Stolen Away

by Collins, Max Allan

  The Bull of Brooklyn, a.k.a. “Death House” Reilly, alias Edward J. Reilly, only occasionally appeared in court after the Hauptmann trial. He alternated between living at home with his mother and being institutionalized at the King’s Park state mental hospital, his drinking and three failed marriages taking their toll. He died of a blood clot on the brain, at King’s Park, on Christmas Day, 1946.

  David T. Wilentz fared much better. While the run for the governorship that was rumored during the Hauptmann case never materialized—he was a Jew, after all—Wilentz became a major political boss among the New Jersey Demos. He continued with his law practice, but his real job was that of power broker. By 1950 he was influencing national politics, including the selection of Democratic vice-presidential and presidential candidates. There were those who said Wilentz had mob ties, and in his later days he was representing Atlantic City casinos. He died July 7, 1988, at ninety-three.

  Wilentz’s star witness, John F. Condon, who like Wendel enjoyed notoriety by writing magazine articles and a self-promoting book, died of pneumonia at age eighty-four with his wife Myra and daughter Myra both at his bedside—exactly ten years from the day that Hauptmann went to trial.

  Some of the others, I lost track of. I don’t know what happened to Gerta Henkel and her husband. Nor do I know what became of Martin Marinelli and his wife Sister Sarah Sivella. Edgar Cayce went on to great fame, of course; in Virginia Beach, in January 1946, on his deathbed, he predicted he was about to be healed.

  Colonel Henry Breckinridge remained friendly with Lindbergh, and continued on as his lawyer. Having run for the U.S. Senate in 1934, and lost, Breckinridge took a shot at the presidency in 1936; he was an anti-New Deal Democrat. I guess you know how he fared. After that, he devoted himself primarily to his law practice. He died in 1960 at age seventy-three.

  Slim Lindbergh went on to have something in common with Dick Hauptmann: both of them suffered due to anti-German sentiment. Lindbergh, while living in England, was invited by Major Truman Smith, military attaché at the American Embassy in Berlin, to inspect the German air forces, with the blessing of General Goering, head of the Luftwaffe. Here began Lindbergh’s ill-fated association with Germany—he at one point accepted a Service Cross from Goering—which resulted in his isolationist stance concerning the war in Europe. He was branded pro-Nazi by the press and public who had so recently idolized him; after America’s entry into the war, he flew as a test pilot and on combat missions—but the Nazi-sympathizer image stuck. Perhaps this wasn’t all bad—he finally could have the anonymity and privacy he’d craved. He continued his research on matters aeronautic and otherwise, including inventing an early artificial heart. He and Anne raised four more children. In 1974, he died on the island of Maui, where he had lived, and where he is buried.

  Some of the others are, as I write this, still alive. Several of the cops and reporters. Betty Gow, still in England. Anne Lindbergh, whose literary skill has won her fame of her own. Anna Hauptmann, who after quietly raising her son in obscurity, reentered the public eye in the 1970s, fighting in the press and in the courts to clear her husband’s name.

  Over the years a number of men came forward claiming to be, or expressing the suspicion that they might be, Charles Lindbergh, Jr. One of these was an advertising executive from Michigan who, starting four or five years ago, contacted me several times for information about the case.

  His name was Harlan C. Jensen—the “C” stood for Carl—and he was always quiet and respectful in our several phone conversations; he seemed not at all a crank, but I wasn’t terribly cooperative. I did hear him out on a couple occasions.

  He had been raised in Escabana, Michigan, by Bill and Sara Jensen. When he was a young boy, he was told (by an uncle) that his mother and father were not his natural parents; naturally, he wondered about this, and as a young teenager confronted his father, who said only that “you’re legitimate.” Before he went to Korea, for combat in 1952, his mother’s cousin had confided in him that “family rumor” had it that he was Charles Lindbergh, Jr.

  Several years later, on his honeymoon, Harlan and his wife had been in a boatyard in Wickford, Rhode Island, where they were enjoying the nautical scenery while they waited to catch the ferry to Cape Cod. An elderly woman approached, with a redheaded woman in her twenties, and introduced herself as Mrs. Kurtzel. She said to Jensen, “You were with us as a baby—I helped care for you. This is my daughter—she was like your sister.” Jensen had been understandably taken aback, but then the woman said, “May I feel the dent in your head?” Shocked that a stranger knew about this defect, which he’d been told was from a slip of the forceps during delivery, he allowed her to touch the back of his head.

  “You are the Lindbergh baby,” she said. “I helped care for you.”

  At this point, the ferry arrived, and Jensen and his bride left, covering their confusion and fear with nervous laughter.

  He began to read about the Lindbergh case, but rejected the notion that Bill and Sara Jensen were not his real parents. He never talked to them about the “family rumor,” but on their respective deathbeds, each parent had tried to tell him something. His mother had become ill while he was in Korea and had lapsed into a coma before he could get home to be at her side; his father, suffering a stroke in 1967, struggled to give his son some message, but could not make himself understood.

  Years later, in a medical exam for recurring headaches, Jensen was shown X-rays and told by a doctor that his skull had been severely fractured in his early childhood. Also, the doctor asked why he’d had so much plastic surgery as a child—Jensen said that he wasn’t aware that he had. But the doctor demonstrated on the X-rays that reconstructive surgery had taken place beneath his eyes and on his chin, possibly removing a cleft.

  He had begun, then, in earnest, making a search for his identity his spare-time obsession. Unlike the others who claimed to be Charles Lindbergh, Jr., Jensen had disclaimed any rights to the Lindbergh estate, putting that in writing in a letter to the probate judge on Maui.

  There was more, but I wouldn’t let him tell me. I told him I was retired from the detective business, that the Lindbergh case was something I didn’t think about anymore, and had no interest in discussing with anybody. He called, I think, three times, telling me a little more of his story each time.

  About a year ago, I was sitting in my little condo in Coral Springs; my wife—my second wife, but who’s counting—was out, playing bridge with some of the other old girls who live in this same complex we do. Occasionally I fish, but most days I either read or write or watch TV. That afternoon I was watching a videocassette of an old Hitchcock movie. Well, hell—I guess all Hitchcock movies are old, at this point. Like me.

  Anyway, I answered the door and found a slender man in his mid-fifties standing there, looking shy and a little embarrassed. He wore a yellow sweater over a light blue Ban-Ion shirt; his slacks were white and so were his rubber-soled shoes—he looked like somebody on vacation.

  Which he was, as it turned out.

  “I’m sorry to drop by unannounced,” he said. For a man in his fifties, he had a youthful face; not that it wasn’t lined—but the nose, the eyes, the mouth, were boyish. “My wife and I are visiting her mom down here and…look, I’m Harlan Jensen.”

  “Oh. Oh yeah.”

  “I know you don’t want to see me, but we were in the area, and I knew you lived around here, and…”

  “Come in, Mr. Jensen.”

  “Thank you. Nice place you got here.”

  “Thanks. Let’s sit here at the kitchen table.”

  He sat and talked and told me his story; he had a lot of facts and rumors and suppositions to share. He was obviously quietly tortured by this quest of his.

  “I found the daughter of the woman who approached me in the boatyard on my honeymoon,” he said. “The mother is dead, but the girl, the redhead, is alive and well. Her name is Mary.”

  “How’d you find her?”

  “Did you
know that Edgar Cayce, the famous psychic, did a reading on the case?”

  “No. Really.”

  “Well, my wife and I followed his directions, and by doing a little interpretation, you know—phonetic sounds instead of literal readings—we found this building in New Haven, on Maltby Street, where I think I may have been kept.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I got the name of the tenant that had lived there in 1932, and it was a Margaret Kurtzel, and through the mother’s sister, managed to track the daughter down. She was in Middletown, Connecticut. She still is.”

  “Really.”

  He sighed. “She didn’t know much. Just that her mother was a nurse, back then, working for private individuals, not hospitals or anything. And that all her life, her mother had proclaimed Hauptmann’s innocence. She didn’t know if, in fact, her mother had cared for the Lindbergh child.”

  “I see.”

  “You know, I’ve been trying for years to get this thing settled. It’s driving me nuts. I used the Freedom of Information Act, to try to get the baby’s fingerprints, but they’re missing.”

  “Hunh. There were plenty of ’em around, once.”

  “Somebody at some point got rid of them. I’ve tried to approach Mrs. Lindbergh, but it’s no use. There are DNA tests, you know, that…”

  “She and her husband decided many years ago that their boy was dead.”

  He shook his head, wearily.

  “What do you want from me, Mr. Jensen? I haven’t been a detective for a long time.”

  “I just want to know what you know,” he said.

  Shit. How could I tell this guy that if I’d just had the balls to go in the goddamn ladies’ room at LaSalle Street Station, back in ’32, his whole life might have been different? Whether he was Charles Lindbergh, Jr., or not, that was true.

  He was looking at me carefully. “You know, I have a memory of a man who helped me. It may not be a memory—it doesn’t seem quite real.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Something a kid might think he remembered. It sounds silly. I seem to remember a gunfight in my bedroom. A man told me…a man told me to hide under my bed and not come out until he said, ‘Olly olly oxen free.’”

  I felt my eyes getting damp.

  He grinned at me; it was Slim’s grin. “Are you that man, Mr. Heller? Did you save my little ass?”

  I didn’t say anything. I got up, went to the Mr. Coffee and got myself a cup. I asked him if he wanted any and he said sure—black.

  “Let’s go in the living room,” I said, handing him his coffee, “and get comfy. It’s a long story.”

  I OWE THEM ONE

  Despite its extensive basis in history, this is a work of fiction, and a few liberties have been taken with the facts, though as few as possible—and any blame for historical inaccuracies is my own, reflecting, I hope, the limitations of my conflicting source material.

  For the most part, events occur in this novel when they occurred in reality (an exception is the slaying of Max Hassel and Max Greenberg, which was shifted in time somewhat). Most of the characters in this novel are real and appear with their true names, and the occasional fictional characters have real-life counterparts (notably, Tim O’Neil and Harlan Jensen). The characters Martin Marinelli and Sister Sarah Sivella are composites, primarily suggested by one real-life husband-and-wife psychic team; however, the tryst between Heller and Sivella has no basis whatever in history. Inspector Welch is a composite character. Heller’s role as police liaison was suggested by the real-life roles of Chicago’s Pat Roche and Lt. William Cusack, both of whom went to Hopewell; and Governor Harold Hoffman (and Evalyn McLean) did hire a number of private investigators to work on the Hauptmann case.

  Bob Conroy and his wife indeed died in a “double suicide,” after Conroy had been pointed out to the authorities as the probable kidnapper by the incarcerated Capone; but my speculation about the real role of the Conroys in the kidnapping is just that: speculation. The false alarm on Sheridan Road in the first chapter, however, is loosely based on fact.

  Several hardworking people helped me research this book.

  George Hagenauer, whose many contributions include developing an extensive time chart of events, spent hours in libraries gathering book and newspaper references, and on the phone discussing with me the ins and outs of this complicated and very strange case. He also went to Virginia Beach to do Edgar Cayce research, and toured the Indonesian Embassy (the former home of Evalyn McLean at 2020 Massachusetts Avenue) in Washington, D.C. George is a valued collaborator on the Heller “memoirs” and I appreciate his contribution as much as his friendship.

  Lynn Myers, one of the nicest people I know, dug in and did research rivaling George’s. Against considerable odds, he rounded up the voluminous and invaluable Liberty magazine material that became the backbone of this novel. The interest of Liberty publisher, Bernarr MacFadden, in the Lindbergh case resulted in book-length multipart stories by Governor Harold Hoffman, John Condon, Paul Wendel, Evalyn Walsh McLean, Lt. James J. Finn and Lloyd Fisher, as well as individual articles by Edward J. Reilly, Fulton Oursler and Lou Wedemar. One of these articles, “Before the Body Was Found She Said the Lindbergh Baby Was Murdered,” by Frederick L. Collins, was the best source of information on the involvement of psychics (other than Cayce) in the case. All in all, the Liberty articles constitute over a thousand pages of coverage on the Lindbergh case. Lynn also dug out numerous individual articles on the case, as well as background on Hassel and Greenberg, Edgar Cayce and John Hughes Curtis. A big tip of the fedora to this methodical, obsessive researcher.

  Mike Gold, a Chicago history buff with an eye for detail, provided a vivid impromptu telephone tour through LaSalle Street Station. Dominick Abel, my agent, provided some tough, valuable advice midway that helped shape this novel. My keen-eyed editor Coleen O’Shea deserves special thanks for her longtime interest in, and support of, Nate Heller and his coauthor; thanks also to editors Charles Michener (who, among much else, helped come up with a title) and Marjorie Braman.

  Other tips of the fedora for support along the way go to my old high-school pal Jim Hoffmann (who provided a videotape of the 1976 TV docudrama, The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case); Janiece Mull for Norfolk background material; Bob Randisi for New York reference material; loyal Heller fan William C. Wilson for assorted background details; and booksellers Patterson Smith and Ed Ebeling, for digging up rare vintage books, magazines and newspapers covering the case.

  Mickey Spillane provided information about Elizabeth, New Jersey, and put me in contact with his friend Walter Milos, who did extensive research and legwork on the Elizabeth Carteret Hotel. Thank you, gentlemen.

  While all were useful, none of the books contemporary to the Lindbergh case proved entirely reliable: Jafsie Tells All! (1936), by Dr. John F. Condon, is predictably pompous and often at odds with Condon’s courtroom testimony; The Hand of Hauptmann (1937), by J. Vreeland Haring, is a biased account by one of the prosecution’s many handwriting experts, although one who never testified; The Great Lindbergh Hullabaloo (1932), by Laura Vitray, is an odd exercise in unintentional whimsy by a former Hearst reporter who apparently felt the kidnapping was a hoax; and The Lindbergh Crime (1935), by Sidney Whipple, is a United Press reporter’s pro-prosecution account. Whipple, though occasionally wildly inaccurate, does present the most detailed contemporary book-length account; and his later The Trial of Bruno Hauptmann (1937) presents a valuable edited version of the court transcript.

  The latter-day nonfiction accounts are also a mixed bag; each has its merits, but each also has its limitations.

  The most coherent, straightforward and readable narrative is the admirably researched The Lindbergh Case (1987) by Jim Fisher; unfortunately, ex-FBI agent Fisher is almost laughably pro-law enforcement, and in interviews has referred to the New Jersey State Police as mounting an “inspired” investigation. Also, Fisher tends to either omit any pro-Hauptmann evidence or relegate it to a footnote.

&
nbsp; The most literate Lindbergh account is The Airman and the Carpenter (1985), by celebrated British crime historian Ludovic Kennedy; but Kennedy’s logical, convincing defense of Hauptmann has a rather narrow focus—John H. Curtis and Paul Wendel are barely mentioned, and Gaston Means and Evalyn McLean appear not at all.

  The groundbreaking Scapegoat (1976) by New York Post reporter Anthony Scaduto was an especially important resource for this novel; but Scaduto concentrates on the Ellis Parker/Paul Wendel aspect of the case, with Curtis getting rather short shrift and Gaston Means (and Mrs. McLean) absent but for one brief mention. On the other hand, his coverage of Isidor Fisch is extensive and impressive. Scaduto jumps around considerably; readers looking for a nonfiction balance probably need to read Fisher and Kennedy and Scaduto.

  The first major account of the case was George Waller’s bestseller Kidnap (1961), a readable if conventional and occasionally inaccurate pro-prosecution depiction. Annoyingly, the nearly 600-page nonfiction novel does not have an index.

  An extremely important source was journalist Theon Wright’s In Search of the Lindbergh Baby (1981), which is the only one of these books that pulls in all the disparate elements of this convoluted case, and attempts to make sense of them. Like Scapegoat, however, Wright’s book is scattershot, and is best appreciated by readers already familiar with the basic facts.

  My candidate for the best nonfiction look at the Lindbergh case is “Everybody Wanted in the Act,” a lengthy article by crime reporter Alan Hynd, published in True (March 1949); it has been reprinted several times in various anthologies, including Violence in the Night (1955) and A Treasury of True (1956). Hynd covered the case for True Detective Mysteries and was the coauthor of Evalyn Walsh McLean’s Liberty magazine serial, “Why I Am Still Investigating the Lindbergh Case” (1938). His cynical reporter’s-eye view—neither pro-prosecution nor pro-Hauptmann—is refreshing; he was also one of the first to voice doubt about the identity of the small corpse found in the woods of the Sourland Mountains. My account of the ghostly doings at Far View derives from this article, and from Hynd’s coauthored piece with Mrs. McLean.