The Kidnap Years:

by David Stout

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHASING THE MONEY

  New York City

  April 1932

  On Wednesday, April 6, 1932, David Isaacs, a retired clothing merchant in Upper Manhattan, withdrew $47 in interest that he had accrued from a savings account at the Ninety-Sixth Street branch of the East River Savings Bank. The withdrawal was in the form of two twenty-dollar bills, a five-dollar bill, and two one-dollar bills.

  On April 13, Isaacs stopped at a branch of the Corn Exchange Bank at Broadway and Ninety-First Street to exchange one of the twenties for smaller currency. By this time, banks across the country had been given circulars listing the serial numbers of the Lindbergh ransom money. But the human element was all-important. Considering all the money they handled in a given day, would clerks and tellers be alert enough to spot a ransom bill?

  Yes. A Corn Exchange Bank teller checked the circular and saw that the twenty that Isaacs wanted to exchange was from the ransom.

  At once, the teller and Isaacs notified the Secret Service. Isaacs said the bill had been in his wallet for a full week. Officials at the East River Savings Bank branch said the bill probably was included with some sixteen hundred deposits made on April 4 and 5. Several detectives were assigned to try to track down the depositors, though it seemed a virtually impossible task.

  But at least someone out there was spending the money.

  Yet the manhunt was hampered by bureaucratic and jurisdictional issues. New Jersey police were investigating the kidnapping itself. New York police were investigating the extortion committed when the man in the Bronx cemetery got Lindbergh’s money. The two police factions cooperated only half-heartedly. They were engaged in the kind of turf battle not uncommon between police agencies. And there was precious little state-to-state coordination among the lawmen—a problem that the federal anti-kidnapping statute, which was still working its way through Congress, was supposed to correct.

  Meanwhile, efforts went on behind the scenes to reconnect with the kidnapper or kidnappers. Condon continued to place ads in the Bronx paper. “What is wrong?” an ad on April 6 began. “Have you crossed me? Please better directions. Jafsie.”45

  Major Schoeffel, the deputy commander of the New Jersey State Police, booked passage for England, there to confer with Scotland Yard and pursue a rumor that the child had been taken overseas just after being abducted.

  Maryland State Police searched isolated areas of both shores of the Chesapeake Bay after hearing that the baby might be on a boat in the region.

  On April 14, Lindbergh declared that it was of “the utmost importance” that neither he nor his wife “nor our representatives” be followed by reporters for fear of ruining negotiations with whoever had the baby.46

  Colonel Schwarzkopf tried to head off any questions about negotiations. It was clear from the Lindberghs’ language and Schwarzkopf’s reticence that the legendary aviator trusted himself more than the police to get his son back.

  Lieutenant Detective James Finn of the New York City police watched the developments in New Jersey with frustration and, more and more, a sense of foreboding.

  Finn, in charge of the New York City facet of the investigation, had never bought into the theory that the baby had been taken by professional criminals. Gang members wouldn’t be stupid enough to steal the child of a national hero, Finn thought. Such a crime would bring way too much heat. Besides, there were many targets with more money than Charles Lindbergh, notwithstanding the advantages the aviator’s fame had brought him.

  Thus, Finn thought, Lindbergh’s early attempts to recruit organized crime figures in the search for his child were useless. Most likely, the kidnapper was an amateur with no ties whatsoever to gangsters.

  Finn felt left out of the overall investigation. Colonel Schwarzkopf, perhaps eager to keep as much personal authority as possible over the investigation, even refused at first to let Finn see copies of the ransom notes—despite the fact that the notes had all been mailed from New York.

  As for Finn’s growing sense of foreboding, it was triggered in part by a long conversation Finn had had with a psychiatrist.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE PROFILER

  New York City

  April 1932

  Dr. Dudley D. Shoenfeld knew that, even in the twentieth century, there were people who viewed his field of psychiatry as no more scientific than astrology or voodoo. And sadly, there were people who might benefit from visiting him but were embarrassed at the thought of seeing a psychiatrist.

  Which was a shame, really, because Shoenfeld was the least threatening of men and not just because he was only five feet four inches tall. He smiled easily, had many friends, and enjoyed parties. Now and then, he rested his formidable intellect by going to Yonkers Raceway, where he loved to bet on the trotters, sometimes after trading hot tips with the elevator operator in his Midtown Manhattan apartment building.

  Shoenfeld had been drawn to the study of the mind while a navy physician during the Great War, after his graduation from New York University and its medical school. Besides maintaining a private practice, he worked at Mount Sinai Hospital and was a consultant at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. He was a charter member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society.

  He was no worshipper of the Lone Eagle, for he had heard that Lindbergh was an anti-Semite, like many Americans at that time. But Shoenfeld could empathize with the ordeal of the Lindberghs, since he and his wife, Helen, had a young son, Richard.

  Shoenfeld, who had turned thirty-nine on March 24, had been following the Lindbergh case with interest and, increasingly, with dismay. He couldn’t understand why some investigators theorized in public that the kidnapping must have been committed by an organized gang. Shoenfeld thought gang involvement was almost inconceivable, given the firestorm that a crime against the Lindbergh family would set off.

  “No gang would have undertaken so hazardous an enterprise for the ridiculous sum of $50,000,” Shoenfeld would write later. And if a gang had been reckless enough to undertake the kidnapping, “the ransom demand would have been much higher.”*

  But Lindbergh subscribed to the organized gang theory and wanted the New Jersey State Police to walk a tightrope. Above all, of course, he wanted them to recover his son unharmed. If they could do that and track down the kidnappers, fine.

  Shoenfeld thought the police were deferring to Lindbergh too much, that Lindbergh’s interference had “placed the troopers in the roles of estate guards and messenger boys” whose main task “was the sorting of crank clues.”

  Shoenfeld also knew, from his contacts in the realms of science and medicine, that the New Jersey State Police had bungled a test for fingerprints on the kidnapper’s ladder days after the baby was stolen.

  Dr. Erastus Mead Hudson, a New York City physician who for years had been interested in fingerprinting, had volunteered his services just after the kidnapping. Of crucial importance, Hudson had been trying out a new method using silver nitrate in a chemical process that could lift prints that were otherwise indiscernible. Given a small section of the ladder, he was allowed to demonstrate his method to a group of troopers—who then tried to imitate the method themselves, hopelessly smudging whatever prints might have been discovered.

  (Had someone had the good sense and exercised authority, the ladder might have been quarantined from the start until a fingerprint expert like Dr. Hudson was allowed to examine it. For that matter, the FBI might have been valuable early on in this aspect of the case. The bureau’s laboratory was being set up in 1932, and FBI technicians were gaining expertise in the art and science of fingerprint analysis.)

  Dudley Shoenfeld’s specialty was not chemistry but psychiatry, and it was in that capacity that he became acquainted with Leigh Matteson, science editor of the International News Service. The journalist was seeking support for a theory that had been forming in his mind: that the Lindbergh crime was the work of one man, a man who might be considered insane but would function well enough to
carry out the kidnapping.

  Matteson had visited Dr. Lindsay R. Williams, secretary of the New York Academy of Medicine, who had referred him to Dr. Israel Strauss, chairman of the Committee on Medical Jurisprudence. Finally, Matteson was referred to Shoenfeld, who was secretary to the committee at the time.

  Shoenfeld and Matteson traded opinions and hunches. Then Matteson set up a meeting between the psychiatrist and Detective Finn. So Shoenfeld and the detective sat down one day in April 1932, just after Condon’s mysterious night meetings with Cemetery John.

  We can envision Finn, who was more open-minded than many cops about psychiatry, and Shoenfeld quietly discussing the most sensational crime of the era, with the psychiatrist smoking the “luxury cigarettes” he liked to buy from Nat Sherman’s fashionable tobacco shop in Manhattan.

  Finn said he had heard rumors that members of some gangs were eager to cooperate with lawmen, eager to convince them they’d had nothing to do with the kidnapping. If they could do that, they could resume their activities without distractions. Finn thought the gangsters’ eagerness made it all the more likely that professional criminals had nothing to do with the crime.

  Shoenfeld agreed. He told Finn that the behavior of Cemetery John in the meetings with Condon—talking to Condon at length, even negotiating at the last minute over the exact ransom amount and agreeing to accept less—was hardly the work of a slick intermediary working for professionals.

  But could a lone amateur really have climbed a ladder to the Lindberghs’ second-floor nursery, opened a window, and spirited the baby away without inside help? Some police investigators had declared that feat virtually impossible.

  Shoenfeld disagreed. He pointed to a 1920 case in a small town in Pennsylvania. A mother and father lived in a private house with three children, the youngest just eighteen months old. One night, the mother heard a sound and awoke her husband to investigate. When the father entered the second-floor nursery, he found the two older children asleep and the nearby baby’s crib empty. A ladder had been used to gain entry.

  Ransom negotiations followed, the police set a trap, and a man was arrested as he picked up a package he thought held the ransom money. The man confessed and said he had accidentally smothered the infant while carrying it away. Then he’d weighted the body down and thrown it into a river. The body was never found. The man was sentenced to life in prison.

  The Pennsylvania case showed that it was possible for a kidnapper to climb a ladder and remove a small child from a home and do it quietly enough to avoid detection, Shoenfeld said.

  Implicitly, Shoenfeld was accusing investigators of a failure of imagination and of failing to do their homework. He was also engaging in—pioneering, really—a blend of science, art, common sense, and intuition that would one day be called criminal profiling.

  The Lindbergh kidnapper was a German immigrant; that much seemed clear from the ransom messages. Shoenfeld told Finn he’d like to see them instead of just reading about them in the newspapers. Finn said he’d see what he could do.

  Ominously, in Shoenfeld’s view, none of the ransom notes had contained threats to the baby. Rather, they had said that the child was well. But Shoenfeld thought a kidnapper would more likely threaten harm to a victim rather than offer reassurances to spur quick payment of ransom—if the victim were still alive, that was.

  Then there was Cemetery John’s cryptic comment to Condon: “I’m only a go-between. Would I burn if the baby was dead?”

  Shoenfeld told Finn the kidnapper had almost surely killed the baby just after taking him.

  What kind of man would do such a thing? What was the key to catching him? In a sense, Shoenfeld theorized to Finn, the key might lie not in the kind of man the kidnapper was but in the kind of man Lindbergh was. Think of magnets, Shoenfeld said. Opposites attract; in a perverse sense, the kidnapper was drawn to Lindbergh.

  After his 1927 flight, Lindbergh was—or appeared to be—virtually omnipotent. He soared above the world, this boyishly handsome man, seemingly indifferent to the adoration from below, which he attracted endlessly and effortlessly.

  The kidnapper was the polar opposite, “inferior in the world of reality,” and had probably had earlier brushes with the law, Shoenfeld said. Perhaps he had been incarcerated. Surely, he had delusions of grandeur along with a tremendous unconscious drive to be powerful.

  To the kidnapper, Lindbergh was an enemy, everything the kidnapper wanted to be but never could. Taking the child meant the kidnapper had triumphed over the father, wounding him, as he himself had been wounded by life. How gratifying it was to force “the great man, Colonel Lindbergh” to bow before him by paying a ransom! But the money itself was not as important to the kidnapper as the power he had displayed in acquiring it. He had brought the Lone Eagle down to earth, where he himself felt so inferior.

  If and when the kidnapper was caught, Shoenfeld predicted, he would not display fear or apprehension; indeed, he would not even feel those sensations, since he lacked the normal emotional development to do so.

  The suspect would seem mild-mannered and would tell obvious lies yet not be able to feel how ridiculous he was being, Shoenfeld told Finn. But paradoxically, given his deep-seated feelings of inferiority, “he thinks he is capable of getting away with anything, merely by trying.”

  He would probably talk a lot but he would say essentially nothing, Shoenfeld went on. Physical violence wouldn’t result in a confession because “he would enjoy playing the stoic and thus demonstrating his superiority.”

  But a questioner who feigned a sympathetic, simple-minded demeanor might—might—obtain a confession by leading the suspect on “from extravagance to extravagance” and thence to overconfidence and carelessness.

  “None of your routine questioning methods, however, will serve to obtain that confession,” Shoenfeld said. “Of this, I am certain.”

  One more thing, Shoenfeld said. If the police discovered who the kidnapper was, they should arrest him away from his home. If he was arrested in his home—well, who knows? Maybe he had hidden the ransom where the police would have a hard time finding it. But if they arrested him when he was away from home, he would have some of the ransom bills on his person. Even when he was not planning to spend them, Shoenfeld thought that he would like to carry them as little trophies from his great triumph.

  After the meeting, Finn contacted Schwarzkopf, who agreed to let the psychiatrist see photostatic copies of the ransom notes. But Schwarzkopf, in another mind-boggling display of bureaucratic territoriality, said that Finn could not see them, that the New Jersey State Police did not need the assistance of the New York police, thank you very much.

  By this time, Dudley Shoenfeld wasn’t surprised at the turf battles between police forces. But at least Detective James Finn had listened to him. Maybe something good would come out of their session one day.

  Many months would pass before Shoenfeld’s theories about the kidnapper could be compared to the actual human being. Then the police would see that the psychiatrist had been remarkably perceptive.

  *The direct quotes in this chapter and my paraphrasing of Shoenfeld’s views are from his 1936 book The Crime and the Criminal: A Psychiatric Study of the Lindbergh Case, as well as a memo he wrote after meeting with Finn. And I am indebted to Dr. Peter D. Byeff, whose late mother, Ruth Eile, was Shoenfeld’s personal secretary for many years. Dr. Byeff was kind enough to share his own recollections of Shoenfeld.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  TWO VICTIMS

  Englewood, New Jersey

  May and June 1932

  The household help at the Lindberghs’ home near Hopewell had been questioned and cleared, their whereabouts on March 1, the day of the kidnapping, accounted for. Then there was Violet Sharpe, a twenty-eight-year old maid at the Englewood estate of Anne Lindbergh’s mother. Sharpe had left her native England two years before in search of a better life in the United States.

  Questioned by the New Jersey State Police nine days afte
r the baby was taken, she gave answers that were vague, even contradictory. She seemed defensive and surly.

  Asked where she had been on March 1, she claimed at first that she had gone on a double date to a movie that night. But she said she couldn’t recall the name of the man who had accompanied her, nor the names of the other couple, nor the title of the movie, nor even the location of the theater.

  So, she was asked, how did you meet this guy who took you on a date and whose name you don’t even remember?

  Sharpe said she and her sister, Emily, were strolling on Lydecker Street in Englewood, not far from the Morrow estate, on Sunday, February 28, when a man waved from a car. For a moment, Sharpe said, she thought she knew him, so she waved back. As he stopped the car, she realized she didn’t know him after all. But the man had a friendly way, and he asked her out, Sharpe politely declined, but the man was persistent. He got her phone number and said he would call. He did, early on the evening of March 1, saying he’d pick her up at the Morrow estate around eight o’clock.

  Sharpe’s story raised suspicions from the onset, yet the police did not question her again until April 13. This time, the police expressed their skepticism, and Sharpe admitted that she’d lied. She said the foursome had not gone to the movies; rather, they had gone to a roadhouse in Orangeburg, New York, just across the New Jersey border and a half hour drive from Englewood. Sharpe said she drank coffee while the other three drank beer. And this time, she remembered her date’s first name: Ernie.

  After some dancing to the radio, Sharpe said, the group left, and she was dropped off back in Englewood around eleven o’clock.

  Sharpe’s new account did not dispel the suspicions. For a young single woman to go to a roadhouse during Prohibition with a man she’d just met called her character into question, at least in the eyes of some people, even if she had drunk nothing stronger than coffee. Besides, she still couldn’t remember her date’s last name.