The Annals of Unsolved Crime

by Edward Jay Epstein

  Then on May 12, 1932, the corpse of a decomposed child was found in the woods about four and a half miles from the Lindbergh home. Even though both hands and the left leg were missing, Lindbergh identified the remains from the toes on the right foot. In response to the public outrage, Congress rushed through what became known as the Lindbergh Law, making kidnapping a federal offense.

  Meanwhile, unable to find any credible evidence of a kidnapping gang, police began focusing on the possibility of an inside job. The absence of fingerprints after the room had been searched by the Lindbergh family suggested that the room had been wiped clean by someone with something to hide. An inside job would also explain how the kidnapper could have escaped carrying a thirty-pound child. Inside information could also account for how the kidnapper knew not only the child’s whereabouts but which was the unlocked window in the nursery. Violet Sharp, a pretty twenty-eight-year-old serving maid, who had told contradictory stories about where she was on the night of the kidnapping, became a prime suspect. The police and FBI were particularly interested in associates of hers with suspected criminal associations. In June 1932, police announced their intentions to take Sharp to police headquarters for questioning, but when they arrived at the Lindbergh house, they found her dead. An autopsy determined that she had died of cyanide poisoning, and the coroner ruled it an apparent suicide.

  No further evidence developed, and in 1933, the new President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, met with J. Edgar Hoover and ordered that the entire kidnapping investigation be centralized under the FBI. Finally, on September 18, 1934, a gold certificate from the ransom that Lindbergh had paid in the Bronx graveyard turned up at a gas station. That clue led police to the home of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a thirty-four-year-old carpenter, who had a criminal record in his native Germany. A search of his garage turned up about one-third of the ransom money. Hauptmann claimed that the gold certificates had been left with him by his former business partner, Isidor Fisch (who had died after returning to Germany in 1933). Although he denied any knowledge of the kidnapping, Hauptmann was arrested and charged with kidnapping and murder.

  At the trial, the prosecutor, New Jersey Attorney General David Wilentz, presented a chain of evidence tying Hauptmann to the $50,000 ransom that Lindbergh had paid for bogus information: handwriting experts found his style consistent with the note; he had part of the ransom money in his garage; and Lindbergh identified his voice as matching that of the man he spoke to in the cemetery. But there was much less evidence placing him anywhere near the scene of the actual kidnapping. One witness who testified that he saw someone looking like Hauptmann driving in the area turned out to be legally blind. The only physical evidence was the ladder used in the kidnapping itself. The state’s expert witness rendered an opinion, based on his examination of a floorboard taken from Hauptmann’s attic, that it was consistent with one strut of wood in the ladder. But “consistent” merely means that it could have been cut from wood in his attic, not that it had been. The provenance of the wood was also questionable, since it was not found in the original search. It also turned out that none of the partial prints on the ladder or ransom notes matched those of Hauptmann. Despite the lack of direct evidence, Hauptmann was convicted on February 13, 1935, and sentenced to death. Even though New Jersey Governor Harold Hoffman offered to commute his death sentence if Hauptmann would confess, he maintained his innocence, and he was executed by electric chair on April 3, 1936.

  The prosecution theory was that Hauptmann acted alone. He built a ladder himself, drove alone to the Lindbergh home in New Jersey, used the ladder to enter the unlit nursery through an unlocked window, left a ransom note that he had prepared, and stole the child. In making his escape, he accidentally killed the child. He then contacted Lindbergh about the ransom, went alone to the cemetery, and collected the $50,000 from Lindbergh.

  The problem with the loner theory is that it does not account for how Hauptmann would have known about the movements of the Lindbergh family, who had just returned from New York City, or that the child would be alone in his crib, or which was the unlocked nursery window. An alternative theory is that the kidnapper had an inside source of information. This was the theory of the New Jersey police investigators when they came to arrest Violet Sharp. According to it, the kidnapper was tipped off that the Lindbergh family had returned from New York City, that the child would be alone in the nursery, that the nursery window would be left unlocked, and that there were no alarms or guard dogs that would prevent him from escaping through the house. If he had such inside help, he may even have entered through the house and left the ladder as a diversion for the police. Since Lindbergh restricted police access to his wife and servants—and Violet Sharp died of cyanide before she could be questioned—the police were unsuccessful in pursuing this theory.

  A third theory is that the kidnapping story was part of the cover-up of an accidental killing or murder. According to this theory, the child died as the result of domestic violence, his body was buried, and then the responsible party in the household left the ransom note to explain the missing child. Two investigators of the case, Gregory Ahlgren and Stephen Monier, go so far as to suggest in their book Crime of the Century: The Lindbergh Kidnapping Hoax that Lindbergh himself accidentally killed his son and then wrote the ransom note to cover up the accident. However, in my view, Lindbergh’s actions, including paying the ransom and his relentless searches for his son, are not consistent with the theory that he had killed and buried his son.

  Finally, there is the theory that Hauptmann was part of a gang of swindlers, not kidnappers. According to this theory, Hauptmann or his accomplices, after reading the newspaper stories about the kidnapping, decided to collect the ransom by pretending that they were holding the baby. Since the ransom note had been published, forging similar handwriting would not be difficult. The swindler theory would account for why most of the $50,000 was not found in Hauptmann’s home—or anywhere. Another $3,000 of it was later traced to Jacob Novitsky, a convicted forger. Novitsky, who was arrested for another crime, reportedly told a cellmate that he had been involved in the extortion plot but not the kidnapping.

  Any assessment of this case needs to take into account how deeply it was corrupted by the media circus. Within an hour of the reported kidnapping, a swarm of reporters trampled through the crime scene, literally muddying up potential footprint and fingerprint evidence. Lindbergh himself gave a copy of the ransom note, the secrecy of which was critical to the investigation, to intermediaries who provided it to the New York Daily News. Copies were later sold for five dollars apiece. Other reporters attempted to bribe Lindbergh’s servants. The New York Journal provided Hauptmann with a flamboyant lawyer, Edward Reilly, who made sensational but false statements to the press, and the Hearst newspapers offered Hauptmann $90,000 to confess. What was lost in this circus is that there were no fingerprints, footprints, fibers, or witnesses that showed Hauptmann was ever in the Lindbergh house or even in the vicinity.

  My view is that a perpetrator cannot, even prior to the era of DNA, stage a crime of this magnitude and complexity without leaving a trace of his presence at the crime scene. The possible match of the wood in the ladder to a wood sample taken from Hauptmann’s former home is, at best, only probative evidence. So I do not believe that the evidence proves that Hauptmann either kidnapped or killed the baby.

  The evidence that Hauptmann came to the cemetery and collected Lindbergh’s $50,000 ransom is convincing. I believe that he was part of a gang of swindlers who decided to cash in on the crime. They answered the ad that Lindbergh had placed in the newspapers requesting a meeting, misrepresenting themselves as the kidnappers, and they stole the real kidnappers’ ransom. We know that Hauptmann was not alone in this enterprise because he turned over most of the money to others, including $3,000 to Novitsky, an expert forger, who probably wrote the note. As for the kidnapping itself, none of the evidence identifies the perpetrator or perpetrators. The circumstances surrounding the crime s
uggest that the kidnapper either knew someone inside the household or had other means of learning the Lindberghs’ schedule and the layout of the home. Whatever evidence might have pointed to an insider was lost when the nursery was wiped clean of fingerprints. As a result, it is not possible to know how many people were involved in the “crime of the century.”

  One lesson to be taken away from the Lindbergh case is that the evidence of a crime can be lost forever if the crime scene is not immediately sealed off from journalists, curiosity-seekers, unauthorized law enforcement officers, and family members. The trampling, muddying, and erasure of evidence in and around the Lindbergh home left investigators with no convincing way to determine the identity of the intruder or intruders. With tighter crime-scene procedures, the evidence necessary to resolve this case may have been discovered. Instead, the holes in the case, spotlighted by journalists, have kept this crime unsolved.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE ASSASSINATION OF OLOF PALME

  Olof Palme was the young, dynamic, and charismatic prime minister of Sweden with a radical foreign policy that had attracted worldwide attention—and concern. His assassination in 1986 bedeviled, divided, and haunted the country for over a decade.

  On February 28, 1986, at 11:21 p.m., while walking home with his wife from the Grand Cinema on Sveavägen Street in Stockholm, Prime Minister Palme was fatally shot from behind at close range as he neared a subway station. His wife, Lisbet Palme, was then shot by the assassin and critically wounded, but she survived. Palme had no bodyguards or escorts, and no one witnessed the shooting. By the time Lisbet turned in his direction, the shooter, wearing a heavy overcoat, was calmly jogging away. He then disappeared from Lisbet’s view through a tunnel at the end of the street.

  No one else saw him, and no murder weapon, or any other physical evidence, was found at the crime scene. The Swedish police were able to methodically reconstruct the timeline of the Palmes’ movements from cell phone records, but the inferences they drew only added to the mystery. Calls made between Palme and his wife and their son Marten established that the decision to go to the 9:00 p.m. movie was made at 8:00 p.m. The police checked and found no bugs on any of their phones. So, if this was a pre-planned murder, someone would have had to follow Palme to the movie theater and then wait for him to emerge at 11:00 p.m. The assassin would then presumably have followed the Palmes to the deserted street leading to his Hötorgart subway station, shot them both with .357 magnum bullets, and escaped the crime scene. Since the murder weapon was a revolver, no cartridge case was left behind for the police to match to the weapon. Nor was ballistic matching possible on the fragmented bullets. So the killer left no trace. There were two possible explanations: either this was a professional killer who knew how to cover his tracks, or a deranged person who left no evidence by pure chance.

  The Swedish investigation focused for the next twenty-one months on the latter possibility, searching Stockholm for a deranged loner who might have been on the street that night and who had a prison record for drug abuse. Then, in December 1988, Lisbet Palme picked out of a police lineup Christer Pettersson, a brain-damaged drug user, who had previously been convicted of manslaughter. Even though she had only seen a man running away from the murder scene, Pettersson was arrested, tried, and convicted of Palme’s murder. The only evidence against him, other than that he fit the police’s profile of a loner, was Mrs. Palme’s testimony.

  On appeal, however, that verdict was thrown out because no motive had been established and no murder weapon had been found. The court found inconsistencies in Mrs. Palme’s testimony. Pettersson was subsequently acquitted on all charges, released, and died in 2004 from a head injury. No gun was ever found, although, in 2006, a Smith & Wesson .357 revolver, consistent with the type of gun used to kill Palme, was recovered from a lake. But the Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Science was unable to match it through ballistics to the bullets fired in the assassination. No one else has ever been arrested. Even a $7 million reward failed to produce any further evidence or credible witnesses. So, although the Palme investigation generated some 700,000 pages of documents and cost over $45 million, the case remains unresolved.

  There have been many theories offered to explain this unsolved crime. Even after the acquittal of Christer Pettersson, police tended to stick to the loner theory. A gunman saw an unprotected Palme as a target of opportunity, and he simply walked up to him, shot him, shot his wife, and disposed of the weapon. Another theory claimed that the Kurdish militant organization “PKK” had organized the assassination because Palme was cutting off their sources of finance. After receiving a number of tips, Swedish police arrested a number of Kurdish refugees in Stockholm. As there was no evidence placing them at the scene of the crime, and because most of them had alibis, they were released. Fifteen years later, Kurdish PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan was questioned by Swedish investigators in prison in Turkey, but he denied any Kurdish involvement.

  Finally, there is the theory that the South African intelligence service killed Palme because he was about to make a deal with its archenemy, the outlawed African National Congress. This theory grew out of the testimony of Eugene de Kock in 1996 to the South African Supreme Court in Pretoria. De Kock, a former high-ranking South African police officer during the apartheid era, said that Craig Williamson, a former police colleague, had organized the plot and hired Anthony White, a former Rhodesian Selous Scout, as the triggerman. The code name for the covert action, according to de Kock, was Operation Longreach.

  My assessment is that the assassin was not a spur-of-the-moment amateur. All the evidence points to a professional killer who had carefully stalked his prey and then chose a time and place in which there were no witnesses. He had also planned to kill Lisbet Palme. If she had not survived, no one would have known what had happened. The fact that the weapon was not found, and that the bullets were never traced, are also the marks of a professional hitman. It is also likely he had the false documentation and other support necessary to escape Sweden. We have such a candidate in “Operation Longreach.” So I find plausible Eugene de Kock’s testimony to the South African Supreme Court that a South African covert-action unit sent a professional assassin to kill Palme. It had a motive in Palme’s dealings with the African National Congress. It had the means to get an assassin in and out of Sweden under a false identity. And it had an opportunity in Palme’s lack of security. Since de Kock had been granted immunity and had no obvious reason to lie, I believe that Palme was killed by an assassin dispatched from South Africa.

  The lesson of this case is that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, which Sherlock Holmes famously referred to as “the dog that did not bark in the night-time” in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “Silver Blaze.” After the Palme murder, Swedish police searched high and low for the murder weapon for more than a quarter century without success, including tracking down all the reported stolen Magnum revolvers and test-firing more than 400 other weapons. The absence of a weapon, as well as the absence of any clues at the crime scene, is part of the modus operandi of a professional hitman, who, if successful in his work, commits unsolved crimes.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE ANTHRAX ATTACK ON AMERICA

  The anthrax attack in September 2001 was an act of biological warfare involving the first use of a weapon of mass destruction. It came less than three weeks after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Accompanying the lethal biological agent were photocopies of two handwritten notes dated 09/11/2001. The first note was sent along with anthrax to NBC and to the New York Post. The note read: “THIS IS NEXT. TAKE PENACILIN [sic] NOW. DEATH TO AMERICA DEATH TO ISRAEL ALLAH IS GREAT.” The second note was sent to U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, and to Senate majority leader Tom Daschle. This note read: “YOU CANNOT STOP US. WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX. YOU DIE NOW. ARE YOU AFRAID. DEATH TO AMERICA DEATH TO ISRAEL ALLAH IS GREAT.” The anthrax in the envelopes w
as the most virulent of all anthrax, the deadly Ames strain. Even though the secret technology for turning anthrax spores, which tend to clump together, into an aerosol remains a closely guarded state secret, the letters contained a powdered anthrax that, once they were opened, transformed into a cloud of billions of spores of anthrax. This anthrax in aerosol so thoroughly contaminated the Senate Office Building that it had to be closed down for nearly three months. The anthrax also was not pure. It contained a signature of silicon—the anthrax in the New York Post letter was 10 percent silicon when the bulk material was measured by mass—and also contained traces of tin. The anthrax powder had been packed in standard, pre-stamped, 3 ½-inch-by-6 ¼ inch white envelopes. They were postmarked “Trenton, New Jersey,” and a test of mailboxes in that postal zone indicated that at least one had been sent from Princeton.

  The victims provided no further clues. There were five deaths from the inhalation of the anthrax, and seventeen other people were hospitalized. But most appeared to be random exposures caused by anthrax leakage in the postal system.

  In the midst of the panic that ensued in the fall of 2001, the government, which had information that it declined to make public, also became uneasy. The CIA had learned that in 1999, al-Qaeda had employed a Malaysian scientist, Yazid Sufaat, to build an anthrax lab near the Kandahar airport in Afghanistan. Had al-Qaeda used anthrax, as the letters themselves suggested? This possibility could not be neglected by the Defense Department, since most of its military personnel had not yet been vaccinated against anthrax. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld therefore dispatched a top deputy to FBI headquarters to ascertain if the anthrax put U.S. troops at risk. The FBI considered the subject so sensitive at the time that the deputy was not allowed to bring any of his aides to the meeting. He later described the secret briefing as an eye-opener into the FBI’s approach to this biological attack. The FBI assistant director reassured the deputy that it was only a matter of time before they identified the perpetrator. Based on the psychological profile it had already assembled, the view of the FBI task force was that a “lone wolf” American scientist, acting alone, had perpetrated all the attacks. The FBI had narrowed the list down to between 150 and 200 scientists who both had access to lab samples of the Ames strain of anthrax and were located within range of the postal district from which the letters were mailed. The deputy assured the Defense Department executive that all were under surveillance, so there was little danger of another attack. He expressed confidence that they would quickly determine the guilty party by giving each one of the suspects a polygraph examination. When the Defense Department executive then asked him if the FBI was also investigating and polygraphing foreigners who had access to anthrax (since the Ames strain had been sent to several labs abroad), the FBI assistant director told him that they were focusing on the American scientists, and that he expected that the guilty party would soon reveal himself. That was in 2001.