The Cases That Haunt Us

by Mark Olshaker

  The kidnapping of their baby firstborn son instantly became “the crime of the century,” unquestionably the biggest news story since Lindy’s historic flight five years earlier. And for many, despite the subsequent atom-bomb spy ring, the John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations, the Manson family murders, the slayings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, and so many other cases, this remains the crime of the century.

  The facts and the evidence have been so persistently and painstakingly sifted for so many years that there are probably no completely “new” theories left to present. And like the Whitechapel murders, this case is a perfect example of the emotional tendency to come up with a scenario, then arrange and organize facts and evidence to fit it. What we want to do here is start from the opposite side—the only proper side for an investigator—to work our way through those facts and evidence in an attempt to arrive at an explanation that makes sense . . . whether or not it conforms to the official record. There are literally millions of pages of accumulated evidence, reports, and testimony, and no one person could possibly go through it all. Keep in mind as you read along, though, that every element presented is, or may be, significant in determining what happened, and who caused it to happen.

  Like the Ripper case, the Lindbergh case is about the potential for random and unexpected evil to appear at any time. Like Lizzie Borden’s case, it is about what can happen behind the closed doors of the most proper and upstanding home. And as much as anything, it is also about the potentially malignant consequences of celebrity and fame.

  Charles Lindbergh had a complicated and troubled relationship with his own celebrity. He accepted the adulation and the ticker-tape parades, the meetings and receptions with world leaders, the endless testimonial dinners, the appointments and commissions and consultancies. An exhibit of his awards and trophies in St. Louis attracted a million visitors a year. He understood that his opinion on anything was instant news, and each daring new exploit—whether it was opening up a new aviation route or testing a new piece of technology—only further burnished his gleaming image. And yet he was suspicious of it all, wary of any emotional intrusion, resentful that the press just wouldn’t leave any aspect of his existence unexamined. In the midst of a life lived under the unrelenting spotlight of a public’s interest and attention, privacy became an obsession for Lindbergh.

  When they weren’t traveling around the world, the Lindberghs lived at Next Day Hill, Dwight and Elizabeth Morrow’s palatial estate in Englewood, New Jersey. For their own home, the Lindberghs selected a secluded 425-acre tract of wooded hills in New Jersey’s Sourland Mountains a few miles from Hopewell. The property overlapped the Hunterdon and Mercer County lines. Lindbergh had spotted the site from the air and thought it would offer the refuge they sought. He also liked that the land was suitable for a private airfield. The couple built a traditional-style, $80,000, twenty-room, whitewashed fieldstone house with a thick slate roof and all the modern technological advances. It was designed by Chester Aldrich, the architect of Next Day Hill. Here, Charles and Anne hoped to start and then raise their family. During the construction, they rented an old farmhouse between the property and Princeton.

  After months of rumors eagerly reported by the press, the world got the news it had been waiting for. On June 22, 1930—Anne’s twenty-fourth birthday—she gave birth to a seven-pound-six-ounce baby boy at Next Day Hill. They named him Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. and called him Charlie. But in the headlines he soon became “Little Lindy,” “Eaglet,” or “the Baby Eagle.” Telegrams, letters, and gifts poured in from around the world. If his father was the earth’s most famous man, Charlie was the most famous baby. Every detail of the baby’s day-to-day existence was grist for the papers. In his outstanding 1998 biography, Lindbergh, A. Scott Berg reported that there was a standing offer of $2,000 for any “secrets of the household.”

  So thick were rumors that the reluctant Lindbergh felt himself forced to call a press conference in New York to clarify matters. He had personally barred five newspaper chains, including Hearst, which had published stories speculating that the baby was deformed or somehow imperfect. When he was asked what he hoped his son might grow up to be, Lindbergh replied testily, “I don’t want him to be anything or do anything that he himself has no taste or aptitude for. I believe that everybody should have complete freedom in the choice of his life’s work. One thing I do hope for him, and that is when he is old enough to go to school, there will be no reporters dogging his footsteps.”

  THE HOUSE NEAR HOPEWELL

  The Lindberghs began staying at the nearly completed Hopewell house on weekends, returning to the Morrow compound fifty miles away on Monday mornings. The Lindbergh’s full-time staff consisted of an English butler, Aloysius “Olly” Whateley, and his wife, Elsie. In February, 1931, the Lindberghs hired Betty Gow, a recently emigrated Scottish woman of Anne’s age, to be Charlie’s nursemaid. She had been highly recommended by another member of the Next Day Hill domestic staff. Charlie had developed a head full of golden curls and had his father’s distinctive cleft chin, and Anne was pregnant with a second child. She had also begun to seriously consider her goal of becoming a professional writer and had been recording her experiences of her and Charles’s recent trip to the Orient. Her chief domestic concern was that despite their attempts at security, unless the baby was watched every moment of the day, photographers might sneak in and take pictures of him.

  The narrative of the few days before the crime is well documented by Scott Berg. As had become their custom, during the afternoon of Saturday, February 27, 1932, the Lindberghs left Next Day Hill and drove from Englewood to Hopewell to spend the weekend at the nearly completed house. But by Sunday, little Charlie, now twenty months old, had developed a cold, which left him sneezing, stuffy, and feeling ill. On Monday, February 29, the baby was still sick, and after lunch Anne called Betty Gow at Next Day Hill and said they’d stay in the Hopewell house until Charlie was feeling better. That evening, Lindbergh called from New York to say that he’d be spending the night in town and planned to return the next night. He had been pursuing his interest in biological research at the Rockefeller Institute.

  On Tuesday morning, the baby seemed to be a little better, but Anne herself had come down with the cold. She called Betty Gow again and asked her to come to Hopewell. Gow arrived early in the afternoon and spelled Anne so she could get some rest. A little before 3 P.M., according to Berg, the two women went into the nursery together and found Charlie much improved. He played in the living room until around 5:30, then Gow took him back upstairs to the nursery, which, as you approach the house, was the room in the far left rear of the second floor. Gow fed him some cereal, then around 6:15 Anne came in and they prepared him for bed.

  They rubbed his chest with Vicks VapoRub, then Gow quickly made a simple undershirt for him out of some leftover cream-colored cotton flannel. They put on his diapers, a woolen vest-style shirt, and a gray, size-2 Dr. Denton’s sleeping suit. Lindbergh did not want him to suck his thumb, so he’d outfitted his son with wire thumb guards at night that clipped onto his sleeves. Betty laid him down in the dark wooden four-poster crib and pulled up the blankets.

  Anne tried to close the shutters but found the ones on the corner window too warped. She left the room around 7:30, and Betty Gow stayed another few minutes, opening one window about halfway for some circulation before turning out the light and leaving to wash the baby’s clothes. After that, she went in again to check on him and safety-pinned the blanket to the mattress to keep him warm. She then went to the basement to hang up the things she had washed and joined Elsie Whateley for dinner in their sitting room at about 8 P.M.

  Twenty-five minutes later, Lindbergh arrived home. Actually, he was supposed to be at a dinner hosted by New York University at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, but there had been a scheduling mix-up, so he had driven home to Hopewell. He came from the garage through the kitchen. He and Anne sat down for dinner together aroun
d 8:35. After dinner, they went into the living room, which occupied the central area of the ground floor on the back side of the house.

  Just after 9 P.M., Lindbergh thought he heard a strange sound, which he later described as similar to a wooden orange crate breaking. He thought maybe it had come from the kitchen on the right front side of the house, in line with the dining room in the back. Anne recalled that about fifteen minutes before Charles drove up to the garage, she thought she’d heard the sound of car wheels crunching the gravel of the driveway. But no one had been there. The Lindberghs’ dog, Wahgoosh, had not barked at any point, and so Anne had paid little attention.

  During this time, Betty Gow got a call from her boyfriend, Henry “Red” Johnson, a Norwegian sailor who was currently working as a deckhand on a yacht. They were supposed to have gone out that evening, but had to cancel the date when Gow was called to Hopewell. Instead, Johnson told her, he was going to drive up to Hartford, Connecticut, to see his brother.

  After sitting in the living room for a little while, Anne and Charles went upstairs to their bedroom, which was just above the living room at the rear of the house and connected to the nursery by a short hallway that led past their bathroom. Charles bathed, then dressed again and went downstairs to read in the library, which was next to the living room at the left back corner of the house and directly under Charlie’s nursery. Meanwhile, Anne bathed and went to bed around 10 P.M.

  At around the same time, Gow went back to the nursery to check on Charlie. She didn’t want to disturb his sleeping so she only turned on the light in the bathroom. It was now cold enough outside that she closed the half-open window and plugged in an electric heater.

  But as she approached the crib, she was alarmed that she couldn’t hear the baby breathing. In the dim light, he didn’t look to be in the crib, but she felt all over with her hands to make sure.

  She went through the connecting door to the Lindberghs’ bedroom and found Anne as she was coming out of the bathroom. “Do you have the baby, Mrs. Lindbergh?” Gow asked anxiously.

  “No,” Anne replied, confused. Perhaps Colonel Lindbergh had him, she suggested, then went into the nursery while Gow ran downstairs to the library.

  “Colonel Lindbergh, have you got the baby?” Gow asked. Then, since Lindbergh was known as a notorious practical jokester, she added, “Please don’t fool me.”

  Lindbergh expressed surprise that Charlie wouldn’t be in his crib, getting up quickly to examine the nursery for himself. He strode into his and Anne’s bedroom, went to the closet, grabbed his rifle, and loaded it. Then, with Anne, he went back to the nursery.

  The crib was empty and the room was surprisingly cold. Lindbergh glanced over and realized the corner window—the one with the warped shutter—was unlatched and slightly open. On top of a radiator enclosure just under the window, Lindbergh noticed a small white envelope. He had the restraint and presence of mind not to touch it before authorities arrived.

  “Anne,” he said, “they have stolen our baby.”

  “MY SON HAS JUST BEEN KIDNAPPED”

  At about 10:25 P.M., Olly Whateley called the Hopewell Sheriff ’s Office to report the crime. Lindbergh himself called his attorney and close friend, Henry Breckinridge, in New York City. Then he called the New Jersey State Police in Trenton, where he spoke to Lieutenant Daniel J. Dunn. “This is Charles Lindbergh,” he said. “My son has just been kidnapped.”

  Dunn asked him when it had happened and for a description of the baby and what he was wearing. After hanging up, Dunn described the call to Detective Lewis J. Bornmann. They discussed the matter briefly and, to make sure it wasn’t a prank, decided Dunn should call the Lindbergh house to confirm that the voice he had spoken to was, in fact, the colonel’s. When Lindbergh answered the phone, Dunn reported that the police were on their way. Meanwhile, Lindbergh went outside, hunting for signs of the intruder, but found nothing.

  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

  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.