Hoover blankets; freight cars being illegally ridden by hobos and a quarter of a million nomadic youngsters were the Hoover express. Hoover hogs were the rabbits farmers caught for food; Hoover steaks, the rodents many were forced to eat in the cities; Hooverberries, the apples being peddled on the streets. Not that long before, Herbert Clark Hoover had been the second most respected and trusted man in the land. The first was Charles Augustus Lindbergh.

  In 1919, a New York City hotel owner by the name of Raymond Orteig offered a twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize to anyone who could fly “an aeroplane” nonstop between New York and the shores of France. Orteig, an aviation buff, had been inspired by two historic flights made that same year, both of which had crossed the Atlantic Ocean. The earlier had been achieved by the NC-4, a U.S. Navy seaplane piloted by Lieutenant Commander A. C. Reed. Despite the fact that he had touched down at the Portuguese Azores and in Spain before reaching England, Reed was the first man ever to have flown the Atlantic. His accomplishment was overshadowed when a pair of British aviators, Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown, flew nonstop from Rope Walk Field at St. Johns, Newfoundland, to Clifden, Ireland, in a Vickers-Vimy biplane. The battered aircraft gave testament to the difficult weather they had encountered. (Alcock had been born in America; nevertheless, he was knighted, along with Brown, for the feat.) Still in 1919, the dirigible R-34 also ran into bad weather during its transatlantic crossing, from East Fortune Airdrome, Scotland, and had to put out an SOS before touching down at Mineola, New York.

  The highly publicized Alcock-Brown flight had been inspired by a fifty-thousand-dollar cash award posted by the London Daily Mail. Raymond Orteig, the owner of New York City’s Brevoort and Lafayette hotels, was concerned that U.S. achievements in aviation were being overshadowed. After conferring with the National Aeronautic Association of America, he put up his own twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize for a direct New York-to-France flight, a challenge many experts criticized as being next to impossible with the equipment and technology at hand. The term of the offer, which was five years, expired without a single taker. Orteig reinstated the prize in 1925. It went unclaimed for another year and a half. By now flying was the international rage, and three different dirigibles had carried a total of sixty-eight people over the Atlantic. The year before, a pair of round-the-world U.S. Army planes made the crossing by way of Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland. Even in May of 1927, as twenty-five-year-old Charles Lindbergh and his Ryan monoplane, The Spirit of St. Louis, reached Long Island, New York, the takeoff point for his contemplated twenty-five-thousand-dollar flight to Paris, he again was not the first.

  Lindbergh, whose nickname was Slim, had read about the Orteig prize in an aviation-magazine article that recounted the failure of Paul-René Fonck, the great French World War I ace, to make the trip and win the money. Fonck’s overloaded tri-engine plane had crashed on takeoff from Long Island’s Roosevelt Field, killing two of his four-man crew. Fascinated by the prospect of flying nonstop over the Atlantic to Europe and believing that a streamlined monoplane using the new, powerful 220-horsepower J-5 Whirlwind engine manufactured by the Wright Aeronautical Corporation had the best chance of success, Lindbergh persuaded a group of aviation-oriented businessmen in St. Louis to finance such an undertaking. A contract to build the plane—Whirlwind engine included—in sixty days went to the Ryan Airlines Corporation of San Diego for $10,508. Before the work was completed, four other aircraft had entered the Orteig contest. Two were multi-engined and two single engined. During a test flight one of the multi-engined planes crashed in a swamp, killing the crew. The other was damaged and its crew injured when it nosed over on a landing. One of the single-engine craft suffered a minor accident as well as being beset with legal problems. The second took off from France, crossed the Atlantic coast of Europe, and disappeared. Construction of The Spirit of St. Louis was completed on schedule. Lindbergh conducted the test flights in California and then flew to St. Louis for the official dedication ceremonies, but the trip was cut short when he learned that two of the damaged aircraft were now repaired and ready to take off in quest of the Orteig prize.

  On May 12, 1927, Slim Lindbergh flew The Spirit of St. Louis to Curtiss Field, Long Island, in record time to find that a new predicament confronted him, one he would spend a lifetime grappling with: the media. A dozen or more newspaper reporters, photographers, and motion picture cameramen ran out into the area where he planned to land. Lindbergh touched down a safe distance away but was soon besieged by the press. Knowing that publicity for the flight would draw attention to aviation, as well as increase his own influence and earning prospects—among other likelihoods, his backers hoped to establish airline service between St. Louis, New York, and Europe—he granted interviews and allowed endless photographs. At first he enjoyed seeing his name and picture on the front pages of great newspapers, but it didn’t take long for him to be dismayed by the exaggeration and exploitation in many of the articles. Contacts with the press became increasingly unpalatable for him. He felt that interviews and photographs attempted to perplex and abase life, particularly those printed in the tabloid papers. His pet peeve was what he considered to be a “trick” technique used with pictures. He was infuriated by the first composite photograph in which he appeared. His mother had come to New York to see him off. While they did pose together for photographers, he refused to assume the lachrymose postures often asked for. The next day he was stunned by newspaper photographs showing them in exactly those positions. “I thought it cheaply sentimental and thoroughly dishonest on the part of the papers,” Lindbergh explained. “A
t New York I began to realize how much irresponsibility and license can lurk behind the shining mask called ‘freedom on the press.’”1

  Lindbergh had a more serious difficulty to tend to at Curtiss Field: He wasn’t eligible to go after the twenty-five-thousand-dollar purse, the money with which he had hoped to pay back his investors. A contest rule required that sixty days must elapse between the Orteig Prize Committee’s acceptance of entry papers and the contestant’s takeoff for the flight. Lindbergh didn’t have that much time. At neighboring Roosevelt Field two eligible planes were waiting for the overcast to lift so they could leave for France: a single-engine Bellanca named Columbia, which was piloted by Clarence Chamberlin and Lloyd Bertaud, and America, a trimotor Fokker like the one Paul-René Fonck had crashed in on this very airfield the year before. The America and its crew were led by the world-famous North Pole explorer Lieutenant Commander Richard Byrd, who had already made a historic flight over the top of the world. Though Byrd claimed he was not an official entrant, Orteig had personally invited him to participate, and the media treated him as a competitor.