The Cases That Haunt Us

by Mark Olshaker

“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, blac
kened 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.

  Norman Schwarzkopf himself came to inspect the site. Not only did the flannel material and thread match up, the label on the T-shirt the baby was wearing was the same as the nine others in the package Anne had bought. Schwarzkopf then broke the news to Betty Gow, then to Elizabeth Morrow. Together they told Anne, Elizabeth saying simply to her daughter, “The baby is with Daddy.” Anne then called her mother-in-law in Detroit.

  The corpse was removed to the Swayze & Margerum Funeral Home at 415 Greenwood Avenue in Trenton. In addition to being a mortician, Walter Swayze served as the Mercer County coroner. Betty Gow went to officially identify the remains and did so from clothing, hair, facial features, teeth, and Charlie’s characteristic overlapping toes.

  A postmortem exam was conducted, officially by Dr. Charles H. Mitchell, but the actual dissection and physical examination was handled by Walter Swayze since Mitchell was elderly and had severe arthritis. That Swayze did the actual hands-on work of the autopsy was not revealed until 1977. The baby’s pediatrician, Dr. Philip Van Ingen, was there to compare measurements from his own examination records. There was no evidence of strangulation or gunshot. The cause of death appeared to be a massive skull fracture as evidenced by a decomposing blood clot. It had occurred the night of the kidnapping, probably when the ladder had broken and a burlap bag, found along the road and containing blond hairs consistent with Charlie’s, had been dropped. The extra weight of the baby could have caused the ladder failure, and he probably hit the concrete footer of the house in the fall.

  The finding of Charlie’s remains should have quieted once and for all the persistent and ugly rumor that Lindbergh himself had killed the child because of some defect. Of course, it did not. Some people, fueled by the least responsible members of the media, seem to revel in these ideas. But in my unit, we’ve seen over and over that the method of disposal of a child’s body tells us a lot about the personality and motive of the murderer. It is a sad fact that parents do kill children, but as we will see in chapter 6, there are ways they do and ways they do not.

  By the same token, there are ways they treat the body after death. Of course, in some instances, such as the Susan Smith case in South Carolina in which a desperate and distraught single mother got rid of her two young sons by plunging her automobile into a lake and letting them drown, there is no body disposal at all. But wherever we see postmortem handling of a child by a parent, we almost always see some attempt at careful or “protective” treatment. The body will be wrapped, buried with dignity or tenderness.

  In the Lindbergh case, we have a body casually dumped by the side of the road when it is of no further use to the offender. A rudimentary attempt is made to bury it, but only to avoid detection. Nor is there a conscious attempt to degrade the body or symbolically pose it. This is the work of someone who just doesn’t care about anything beyond himself.

  One more small point: In case you think I’m giving away trade secrets here—letting parents know how they can murder their children and avoid suspicion by treating the body in a certain manner—let me assure you in the plainest terms that any individual who thinks he or she can outsmart the law that way will make so many behavioral errors, leave so many other inadvertent behavioral clues in the commission of the crime and its aftermath, it will be easier rather than more difficult for us to crack the case.

  As soon as they learned of the discovery of the Lindbergh baby’s body, state police officers drove to Cape May, where they found Charles on board the Cachalot, waiting for the next act of that drama. He rushed home to comfort his wife, saying that the examination showed Charlie hadn’t suffered long, and that since he was dead from the beginning, nothing they had done, no decision they had made, would have changed the outcome. Charles went to Swayze’s and identified the body for a second time. For him, the search was finally over.

  THE POLICE TAKE CHARGE

  Even in death, the media would not leave the Lindberghs alone. A photographer had snuck into the funeral home and taken photos of Charlie’s remains. The photos were going on the street for $5 each. Fearing that a grave site would turn into a similar circus, Lindbergh had Charlie’s remains cremated, then he took them up in his plane and scattered them among the clouds where he felt most comfortable and secure.

  Now, his need for control of the case was over. The police could do whatever they needed so as to find the monster or monsters who had changed his and Anne’s life so horribly and profoundly.

  Anne and Charles moved back to Next Day Hill, abandoning the nearly completed Hopewell house forever. They never spent another night there. Their ultimate desire, once Anne gave birth, was to get as far away as they could—from the press, from the police, from the memories.

  President Herbert Hoover announced that the federal law enforcement establishment would be thrown behind the case to aid Schwarzkopf ’s department, saying, “We will move heaven and earth to find out who is this criminal that had the audacity to commit a crime like this.”

  In spite of the effective involvement of the IRS and the Treasury Department, especially Elmer Irey, the president named FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to lead the federal investigative effort. As became his rather notorious custom over the decades of his reign, Hoover threw the other U.S. government agencies off the case. But that still left the various New Jersey and New York police departments, as well as district attorneys’ offices. Altogether, plenty of people were working the case with plenty of opportunity for toes to get stepped on. The crime was now months old, the trails cold, and Schwarzkopf the target of widespread criticism that would never really go away.

  To test the theory of how the baby was abducted and then killed, Schwarzkopf had a duplicate ladder constructed and, in Lindbergh’s presence, reenacted the abduction himself at the scene. On his way back down the ladder, the 165-pound chief carried a sandbag weighing the same as the child. When he stepped down on the highest rung of the base section of the ladder, the side rail split, just where it had on the real ladder. When that happened, Schwarzkopf dropped the bag and it struck the cement windowsill of the library.

  He also sent the written communications out to independent handwriting experts, most notably seventy-four-year-old Albert Sherman Osborn, considered by many at the time to be the dean of American forensic graphologists. As others had before him, Osborn concluded that one person had written all of the notes, and that certain misspellings, letter transpositions, and handwriting anomalies were consistent throughout. And he said that the writer was German. Even the convoluted sentences made syntactical sense when translated into German. Osborn composed a sample paragraph including many key words from the notes that investigators could get suspects to write without connecting it to the Lindbergh communications.

  At the same time that Osborn and his associates were evaluating the notes, Schwarzkopf had pieces of the ladder analyzed by other experts. The critical man here was Arthur Koehler, a wood technologist with the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service Lab in Madison, Wisconsin. According to author and professor Jim Fisher, Koehler was able to identify at least four types of wood in the construction: North Carolina pine, ponderosa pine, western Dougl
as fir, and birch.

  But despite the impressive work of the experts Schwarzkopf had arrayed, despite the NYPD’s relentless trotting of John Condon from one police station, prison, or mug book to the next, despite the supposed connections of John Curtis, Gaston Means, and Morris Rosner to the kidnapper or kidnappers, all trace of Cemetery John had evaporated. All that was left of him was Condon’s account of his meetings and a few words Lindbergh had heard more than a hundred feet away.

  VIOLET REVISITED

  On the investigative side, Inspector Harry Walsh believed the kidnapping must have been an inside job. Whoever took the child not only knew the precise location of the nursery, he also knew that the Lindberghs had not returned to Englewood after the weekend. The first piece of knowledge might be explained by publicity about the house, but the Lindberghs themselves didn’t know they were staying on in Hopewell until essentially the last minute.

  The most suspicious of those with established knowledge, Walsh felt, was Violet Sharpe, and Schwarzkopf was anxious to follow up with her. But on Monday, May 9, she had come down with acute tonsillitis and needed to be hospitalized. While she was in the hospital recovering from surgery, Charlie’s remains were found. The day after Lindbergh identified his son and had the body cremated, Violet checked herself out of the hospital against doctor’s advice. Schwarzkopf waited a week, then sent the state police surgeon, Dr. Leo Haggerty, to Next Day Hill to examine her and determine if she was up to renewed questioning. Haggerty and a local physician, Dr. Harry D. Williams, found her still weak and advised against proceeding. Nonetheless, Walsh came to interview her on the evening of Monday, May 23. He was accompanied by Schwarzkopf and Lieutenant Arthur Keaton. Lindbergh was there, too.

  With her employer present, Sharpe was more docile and cooperative than she had been in previous encounters with the police, but her story was still full of holes and contradictions. For example, she couldn’t explain why she had first mentioned a movie and then changed her story to a restaurant. She couldn’t even explain why she’d agreed to go out with Ernie since she never went out with people she hardly knew. And it now came out that her mysterious date Ernie had called about an hour and a half after Violet learned that Betty Gow was going to Hopewell instead of Charlie and his parents returning to Next Day Hill.