Lindbergh Read online

  Anne was at her desk in the living room when Betty entered to say that the baby had fallen asleep quickly and was breathing easily. Because Lindbergh had called at around 7:00 P.M. to say that he would be a little late, Ollie Whateley decided that the staff should eat before his return. Ollie snacked first; then Betty joined Elsie for supper in the sitting room. The weather outside was nasty, and the wind had begun to howl. Even so, Anne, who was still at her desk, thought she heard the sound of car wheels on a gravel driveway. It was about 8:15 P.M., but no one arrived. Ten to fifteen minutes later the sound of an auto horn was clearly heard in the sitting room. Knowing that Colonel Lindbergh had arrived home, Elsie Whateley went to the kitchen and helped Ollie in preparing dinner. Anne heard the horn as well and also the sound of her husband’s approaching car.

  Lindbergh parked in the garage, entered the house through the back door, passed the sitting room, and crossed the kitchen. Anne accompanied him as he went upstairs to wash his hands. Their bathroom connected to the nursery, but they did not look in on their son. At 8:35 P.M. they were served supper in the dining room. Ollie took the phone call that came in at approximately 8:45 P.M. It was Red Johnsen wanting to speak with Betty. She came into the kitchen and got on the line. Red said he was sorry he had missed her at Englewood and that he would have liked to have seen her before she left. He also told her he was going to West Hartford. Betty returned to the sitting room and turned on the radio. Whether or not the family dog, Wahgoosh, who usually slept outside the nursery door, was with her would become a point of contention.

  Charles and Anne finished dinner shortly after 9:00 P.M. and retired to the living room, where logs were burning in the fireplace. They sat talking on the sofa. Charles heard a noise, which he attributed to something dropping in the kitchen, such as a wooden orange crate. In the dining room the Whateleys cleaned away the dishes without any mishaps. After spending some five minutes in the living room, the Lindberghs went upstairs to their bedroom. They chatted for ten to fifteen minutes; then Lindy took a bath. Having finished washing the dishes, the Whateleys went to the sitting room, where Betty was reading a book and listening to the radio. His day’s chores done, Ollie sat down to peruse the newspapers. Elsie took Betty up to their bedroom to inspect a newly purchased dress. After bathing, Lindbergh dressed and went downstairs to the library to read. Upstairs, Anne drew a bath for herself. Discovering that she had run out of tooth powder, she went into the baby’s bathroom and, without turning on the light, appropriated the needed powder. Returning to her own bathroom, Anne brushed her teeth and then summoned Elsie, whom she asked to prepare some hot lemonade. Elsie went downstairs to do as she was bade. Anne took her bath. It was approximately 10:00 P.M.—time for Betty Gow to check on the baby.

  Betty used the kitchen staircase to reach the second floor; then she followed the hall past a pair of facing guest bedrooms, the Lindberghs’ master bedroom, and on into the baby’s bathroom at the end of the passageway. There was a chill in the air, so she turned on a heater. She entered the unlighted nursery. It was also too cold for her liking. Betty closed the window and activated the heater. She headed for the crib, from which no sound of breathing could be heard. She reached down to pick up the baby—and felt around inside. The blankets were still pinned to the mattress, and the pillow was in place. But the child was gone.

  Anne had finished her bath and was in the master bedroom when Gow entered. Not wishing to alarm her mistress, Betty asked if by any chance Anne had taken the baby or if Colonel Lindbergh might have him. Anne thought it possible that the child was with his father, who was downstairs.

  Anne, in a letter to her mother-in-law, would say that her first reaction was that her prankster husband was playing another of his infamous and often not-too-funny practical jokes on her.7 Betty Gow also thought it might be a trick. She ran downstairs into the library and asked the master of Sorrel Hill. “Colonel Lindbergh, do you have the baby? Please don’t fool me.”8

  “No, of course not,” he answered. “Isn’t he in his crib?”

  “You must have the baby,” she told him, “he’s gone.”9

  Lindbergh ran upstairs with Gow at his heels. Anne was coming out of the nursery as her husband rushed in. He went to the empty crib, then hurried into the master bedroom and took a Springfield rifle from the closet. He was back in the nursery along with Anne. Whether they saw the envelope resting near the window on this or on their previous visit remains confused, but Lindbergh had no doubt what had happened and told his wife, “Anne, they’ve stolen our baby.”10 Anne hastened back to her own room and, she later related, without thinking what she was doing, threw open the window and leaned out. She thought she heard what sounded like a cry in the general direction of the woodpile. Elsie thought it was a cat or possibly the wind.

  The underground telephone line to Sorrel Hill was encased in metal tubing. Even so, Lindbergh reacted as if the wire may have been cut.11 He strode from the nursery to the top of the stairs and shouted down to Ollie Whateley to see if the phone was working. When Whateley reported that it was, Lindbergh ordered him to call the Hopewell sheriff. By now Anne was dressed and, along with Gow and Elsie, began a desperate search for the baby. They started with the nursery closets and continued on through the house. Lindbergh, Springfield rifle in hand, went out on the private drive leading to the house. It was too dark to see. Whateley started up the car and trained the lights along the roadside as Lindbergh searched. The process was cumbersome. Lindbergh ordered him to drive into town and buy a flashlight so they could explore the area more thoroughly. Ollie was nearing the front gate when a car carrying Chief Wolfe and Constable Williamson entered the grounds. He turned around and escorted them up to the house atop Sorrel Hill.

  And so the record read for sixty years. Little or nothing was challenged. Authorities established the brief period between 8:30 P.M. and 9:00 P.M., when a “crash” was heard, as the probable time when the kidnapping was perpetrated, without giving much thought to what a narrow time frame this allowed the criminals to steal the child. Also ignored or downplayed was the fact that the Lindberghs and their child never stayed at Sorrel Hill past Monday morning. This negated theories that the crime was long and meticulously planned. The fact that it happened on a Tuesday, when even the Lindberghs hadn’t expected to be there, pointed to a crime of opportunity—and immense luck.

  Another event to which investigators and the media would pay little or no attention was taking place some sixty miles away, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, in New York City: New York University’s All Alumni Centennial Dinner. Eighteen hundred guests, including scores of prestigious names, graced the 111 tables and thirty theater-style boxes. Considering that it was the worst year of the Great Depression, the gala offered a dignified but not garish menu of grapefruit with Maraschino cherries, cream soup St.-Germain with toasted croutons, celery, olives, a choice of escalope of bass in lobster sauce with parsley potatoes or breast of roasted chicken with new green peas in butter, salad with California angel dressing, coffee, and a dessert of frozen log écossaise. Songs were to be provided by the Chapel Choir of the New York University Glee Club. The seating list placed nineteen men on the dais, seven of whom would speak and two of whom were guests of honor. One of the guests of honor never appeared: Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh.

  Organizers of the centennial celebration had given up a frenzied quest to locate Lindbergh, and the dinner proceeded without him. The main obstacle to locating Lindy was that his phone number at Hopewell was unlisted. Henry Breckinridge had been reached in New York and said he’d do what he could to find his missing friend and client. If Henry did phone Hopewell, no mention of this seems to be have been made by Anne or the staff to the arriving Lindbergh, not according to their sworn statements in court or to state-police investigators. Anne says nothing of it in her published writings. If the Lone Eagle prided himself on anything, it was that he never forgot an appointment. Lindy would never acknowledge that he had overlooked the speaking engagement at
the Waldorf.

  Nearly two years later the FBI Summary Report would claim Lindbergh sent a telegram of apology to the NYU banquet that very night. The bureau was not the prime investigator of the crime, did not have direct access to Lindbergh, and had not officially questioned him. A search of the entire bureau file on the crime, from which the summary was extracted—some 140 volumes of three hundred pages each plus appendixes—produced no agent’s report or other verification that such a telegram was sent, nor was any mention made of the NYU dinner or if Breckinridge was a go-between. It appears only in the 407-page summary.12

  Henry Breckinridge would maintain that Lindbergh had been misinformed about the date of the New York University dinner. The organizers of the tribute could probably have proved otherwise, but no one cared.

  Other, more spectacular, events were occupying the police and the media.

  5

  Old Enemies and Friends

  During the late evening of March 1 and the early morning of March 2, 1932, as radios crackled with accounts of a kidnapping, the press corps descended on Charles Lindbergh as it never had before, and all the old friends and enemies were to be counted.

  If indeed Lindbergh had a master plan to alter the truth, as I suspect was possible, it would have had to rely on the media’s spreading the gospel of the kidnapping according to his dictates and no one else’s. Once he had accomplished this, it would be necessary to cut himself and his family off from them as best he could. Only in this way would the fourth estate ride off in search of the nonexistent kidnappers, focus the public’s and the law enforcement’s interest on the future rather than have them looking back and perhaps becoming suspicious as to what actually occurred the previous Saturday. Skill and a great deal of luck accounted for the ease with which this strategy was implemented.

  The earliest newspeople to reach Sorrel Hill were local reporters and stringers; then came the vanguard of national and international journalists. Lindbergh invited a select group of writers into his living room for a press conference he would personally conduct. They were, by and large, tried and true believers who defended his image as the Lone Eagle and tended to write what he wanted. A second group would be invited in the next day.

  While Ollie Whateley provided coffee and sandwiches, Lindbergh told the journalists of his son’s disappearance, explained that he needed their cooperation in disseminating photographs and descriptions of the child to the public on the chance that someone would spot the Eaglet, as well as in persuading the kidnappers not to harm him. He revealed that the infant had a cold and was being fed a special formula, which he wanted printed and broadcast in hope that it would be followed by the kidnappers. Lindy even allowed for a brief period of questions but would not accede to reporters’ requests to talk to his wife or members of the household staff. In this first encounter with the press, Lindbergh made at least one slipup that nobody caught at the time. The missing child had recently had his baby locks shorn. The photographs Lindbergh passed out to reporters were not of his blond, short-haired son but of a long, curly-haired pretonsorial Eaglet.

  Lindy’s prime contradiction involved what was in all probability his most effective ploy. While he vehemently denied to the group of reporters that a ransom note existed, he privately confirmed for several individual sources, including the New York Times, that it had been found. Despite his continued disavowal, headlines would soon be proclaiming that such a message had been left by the kidnappers—which was pivotal to Lindbergh’s scenario.

  The roads leading to Hopewell and the estate were already jammed with media people—four hundred would be counted in the first twelve hours. The Associated Press had dispatched four carloads, and the United Press, three cars. William Randolph Hearst, Jr., was personally directing the activities of the ten men and one woman he had ordered to the scene. Hearst’s International News Service, which had its entire staff en route, would soon convert a pair of rented ambulances into mobile darkrooms so pictures of the kidnapping site could be printed on the spot and rushed back to town. Those newsmen who had already arrived wandered the grounds at will, as did random sightseers and state and county officials with no part in the investigation. One correspondent likened it to the circus coming to town and all the neighbors rushing over to get first looks. Radio host Long John Nebel recalled, “Down on the road the cars were bumper to bumper waiting to get in or parked there bumper to bumper. They [the New Jersey State Police] were overwhelmed. So was everyone else. There were hundreds of us walking around that place in a stupor, maybe even a thousand, if you count the folks in the woods. There were people walking all over the woods.” In the process two vital pieces of evidence were disturbed: Footprints in the ground outside the nursery were destroyed, and ladder segments were picked up and examined by curious officials and journalists.

  After his need for reporters was fulfilled by the living room press conference, Charles Lindbergh’s tolerance of the marauding media came to an end. While leading a search of the grounds, he told a group of writers who approached him, “I hope you boys will excuse me, but I would rather the state police answer your questions. I’m sure you understand how I feel.”1 Major Charles A. Schoeffel, the deputy to the state-police superintendent, Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, was the designated trooper liaison with the press at the estate.

  A car carrying a newswoman and several of her fellow New York City reporters reached Hopewell about 1:00 A.M. They worked for the Hearst newspaper chain and discovered that Gebhart’s Hotel and refreshment parlor in the center of the little town had opened to accommodate the influx of journalists. After getting a cup of coffee and directions, they joined the caravan of vehicles heading out for the Lindbergh estate. As they grew near, the hilly, wooden terrain was illuminated by flares being dropped from unseen airplanes. There was no trouble driving onto the grounds and walking up to the house in which every room was lighted, but they were kept from going in by state troopers wearing wide-brimmed hats, smart blue jackets, and dark motorcycle breeches. Looking through the living room windows, they saw Anne Morrow Lindbergh pacing and talking with the household staff. She was nervous but dry eyed. They returned to their car and started cruising around the grounds to see what could be found. On a steep, muddy lane they encountered another car. It stopped, and Lindbergh, hatless and wearing his familiar leather flying jacket, got out and walked up to them. On learning they were reporters, he said familiarly, “Boys, I rely on you to stay off my estate and not annoy me. For my part I promise to give you a good break.”

  As they watched him walk away, one reporter commented, “Hell, that was what you call nonchalant.”

  “The Lindberghs are like that,” a fellow scribe explained. “They never show any emotion.”

  “Still, God Almighty, that man’s baby has been stolen—dead, maybe—in the hands of some nut or fiend,” said the only woman reporter in the group.2 Her name was Laura Vitray, and she knew that writing about Lindbergh’s nonchalance was pointless. Composure doesn’t make good copy; grief does.

  Hostility between state policemen and the press became evident when the troopers regrouped and began clearing newspeople off the estate. Their methods often were not gentle, and even when they were, the media folk did not always cooperate. Well before dawn the removal was complete. Except for a few pet journalists, who were escorted up to Lindy’s home on the hill for special briefings, the press had access to nothing but a small holding area at the far end of the estate, where they had been told announcements would be made. The nearest telephone was on a five-party line in a farmhouse a mile up the road. Official statements and press releases were slow in coming. Reporters racing up to the farmhouse and waiting in a long line to make a call were not cheered at the sight of workmen laying telephone and telegraph lines to the Lindbergh garage, where a communications center was expected to be operative by morning. When complete, the lines would link the estate with Princeton, less than twenty miles away.

  The Lindbergh news blackout extended far beyo
nd Sorrel Hill. City editors intent on getting stories from Lindbergh-Morrow relatives ran into an impenetrable iron curtain, even though Lindy would later attest he had not yet informed his mother, Evangeline, or in-laws of the tragedy. Efforts to talk with the baby’s grandparents, Mrs. Elizabeth Morrow, in Englewood, and Mrs. Lindbergh in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, were intercepted by spokesmen. The missing infant’s uncle and aunt, Dwight Morrow, Jr., and Constance Morrow, refused comment. A second aunt, Elisabeth Morrow, could not be located. No one connected with the Morrow household was available to the press.