The Cases That Haunt Us (24 page)

Dear Sir: take a care and follow east tremont Ave to the east until you reach the number 325 east tremont ave.

It is a nursery.

Bergen

Greenauses florist

ther is a table standing outside right on the door, you find a letter undernead the table covert with a stone, read and follow instruction.

On the reverse side the offender warned:

don’t speak to anyone on the way. If there is a ratio alarm for policecar, we warn you, we have the same equipment. have the money in one bundel.

we give you 3/4 houer to reach the place.

The plan was for Lindbergh to drive Condon to the meeting point and wait there for him. At the last minute, Reich suggested that Lindbergh take his Ford coupe. John had seen it and so he wouldn’t think a new or unexpected element had been added to the equation.

The place they had been directed to was another cemetery, St. Raymond’s. Tremont Avenue ran along its north side. The Bergen Greenhouses referred to in the note were near the intersection of Tremont and Whittemore Avenues. Near the door to Bergen’s flower shop they saw the table. Lindbergh stopped the car in front. Condon got out and spotted the note held down by a rock. He brought it back to the car and together the two men read it.

Cross the street and walk to the next corner and follow whittemore Ave to the soud

take the money with you. Come alone and walk

I will meet you

Lindbergh said he was coming, too, but Condon reminded him that the note said to come alone. Lindbergh reluctantly agreed, handing him the ballot box. Condon said he’d come back for it after he’d met with John.

Instead of walking south on Whittemore, which was a dark, poorly lit dirt road, Condon headed east on Tremont, where the light was better and he felt safer. But he couldn’t see anyone, so he headed back to the car to report to Lindbergh. But before Lindbergh could answer, Condon heard a voice from the direction of the tombstones.

“Hey, Doctor!” It sounded like Cemetery John.

There is a minor discrepancy in the stories at this point, one of many. According to some accounts, Condon answered, “All right,” then the man called out, “Hey, Doctor. Over here! Over here!” According to other accounts, Condon didn’t respond until the man had called to him for the second time. This may be significant as to how much of the exchange Lindbergh himself heard, since he remained in the car, and years later he was called upon to identify the voice. Had he allowed police surveillance of the scene, it would not have been so great an issue.

Condon strode down Whittemore Avenue and into the cemetery, the direction from which the voice came. Inside, he saw a figure moving parallel to him through the gravestones. He began following the man down the hill and to an access road bounded by a five-foot-high cement wall. The man climbed over the wall, crossed the access road, scaled a low fence on the other side of the road, then crouched down below a hedge just to the left of where Condon was now standing.

The man called out to him. Condon boldly told him to stand up. He recognized the man as Cemetery John. He was wearing a black suit and the same felt fedora. “Did you gottit the money?” he asked.

“No,” Condon replied. “It’s up in the car.”

“Who is up there?”

“Colonel Lindbergh.”

“Is he armed?”

“No, he is not.” This was a lie. Condon knew Lindbergh was carrying a revolver. He demanded the baby. John said he could not get the baby back for about eight hours after the money was received. The two men went back and forth over this for several minutes, with Condon ultimately demanding a receipt for the money and a note telling exactly where the baby was before he would go back to get the money. John said he didn’t have those items with him. They both agreed to get what the other asked and return in a few minutes.

Then Condon had a stroke of inspiration, a way to do one more favor for the man he admired so much. These were hard times, he explained to John. Lindbergh was not nearly so rich as many believed. All he’d been able to raise was the original $50,000, not the additional $20,000. But if John would accept that amount, he’d go right to the car and get it.

John shrugged. “Well, all right. I suppose if we can’t get seventy we’ll take fifty.”

It was 9:16. Condon went back to the car and reported to Lindbergh, who handed him the box and the other package from his pocket. Condon told him to put it away, that he’d talked him out of the other twenty.

When Condon and John met up again just before 9:30, John asked, “Have you gottit the money?”

“Yes,” Condon answered. “Have you got the note?”

“Yes.”

Condon handed over the box. John opened it and briefly examined the contents. He instructed Condon not to open the envelope he’d given him for six hours. They shook hands. Condon made another vain plea to be taken directly to the child.

John turned and disappeared back into the cemetery. Condon made his way back to the car, disappointed that he didn’t have Charlie in his arms, but optimistic that he soon would and pleased that he’d saved Lindbergh twenty grand of his money.

In fact, this was much more a problem than a slick maneuver on Condon’s part. The $20,000 package contained the $50 gold certificates—the easiest bills to spot and trace. Elmer Irey was crestfallen when he found out. Condon’s initiative had removed four hundred potential “red flags” from the investigation.

Back at the car, Condon told Lindbergh of his agreement not to open the note for six hours. Surprisingly to him, the superstraight aviator said he would uphold the bargain. But on the way home, Condon asked Lindbergh to stop the car. He pointed out that only he had made the pledge, not Lindbergh, so he should feel no obligation to wait.

Lindbergh opened the envelope and read:

the boy is on Boad Nelly. it is a small Boad 28 feet long. two person are on the Boad. the are innosent. you will find the Boad between Horseneck Beach and Gay Head near Elizabeth Island.

Finally, they had something to go on.

THE
SEARCH

Lindbergh knew the waters described in the note, where he might find the “boad”
Nelly.
The area was around Martha’s Vineyard, where he and Anne had spent their honeymoon.

After stopping off at Condon’s house to pick up Breckinridge and Reich and to send a coded message to the Hopewell house that the money had been delivered, they proceeded to the town house the Morrows owned on Seventy-second Street in Manhattan. There they were met by the
IRS
team, including Irey. They put together a sketch based on Condon’s description of John.

Following his own instincts and taking matters once again into his own hands, Lindbergh took to the air, searching up and down the Massachusetts coast with navy planes and coast guard cutters to assist him. Meanwhile, the Treasury Department distributed a fifty-seven-page list of all the ransom bill serial numbers to every bank and financial institution in the country. And Condon led an
FBI
team back to St. Raymond’s Cemetery, where they searched for evidence and took plaster casts of footprints where Condon said John had been standing.

After a full day of searching, no sign of the
Nelly
or any other suspicious boat had turned up, and Lindbergh returned to Hopewell exhausted and finally beginning to believe the kidnappers had double-crossed him. The next day, he and Breckinridge set out in Lindbergh’s own Lockheed Vega, working down the coast as far as Virginia. But still nothing. At this point, more than a month after the abduction, Scott Berg reports, Anne finally seemed to lose hope.

Charles continued his search, but the press was catching up with the facts. On April 8, a bank teller tipped off journalists that the ransom money had been paid but the Lindberghs had not gotten their child back. The next day, Schwarzkopf confirmed the story. Then on Monday, April 11, the
New York Times
broke the news that Dr. John F. Condon was Jafsie. Reporters immediately beat a path to his doorstep. His effectiveness as an intermediary, if there was ever a possibility of further contact with Cemetery John, was gone.

But he became an instant celebrity, his every strut picked up by the media. He had to change to an unlisted phone number. When the press and total strangers didn’t keep him busy, the police did, having him go over countless mug shots and view endless lineups. He was the only one who had seen the kidnapper face-to-face. Eventually he went on the vaudeville circuit and published a book entitled
Jafsie Tells All!

On April 13, Harry Walsh, an inspector with the Jersey City Police Department on loan to the state police and a personal friend of Schwarzkopf ’s, went to interview Violet Sharpe at Next Day Hill. It was the first time police had questioned her since Newark police officers had conducted their routine questioning of all the servants on March 10. With full knowledge of her edginess and evasiveness during the previous interview, Walsh was careful to be cordial and nonthreatening. Still, Violet was no more relaxed or comfortable. This time she said she now remembered that she hadn’t gone to the movies on March 1, which would account for why she couldn’t remember the name of the film, who was in it, anything about the story or the theater where it was showing. In fact, she said, she and her date and the other couple had gone to a roadside restaurant called the Peanut Grill, about an hour’s drive from Englewood. Since the last interview, she had recalled that her date’s name was Ernie, because he had called the Morrow house. Ernie was in his midtwenties, tall and thin with light hair. There was passing conversation regarding the Lindbergh baby, but nothing more than pleasantries. That was still all the information she could provide.

Walsh wasn’t any more satisfied with Violet Sharpe’s responses than the Newark police had been. He discussed the matter with Captain John Lamb of the state police. Violet’s story just didn’t ring true. She was practically engaged to Septimus Banks, she was very proper and grateful for her job in the midst of this crippling depression, and yet she would risk scandalizing her employer by going to a roadside hangout and probable speakeasy with a guy whose last name she didn’t even know? Then there was another troubling detail: on April 6, Violet’s sister Emily had left the country for home without informing the police. She had applied for her return visa to England on March 1, the day of the kidnapping.

By this time Evalyn Walsh McLean had realized that Gaston Means was taking her for an expensive ride and turned the matter over to her attorney, who got in touch with J. Edgar Hoover. But one of the other dead-end hustles was still playing itself out. On Saturday, April 16, John Curtis proclaimed that the baby was safe. Lindbergh agreed to meet with him in Hopewell the following Monday, where he heard more details about a five-man Scandinavian gang—led by Cemetery John. A German nurse was also involved, and she had written all the ransom notes.

Curtis described how the gang had neutralized the baby with chloroform (though no telltale odor was detected in the nursery), then taken him down the steps and left by the front door because the ladder was too unstable. They had a floor plan of the house. They had told Curtis a key was still inside a door they had used, and when Lindbergh checked, the key was there. The baby had been taken directly to Cape May, New Jersey, and from there by boat to the area around Martha’s Vineyard. Oh, and the gang wanted an additonal twenty-five large because another underworld organization was bidding for the child, too.

Though Schwarzkopf placed no faith in this tale, just enough fit in with other pieces of the puzzle that Charles and Anne regarded it seriously. Lindbergh made a trip to Cape May, and things went back and forth with Curtis for several weeks with no noticeable progress. By the second week in May, Lindbergh was going out with Curtis on Curtis’s friend’s boat, the
Cachalot
, from which they were supposed to establish contact with the gang in the waters off the New Jersey coast. For several days they stayed on the
Cachalot
because Curtis’s intelligence had told him they needed to meet up with the gang on a fishing boat called the
Mary B. Moss.

Lindbergh was still in Cape May the afternoon of May 12, when a forty-six-year-old truck driver named William Allen, heading in the direction of Hopewell with a load of timber, stopped on the Princeton–Hopewell Road about a half mile outside Mount Rose, to relieve himself. He walked about seventy feet from the roadside into the woods. There he saw what looked to be the skull of a child and one leg sticking out of the ground. He called his fellow driver, Orville Wilson, over to see. Then they went into town looking for a police officer. They found Patrolman Charles Williamson at the barbershop. He went back to the site with them, which was about four miles from the Lindbergh house, whose lights were clearly visible from the spot at night.

The baby’s corpse lay in a shallow depression that appeared to have been made by someone’s foot. The rain-saturated, blackened body was facedown, covered with leaves and insects. It was little more than a skeleton, the outline of a form in a dark, murky heap of rotting vegetation. The left leg was missing from the knee down, as were the left hand and right arm. Most of the organs and some of the lower part of the body were gone, scavenged by animals. The body had decomposed to such an extent that it wasn’t possible at first to determine its sex. Poignantly, the eyes, nose, and cleft chin were Charlie’s. While trying to reposition the head with a stick to remove some of the clothing, one of the investigators pierced the fragile skull.

Though the body was in terrible shape, the clothing was substantially intact. Two of the officers drove to the Lindbergh house, where Betty Gow described what Charlie had been wearing, then gave them samples of the cotton flannel and the spool of thread she’d used to make his undershirt that night.