The Annals of Unsolved Crime (5 page)

At this point, police had little to go on. No witnesses could be found who saw a car arrive or leave between 8:00 and 10:00 p.m. Nor was there any evidence of the intrusion, other than the note. Even the specks of mud found in the nursery could have come from Lindbergh himself. So could many of the fragmented footprints found on the grounds.

The lack of evidence fed speculation that some powerful criminal organization or a foreign government had stolen “the Eaglet,” as the baby was called in the press. President Herbert Hoover, who had personally decorated Lindbergh after his solo flight, vowed to “move Heaven and Earth” to recover the child. And J. Edgar Hoover—no relation to the President—took the kidnapping as a mandate to expand the FBI, which he had headed since its creation, into a national police agency.

For his part, Lindbergh chose not to cooperate with the FBI agents that Hoover sent to New Jersey. Instead, he first went to William “Wild Bill” Donovan (who would go on to head America’s wartime intelligence service, the Office of Strategic Services), then sought out shady intermediaries who claimed to have underworld connections. At this point, he seriously contaminated the police investigation by supplying these intermediaries with the only real secret information in the case, the precise contents of the ransom note. They then provided it to the
New York Daily News
, which, engaged in a circulation war, published most of it. As a result, extortionists, who had nothing to do with the kidnapping, could make bogus requests for the money that Lindbergh, in newspaper ads, was offering to pay. On April 1, 1932, for example, a purported kidnapper answered the ad, claiming that he would return the Eaglet for $100,000. Lindbergh packaged $50,000 in gold certificates and, following instructions, went to St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx, where he gave the money to a man called “John.” “John” then handed Lindbergh a note saying that his son was in good health, cared for by two women, on a boat called “The Nelly” docked at Martha’s Vineyard. Lindbergh again did not wait for the police. He overflew the docks in his private plane but found no sign of his son—nor the boat (which, it turned out, did not exist). In all, Lindbergh received twelve ransom notes.

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 suggest 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.