The Aviators

by Winston Groom

AN ALL POINTS BULLETIN went out from New Jersey state police headquarters notifying police locally and nationwide that the twenty-month-old son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh, wearing a gray sleeping suit, had been kidnapped. That of course alerted the press, which descended on the Lindbergh home like ants on a wounded beetle. It quickly became the “crime of the century” or, in the words of H. L. Mencken, “The biggest news story since the Resurrection.” Within the day photographs of the child, provided by Lindbergh, appeared on the front pages of newspapers around the world. For once, in Lindbergh’s estimation, here was a chance that the press might actually make itself useful.

  All through the night, as state police officers arrived, the grounds were searched for clues, more of which were likely destroyed than found. The window of the nursery had been ajar and a white envelope was lying on the sill. Deciding that it might be a ransom note, Charles had not touched it in case there were fingerprints. Outside, he and the butler found footprints beneath the window. Thirty yards from the house officers found three sections of a homemade extension ladder.

  An officer who dusted the envelope taken from the windowsill found no fingerprints. He opened it and gave the single sheet of paper inside to Lindbergh. Written in blue ink with odd curlicues, misspellings, and Germanic intonations, the ransom note began “Dear Sir,” demanded $50,000 in various denominations, warned against going to the police, promised contact “after 2–4 days,” and included a strange symbol in the lower right corner consisting of two interlocking circles.

  From the note, police deduced that the crime had been committed by someone of Nordic descent who was either agonizingly unskilled at writing or trying to disguise his penmanship.

  President Hoover offered the full resources of the U.S. government, including the attorney general’s office, postal inspectors, the Internal Revenue Service, and the military. Congress began working on a bill, later known as the Lindbergh law, making kidnapping a capital crime and allowing the FBI to intervene if a kidnapper went across state lines. Everyone from Boy Scouts to men’s and women’s service clubs offered help. Labor leaders promised to put their members on the lookout. Churches regularly began conducting prayers until the child was found. Moreover there was an enormous outpouring of sympathy from the general public, confirmed by the thousands of letters each day that began to arrive at Highfields. Most of these were merely expressions of sympathy by individuals far and wide, but far too many were from cranks, crackpots, and con men. There were all sorts of clairvoyants, seers, and other oracles, people claiming to have had dreams about the baby’s whereabouts, people who claimed to have seen him, many of these seeking money. And, unfortunately, as the days went by with no news, some elements of the press began publishing made-up stories of the most lurid variety, which was not only unhelpful but infuriating and hurtful to the Lindberghs.

  Anne held up well, all things considered, and mostly stayed in her room, out of the way, while Charles read police reports, sat in conferences, and hovered around the command center. It is heartrending, even now, to read her account, reflected in the letters she wrote at the time. On the second day, Anne tried to be upbeat to Evangeline Lindbergh, pointing out that the kidnappers’ “knowledge of the baby’s room, lack of fingerprints, well-fitted ladder, all point to professionals, which is rather good, as it means they want only the money and will not maliciously hurt the baby.”

  As the days wore on, she tried in quiet desperation to keep up hope and on March 3 was prompted to write Evangeline: “C [Charles] is marvelous—calm, clear, alert, and observing. It is dreadful not to be able to do anything to help. I want so to help.”

  And March 5: “We seem to have pretty tangible word that the baby is safe, and well cared for … we are progressing toward recovery of the child … at any time I may be routed out of my bed so that a group of detectives can have a conference in the room.”

  And March 8: “It is a slow hard game but they all have faith in the ultimate success.”

  March 10: “There really is definite progress. I feel much happier today.”38

  Charles was telling her only in a general way what was actually happening. Police were investigating hundreds of leads daily. On March 5 a genuine ransom note arrived (there had been numerous phony ones). It warned that the Lindberghs would now “have to take the consequences” of going to the police and the press, and now upped the ransom from $50,000 to $70,000. But the note also gave assurances the baby was well cared for and that the kidnappers intended “to send him back in gut health.”

  With no good leads, Lindbergh saw no other course than to pay the ransom. He did so personally, and with a strange accomplice, seventy-one-year-old John F. Condon, retired doctor of pedagogy, who had been the swimming and boxing coach of Fordham University in the Bronx, New York. Condon had inserted himself in the case and made contact with the person who claimed to be the kidnapper.

  At a park in the Bronx on the night of April 2, with Lindbergh waiting in the car with his army .45, Condon gave the kidnapper a box of bills that had been specially marked for identification by agents of the U.S. Treasury Department. In exchange, the alleged kidnapper told Condon the baby could be found on a small boat named the Nelly located on a windblown island south of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. A search of the island and surrounding area next day turned up no such boat. “We’ve been double-crossed,” Lindbergh said.

  EARLY IN THE MORNING of May 12, 1932, a truck driver pulled over on a road several miles from Highfields so that his passenger could go into the woods to urinate. There, the passenger stumbled across what he thought was a small human skull in a shallow grave. Upon further investigation he saw a bloodstained burlap sack with what appeared to be the decomposed remains of a child, with golden curls intact. Animals had apparently dismembered some of the body.

  Colonel Norman Schwarzkopf, head of the New Jersey State Police,k got a full description of the clothing that the baby was wearing the night of the kidnapping, which was supplied by Betty Gow, down to the last undergarment. At the scene, Schwarzkopf told one of his police inspectors to carefully examine and sample the clothing on the body, and piece by piece it matched what the nursemaid had said the child had worn that night. Sorrowfully, but resolutely, they returned to the Lindbergh home where Betty verified that the sample of clothing had belonged to little Charlie.

  Anne’s mother, Betty Morrow, who had lost her husband only a few months earlier, was the first family member told of the discovery. When she went upstairs into Anne’s bedroom the look on her face must have told the awful truth. Just recently Anne had wakened from a dream in which the baby was actually returned, and someone was saying, “Why, she hasn’t even kissed him yet,” wrote Anne in her diary. “They don’t understand—I don’t want to kiss him but just put my hand over the top of his curls.”

  “The baby is with Daddy,” Mrs. Morrow told her daughter.39

  CHARLES, WHO HAD JUST ARRIVED HOME exhausted after chasing down another phony lead, was distraught over the news. He went to Anne’s room, where he found her nearly inconsolable. He “spoke so beautifully and calmly about death that it gave me great courage,” she wrote afterward.

  The remains of the body were taken to a funeral home in Trenton that doubled as a morgue, where an autopsy was performed and the cause of death revealed to be a heavy skull fracture. At first authorities thought “a maniac” had committed the crime and deliberately murdered the child, but later it was determined that the broken step in the ladder had probably caused the kidnapper to drop the burlap sack in which the baby had been placed and the child landed headfirst on a concrete windowsill.

  Possibly, that was the sound that Lindbergh had heard on the night of the kidnapping as he sat in his chair reading in the library below the nursery.

  Next day, Lindbergh insisted on identifying the body himself. It left some people to wonder why a father would put himself through that kind of ordeal, but thoroughness was ingrained in Lindbergh’s makeup. He knew he didn’t want for either o
f them that, somewhere down the road, there would arise any spark of doubt that it was their son’s dead body that had been found.

  After being shown the autopsy report, Charles concluded that the child must have died immediately from the fall. “I don’t think he knew anything about it,” he told Anne. The scene around Trenton was already turning into a sideshow, with people vending food to curiosity seekers. Even more nauseating, and painful, a photographer had broken a window and gotten into the morgue, where he took a photograph of the dead baby, copies of which were being sold on the street. Lindbergh decided a funeral and burial would merely attract more unwanted attention and desecration and made arrangements to have the body cremated. Schwarzkopf accompanied him as they drove to the crematorium behind the hearse that contained the small body, and the state police chief remained with Lindbergh until the process was finished and Lindbergh had accepted the ashes to scatter in the air.

  The search phase of the crime had now ended, but Schwarzkopf swore to redouble his efforts to arrest the perpetrators. The scum of it was the realization that, after the child was dead, the kidnapper or kidnappers threw him into the woods like garbage and even took his sleeping suit to use as a bargaining chip. Police made a duplicate of the ladder and tried to reenact the crime to see if some clue turned up. The ladder was a clue in itself; Schwarzkopf sent a few pieces of it to the Forest Service Laboratory of the Wisconsin department of agriculture, where one of its scientists, Arthur Koehler, said that by examining its unique grain, which exists in all wood, he might be able to trace the timber in the ladder to the place where it was sold. Meantime, some of the bills of the ransom money began to appear in New York.

  ANNE, NOW IN HER SIXTH MONTH OF PREGNANCY, suffered deeply from the ordeal but tried to put the best face on it for herself. “I am glad,” she said, “that I spoiled him that last weekend when he was sick and I took him on my lap and rocked him and sang to him. And glad he wanted me those last days.” Charles, the epitome of courage and strength, was drained to the point of exhaustion but determined to find a way to reclaim their lives. He tried desperately to overcome the temptation toward bitterness, but he was not always successful. The fact that something like this could happen, in the face of all his resolve to secure privacy at Highfields, left Lindbergh feeling guilty, and he damned his own naivete for assuming that the family was safe. But mostly, beyond the hurt, he felt violated.

  The outpouring of sympathy was stunning. From all parts of the globe tens of thousands of messages arrived in telegrams and letters and bouquets of flowers. Trees were planted and other memorials made in the dead child’s name. One woman even offered her own one-year-old son to the Lindberghs for adoption. The Guggenheims graciously invited Anne and Charles to Falaise for a long weekend, where they tried to gather their thoughts for the future. Anne was due in August, and she felt the most important thing was to prepare for the new baby. Highfields seemed cursed now, and Anne felt more comfortable being at home with her mother at Next Day Hill.l

  It had been building for a long time, but the Lindberghs had developed almost a siege mentality when it came to their privacy—largely it consisted of the intrusions of reporters and photographers who seemed to dog them to the ends of the earth—but now a new danger had arisen: murderers and kidnappers. As one of Lindbergh’s biographers put it, “They were no longer in the world, but surrounded by it, and it was menacing.”40

  * This was made known only decades later by the Tribune’s esteemed correspondent Waverley Root.

  † No trace of Nungesser’s plane was ever found.

  ‡ While the stamp honored Lindbergh by name, long-standing custom dictated that no U.S. stamp would be issued with the likeness of a living person. Thus, while tradition was broken using Lindbergh’s name, the airplane itself was the featured art.

  § The New York City street cleaning department announced later that it had picked up two thousand pounds of confetti.

  ‖ Later accused of taking bribes, Walker was forced to resign and in 1932 fled to Europe to avoid prosecution.

  a The combined value of these awards was worth nearly $1 million today, enough to relieve for the foreseeable future the day-to-day living concerns of a young man who’d been barnstorming for $5 a day only a few months earlier.

  b Beginning in 1927 Lindbergh permitted the St. Louis Historical Society to exhibit the items for an indefinite period, and in 1935 he deeded the entire collection over to the society for permanent display. The collection was seen by 1.5 million people in 1927 alone.

  c According to Lindbergh’s biographer Leonard Mosley, from that time on this was Lindbergh’s personal bedroom and was never used by anyone else.

  d This in a time of 5 percent maximum taxes, when a four-story town house on New York City’s Upper East Side could be purchased for $100,000 or less.

  e Lindbergh did not like the song because he considered it ostentatious.

  f It did not hurt that Morrow was a college classmate at Amherst and friend of Coolidge.

  g A newspaper later described her nose as sticking out of the cockpit of Lindbergh’s plane “like a red grape.”

  h The boat was a wood cabin cruiser made by the Elco corporation, which previously had made electric engine launches. The author went aboard Mouette in 1978 when she was for sale in Three Mile Harbor in East Hampton, Long Island. Among her accoutrements then was the original set of yachting china, monogrammed for the Lindberghs. Recently, she was listed for sale again, in California.

  i This is not to suggest that Anne Lindbergh did not at times become homesick or miss her children. Of course she did.

  j Like yachtsmen, it was customary for pilots to name substantial planes such as the Spirit of St. Louis, but for some reason the Sirius remained unnamed until several years later on a stopover in Greenland when an Eskimo boy deemed it Tingmissartoq, or “one who flies like a big bird,” which stuck.

  k He was the father of the late U.S. Army general Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. of Operation Desert Storm fame.

  l Ultimately, the Lindberghs donated the Highfields property to the State of New Jersey, and today it is the Albert Elias Group Center, a home for delinquent and troubled boys.

  CHAPTER 10

  HIS HALO TURNED INTO

  A NOOSE

  ON AUGUST 16, 1932, a second baby boy was born to Anne and Charles Lindbergh. They named him Jon, the Scandinavian spelling for John. They acquired a German police dog named Thor to watch over the child, and Thor performed as advertised, rarely leaving the baby’s side unless he was called away by Charles or Anne. To get away from the summer heat, they took the baby up to the Morrow place in Maine. Anne’s sister Elisabeth was there, newly engaged to a wealthy Welshman, but she was doomed, and everyone knew it. Doctors had discovered lesions on her heart that were inoperable. On December 28, 1933, she married Aubrey Niel Morgan in an elaborate wedding at Next Day Hill. Within two years she would be dead.

  Charles became very interested in his sister-in-law’s case and inquired of Elisabeth’s physician why an operation could not be performed on her heart to save her life. The answer was that the heart would have to be stopped to do the surgical work, and she would die on the operating table.

  The mechanically minded Lindbergh went to the glassblower at Princeton University and began fashioning a crude heart pump that, when perfected, would ostensibly pump blood through a human body long enough for the heart to be stopped and operated on. Ultimately teaming with Dr. Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize–winning French vascular surgeon, he produced a series of these pumps, but none of them quite worked yet. He also invented a centrifuge for separating blood plasma without destroying it. It was because he was working on yet another version of the pump that he arrived home late on the night Charlie was kidnapped. After that, work ceased, but over time it was resumed.

  Meanwhile, Anne devoted everything to the new baby; her letters and diaries speak of little else. “You’ll wear the baby out, just looking at it,” Charles told her. All through th
at dim winter she doted, but she also found time to write her account of the trip to China.* Then Charles, restive as ever, approached her about another aerial survey—this time to test the feasibility of seaplane routes for Pan Am, which was beginning its famous China Clipper trips to the Orient.† The itinerary this time would surpass even the Grand Tour: Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Estonia, Russia, England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Holland, Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal—then home through the Azores, Canary Islands, Cape Verde Islands, Brazil, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, Miami, and New York.

  Anne winced at the notion of being away from Jon for so long, but in the end Charles convinced her that her partnership had become invaluable, and that such a trip as this would help to lift her spirits from what by than—despite the arrival of the new baby—had become noticeable signs of the onset of depression, a kind of late-whipsaw reaction to the kidnapping and its aftermath.

  The trip took five months and covered more than thirty thousand miles and was considered a grand success; the Lindberghs were received as royalty and mobbed almost everywhere they landed.

  Afterward, they received a warm congratulatory welcome home telegram from the new president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, thanking them “FOR THE PROMOTION OF AMERICAN AVIATION.”

  This fraternal relationship did not last long, however, for it was only a few months afterward that the Roosevelt administration issued its startling order requiring army pilots to carry the U.S. mail. Lindbergh saw this as a purely political maneuver to both blacken the reputation of the previous administration and besmirch the characters of the businessmen who ran the major airlines—men Lindbergh knew intimately.

  Roosevelt’s order was no laughing matter to the airlines, which were panic-stricken since air-passenger revenues were not then nearly enough to keep the businesses alive. Without the government mail contracts, they would have to shut down or drastically curtail their schedules. We have already seen how this dispute turned out, with the appalling deaths of the inexperienced and misused army pilots, as well as the insertion of Lindbergh and Rickenbacker into the argument, with Jimmy Doolittle standing on the sidelines. In a direct rebuke to the president, Congress passed the Air Mail Act of 1934, giving the airmail contracts back to commercial aviation, which not only vindicated Lindbergh, as he saw it, but made him aware that he had great stature and influence on public opinion. This merely set the stage for what was to come between himself and Roosevelt.