The Kidnap Years:
Page 37
The other giant figure whose image was sullied with the passage of years was Charles Lindbergh, who suffered mightily because of his fame.
Charles and Anne Lindbergh were hounded so mercilessly by reporters and photographers that in 1935, months after Bruno Hauptmann was convicted, they fled to Britain with their son, Jon, who had been born on August 16, 1932, and for whose safety they feared in America. (The Lindberghs eventually had two other sons and two daughters.)
The Lindberghs did enjoy far more privacy in Britain than they had in the United States. They moved easily in conservative political and social circles. They also traveled across the Channel to France and Germany. Lindbergh voiced admiration for the new Germany that Hitler seemed to be building, and he was impressed by Germany’s growing military power.
In 1938, at a stag dinner at the U.S. embassy in Berlin, Lindbergh was given a medal by Hermann Goering in honor of his epic 1927 flight and his contributions to aviation. Anne Lindbergh predicted, presciently, that the medal would one day be an “albatross” and urged her husband to return it.200 He declined.
The Lindberghs returned to the United States in 1939. When war erupted in Europe, Lindbergh became prominent in the America First Committee, which wanted to keep the United States out of a conflict an ocean away. In a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 11, 1941, he urged his countrymen not to let “the British, the Jews and the Roosevelt administration” drag the United States into war. Later, he denied that he was anti-Semitic, asserting that he had Jewish friends. But the damage was lasting.
After the United States entered the war, Lindbergh sought to atone, sharing his deep knowledge of airplane engines and aerodynamics with the companies designing the planes that would battle the Germans and Japanese. He even flew on combat missions in the Pacific as a civilian after President Roosevelt rebuffed his entreaties to give him a military post.
Before and after the war, Lindbergh prospered as a commercial aviation consultant. In later life, he devoted himself to conservationist causes.
In 2003, a German newspaper published an article contending that on a visit to Germany in 1957, Lindbergh met and fell in love with a woman a quarter century younger than he was. The relationship produced three children, the newspaper said. But Lindbergh biographer A. Scott Berg said he doubted the veracity of the report.
Lindbergh died of cancer in Hawaii on August 26, 1974, at the age of seventy-two. President Gerald R. Ford issued a statement acknowledging the “political controversy” stirred by some of Lindbergh’s views. As for his epic flight, Ford said, “the courage and daring of his feat will never be forgotten.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh enjoyed great literary success with her 1955 book Gift from the Sea, which, despite its title, was a philosophical meditation on the lives of women in the twentieth century. The book was on bestseller lists for weeks. She wrote numerous other books of prose and poetry and died at her home in Vermont on February 7, 2001. She was ninety-four.
During the trial of Bruno Hauptmann in 1935, there was an incident, little known at the time, that said much about the pettiness to which Hoover could descend.
Charles Lindbergh was talking with Elmer Irey, an agent of the Internal Revenue Service, whose idea it had been to include gold certificates in the ransom money in the theory—which proved correct—that gold notes would be easy to spot.
“If it had not been for you fellows being in the case, Hauptmann would not now be on trial, and your organization deserves full credit for his apprehension,” Lindbergh told Irey.201
Hoover heard about Lindbergh’s remark and never forgave him for it, probably because it reflected the truth, which was that the FBI, while involved in the Lindbergh investigation, had not played the central, all-important role that Hoover had coveted for it. What’s more, Hoover had tried to nudge the Internal Revenue Service onto the sidelines.
“Irey was a good Christian who didn’t cuss,” one of his longtime aides recalled later, “but the air would be blue when the subject of the Lindbergh kidnapping case came up.”
*Three guards were fired after an investigation into the escape debacle.
**Hoover’s “perceived reluctance” to tackle civil rights issues was in keeping with his neo-Confederate attitude toward people of color. As Curt Gentry notes in his book, in 1943, Hoover remarked in a memo to President Roosevelt that recent racial unrest in Washington, DC, was most likely caused by “the sporting type negro.”
EPILOGUE
By the late 1930s, the epidemic of kidnappings was over. Of course, there would be others in the following years, but nothing like what the country experienced in the decade before the Second World War.
What caused the plague to fade away? More effective law enforcement and the obvious willingness of the law to put people to death? The availability of factory jobs as war loomed and then came? Some combination of events and trends? No one can say.
The central figures in the sensational cases of the thirties fared differently as the years went on. I was not able to learn the fates of all of them. But I do know what happened to some of the people.
Adolphus “Buppie” Orthwein, who was kidnapped as a boy, graduated from Yale, served as an intelligence officer in the navy during World War II, tracking German submarines, and joined the family business, the Anheuser-Busch beer empire. He also had other business interests. He married twice and had five children. He died in 2013 at the age of ninety-six.
Nell Donnelly, the dressmaker with a vision, divorced her husband and married James A. Reed, who had been widowed. She lived until 1991 when she died at the age of 102. (Reed died in 1944 at eighty-two.)
David Wilentz became one of the most powerful Democratic politicians in New Jersey. He practiced law until shortly before his death in 1988 at the age of ninety-three.
John Condon, the eccentric go-between in the Lindbergh case, died on January 2, 1945, at the age of eighty-four. Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf, the first superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, died in 1958 at sixty-three. Arthur Koehler (“the man who loved trees”), to whom Schwarzkopf wisely turned over the kidnapper’s ladder for study, died in 1967 at eighty-two.
Dr. Dudley Shoenfeld, the pioneer criminal profiler who advised the police on what kind of man to look for in the kidnapping case, died in 1971 at the age of eighty-two after a distinguished career in psychiatry. He was among the doctors who took part in a study of the effects of marijuana for the New York Academy of Medicine for Mayor Fiorello La Guardia—and concluded that marijuana was not much more addictive than cigarettes.
Anna Hauptmann continued her futile attempts to prove her husband innocent of the Lindbergh kidnapping before she faded into obscurity. She died in 1994 at age ninety-five.
Charles Boettcher, who was kidnapped in 1933 by Verne Sankey and accomplices, was found dead by his wife, Mae, in 1963. He apparently had had a heart attack. He was sixty-one. Boettcher’s first wife, Anna, who had been all but ignored as her husband returned home from his kidnapping ordeal, had committed suicide in 1941.
William Hamm, kidnapped in 1933 by the Barker-Karpis gang, died in 1970. He was eighty-seven. Edward Bremer, another prominent kidnapping victim of the Barker-Karpis gang, died of a heart attack in 1965 as he was emerging from a swimming pool at his summer home in Florida. He was sixty-seven.
Jake “the Barber” Factor, the supposed victim in a “kidnapping” that probably never occurred, died in 1984. He was ninety-one.
Charles Urschel, the fabulously wealthy oil tycoon kidnapped in 1933, died at eighty in 1970. The man who engineered the kidnapping, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, spent seventeen years in Alcatraz, where he earned the nickname “Pop Gun” Kelly because of his friendly demeanor and model behavior. In 1951, he was transferred to Leavenworth prison, where he died of a heart attack on July 18, 1954, his fifty-ninth birthday.
Basil “the Owl” Banghart served a long stretch in Alcatraz where he worked in the kitchen with Alvin “Creepy” Karpis. Eventually, Banghar
t was transferred back to the Illinois state prison. The kidnapping charges against him in the Factor case were dropped, and he was released in 1960. He spent much of his later life living quietly on an island in Puget Sound and died in 1982 at age eighty.
Alvin Karpis is said to have served the longest sentence of any inmate at Alcatraz, twenty-six years. In 1962, as the federal government was preparing to close the prison, he was transferred to McNeil Island Penitentiary in Washington State. Paroled in 1969, he moved to Montreal, then settled in Spain in 1973. He died there on August 26, 1979, at seventy-two.
While he was at McNeil Island, Karpis showed a softer side. He also became a link, in a way, between two vastly different eras.
As Karpis told the writer Robert Livesey, who collaborated with Karpis on the gangster’s 1980 autobiography, a young prisoner approached him one day and mused that he would like to take music lessons. Karpis learned that the young man had been in institutions much of his life—orphanages, reformatories, and finally prisons—after a childhood utterly lacking in stability and parental guidance. So Karpis became protective of the young man, finding his personality pleasant enough, and rather mild for a convict. The young prisoner’s name was Charles Manson.
J. Edgar Hoover in 1924.
Photo © Library of Congress
Charles Lindbergh at the trial for Bruno Richard Hauptmann.
Photo © Library of Congress
The Lindbergh baby ransom note.
Photo © FBI
Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., whose kidnapping and murder became known as “the crime of the century.”
Photo © FBI
Charles Boettcher and his wife, Anne.
Photo © Stephen H. Hart Library, Colorado Historical Society
Charles Boettcher in his robe the morning after he was freed from his kidnappers.
Photo © Stephen H. Hart Library, Colorado Historical Society
A portion of Charles Boettcher’s ransom note.
Photo © Stephen H. Hart Library, Colorado Historical Society
Verne Sankey, the man who kidnapped Charles Boettcher.
Photo © Stephen H. Hart Library, Colorado Historical Society
An arsenal of weapons at Ma Barker’s hideout.
Photo © FBI
Kate “Ma” Barker.
Photo © FBI
Frederick Barker, the youngest son of Ma Barker and one of the founders of the Barker-Karpis gang.
Photo © FBI
Arthur “Doc” Barker, the son of Ma Barker and a member of the Barker-Karpis gang.
Photo © FBI
Depression-era gangster Alvin Karpis.
Photo © FBI
Alvin Karpis’s fingerprints, which he had altered to avoid detection.
Photo © FBI
Kidnapping victim Haskell Bohn and his father.
Photo © Minnesota Historical Society
William Hamm (right) and his brewery manager, W. W. Dunn.
Photo © Minnesota Historical Society
Edward Bremer and his father, Adolph.
Photo © Minnesota Historical Society
READING GROUP GUIDE
1. Prior to reading this book, how much did you know about the lawlessness of the Great Depression? Did you recognize any of the cases covered in the book?
2. How do you feel about the kidnapping of Buppie Orthwein by Charles Abernathy, where the kidnappers were not cruel or malicious, merely desperate? Discuss your feelings regarding crimes like these. Are they comparable to violent kidnappings? Should these crimes be treated similarly?
3. Before the advances in forensic science and technology of today, investigating violent crimes was especially difficult. Were there any investigations that you found impressive? Which ones did you find lacking?
4. Discuss which unsolved cases you think could be solved by modern-day forensics.
5. Some instances of kidnapping, like Marion Parker’s, are especially gruesome. Which cases were the most difficult for you to read about?
6. During the “kidnap years,” it became common for people to be taken from their homes, schools, and places of work. Imagine you lived during this time. How would you feel going about your day-to-day routine?
7. While this kidnapping epidemic terrorized the States, they produced some positive results. Discuss the good that came out of such a dark history.
8. Many of these stories involve poorer people kidnapping wealthier ones. Given the desperate poverty suffered by many at the time, how do you feel about the motives behind some of these abductions? Does this change the way you think about crime and those who commit it?
9. As the kidnapping epidemic continued, people became violent in their fear, like when a mob took justice into their own hands by lynching Thurmond and Holmes. Citizens and officials alike supported this action, and many encouraged further vigilante justice. Do you think it’s important for the government to reserve the right to dictate punishment? How did you feel reading about the mob?
10. Charles Lindbergh’s celebrity status granted him a certain amount of freedom in the investigation of his son’s kidnapping. If he hadn’t been famous, how do you think the case would have been different? Would the investigation have been more or less successful?
11. The press was clearly biased during the Lindbergh trial—do you think they influenced the outcome of the investigation or the trial? Do you think the impartial reporting of crimes is important?
A CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR
How has your career as a journalist informed the way you approach writing books?
A journalist wants to learn as much as he can about a subject. He won’t write everything he knows, but his depth of knowledge makes his prose more muscular, gives him access to vivid examples and vignettes, and lets him use shorthand with far more confidence. It’s far less satisfying for a journalist to have to concede, or spackle over, gaps in his information.
This book necessitated an incredible amount of research. Can you talk a little bit about your methods?
I relied a lot on microfilm from the New York Times, where I worked for twenty-eight years, and other newspapers. Plus, I read a number of books on important individuals, like J. Edgar Hoover, and especially noteworthy cases, the most famous being the Lindbergh kidnapping. And with some persistent internet surfing, I came across a magazine article and a book from the 1930s. The article was by a wood expert who traced the source of the Lindbergh kidnapper’s ladder, and the book was by a psychiatrist who pioneered criminal profiling and predicted—accurately—the kind of man the kidnapper would turn out to be, once the police caught him. A little extra digging can pay big dividends!
This kidnapping epidemic has been largely forgotten—why do you think that is?
Years went by, and other events seemed far more important: World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, and so on. A lot of the kidnappings that were front page news at the time then faded from memory.
In this book you discuss dozens of cases of kidnapping. How did you decide to structure the project?
I decided early on that it would be a mistake to recount every case in a single chapter, although I treated a number of cases that way. But I felt that the Lindbergh case was so fascinating, from the kidnapping through the arrest of suspect Bruno Hauptman two and a half years later and through his trial, that I needed to make the most of it. So I spaced the events of the case throughout the book to create suspense. I used the same technique with the 1928 kidnapping of little Grace Budd and the arrest of the kidnapper more than six years later. It would have been a mistake to use a strictly linear time line. Incidentally, I had to decide which of the many kidnapping cases of that era to include in the book and which to leave out. How did I decide? Instinct.
The Lindbergh case was hugely influential in shaping legislature, and the case itself was widely publicized—is this simply because the victim was a celebrity, or were other factors at play? Why was this case so culturally significant?
Lindbergh
’s celebrity status was the main factor. Plus, his wife was an appealing person (and from a famous family), and their baby was adorable. And Lindbergh was more than a celebrity; he was an idol. His great courage in flying utterly alone across the Atlantic, his all-American good looks, his “aw shucks” smile—all contributed to his image. And there was far less debunking of famous people than there is today.
The prevalence of kidnapping during the Great Depression was enabled by the lack of technology and forensic science available to law enforcement. Do you think it would be possible, in the present day, for a crime epidemic to occur on a similar scale?
Probably not, given the instant, multi-state communications available today, making it possible for police agencies across the country to talk to one another. But there is still the human factor. For instance, the investigation into the 1969 murders of actress Sharon Tate and several others was hampered by poor communication within the Los Angeles Police Department.
Your body of work largely covers the investigation of violent crimes. What is it about this topic that interests you?
Let’s stick with murder. A murder changes everything forever, at least for the victim and those close to him or her. There is nothing on this earth than can undo it, and there is no true justice this side of heaven. Even if the killer is caught and punished, the victim is gone forever, and those close to him or her are scarred forever. And I have occasionally reflected on how issues of profound legal importance reach the Supreme Court after originating in, say, a shabby rooming house or a grimy saloon or pool hall.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND LIST OF SOURCES