The Cases That Haunt Us (20 page)

The first officers on scene, local sheriff ’s deputies, arrived at 10:40. They looked inside the nursery and outside the corner window, where they noticed impressions in the ground. From there they followed a set of footprints seventy-five feet away from the house toward the southwest, where they found a wooden ladder, obviously homemade, lying on the ground. Light in weight, it was rather crudely constructed in two sections that folded together with the rungs seemingly inconveniently far apart, and the side rail of the upper section had split. About ten feet beyond, they discovered a third section of ladder, designed to fit on top of the other two. When fully unfolded and assembled, the ladder measured about twenty feet but could be collapsed down to six and a half feet.

At 10:46, a Teletype alarm was sent across the state instructing police to stop any car that might be carrying a child dressed in a sleeping suit. By 11:00, the statewide roadblock was in place, and the state police of Delaware, New Jersey, and Connecticut had also been notified.

The first state trooper to arrive at the house was Corporal Joseph A. Wolf from Lambertville, who reached the house at 10:55. A number of other officers and officials followed, including Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the thirty-seven-year-old chief of the New Jersey State Police, West Point graduate, and World War I army veteran (and father of the commanding general of the Desert Storm campaign against Iraq). He was accompanied by his second-in-command, Major Charles Schoeffel.

Betty Gow searched the house from cellar to attic on her own, opening every closet. Anne went back to her bedroom, opened a window, and leaned out. She heard what sounded like a cry, but Elsie Whateley assured her it was just a cat.

Corporal Wolf noted yellow clumps of mud or clay on a suitcase beneath the corner window of the nursery. He then went outside to investigate and saw footprints in the wet ground below the window. He didn’t have a ruler or tape measure, so he compared the impressions to his own size-9 shoe and found the prints larger. No plaster casts were ever made.

By 11:15 other troopers had arrived. They reported seeing two sets of footprints, made by two different people, but later changed their story to say they had only seen one. This is somewhat ambiguous—only one of many ambiguous aspects of this highly troubling case. One explanation is that they concluded the smaller set of prints were actually Anne’s. She said she had been outside the nursery earlier in the day and had thrown pebbles up to the window to try to attract the baby’s attention. But as reported by Berg and others, beneath the window, near where the ladder had evidently stood, was a clear shoe print with a textile design, suggesting that socks or a bag of some sort had been worn over the shoe. Near the ladder impressions, officers found another potential piece of evidence: a nine-and-a-half-inch-long, wood-handled, three-quarter-inch carpenter’s chisel manufactured by Buck Brothers Company.

The investigators wondered why the dog had not alerted the household to a potential intruder, but Lindbergh explained that Wahgoosh had been on the far side of the house, where he slept, and would not have heard anything that far away above the wind noise.

By this time, Lindbergh’s lawyer, Henry Breckinridge, had arrived. He accompanied his friend and client and Schwarzkopf and other officers into the nursery. Corporal Frank A. Kelly from the Morristown Barracks, the crime scene technician, dusted for fingerprints. With the exception of one inconclusive smudge, no prints were discovered—not even those of Anne Lindbergh or Betty Gow—a fact that continues to confound and attract controversy to this day. Kelly took photographs and collected samples of the mud on the leather suitcase and the hardwood floor around the window.

Breckinridge called
FBI
director J. Edgar Hoover. They had met and become friends while Breckinridge served as assistant secretary of war during the Harding administration. Ironically, Hoover had been among the Lindberghs’ distinguished houseguests at Hopewell, along with the likes of Amelia Earhart, Will Rogers, Wiley Post, and Albert Einstein. Hoover assured Breckinridge of full cooperation.

The ladder was brought inside before Kelly had a chance to photograph it in a preserved crime scene. He dusted for prints, but found none of any use. Soil on the rungs appeared to be of the same consistency as that found in the nursery. He also dusted the chisel, but found no prints there, either.

Kelly turned his attention to the white envelope in the nursery, carefully slitting it open with his penknife. He removed a single folded sheet of white paper. The note was written in blue ink in a shaky hand. He handed it over to Lindbergh:

Dear Sir!

Have 50.000 $ redy 25 000 $ in
20 $ bills 1.5000 $ in 10 $ bills and
10000 $ in 5 $ bills. After 2–4 days
we will inform you were to deliver
the Mony.

We warn you for making
anyding public or for notify the Police
the child is in gut care.

Indication for all letters are
singnature

bq.  and 3 holes.

This last statement referred to the bottom right-hand corner of the sheet. There were two interlocking blue-circle outlines, each a little more than an inch in diameter. The area where the two overlapped had been colored red, and three small holes had been punched into the design about an inch apart at the left, center and right. No prints were on the letter.

By the time it was light, scores of reporters had found their way to the estate, tramping over the property. Schwarzkopf had established a police command post in the three-car garage on the side of the house opposite the nursery, but he found it impossible to protect the area from contamination.

Stories began surfacing of strange people in the area. Olly Whateley said he had seen a man and a woman in a green automobile drive up to the estate to take photographs. He had sent them away, but later saw the woman behind a bush taking photos and focusing on the nursery window.

Two men in a blue-black sedan were reportedly asking around on Tuesday how to find the Lindbergh estate. The car was traced to a resident of Brooklyn, who said it had been stolen that day.

In Trenton, police were told that at midnight, railroad brakemen had seen two men and a woman with a child on the platform, waiting for the New York–bound train and appearing nervous and agitated. These people were never identified.

Schwarzkopf requested a list of everyone who had worked on the house, all to be checked out. He also asked for the names of all servants both in Hopewell and at Next Day Hill, to follow up the possibility of an inside job. No one could understand why the kidnapper or kidnappers had taken such risks rather than wait until everyone in the house would likely be asleep and the child’s disappearance would go unnoticed longer. That, and the fact that the dog had not barked, helped focus the chief ’s attention on the domestic staff.

Yet at the same time, he had to acknowledge that the Lindbergh home was far from unknown outside the family. Its construction had been featured in magazines all over the country, with elaborate photos and floor plans. The house sat on one of the highest points in the state and would have been fairly visible, especially at night, to anyone secluded in the woods. And with only one road leading in and out, the family’s movements were easily monitored. That the offender had brought a chisel with him suggested he didn’t know the shutter could not be completely closed. Since the baby’s blanket was still essentially in place in the crib, it appeared that he had been pulled out by the head and therefore possibly handled roughly. There were no odors of chloroform, but that did not rule out the use of some chemical or drug to quiet or neutralize the child.

TAKING
CHARGE

Lindbergh had built his career and reputation on controlling himself and whatever situation in which he found himself. With the life of his son at stake, he was not about to give up control here. And with his fame and influence, he had the clout to exert control and take charge, even in the face of a police investigation. Schwarzkopf, who deeply admired the aviation hero, essentially had to work around him.

In consultation with Breckinridge, Lindbergh decided that the best chance of securing the return of the baby was to do what the kidnappers asked. But this was not an easy task. In the first few days after the abduction, thousands of pieces of mail were received at Hopewell. Three state police officers worked full-time sorting through it all looking for clues.

It’s important to remember that during those Depression years, kidnapping had become a common criminal enterprise. There were even kidnapping syndicates in some of the major cities. Going back only two years—to 1930—four hundred abductions had been reported in Chicago alone. The day after Charlie Lindbergh disappeared, a boy in Niles, Ohio, was taken. That March, sixteen kidnappers were convicted and sent to prison. In fact, Anne’s younger sister had come close to being abducted in 1929.

During the wait for further word from the kidnappers, several working theories were evolving. Lindbergh believed the offenders were professionals because of the absence of prints and the apparent knowledge of the house and the baby’s room. He suspected a gang was involved and wanted to get in touch with the underworld to see if a deal could be worked out.

Because of the kidnappers’ apparent familiarity with the house and the location of the nursery, the construction of the ladder, and the relatively modest ransom request, Norman Schwarzkopf believed the offenders were local and nonprofessional.

Lieutenant Arthur T. Keaton, Schwarzkopf ’s principal detective, wanted to pursue the possibility that the kidnapping had been an inside job, the work of domestic employees, since somehow the offenders knew that the family was not returning to the Morrow estate right after the weekend, as was their established custom, since the baby was ill. They had never before spent a Tuesday night in Hopewell.

Charles and Anne expressed total faith in the family servants from the very beginning and never wavered in that faith.

As with Lizzie Borden forty years earlier, Lindbergh raised some eyebrows by his seemingly overly stoic reaction to Charlie’s abduction. He was so unemotional, it was said, that either (a) he did not really love his son in the normal, human way, or (b) he had to have had something to do with the crime. The rumors began to resurface about the little boy being somehow defective, either mentally or physically, and that the perfectionist colonel couldn’t deal with this.

I bring this up here primarily to shoot it down. First of all, there was absolutely no remotely creditable evidence to suggest anything was abnormal about the child. But more to the point, I have seen enough parents in times of terrible grief to know that emotional reaction to such horror is very individual. Some people let the floodgates open up; others maintain a quiet and icy control. Most are somewhere in the middle. But no reaction is “right” or “wrong.” Everyone who faces what must be the worst thing that can happen to a person copes as he or she must.

One time when I was on the television program
America’s Most Wanted
, I was talking to host John Walsh about this subject as it related to a case they were currently featuring. Walsh, whose career as a pursuer of predators had its origins with the horrible murder of his young son Adam, put it succinctly: “Who are any of us to say how a person is supposed to react to something like this?”

In the case of Lizzie Borden, the detachment reflected the mind-set of a calculating murderess. In the case of Charles Lindbergh, it reflected the personality of a man who had regularly faced death and gotten through the experience by not going to pieces. So each reaction means something different. If surface behavior were that easy to interpret, it would take little or no training and anyone could be a profiler.

Anne did whatever she could to cope, relying heavily on the emotional support of her mother and confessing her fears to her own diary. Her father, Dwight, always a source of strength, had died in his sleep of a cerebral hemorrhage the previous October 31. Those around Anne worried that the stress and sleeplessness might threaten her pregnancy. In an attempt to do something constructive, on the morning after the abduction she wrote out the baby’s diet and offered it to the press. The diet appeared the following day on the front page of virtually every newspaper in America. Anne and Charles also published a statement in those same newspapers expressing their desire to make personal contact with the kidnappers or to communicate with them through any intermediaries they might designate. They said they would keep all pledges of secrecy and were only interested in getting their child back; that they would “not try to injure in any way those connected with the return of the child.”

New Jersey attorney general William A. Stevens issued his own statement, empathizing with the Lindberghs’ anguish and desire to get their child back, but making it clear that the kidnappers were in no way being offered immunity.

On March 2, a postcard arrived that said, “Baby safe. Instructions later. Act accordingly.” No red and blue circles were present, and the handwriting was different from that of the note found in the nursery, but police certainly took it seriously. However they were able to trace it to a mentally disturbed seventeen-year-old boy who wanted to see if it would get into the newspapers.

THE
DEMANDS

On March 4, a second ransom communication arrived, scolding Lindbergh for involving the police, and upping the monetary demand to $70,000 because of the additional security and “administrative concerns” this imposed on the offenders. The same signature of interlocking circles appeared at the bottom of the note. It was handwritten in ink on both sides of the paper and had been mailed from Brooklyn, New York.

Dear Sir. We have warned you note to make anyding public also notify the police now you have to take consequences—means we will holt the baby until everyding is quite. We can note make any appointments just now. We know very well what it means to us. It is rely necessary to make a world affair out of this, or to get your baby back as sun as possible to settle those affair in a quick way will be better for both seits. Don’t by afraid about the baby two ladys keeping care of its day and night. She also will fed him according to the diet. Sintuere on all letters