The Cases That Haunt Us

by Mark Olshaker

  Walsh returned for another round with Sharpe on Thursday, June 9. He had a theory that a cheap crook and former taxi company operator named Ernest Brinkert from White Plains, New York, may have been the Ernie whose last name she couldn’t recall. When they’d searched her room back in March, they’d found six of Brinkert’s business cards. Violet looked even weaker and more sickly than when she’d gotten out of the hospital.

  Walsh showed her a mug shot of Brinkert and asked if he had been her date on March 1.

  “That’s the man,” she confirmed.

  Then how come she didn’t know his last name since she’d had his cards in her room? She knew nothing about the cards.

  She was growing hysterical. A doctor was called in. Walsh agreed to suspend the interview, but said he wanted to resume the following day at his office. Laura Hughes, Mrs. Morrow’s secretary, was present to record the interview. When Violet left the room, she flashed Hughes what has been described as a sly smile, then gave her a wink. Walsh and the doctor were unaware of this.

  That night, Sharpe again became hysterical, this time in the presence of Betty Gow and other servants, swearing the police would not take her away and that she would answer no more questions. The next morning, Walsh phoned the estate to let Violet know a state police car would be by to bring her in for another interview.

  Before the car arrived, Violet Sharpe was dead. She had mixed cyanide chloride, a powdered silver polish, with water, drunk it, come downstairs, and collapsed in the pantry.

  Later than night, Ernest Brinkert surfaced, getting in touch with the White Plains police. He told them he didn’t know Violet Sharpe, had nothing to do with the Lindberghs or the kidnapping, and had no idea why his name had been connected with the case in any way or how his cards had ended up in Sharpe’s room. On the night of March 1, he was visiting a friend in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Dr. Condon was brought in to see if Brinkert could be Cemetery John, and as soon as he saw him, Condon said he was not.

  The New York police handed him over to New Jersey, where the questioning continued, and he gave handwriting samples according to Osborn’s sample paragraph. Brinkert’s wife could also alibi him for the night in question.

  Then on Saturday, June 11, a twenty-three-year-old bus driver named Ernest Miller told detectives of the Closter, New Jersey, police department that he was the Ernie who was out with Violet Sharpe on March 1. The police were left scratching their heads. He named the other couple, and his story matched up with the revised one Violet had given.

  But why didn’t Violet identify him? Miller had no idea. He’d certainly given her his name. And why did she identify the photo of Ernest Brinkert, who looked nothing like Miller? Again, Miller was in the dark. Police rounded up the other couple. Their stories squared with Miller’s. Now there were more questions and fewer answers.

  Since Violet Sharpe’s suicide, Lindbergh case scholars and aficionados have wrangled over what significance, if any, it had beyond her personal tragedy. Some have accused Schwarzkopf and Walsh of harassing her to death. Violet’s sister Emily essentially said as much after Scotland Yard investigated and cleared her back in England. Others have suggested Violet was afraid the police interest in her and her small improprieties might have lost Septimus Banks’s affection and caused Elizabeth Morrow to sack her and leave her jobless. It was suggested that she had been married years ago in England and the close police scrutiny would reveal this “scandal.” But further investigation proved this claim to be without foundation.

  To me, Sharpe’s suicide calls to mind the case of Leonard Lake, thirty-eight years of age, who was picked up by South San Francisco police in June of 1985 for stealing a $75 vise from a lumberyard. Police found the vise and a silencer-equipped .22-caliber pistol in his trunk, took him to the station house, and booked him on theft and weapons charges. He was carrying a driver’s license that identified him as Robin Stapley, but the photograph looked nothing like him. After a couple of hours in the station, he asked for a drink of water, and before the cops knew what was happening, he’d swallowed a cyanide capsule from a secret compartment in his belt buckle. He went comatose and died after several days on life support.

  When we in the behavioral business see something like this, it raises some instant questions. Why does a guy up for petty and routine charges take his life so dramatically? Well, it turned out these insignificant details had nothing to do with it. Leonard Lake was a rapist-torturer-murderer of young women who, with his younger partner, Charles Ng, had captured multiple victims and videotaped their hideous activities in what amounted to snuff films. They would replay these tapes over and over to get off. When Lake was picked up on unrelated charges, he figured his real crimes would soon come out and the game would be up.

  I’m not suggesting that Violet Sharpe took the Lindbergh baby—Miller and his companions could pretty well alibi her—or even that she was part of the kidnapping ring. But her suicide for the stated reasons of being overwrought by the questioning and the general trauma of the events rings false to me.

  It may be a cliché to say that when those of us in law enforcement hear incomplete, evasive, and hostile responses in a routine interview, we tend to get suspicious, but it’s true and true for good reason. During the initial interviews of the Morrow servants, Sharpe had to know how serious the police were on such a high-profile case, so it defies all logic that she would have been so cavalier in her answers simply because she felt annoyed and put out. If she were so concerned about her reputation with Mrs. Morrow as some have said, she would have gone out of her way to be cooperative if she had nothing to hide. And you don’t suddenly up and kill yourself in so agonizing a manner simply because you’ve had enough of perceived police harassment. As with Leonard Lake, something else has to be going on behind the scenes.

  Among the documents and pieces of evidence Mark Olshaker and I examined at the voluminous Lindbergh case archives at New Jersey State Police headquarters in Trenton was Violet Sharpe’s small red diary. In it we found poems, commentaries, and various brief accounts of her life. What struck us particularly was her ongoing sense that there was more to life than being a servant, that even though that’s what the outside world saw her to be, inside she strove for a higher, grander, more poetic existence. Someday, she would be able to break out of her circumscribed world into the life she dreamed of.

  Do I think she saw the ticket into this finer world as participation in a hideous crime? No. Was she part of this yearlong planning to which the notes and Cemetery John referred? No, again. Nothing in her background or makeup suggests that she ever considered illegal activity for solving problems or achieving what she desired.

  But Violet Sharpe’s personality suggests a young woman desperate to improve herself and be liked and appreciated by others, and I think it possible, even likely, that somewhere along the line, culminating on March 1, 1932, she had been giving information about the Lindbergh family’s activities, their comings and goings, to one or more other persons. This may have been completely innocent on her part. But when she learned that the baby had been taken, I believe she must have started completing the picture in her mind and realized her unwitting complicity in the act. Now maybe the offender didn’t actually obtain his information from Sharpe; maybe it came from someone or someplace else. But for Violet to have behaved as she did with the authorities—despite Lindbergh’s consistent stated belief in her and her fellow servants’ complete innocence—she had to have been worried that she had inadvertently betrayed her employer and enhanced the offenders’ ability to pull off the crime. Was she the “missing link”?

  An FBI file we found in the police archives states:

  Under direct questioning she indicated that she had never had a boy friend prior to this date with Ernie, however, when asked directly if she had not been friendly with a newspaper reporter or photographer by the name of McKelvie employed by the Daily News, New York City, she admitted that she had been out several times with McKelvie. (According to Inspect
or Walsh, McKelvie had made the statement that Violet Sharpe furnished him the first information from the Morrow home as to the sex of the Lindbergh baby when all newspapers were clamoring for this information, and that this tip from Violet enabled McKelvie to score a beat in that he furnished the desired information to his paper five hours before any of the other newspapers. . . .)

  Violet Sharpe would not answer questions as to whether she had furnished McKelvie the above information.

  We do see here that though it may have been innocent, Violet was willing to talk to outsiders about what happened within the household and the family.

  With Violet’s suicide and Emily Sharpe’s clearance by Scotland Yard, this aspect of the case quickly dropped below the horizon. But I don’t believe we can dismiss Violet that easily or what I suspect was her link in the chain of intelligence information that made the kidnapping possible. This is something that should be kept in mind as we examine the subsequent occurrences in the case.

  THE TRAIL GOES COLD

  With Violet Sharpe dead, the other names floating around all cleared, and no trace of Cemetery John, the kidnapper’s trail was growing cold.

  As some consolation, on June 22 Congress passed what became known as the Lindbergh Law, the most famous provision of which was that after one week from the abduction, if the case had not yet been solved, the kidnapper was presumed to have crossed state lines and the FBI could then be given primary jurisdiction. The law is still in effect, and in later years the presumption period was considerably shortened. The law also called for a federal maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

  On Tuesday, August 16, Anne gave birth to another baby boy, this time in her mother’s apartment at 4 East Sixty-sixth Street in Manhattan. She and Charles named him Jon, and Charles once again appealed to the press to leave him and his family alone. Once again the request went unheeded.

  A few of the bills from the ransom money had begun turning up in and around New York City, but by the time anyone at a bank noted the serial number, there was no way to track who had passed the bill. Did this mean Cemetery John and his cohorts, if any, were still in the area? Or were these bills showing up as the result of secondary or tertiary passing, with the original holders long since out of the picture? Detective James Finn maintained a pin map with each location where a bill turned up.

  That fall, a New York psychiatrist named Dudley D. Schoenfeld got in touch with the NYPD, who in turn contacted New Jersey State Police, about having him study the notes. Schwarzkopf didn’t have much to go on, so he took a shot on Schoenfeld.

  According to Jim Fisher in The Lindbergh Case, Schoenfeld believed “the kidnapper had a mental disease called dementia paralytica (today considered a form of schizophrenia). Although the kidnapper felt omnipotent or all-powerful, he was, in reality, a powerless man who occupied a low station in life. Angered and frustrated by his status, he blamed others for his inadequacies, laboring under the illusion that certain forces in society were preventing him from realizing his grandiose goals in life.

  “Colonel Lindbergh was everything this man wasn’t and wanted to be—powerful, wealthy and universally revered. The kidnapper saw him as a rival, someone to defeat, outsmart and humiliate. This was the unconscious motive for the crime. Schoenfeld said that such a man would work alone and take great personal risks.”

  Fisher goes on to say, “Schoenfeld concluded that the kidnapper was a forty-year-old German who had served time in prison. He had homosexual tendencies, was mechanically inclined, secretive, and not prone to confess. The psychiatrist speculated that the kidnapper was physically similar to Lindbergh, and if married, would be tyrannical. He would have female friends but his life would revolve around men. Because he was secretive, cautious and untrusting, the kidnapper would be very difficult to catch.”

  It is certainly common for violent offenders, particularly sexual predators, to feel a strong conflict between inadequacy and powerlessness, and omnipotence and entitlement. Such a person would be jealous of someone like Lindbergh who really was a success and seemed to have everything he wanted. Such a person might want to bring a world hero down to normal size by making him suffer the most basic of griefs. The German nationality isn’t much of a stretch.

  If you accept that the man worked alone—and I’m not saying I do—then some of the other traits have to follow from that. He had to be secretive and control-oriented for no one else to know about the crime. He had to be mechanically inclined, because if he worked alone, then he had to have built the ladder. Perpetrators of major crimes don’t suddenly blossom from nowhere, fully skilled in their craft, so it is likely he would have done some time in prison. Snatching the baby right out of his crib with one parent in the next room and the other one a floor below is an extremely daring, high-risk crime, so of course he would be someone who took great personal risks. And no one who pulls off a notorious crime that has the FBI and half the law enforcement establishment in three states looking for him is going to be prone to confess. Still, this was a good example of early profiling, and Schoenfeld earned himself a respected place in the history and development of the discipline.

  In August of 1934, Condon did think he spotted Cemetery John. While on a bus in the Bronx, he thought he saw John dressed in workman’s clothes, walking along the road. In true Condon fashion, he shouted to the driver, “I am Jafsie! Stop the bus!” But by the time Condon began his pursuit, the man had vanished.

  DECONSTRUCTING THE LADDER

  By early 1933, Arthur Koehler had given each component of the ladder an individual designation. He numbered the rungs one through eleven and the six side rails of the three-section ladder twelve through seventeen, starting with the lowest section. The key piece of the puzzle was rail sixteen, the left-side support of the top section. It piqued Koehler’s interest because it alone had four extra square-nail holes, indicating to him that it had previously been used for something else. In other words, as the builder got to the final section, he likely ran out of lumber and had to cannibalize a piece from something else.

  Koehler further determined that eight of the rungs made of ponderosa pine had been cut from a single board and planed by a defective tool that left characteristic marks on the wood. Of the five side rails made of southern pine, the planing marks were so distinctive that he believed they might be used to isolate and identify a single mill. Altogether, he sent inquiries to more than fifteen hundred mills along the Atlantic seaboard, giving the specs of the kind of lumber plane he was looking for, how fast it would feed boards through, and how many cutting blades it would employ.

  Though laborious investigation, Koehler finally traced characteristic boards from a mill in McCormick, South Carolina, to the Halligan and McClelland Company in New York, and from there to the National Lumber and Millwork Company on White Plains Avenue in the Bronx. There, on November 19, 1933, in one of the storage bins, Koehler found what he considered the perfect match. He was convinced that side rails twelve through fifteen had been dressed by the same cutting machine.

  But the lumberyard said they would have no records for anyone who paid cash for their wood and took it with them, so Koehler’s brilliant deduction was only a partial victory. Handwriting samples were taken from all of National’s employees, but nothing of promise turned up.

  THE MONEY TRAIL

  On April 5, 1933, the new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, announced that the United States would be going off the gold standard and, to prevent hoarding of gold, directed that all gold coins and gold certificates over $100 in total value had to be turned in for equivalent value of new currency by May 1. As a side benefit, investigators hoped that when the gold notes started flooding in, bank personnel would be more mindful of ransom-money serial numbers as listed in the fifty-seven-page document they’d distributed shortly after the payoff to Cemetery John.

  In fact, on May 1, a packet of $2,980 in gold notes was given in for exchange to the Federal Reserve Bank in New York City. Each one was a ransom bill. The deposi
t slip accompanying the bills was made out by a J. J. Faulkner of 537 West 149th Street. It turned out to be a fake. To this day, this was the last anyone ever heard of J. J. Faulkner, and the trail of this money was as cold as every other lead to Cemetery John or other kidnappers.

  A few individual notes were continuing to turn up, most of them characteristically folded into eight sections. Recollections of clerks and tellers who encountered these notes were sketchy, but generally centered around a white male of medium height with blue eyes, high cheekbones, and a pointed chin. No surprise, the man spoke with a foreign accent and tended to be seen with a soft felt hat pulled down over his forehead. Though vague, the descriptions fit in with Condon’s description of Cemetery John and cabdriver Joseph Perrone’s of the man who had him deliver an envelope to Condon.

  By the time Arthur Koehler had located the National Lumber and Millwork Company, a pattern had emerged to the passing of the smaller bills—fives and tens—from the ransom money. They were turning up around Lexington and Third Avenues in upper Manhattan and the German areas of Yorkville. And shortly after Koehler completed that phase of his work, Cecile Barr, a cashier at Loew’s Sheridan movie theater in Greenwich Village, took in a $5 gold note, creased into eight sections, that caught her attention. It turned out to be Lindbergh ransom money, and the description she gave matched the previous ones, down to the suit and dark felt hat. But that was it. The crime of the century remained unsolved.