Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  For the second time in less than five years, the world revolved around Charles Lindbergh. Radio programs everywhere were interrupted and front pages of newpapers were remade, shunting the Sino-Japanese War and Congressional attempts to repeal prohibition aside. “LINDBERGH BABY KIDNAPPED FROM HOME OF PARENTS ON FARM NEAR PRINCETON; TAKEN FROM HIS CRIB; WIDE SEARCH ON,” read the headline in the The New York Times, which topped four columns on the right-hand side of page one. The back roads of central New Jersey were already crawling with reporters. Before dawn, one journalist pounded on the door of Paul T. Gebhart’s general store and hotel in Hopewell. “Wake up, Pop!” he yelled. “You’ll have three hundred here for breakfast.”

  Anticipating public reaction, Lindbergh emphasized to all those within the estate walls the cruciality of controlling everything that was said and not said to the press. “I hope you boys will excuse me,” Lindbergh told the first wave of reporters, who had found their way to his secluded house in the predawn hours, “but I would rather the State Police answered all questions. I am sure you understand how I feel.”

  Lindbergh ordered the immediate conversion of the Hopewell house into an auxiliary police station. A twenty-line switchboard was installed in the garage, which became headquarters. Because three dozen peace officers had been pulled from three counties to guard every entrance of the house and property, all available bedding in the house was set down in the living room and dining room, turning the ground floor into a makeshift dormitory. Lindbergh designated the guestroom for informal meetings and reserved his study for private conferences. Betty Morrow’s staff in Englewood cooked meals for forty men a day and delivered them to Hopewell.

  Anne’s assignment during these first terrifying hours was to stay out of the way. Amid the bedlam, she maintained her composure in her bedroom, comforted by her mother. She wrote a long letter to Charles’s mother, and the mental exercise of setting down the details as best she knew them filled her with hope. The kidnappers’ “knowledge of the baby’s room, the lack of finger prints, the well fitted ladder,” she wrote “—all point to professionals which is rather good—as it means they want only the money—& will not maliciously hurt the baby.” That allayed her fears that a “lunatic” had taken the baby. Meantime, Anne noted, Charles, Henry Breckinridge, and the detectives appeared optimistic, thinking “the kidnappers have gotten themselves into a terrible jam—so much pressure—such a close net over the country—such sympathy for us—& the widespread publicity.” Anne felt “dreadful” not to be able to “do anything to help”; but she found solace just in watching her “calm, clear, alert, and observing” husband.

  Henry Breckinridge placed a call to a friend in Washington, J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Because of the initial suggestions that professionals had committed the crime, Hoover said his agents would tap into their underworld connections.

  Official reaction to the crime was unprecedented, as every level of government joined forces in the most massive manhunt in history. Observed one reporter, “The world dropped its business, that day, to discuss in horrified and angry accents the most revolting crime of the century.” President Hoover and his Attorney General offered Colonel Schwarzkopf the fullest cooperation of every law-enforcement agency of the federal government, including not only the FBI but also the Secret Service, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Postal Inspection Service. Coast Guard stations were put on special watch. The Department of Commerce ordered the policing of the nation’s airports, and F. Trubee Davison, Assistant Secretary of War for aviation, placed the Army Air Corps at Lindbergh’s disposal. The Army signal corps lined the shortest distance between Trenton and Hopewell with communications cable, sometimes right across farms and fields. Customs and immigration officials from Canada to Texas, New York harbor to California went on alert. New Jersey’s Governor A. Harry Moore and New York’s Franklin D. Roosevelt offered their police resources as well.

  Congress moved to the top of its agenda the pending legislation that would make kidnapping a federal offense punishable by death when two or more states were involved. Its subsequent passage became known as the Lindbergh Law.

  President Hibben of Princeton drove to Hopewell to offer the resources of the university, specifically a few thousand students who were prepared to scour the woods for any trace of the baby. Lindbergh and Schwarzkopf declined the offer, for fear that amateurs might contaminate a crime scene; but undergraduate troops took to the woods anyway. Within twenty-four hours of the baby’s disappearance, it was estimated that one hundred thousand peace officers and cooperating citizens were involved in the nationwide dragnet. And that did not count the Boy Scouts of America, whose Chief Scout Executive, Dr. James E. West, called on his entire membership—past and present—“to be alert and watchful and cooperative in every way possible in seeking clues or information as to the Lindbergh baby.” That put another 914,840 boys and young men—forty percent in rural areas—into the field. William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, urged the thousands of members of the trade unions to organize search brigades and blanket New Jersey and its neighboring states. Daniel Sheaffer of the Pennsylvania Railroad wired Lindbergh that “OUR FACILITIES ARE AT YOUR COMMAND WE ARE HAVING ALL OUR TRAINS AND STATIONS COVERED AND OUR DETECTIVE TRAIN AND STATION FORCE ARE ACTIVE.” Women’s organizations, such as the White Plains Contemporary Club, refrained from their usual activities so that they could search boardinghouses for stray children; and they urged other ladies’ groups to follow suit. Indeed, every baby in public was looked at twice by every passerby, and practically anyone seen with a blond tot was stopped and questioned. One solitary bank clerk from Trenton, driving home from a vacation out West, was pulled over 107 times just because of the New Jersey plates on his car.

  “WE DONT NEED TO TELL YOU FOLKS HOW WE FEEL,” Will and Betty Rogers wired the Lindberghs. Most of the world felt the same, but many declared their feelings nonetheless. Privately, President Hoover wrote, “My heart goes out to you in deepest sympathy in your distress, and I do pray that you may speedily have your son restored to you.” Other heads of state, national legislatures, and the foreign press also expressed their sympathy. New York City’s municipal radio station broadcast a special service, in which Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish clergymen prayed for the speedy return of the child. Several state legislatures passed resolutions offering sympathy and prayers to the Lindberghs. Even the new invention of television was called into play, when Station W2XAB atop the Columbia Broadcasting Building uninterruptedly broadcast the photograph of the Lindbergh baby during the afternoon and every fifteen minutes during the evening. There were only a few thousand television receivers within the thousand-mile broadcasting radius that could pick up the fuzzy transmission; but for the first time television had instantly broadcast the image of a kidnapped person over an extensive range.

  When neither a trace of the baby nor word from the kidnappers surfaced after the first day, Lindbergh felt his most critical task was in opening lines of communication with the kidnappers. He believed the media should be told that a ransom note had been left and that the Lindberghs fully intended to pay it. Anne appealed to the kidnappers’ hearts, releasing to the press the baby’s diet, in hopes that “whoever has taken the baby may see and understand the necessity for care” in light of the child’s recent illness.

  On March second, a penny postcard arrived from Newark. It was addressed to “Chas. Linberg, Princeton, N. J.,” with the “J” looping backward. It said: “BABY SAFE, INSTRUCTIONS LATER, ACT ACCORDINGLY.” Even though the card bore neither the identifying symbol nor the same handwriting as the ransom note left on the window sill, its importance was in no way doubted. More than five hundred men—practically the entire Newark police force and several fire companies—were put on that one piece of potential evidence. A mail carrier had noticed it while emptying a box in the center of the rooming-house district of Newark; and he had brought it to the attention of the police, who
searched two thousand homes within two square miles.

  Meantime, law-enforcement officers nationwide traced countless drivers of cars that had been reported all day as appearing suspicious. Of particular interest was the observation of Benny Lupica, a student at Princeton Preparatory school, who lived a little more than a mile from the Lindberghs. On the afternoon of March first, he had gone to his R. F. D. mailbox on the road opposite the entrance to the Lindberghs’ farm. He was standing on this remote lane when a car drove by—a Dodge with what appeared to be two sections of a ladder poking out the empty right-hand side. Lupica caught a glimpse of the driver, a man with “a thin face,” wearing “a black overcoat and a fedora hat.”

  The rural mail carrier from Hopewell appeared at the Lindbergh house several times a day, bringing hundreds of letters at a time. Detectives screened every item, most of which came from strangers. A man from Pulaski, Virginia, offered his pack of bloodhounds, and a veteran postal inspector from Minneapolis offered his professional services. Tips came from around the world. Astrologers and seers, from as far off as Trieste, sent accounts of their visions, while thousands of people sent accounts of their dreams in which the baby appeared—often fatally so. Crank ransom notes arrived by the thousand, mostly from people who were Depression-desperate, trying to get their hands on some cash. Kidnapping had, in fact, become one of the “big money crimes” in which the rackets trafficked—with kidnapping syndicates springing up in every major city. Four hundred such crimes had been reported since 1930 in Chicago alone.

  A New Jersey bootlegger, con-man, and sometime stool pigeon named Morris “Mickey” Rosner got Henry Breckinridge on the telephone the day after the Lindbergh kidnapping. Under indictment for grand larceny in a stock swindle, Rosner said he had the contacts to ascertain who committed this crime. The next morning, he sat in the corner library in the Hopewell house with the three colonels managing the case—Lindbergh, Breckinridge, and Schwarzkopf—suggesting that two of his henchmen act as intermediaries to the criminals.

  Lindbergh had been involved in enough dangerous ventures to know the imperative of backup plans. And so he elected to proceed unofficially with Rosner. Schwarzkopf was against Breckinridge’s giving this known criminal $2,500 “for expenses”; and he and “Buster” Keaten were aghast when Lindbergh also handed over the ransom note with its unusual identifying symbol of interlocking circles, the one touchstone they had to test the validity of any future communiqués from the kidnappers. But Lindbergh was so powerless that he felt obliged to follow every avenue, even down the most criminal alleys. His instincts told him there was a basic honor among thieves.

  By the day after the kidnapping, there was already no question that Lindbergh was acting rashly and that he resented being forced into behaving that way. Keeping her distance, Anne thought he looked “like a desperate man”—so distraught that she was afraid even to speak to him. “It was probably the first time she realized her Lindy was not a god, but only a mortal,” Betty Gow observed. “We were all so helpless.” Anne confined her crying fits to the privacy of her bedroom.

  The Lindbergh kidnapping affected every child and parent in America. The wealthy seemed prime targets, but fears did not stop there. If “Baby Lindy”—protected by servants within estate walls—could be abducted, then every child in America was vulnerable. Parents encouraged their children to come inside and play, and many were forbidden thereafter from walking even a block from home by themselves. For several generations the Lindbergh kidnapping became children’s first cautionary tale. They were told never to talk to strangers, and any adults in the vicinity of schoolyards were stopped and questioned. The House of Morgan commissioned a private force of two hundred and fifty bodyguards to protect the families of its partners.

  Numerous letters streamed in to Hopewell advancing theories worthy of Agatha Christie. Some suggested that the kidnapping was the work of one of the many female admirers of Lindbergh who resented his marrying Anne Morrow. Many actually accused Elisabeth Morrow.

  The absence of Anne’s older sister through most of the kidnapping crisis fueled speculation for more than sixty years that she was the perpetrator of the crime. Several people have suggested that she was mentally unstable and the family kept her locked up at Next Day Hill during this period. In truth, it was her physical, not mental, health that was failing. Her heart condition left her constantly fatigued. On top of that, on the night of the crime she was, in fact, in bed nursing an impacted wisdom tooth. Even madder theories sprang up and lingered to the end of this century. One propounded that Lindbergh himself killed his baby, accidentally or otherwise, and could not face the consequences. Such theories were based on a lack of information rather than any evidence.

  Agatha Christie herself was inspired to capture some of the hysteria created by this case in her classic thriller Murder on the Orient Express. Maurice Sendak, a poor boy in Brooklyn, was so traumatized by the event that he admitted to having spent a lifetime trying to exorcise his fears through his macabre children’s books. The Lindbergh case inspired sculptor Isamu Noguchi to create his only “strictly industrial design,” the “Radio Nurse”—an intercom that served as “a device for listening in to other rooms within a house, as a precaution against kidnapping.”

  “I am wondering if proper consideration has been given in the investigation … to the ‘Epileptic Colony,’ which … is located in the neighborhood,” a doctor wrote from Chicago. He observed that “it is definitely established, by members of the medical profession, who have done work with epileptics, that the outstanding characteristics are pathological irritability and revenge.” Even without the suggestion, the state home for epileptics four miles away, in Skillman, New Jersey, was investigated, as were all neighboring mental asylums and orphanages. The police obtained from the Lindberghs’ building foreman a list of everyone who had worked on the house so that they and their families could be questioned.

  They also interrogated a man named Millard Whited, one of the illiterate backwoodsmen living in a shack in the Sourland Mountains. He told Lindbergh and officers Keaten, Wolf, and Lamb that on three occasions in the past two weeks he had seen a strange man nosing around the Lindbergh property. He provided specific dates and a general description of the man. When a pair of detectives later called on Whited, he declared he had never seen any suspicious people on the Lindbergh property. At every turn, the case produced a similarly surreal twist.

  “No story was too fantastic for investigation,” reported The New York Times on March fourth. “No suspected place was too remote for search. The entire nation was aroused and there were stories of innocents being detained for questioning”—from Maryland to New Hampshire. A man in Long Branch, New Jersey, called the switchboard at the Lindberghs simply to present his suggestion that the famous flier use his influence with the government to obtain immunity for the kidnappers if they would return the baby unharmed. Before the conversation was completed, state troopers had the caller in custody for two hours of interrogation and another two days of investigation. Three suspicious characters who had been reported by a waitress in Pennington because they had asked for directions to the Lindbergh house the week before turned out to be newsreel photographers who simply wanted to photograph the house.

  “It is impossible to describe the confusion,” Anne wrote her mother-in-law on Saturday, March fifth, “—a police station downstairs by day—detectives, police, secret service men swarming in and out—mattresses all over the dining room and other rooms at night. At any time I may be routed out of my bed so that a group of detectives may have a conference in the room. It is so terrifically unreal that I do not feel anything.”

  At first, any reasonable-sounding person who telephoned the Hopewell house to say he had seen the baby was patched through to Lindbergh himself. But nobody described the baby to his satisfaction. Thousands of sightseers descended upon the Sourland Mountains, filling the streets of Hopewell from morning until night, and crowding around the entrance of the Lindberg
h estate. One perfectly respectable-looking man insisted he had “a secret he would tell no one else but Anne Morrow Lindbergh.” Even he was ushered into the Lindberghs’ bedroom, where the anxious couple awaited his pronouncement. The man burst into some lines from Shakespeare, before the police carted him off.

  After forty-eight hours with little sleep, insinuating himself in every aspect of solving the crime, Charles at last got a good night’s rest. It made a great difference in his attitude and, as a result, Anne’s. “He is tense and worried still,” she wrote his mother, who carried on teaching her Chemistry classes at Cass Technical High School, “but excited and buoyant.” Charles’s optimism—constantly staving off his and Anne’s worst fears by living in constant hope—dictated his every movement. Remaining active made him feel his baby remained alive.

  In an attempt to nudge the abductors into making some kind of move, Lindbergh released a public statement urging them to “send any representatives that they desire to meet a representative of ours who will be suitable to them at any time and at any place that they may designate.” If that was acceptable, Lindbergh pledged not only confidentiality but also “that we will not try to injure in any way those connected with the return of the child.”

  That very moment, the authorities apprehended a suspect whom they were convinced was the right man. “Red” Johnson, Betty Gow’s suitor, was taken into custody in West Hartford, Connecticut, just as another postcard allegedly mailed by the kidnapper was found in the Hartford post office. It too had the backward J in New Jersey and read, “BABY STILL SAFE. GET THINGS QUIET.” Because of his relationship with the Lindberghs’ baby nurse, he had knowledge not only of the Lindbergh house but also of the movements of all the people therein. Pouncing on his being an illegal alien, the police proceeded to find everything about the Norwegian sailor suspect. All but clinching the case for several police officers was their finding in his green Chrysler coupé—a car several witnesses had said they had seen in the vicinity of the Lindberghs’ house—an empty milk bottle! A milk-drinking sailor seemed beyond probability; and it took several people attesting to Johnson’s often drinking a quart at a time before they accepted the possibility of his innocence. The sender of the postcards was soon discovered to be a mentally disturbed young man.