by Noel Behn
It seems more likely that they went directly to Breckinridge’s office at 25 Broadway, where he dispatched his secretary to put the notice in the classified section of the New York American, and then he drove Condon home to the Bronx. The ad had been placed too late for the March 10 edition of the paper.
The next morning, March 11, the following notice appeared not only in the New York American, as the kidnappers’ message had said, but in the Bronx Home News as well, which was not in the abductors’ instructions:
I accept. Money is ready. Jafsie.
Around noon on March 11, the Condons’ phone began to ring. Jafsie was away. His wife, Myra, went into the front hall and picked up.
“Is Doctor Condon there?” asked a man with a guttural, accented voice.
Myra Condon replied that her husband was giving a lecture and would be home between six and seven.
“Tell the Doctor to stay at home,” the man said. “I will call him again about seven o’clock.”17
Book Two
EXPANSION
Prelude
Assuming Lindbergh worked a deception, it had taken deep root. Police and officials did not question that a kidnapping had occurred. The press and public certainly believed the crime had been perpetrated. Better yet, Lindbergh was in total charge of the manhunt, had literally been handed the reins of control by the reverent Schwarzkopf, who at Lindy’s bidding barred all major police organizations from the investigation. Sorrel Hill was the seat of Lindbergh’s power, and here he ruled supreme. But the tentacles of the search were moving beyond the estate, moving into areas where his authority, though respected, was no longer manifest.
The ransom message left in the nursery was the device by which Lindbergh hoped to set the pack running in the wrong direction, and he had played an astute game of denial and confirmation to make its existence an issue. The naming of the initial go-betweens, Springer and Thompson, was a further ploy to mislead. The hounds had taken the bait, were poised and pointed the wrong way, yelping and sniffing in place.
It may be that Lindbergh’s ideal scenario would have had no forger trying to claim the ransom money. Then the public interest in the make-believe crime would have abated slowly but completely, without the discovery of any suspect. That wasn’t to be. The ransom message had been shown around the New York underworld, perhaps to lure an extortionist and little more. And extortionists came. So did wanted and unwanted middlemen and persons who may have firmly believed they were in touch with the actual kidnappers.
Suddenly Lindbergh had three balls in the air regarding go-betweens. There was Morris Rosner, Spitale, Bitz, and their underworld cohorts. Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean had given Gaston Means a hundred thousand dollars, and she eagerly expected delivery of the stolen child. Jafsie Condon was the latest and the most troubling. The hand-written messages he presented to Lindbergh and Breckinridge masterfully approximated the original they had concocted. This would probably take the investigation beyond the gates of Sorrel Hill, and more likely than not, a ransom would have to be paid to the clever extortionist. The most troubling aspect became John F. Condon. Was the florid rhetorician part of an extortion plot, or wasn’t he? One thing was for certain: If ever there was a loose cannon, Jafsie was it. Breckinridge seems to have had his doubts about dealing with Condon; Lindbergh apparently didn’t. Waiting in the wings and yet to be heard from was another wannabe go-between: John Hughes Curtis.
Lindy and Breckinridge, whatever their misgivings, now had to play out their hands as if a kidnapper existed—and the baby was still alive.
11
Juggling
Lindbergh, the calm, methodical control freak with a pilot’s cool, attempted to keep abreast of everything that was going on with the manhunt, and this could not be done. He was usually accessible to those who resided or worked at Sorrel Hill, but talking to him could be chancy. One moment he might be chatty and warm; the next he could become distant and aloof or outright curt and might, if approached, spin on his heels and stride gruffly off. As the celebrated Lone Eagle, a persona he seemed to display most often, he was an awesome and seemingly omniscient presence. He was also Slim Lindbergh, the notorious practical joker. Though his behavior was generally sober and responsible, he managed to catch several people off guard with a prank. In general conversation he was usually brief, pleasant, and restrained. A good night’s sleep left him buoyant for a time. He was focused and intent when receiving reports, but in the course of long descriptions he might drift or smile when there was not a thing to smile about. Talking with Henry Breckinridge or other old friends, he might ramble on. When issuing orders, Lindy was terse, sure, and monosyllabic. What prompted him to give an order varied. Sometimes it came as a result of long deliberation. Just as often it was a random proclamation that even took Henry Breckinridge by surprise. He tried never to lose his temper but occasionally did. Often when he was about to fly off the handle, Henry Breckinridge would step in, but Henry couldn’t always be there. To disobey a command was one way of sending Lindy into a state, as was the case when the troopers tampered with his secure line of communication. One fact was observable to those around him: Lindbergh showed no outward signs of grief or loss or revenge in regard to his missing son. None of the Morrows did, not publicly. The job on hand for Lindy was to get the child back. He didn’t betray the least bit emotionally as he went about it—as long as it was done his way.
Lindbergh’s own telephone wire at Sorrel Hill, which had been encased in an underground metal tube at the time the estate was built, was the one on which he conducted his private dealings regarding the kidnapping. Schwarzkopf had been ordered not to let his men pick up the phone or monitor the conversations. Denied the right to hear what was being said on this instrument, the state police assigned a trooper to the telephone-company office in Hopewell and had him listen in on the forbidden calls from the main switchboard. Learning of it, Lindbergh was infuriated; he drove to Hopewell and barged in on the eavesdropping trooper at the switchboard. “Don’t plug it in—not even halfway,” warned the drawn and finger-pointing master of Sorrel Hill. “Heed what I am saying!” The young officer gave assurances it wouldn’t happen again.1
Back at the estate Lindbergh walked into his den and found Captain John J. Lamb of the Jersey State Police speaking on the selfsame private phone the young trooper had been monitoring. Lindy shouted, “What are you doing on the telephone?” Lamb explained that it rang, and he had answered. “I want it understood very clearly and now,” Lindbergh said, “that neither you nor any other policeman is to touch that phone for any reason. You are here through my courtesy, and I ask you not to interfere with my business.”2
At 11:00 A.M. on Saturday, March 5, H. Norman Schwarzkopf had to address the hundreds of local New Jersey, out-of-state, and federal investigators that Governor Moore invited to a Lindbergh-kidnapping coordinating conference in Trenton.3 Included at the gathering were J. Edgar Hoover and the man responsible for putting Al Capone behind bars, Elmer Irey, chief of the IRS Law Enforcement Division. Schwarzkopf briefed the gathering on the crime and progress to date and opened the session to a heated debate over the handling of the case so far and the paths that should be followed in the immediate future.
Officials attending the conference wanted to be part of the manhunt, particularly the New Jersey County Detectives and Hoover’s Bureau of Investigation—which was exactly what Lindbergh did not want. The Lone Eagle, via Schwarzkopf, prevailed. The heavy in the matter, the one who was scorned and took a public battering for excluding every other organization from the state-police chase, was H. Norman. In the eyes of most media people, Lindbergh was credible—he could do no wrong.
The Bureau of Investigation was to become a major nuisance for Schwarzkopf. Despite being excluded from the inquiry, J. Edgar Hoover would have his special agents find out what they could about the crime—without state-police approval and, often, without their knowledge. The same was true for New Jersey’s young, aggressive commissioner of Motor Ve
hicles, Harold G. Hoffman. Hoffman’s department had its own detective corps, which was unleashed to find the kidnappers. What was worse for the troopers, the man Hoffman brought in to head his inquiry was the one person who had continually embarrassed and outshone the state police and Schwarzkopf in the past and who was receiving as much publicity as they were now: the outspoken seventy-year-old chief of detectives of Burlington County, considered by many to be the greatest detective in the world: Ellis Parker, Sr.
The press proved a far more critical and growing problem for Schwarzkopf. So did Charles Lindbergh.
To the media people exiled at nearby Hopewell and Trenton, the Lindbergh house atop Sorrel Hill had become an unapproachable Xanadu, and Lindy himself, Kubla Khan in a leather flying jacket. Troopers guarded every approach to the foothill acres and patrolled the outer perimeters, shooing off, if not temporarily detaining, the occasional interloper. Official visitors, many driving the back roads to avoid being detected and many being chauffeured in limousines, entered and left the estate under the far-off gaze of reporters watching from whatever vantage points they could find. The Lindberghs, after all, were America’s couple. They had spent weekends fishing with the likes of President Hoover—Herbert’s flustered wife referred to them as the Lingrins—and they counted among their intimates Ford, Edison, Guggenheim, and Will Rogers. The visitors coming to see them in the days after the kidnapping often could be identified by sharp-eyed journalists; when they couldn’t, the delicious guessing game of who they might be often ended up in print. Investigators and staff inside the estate usually had no better idea of who was coming and going.
Within the gates of Sorrel Hill, Charles Lindbergh held supreme sway over a household that had taken on the trappings of a baronial castle under siege. Those about him formed the court. Henry Breckinridge was his all-powerful chancellor. H. Norman Schwarzkopf headed the palace guard. Anne’s lady-in-waiting was Aida Breckinridge. Affairs of state were usually conducted in the first-floor community rooms, which still doubled as staff dormitories at night. The family quarters on the second floor were normally sacrosanct, but Anne, her mother, and Aida could be displaced if a room was needed for an urgent conference. The pervasive atmosphere, according to Anne, was bedlam. The telephone never stopped ringing. Hundreds of men “stamped” in and out. And Wahgoosh, the family dog, who had not barked the night of the kidnapping, now never stopped barking.4
Adding to Schwarzkopf’s frustration at being omitted from much of the planning was the presence of Jimmy Finn. At the very time the state police were trying to limit the participation of outside law-enforcement agencies in the investigation, at the liege of Lindbergh, Detective Finn of the New York Police Department was admitted to the Sorrel Hill inner circle, where he had access to the two colonels. During Lindy’s triumphant postflight welcome to Manhattan in 1927, Finn had commanded the elite group of cops who served as the Lone Eagle’s private bodyguard. The two men had remained friendly, and in the wake of the kidnapping Lindbergh had asked that Finn come to Sorrel Hill while simultaneously keeping the New York Police Department out of the investigation. Finn was consulted about some aspects of the Lindbergh strategy to recover the child, but like most other advisers, he was kept in the dark about the others.
In the second week of March, Lindbergh and Breckinridge allowed Elmer Irey, head of the IRS Law Enforcement Division, to join their inner circle.5 This could have been as much for show as for practicality. Irey’s job would be to advise on the ransom payment, when and if negotiations reached that point, as seemed possible in the case of go-between Jafsie Condon. Lindbergh would soon make it clear that he was not going to permit marked ransom bills to be given to the kidnappers. Without marked currency the law had no way of capturing the extortionists should they escape from the transfer location unseen.
Lindbergh’s ability to interfere with routine police procedures was nowhere more blatant than with the interviewing of himself, Anne, and their staff in the wake of the disappearance. A crucial function of an investigation of this nature is to interview witnesses as close to the time of perpetration as possible. Lindbergh had refused to let official questioning of himself, Anne, and Mrs. Whateley be done for ten days. The same would have applied to Betty Gow and Ollie Whateley if the police hadn’t learned that the pretty Scotswoman had received a call from her boyfriend, Red Johnsen. When finally obtained, the statements from the Lindberghs and their staff were all essentially the same and added nothing of value.
A certain black humor emerged as the clandestine and compartmentalized operations at Sorrel Hill inspired courtiers to vie with one another for dominance and survival. Morris Rosner’s interception of phone calls and his failure to relay many of the messages to Lindbergh and Breckinridge had been symptomatic of this. Another example was the digging down to, and attempted tapping of, Lindbergh’s buried phone line by Jersey troopers after he had forbidden them to monitor his calls at the switchboard in Hopewell.6
For the state policemen charged with obeying his edicts, Lindbergh’s decisions were often discrepant and mortifying. Schwarzkopf had been impressed by the results of the newly developed lie detector machines and suggested that the household staff at Hopewell be tested by one. Lindbergh, a believer in science and technology, refused. One of his reasons for this was that the system was still unproved. When a thirty-five-year-old New York City doctor named Erastus Mead Hudson volunteered to provide an innovative process for finding fingerprints, trooper brass could be forgiven for dragging their feet: Hudson’s technique—exposing latent fingerprints by applying a solution of silver nitrate—was no better validated than lie detector testing. But Lindbergh approved.
Dr. Hudson’s arrival at Sorrel Hill posed a credibility problem for the trooper organization. Their expert, Corporal Frank A. Kelly, had not found a single fingerprint in the entire nursery, on the outside of the house, on the ladder, or anywhere else. What if Hudson did? The answer came on Sunday morning, March 13, when the doctor went to the nursery and sprayed the baby’s toys with a silver nitrate mist. After the toys were exposed to sunlight, hundreds of red-brown stains emerged, of which thirteen were identifiable latent fingerprints believed to belong to the missing child. Before the stains faded, they were photographed by a special camera. The next day the ladder sections, which had been soaked in silver nitrate and put out in the sun, produced five hundred stains. He would later find more prints. Two hundred six of them were complete latent prints, and of these, eight were clear enough to be of help. Seven of the eight could not be identified. The eighth belonged to Lieutenant Lewis J. Bornmann of the Jersey State Police, who had taken charge of the ladder the night the baby was reported missing.
What was disquietingly missing from Hudson’s findings were latent prints of Charles Lindbergh, Sr., who had admitted going from the empty crib to the window the night of March 1 and placing his hands flat against the wall as he looked out in search of his son and the abductors. Nor did Hudson find any prints belonging to Betty Gow in the nursery. One of his early conclusions was that someone had gone to the trouble to erase relevant prints. Certain members of the state police downplayed the Hudson fingerprint method as untested.
The Lindbergh-Breckinridge approach to the press remained as paradoxical as that with the state police. Lindy not only insisted on the news blackout that had driven the media off the estate and dramatically reduced the number of printable stories, but upon suspecting that someone inside the Sorrel Hill nerve center was leaking information to a major news organization, he adopted the role of spy master: He dispatched a young police officer to infiltrate the reporters hanging around Gebhart’s Hotel in Hopewell.7
Laura Vitray again witnessed Henry Breckinridge playing good guy to Lindbergh’s bad guy. When the New York Sun, whose headlines had been dominated by the crime, dropped it as the lead news piece, Breckinridge sought out one of the paper’s reporters. “I notice that the Sun is beginning to play this story down,” he said to the journalist. “Use your influence, if
you can, to have them keep it on page one. You boys down there are doing splendid work. The situation is just as we want it to be. With Schwarzkopf snapping at you and everybody apparently knocking the press around, which creates the right public impression, you are still running plenty of good cock-and-bull stories that are doing a lot of good. Thanks!”8 Colonel Henry’s reason for wanting good cock-and-bull stories in print: to keep pressure on the kidnappers to deal with Lindbergh.9
The one area where Lindbergh and Breckinridge did not impose their views and rules, and where they were profusely tolerant of the most outrageous and debilitating actions—often at the price of secrecy and projected future dealings with the kidnappers—was with the go-betweens.
Lindy and Henry were having more than their share of headaches from news stories being leaked by Morris (“Mickey”) Rosner. Why they ignored Thayer’s recommendation to get rid of Rosner is puzzling. Their alternative action—an attempt to isolate the acerbic little underworld character from the rest of the household—was both tepid and flagellatory. Discovering that he had not been told of Owney Madden’s visit to the estate, Mickey tried to bolster his position vis-à-vis the investigation by a private public relations campaign in the press, one result of which was the March 10, New York Daily News report that Madden had been brought in on the case by Rosner. The New York Mirror revealed that it had been Al Capone who ordained that Spitale and Bitz—Madden had opposed recruiting them—should be the underworld go-betweens for Lindbergh.
The greatest slight of all for Mickey was learning that he had not been told that a fourth ransom note had been received by Condon.10 Rosner confronted Lindy and Henry with the assertion that he had been in contact with the kidnappers through a different set of newspaper ads from those he placed for Breckinridge and that the kidnappers were furious he had been bypassed and not shown the fourth ransom message. How had the kidnappers found out he was being bypassed? Rosner contended that Breckinridge had sent his secretary to the New York American to place an answer to the fourth ransom note and that the American refused to publish it unless the identity of the person inserting it was revealed; as a result of this, Henry had been forced to call a contact at the paper and acknowledge the ad was his. The secretary returned with the text but had to sign a receipt before it was accepted. Rosner maintained that once Breckinridge acknowledged being the person who inserted the ad, the kidnappers found out and were so angry they postponed negotiations indefinitely and threatened to kill the child. Rosner claimed he had worked assiduously to convince the kidnappers to continue negotiating. He believed they would. He also believed the infant would be delivered within the next twenty-four hours or so.