Lindbergh kidnapping

• 1. Introduction

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  The Lindbergh kidnapping began at about 9:00 in the evening on the 1st of March 1932, when the nurse Betty Gow went looking for a 20-month-old boy and could not find him. His mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, had just come out of the bath, and the child was not with her. Gow alerted the boy's father, Colonel Charles Lindbergh, who went straight to the nursery. On the windowsill he found an envelope. Inside was a ransom note with poor handwriting and grammar. The missing child was Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., born on the 22nd of June 1930. Within weeks, a retired schoolteacher, a pair of speakeasy owners and the President of the United States would all be drawn into the search. Who wrote that note, and who answered it? Why did a crime in one New Jersey house become a national obsession? And did the state execute the right man?

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• 2. A Night of Clues

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  Taking a gun, Charles Lindbergh walked the grounds of Highfields, his home in East Amwell, New Jersey, with the family butler, Olly Whateley. The baby's crib had stood on the upper floor. Beneath the window of his room, the two men found impressions in the ground, pieces of a wooden ladder and a baby's blanket. Whateley telephoned the Hopewell police. Lindbergh called his attorney and friend Henry Breckinridge, and then the New Jersey state police.

  After midnight, a fingerprint expert examined the ransom note and the ladder. He found no usable fingerprints or footprints. Experts concluded that the kidnapper or kidnappers had worn gloves and put cloth on the soles of their shoes. The baby's room held the child's own fingerprints but no adult ones, not even on the window that witnesses admitted touching.

  The note itself was short and riddled with errors. It opened with the words "Dear Sir! Have 50.000$ 25 000$ in 20$ bills 15000$ in 10$ bills and 10000$ in 5$ bills." It warned the family against making the matter public or notifying the police. At the bottom sat two interconnected blue circles around a red circle. A hole had been punched through the red circle, with two more holes to its left and right. Professionals judged that one person had written the entire note. The odd English suggested a foreigner who had spent little time in the United States, and the FBI found a sketch artist to draw the man it believed was responsible.

  The ladder offered a second profile. Police decided it had been built incorrectly, yet by someone who knew how to work with wood. Experts studied slivers of it to learn how many kinds of wood had been used, what pattern the nail holes made, and whether it was built indoors or outdoors.

  Word of the crime spread fast, and hundreds of people converged on the estate, destroying whatever footprint evidence remained.

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• 3. Colonels and Con Men

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  Among the visitors to Highfields were three men known as colonels. Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf was superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, and he alone had law enforcement expertise. Henry Skillman Breckinridge was a Wall Street lawyer and former United States Assistant Secretary of War. William J. Donovan was a hero of the First World War who later headed the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA. Lindbergh and these men suspected organized crime. They also believed the note was written by a native German speaker. Lindbergh used his influence to steer the investigation.

  Mickey Rosner, a Broadway hanger-on rumored to know mobsters, was their first contact. Rosner turned to two speakeasy owners, Salvatore "Salvy" Spitale and Irving Bitz. Lindbergh quickly endorsed the pair and made them his intermediaries to the mob. Al Capone, Willie Moretti, Joe Adonis and Abner Zwillman all spoke from prison, offering to return the baby for money or legal favors. Capone wanted his release, arguing that he would be more effective outside. The authorities quickly refused.

  On the morning after the kidnapping, officials notified President Herbert Hoover. Kidnapping was then a state crime, and there seemed to be no ground for federal involvement. Even so, Attorney General William D. Mitchell announced that the whole machinery of the Department of Justice would cooperate with New Jersey. The Bureau of Investigation was authorized to investigate. The Coast Guard, the Customs Service, the Immigration Service and the Washington police were told they might be needed. On the 2nd of March, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover offered the Trenton police any resource they wanted.

  Money drew attention too. New Jersey officials announced a $25,000 reward for the safe return of "Little Lindy", and the Lindbergh family added $50,000 of its own. The total of $75,000 was a tremendous sum in the midst of the Great Depression.

  On the 4th of March, a man named Gaston B. Means told a society figure, Evalyn Walsh McLean, that he could retrieve the baby. He claimed a friend of his was the kidnapper. The next day he said he had made contact, and he persuaded her to hand over $100,000 because the ransom had supposedly doubled. She waited daily for the child. When Means refused to return her money, she reported him to the police, and he received fifteen years in prison for embezzlement.

  Formal federal authority was still months away, and in October 1933 Franklin D. Roosevelt announced that the Federal Bureau of Investigation would take jurisdiction over the case.

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• 4. Jafsie and Cemetery John

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  On the 6th of March 1932, a new ransom letter reached the Lindbergh home. It was postmarked in Brooklyn two days earlier and carried the same perforated red and blue marks. The ransom had risen to $70,000. A third note, also postmarked in Brooklyn and bearing the marks, arrived in Breckinridge's mail. It named a go-between, John Condon, asked for a newspaper notice that the note had been received, specified the size of the box for the money, and warned against contacting the police.

  John F. Condon was a well-known Bronx personality and retired school teacher. He had already written an open letter to The Bronx Home News offering $1,000 if the kidnapper would hand the child to a Catholic priest. A reply, reportedly from the kidnappers, authorized him as their intermediary, and Lindbergh accepted it as genuine. Condon then placed a classified ad in the New York American: "Money is Ready. Jafsie."

  A late-evening meeting was arranged at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. According to Condon, the man he met sounded foreign and stayed in the shadows, so Condon never saw his face. The man called himself John. He described himself as a "Scandinavian" sailor in a gang of three men and two women, and said the baby was safe on a boat. Condon doubted him, so John promised proof in the form of the baby's sleeping suit. He also asked Condon an odd question: "... would I burn if the package were dead?"

  On the 16th of March, Condon received a toddler's sleeping suit by mail, along with a seventh ransom note. Lindbergh identified the suit. Condon ran a new ad in the Home News: "Money is ready. No cops. No secret service. I come alone, like last time." On the 1st of April, a letter told him the time had come to deliver the ransom.

  The money was packed in a wooden box made to order, in the hope it could be identified later. Many of the bills were Gold Certificates, which were about to be withdrawn from circulation, so anyone spending them would stand out. No bill was marked, but every serial number was recorded. Some sources credit the idea to Frank J. Wilson and others to Elmer Lincoln Irey.

  On the 2nd of April, an unknown cab driver handed Condon a note. Condon met John and said only $50,000 had been raised. The man took the money and gave Condon a note saying the child was in the care of two innocent women.

  After the discovery of the body, Condon stayed unofficially involved. To much of the public he had become a suspect, and some vilified him. For two years he visited police departments and pledged to find "Cemetery John". His behavior grew flamboyant. Once, riding a city bus, he spotted a suspect in the street, announced his secret identity and ordered the startled driver to stop. The man got away. Critics also called Condon exploitative when he agreed to appear in a vaudeville act about the kidnapping, and Liberty magazine ran his serialized account under the title "Jafsie Tells All".

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• 5. The Roadside Discovery

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  On the 12th of May 1932, a delivery truck driver named Orville Wilson pulled over with his assistant, William Allen, about 4.5 miles south of the Lindbergh home. The spot was near Mount Rose, in neighboring Hopewell Township, where Charles Lindbergh had lived while Highfields was being built. Allen stepped into a grove of trees and found the decomposed body of a toddler. The skull was badly fractured, animals had scavenged the remains, and there were signs of a hasty burial.

  Betty Gow identified the child from the overlapping toes of his right foot and from a shirt she had made. The child appeared to have been killed by a blow to the head. Lindbergh insisted on cremation.

  By June, officials suspected that someone the Lindberghs knew was involved. Their attention fell on Violet Sharpe, a British household servant at the Morrow home, who had given contradictory accounts of where she was on the night of the kidnapping. She was reported to seem nervous when questioned. On the 10th of June 1932, she died by suicide, swallowing a silver polish that contained cyanide, just before a fourth round of questioning. Her alibi was later confirmed, and police were criticized for heavy-handedness.

  Condon was questioned too, and his home was searched, but nothing incriminating turned up. Through it all, Charles Lindbergh stood by him.

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• 6. Following the Gold

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  With almost no other evidence, investigators turned to the ransom bills. They printed a pamphlet of serial numbers and distributed 250,000 copies, mainly to businesses in New York City. A few bills surfaced as far away as Chicago and Minneapolis, but whoever spent them was never identified.

  A presidential order required all gold certificates to be exchanged by the 1st of May 1933. A few days before the deadline, a man brought $2,980 to a Manhattan bank. The bills were later found to come from the ransom. He gave his name as J. J. Faulkner of 537 West 149th Street, but no one by that name lived there. A Jane Faulkner who had lived at the address twenty years earlier denied any involvement.

  Over a period of 30 months, ransom bills kept appearing around New York City. Detectives noticed that many were spent along the Lexington Avenue subway. That line linked the Bronx with the east side of Manhattan, including Yorkville, a German-Austrian neighborhood.

  On the 18th of September 1934, a Manhattan bank teller spotted a ransom gold certificate. A license plate number, 4U-13-41-N.Y, was penciled in its margin, and it led police to a nearby gas station. The manager had jotted down the number because his customer seemed "suspicious" and was "possibly a counterfeiter". The plate belonged to a car owned by Bruno Richard Hauptmann of 1279 East 222nd Street in the Bronx, an immigrant with a criminal record in Germany.

  When arrested, Hauptmann carried a single 20-dollar gold certificate from the ransom. More than $14,000 of the ransom money lay in a suitcase in his garage. Police interrogated him and beat him at least once over the following day and night. He said his friend and former business partner, Isidor Fisch, had left him the money and other items. Fisch had died on the 29th of March 1934, soon after returning to Germany. Hauptmann said he learned what the suitcase held only after Fisch died. He kept the cash because Fisch owed him from a business deal. He consistently denied any link to the crime.

  Searching his home, police found more. A notebook held a sketch of a ladder's construction. John Condon's address and telephone number were written on a closet wall. A section of wood in the attic, once examined by an expert, was ruled an exact match to the ladder from the crime scene.

  On the 24th of September 1934, Hauptmann was indicted in the Bronx for extorting the $50,000. On the 8th of October he was indicted in New Jersey for the child's murder. Two days later, New York Governor Herbert H. Lehman surrendered him to New Jersey, and on the 19th of October he was moved to the Hunterdon County Jail in Flemington.

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• 7. Trial of the Century

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  From the 2nd of January to the 13th of February 1935, the Hunterdon County Courthouse in Flemington, New Jersey, held a trial that the newspaper writer H. L. Mencken called "the biggest story since the Resurrection". American media had already named the crime the "crime of the century", and the trial was soon called the "Trial of the Century". Reporters swarmed the town, and every hotel room was booked. Judge Thomas Whitaker Trenchard presided.

  David T. Wilentz, the Attorney General of New Jersey, led the prosecution. Hauptmann's lawyer, Edward J. Reilly, had been hired by the New York Daily Mirror in exchange for the rights to publish Hauptmann's story.

  Eight handwriting experts, including Albert S. Osborn, pointed to similarities between the ransom notes and Hauptmann's writing samples. The defense called one expert to rebut them. Two others declined to testify after demanding $500 before even looking at the notes. They were dismissed when defense lawyer Lloyd Fisher refused to pay. Other experts retained by the defense never took the stand.

  The wood evidence came from Arthur Koehler of the Forest Products Laboratory. The state showed photographs proving that part of the ladder matched a plank from the floor of Hauptmann's attic. The type of wood, the direction of tree growth, the milling pattern and the grain on both sides were identical, and four oddly placed nail holes lined up with holes in the attic joists.

  Asked about the address on his closet door, Hauptmann told police: "I must have read it in the paper about the story. I was a little bit interested and keep a little bit record of it." He could give no explanation for the telephone number. Prosecutor Wilentz suggested that a sketch in one of his notebooks represented a ladder. Hauptmann said that picture and the other sketches were the work of a child.

  Hauptmann had no obvious earned income, yet he bought a $400 radio and sent his wife on a trip to Germany. Witnesses identified him as the man who received the ransom and as a spender of the gold certificates. Others placed him near the estate on the day of the kidnapping. He had missed work on the day of the ransom payment, quit two days later, and never looked for another job while living comfortably.

  When the prosecution rested, the defense began with a lengthy examination of Hauptmann himself. He insisted he had found a shoe box that Fisch left behind, kept on the top shelf of his kitchen broom closet. Inside was almost $40,000. Fisch had owed him about $7,500, so he kept it. His wife, Anna, was called to back him up. On cross-examination she admitted that she hung her apron daily on a hook higher than that shelf, yet could not remember seeing a shoe box.

  Rebuttal witnesses testified that Fisch could not have been at the crime scene and had no money for medical treatment when he died of tuberculosis. His landlady said he could barely afford the $3.50 weekly rent. In his closing summation, Reilly argued that the case was entirely circumstantial. No reliable witness had placed Hauptmann at the scene, and no fingerprints of his were on the ladder, the notes or anywhere in the nursery.

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• 8. Verdict and Doubts

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  Hauptmann was convicted on the 13th of February 1935 and immediately sentenced to death. His appeal to the New Jersey Court of Errors and Appeals, then the state's highest court, was argued on the 29th of June 1935. On the evening of the 16th of October, Governor Harold G. Hoffman secretly visited Hauptmann in his cell with a stenographer who spoke fluent German. Hoffman urged members of the appeals court to visit the prisoner too.

  In late January 1936, Hoffman said he took no position on guilt or innocence. He cited evidence that the crime was not a "one person" job and directed Schwarzkopf to keep investigating. By the 27th of March, the press learned Hoffman was weighing a second reprieve. On the 30th of March, the Board of Pardons denied Hauptmann's final plea for clemency. A last delay came when a Mercer County grand jury, probing the confession of Trenton attorney Paul Wendel, asked for time. The delay ended when the grand jury adjourned without charging Wendel.

  Hauptmann turned down a large offer from a Hearst newspaper for a confession. He also refused a last-minute chance to swap his death sentence for life without parole in return for a confession. He was executed in the electric chair at the New Jersey State Prison on the 3rd of April 1936. Twice in the 1980s his widow, Anna, sued New Jersey over the execution. Both suits were dismissed because of prosecutorial immunity and the statute of limitations. She kept fighting to clear his name until she died at age 95, in 1994.

  Many books since have argued for Hauptmann's innocence. They point to weak police work at the scene, Lindbergh's interference, ineffective defense counsel and shaky witnesses. Ludovic Kennedy questioned much of the evidence, including the origin of the ladder. Author Lloyd Gardner says fingerprint expert Erastus Mead Hudson used the rare silver nitrate process on the ladder and found none of Hauptmann's prints, even where the builder must have touched it. Officials, Gardner says, ignored the finding and the ladder was washed of all prints.

  Others defend the verdict. Jim Fisher, a former FBI agent, wrote The Lindbergh Case in 1987 and The Ghosts of Hopewell in 1999, attacking what he calls a "revision movement". He wrote: "Hauptmann is as guilty today as he was in 1932 when he kidnapped and killed the son of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Lindbergh." Richard T. Cahill Jr., in Hauptmann's Ladder, finds him guilty but questions whether he should have been executed. John Reisinger's Master Detective describes detective Ellis H. Parker obtaining Wendel's signed confession in 1936, before the case against Wendel collapsed when he said it was coerced. Robert Zorn's 2012 book Cemetery John proposes that Hauptmann conspired with two other German-born men, John and Walter Knoll. Zorn's father, economist Eugene Zorn, believed he had overheard that conspiracy discussed as a teenager.

  The crime also changed the law. Congress passed the Federal Kidnapping Act, called the "Little Lindbergh Law" at the time, making it a federal crime to carry a kidnapping victim across state lines. Culture absorbed the case as well. Agatha Christie drew on it for Daisy Armstrong's kidnapping in Murder on the Orient Express, and Maurice Sendak's Outside Over There took inspiration from it in 1981. The 2011 film J. Edgar, directed by Clint Eastwood, shows the investigation and trial.

  The songwriters were quicker than any of them. On the 13th of May 1932, the day after the body was found, country artist Bob Miller recorded two songs about the child for Columbia, under the name Bob Ferguson.

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