by Noel Behn
Schwarzkopf and his men would later insist they didn’t believe a word of Curtis’s story. They also did not inform Lindbergh of this, perhaps because the Lone Eagle seemed to be keenly intent on much of what was being divulged. There were compelling aspects to Curtis’s story. He was, after all, on record as having said the baby was aboard a boat well before similar information was imparted to Condon the night of April 2.
According to Curtis’s ongoing narrative, Lindbergh’s delay in meeting him and Dynamite Larsen hadn’t sat well with the already nervous sea captain-kidnapper. They couldn’t reach Lindbergh by phone and to kill time had driven to Plainfield, New Jersey, where Dynamite took in a movie while Curtis had visited with relatives. By 6:00 P.M. they returned to a pay phone in Trenton, from which Curtis had called Sorrel Hill in another vain attempt to speak with Lindbergh.3 It was too much for the edgy Dynamite, who had demanded to be taken home. Only after dropping Dynamite off at Cape May had Curtis realized he had left behind Larsen’s letter, in which the baby was described. Later that evening Curtis had been called by a newsman, who informed him that Lindbergh had paid a fifty-thousand-dollar reward to the kidnappers through an intermediary named John Condon.
Curtis claimed that the next day he went to the Newark railroad station for a second meeting with the kidnappers. Everyone but Dynamite was waiting for him. They drove him to a three-story brick house, where John admitted he was the same man who had received fifty thousand dollars in St. Raymond’s Cemetery. It was the first step in a shakedown scheme, “to chisel Lindbergh through Condon, then turn the boy over to you,” he told Curtis. “That’s why we are willing to let the kid go cheap.” Lindbergh was rolling in money, according to John, who also stated, “If this gang of saps had any nerve, I’d sell the brat to the highest bidder.” When asked the whereabouts of the crucial letter in which Dynamite Larsen described the baby, John smiled and told Curtis, “Torn up, of course. Do you think Larsen is a fool to keep something that hot?” After admitting that the baby was not in particularly good health, John said, “But we got a doctor to look after him, and my girlfriend, the nurse.” How did John come up with a doctor they could trust? “You can get anything you’re willing to pay for.”4 When Curtis demanded hard proof that John and the gang had the baby, he was shown fifteen hundred dollars in currency and a list of ransom serial numbers that appeared in a paper. Crosschecking, he found that the serial numbers on the bills corresponded to those on the list. This for Curtis was proof positive that he was dealing with the gang that had the child.
John Hughes Curtis seemed sympathetic, earnest, and certainly not the stripe of fellow to perpetrate a prank sadistic enough to involve a stolen infant. Besides his being a prosperous shipyard operator and respected businessman in his own right, such stalwart citizens as Admiral Burrage and Rev. Dobson-Peacock were confident that he was in touch with the authentic kidnappers. Lindbergh suggested that for the sake of expediency, the next time Curtis met with the kidnappers, he should be nearby. This occurred the very next night, April 19. Once again the state police were not informed of the plan of action or what transpired as a result.
Charles Lindbergh checked into a Cape May hotel, and around midnight Curtis brought him word that the gang had agreed to let Curtis go aboard Larsen’s schooner on the condition that the Coast Guard be kept out of the area and that the serial numbers of the new ransom money not be recorded. Lindbergh agreed. Curtis returned at dawn, saying that John, Sam, and the other three kidnappers had taken him fourteen miles out to sea, where they boarded an eighty-foot-long freshly painted dark-green trolling vessel, whose name, Teresa Salvatore, was applied to a wooden surface that may have been covering up the ship’s real name. Before Curtis debarked, the gang had instructed him to meet them in two days off Block Island. He would be called with the exact location. Should they miss one another at Block Island, Curtis could contact them through Hilda. Lindbergh asked if he had seen his baby aboard the Teresa Salvatore. Curtis said he had not.
Gaston B. Means had definitely seen the Lindbergh baby and held it in his arms. He assured Mrs. McLean of this the week before, on April 14. Reading reports that Jafsie Condon paid a fifty-thousand-dollar ransom, she had grown concerned and called Means in to find out what he had done with the $104,000 she had given him to pay the kidnappers.5 And what about these people in Norfolk who were all over the papers negotiating for the child? Gaston had calmly explained that Jafsie, Curtis, and he were all dealing with the same gang.
According to Means, on discovering that the serial numbers of the ransom money had been recorded and on seeing all the Coast Guard boats near Martha’s Vineyard, the kidnappers had lost faith in Jafsie and decided against giving him the baby. The gang had also come to mistrust John Hughes Curtis. The plain and simple truth was that the only person they now wanted to deal with was Gaston. It was after convincing Mrs. McLean of this that he let her know he had seen the baby. It had been hale and hearty and was being held near her summer home in Aiken, South Carolina.
As Condon had worked through John and Curtis through Sam, Mean’s contact was the Fox, who had already gone to Aiken and was now waiting for Mrs. McLean. She had barely reached her summer house when Gaston appeared with the Fox: a tubby, ferretlike little fellow with horn-rimmed glasses and a pencil mustache, who in reality was a disbarred lawyer by the name of Norman Whitaker. Despite having been a chess champion and having earned degrees at two prestigious universities, Whitaker was a convicted auto thief whose latest arrest had been for using slugs in a pay telephone. Mrs. McLean looked on as the Fox had searched the summer house for hidden microphones. The place was clean, and he told her nervously that he’d go confer with the gang. If she breathed a word of this, they would rub her out. A frightened Mrs. McLean vowed to keep silent.
The Fox showed up the next day, saying that the gang, fearing a trap, had left Aiken and was in Juárez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. Mrs. McLean, Means, and a professional nurse for the baby went to El Paso. After returning from an alleged meeting in Juárez with the kidnappers, Means told Mrs. McLean that because the ransom money they had received bore listed serial numbers and they couldn’t spend any of it, the gang wanted her to give them thirty-five hundred dollars in bills that were not listed or marked. Mrs. McLean went straightaway back to Washington, D.C., where she tried to raise the needed funds by selling pieces of her jewelry to a friend so her bankers wouldn’t know what she was about. The friend ratted to Mrs. McLean’s lawyer. After listening to his client’s story, the lawyer made her realize she was being swindled.
On April 17, the day before John Hughes Curtis went to Sorrel Hill and told Lindbergh about meeting with his John and the kidnapping gang, Gaston Means called Mrs. McLean from Chicago only to be informed that she had found out he was a fake and she wanted him to return the $104,000 he had taken from her. Means professed to be aghast at the accusation and vowed that if need be to protect his good name, he would rekidnap the child from the kidnappers. As for the $104,000, he would go dig it up at his brother’s house in Concord, North Carolina, and bring it to her. Good to his word, he showed up at her house a few days later but without the money. He did have an explanation of why this was. Means definitely had the $104,000 in hand when he started back to Washington; however, along the way he had been flagged down by a man waving a lantern on a bridge. The man had whispered to him, “Number One.” Knowing that this was the code name for a member of the kidnapping gang, Gaston had given the man the money, all of it! Mrs. McLean demanded he leave her home. Then she called her lawyer. Her lawyer called J. Edgar Hoover.
At dawn on Thursday, April 21, Lindbergh and Curtis were in a rented boat near East Quarter Lights, off Block Island, the location specified by the gang. Also aboard were Curtis’s friend E. B. Bruce and Lieutenant George L. Richard, commandant at the Norfolk Naval Air Station, who had been assigned to assist the operation. The kidnappers’ boat, the Teresa Salvatore, did not show up. Lindbergh, Curtis, and their party went
to a New York City hotel previously agreed to by the gang. While the others slept and ergo could not hear, according to Curtis, he received a call from Hilda, who explained that the gang had aborted the rendezvous when they spotted fishing boats in the area. She said they wanted to meet them the next day and gave a location off the Virginia capes, near the Chesapeake Lightship.
Lindbergh, Curtis, and their entourage sailed for the rendezvous on the yacht Marcon, which had been lent to them for the duration of the search. Once at sea, Curtis informed the others of what he had obviously been informed of by Hilda: The boat they should now be looking for was a black-hulled Gloucester fisherman named Mary B. Moss, which had most probably been disguised as the Teresa Salvatore. The Mary B. Moss never appeared. Back in port Curtis received another late-night call from Hilda to which no one else was privy. Hilda said the Mary B. Moss and its kidnappers had developed engine trouble and returned to port for repairs but would be at the original rendezvous spot. Two days of bad weather kept the Marcon in port; sailing on the third day produced no sightings of the Mary B. Moss.
On Wednesday, April 27, with bad weather again keeping the Marcon idle and docked, Curtis flew to New York City on the pretext of meeting with Hilda. Who he actually saw was William E. Haskell, Jr., the assistant to the president of the New York Herald Tribune. Unbeknownst to Lindbergh, Schwarzkopf, and most everyone else, the seemingly prosperous shipyard operator was in serious financial trouble. The New York Daily News had already put in a bid for the story of his dealings with the kidnappers, with the proviso that he make the baby available only to them for photographs. What he was trying to elicit from the Tribune for these exclusive rights was a twenty-five-thousand-dollar advance. The Trib was willing to meet his price once the baby was returned and if Lindbergh agreed. Curtis accepted the terms.
Though there was generally consistent coverage of the Curtis-Lindbergh sea search for the baby, the media’s interest in the case was on the wane. Jafsie’s statements and activities still managed to get into print, but not many papers allotted space to the announcement by two previously well-publicized go-betweens, Salvatore Spitale and Irving Bitz, that it was flat-out asinine for Condon to have paid fifty thousand dollars to some clown in the dark before having the baby in tow. Pointing out that their professional opinions had been ignored, the two career gangsters publicly withdrew their services from the investigation.
A more discreet go-between was also about to end his association with the case and with liberty in general. Because Gaston B. Means had received the $104,000 dollars from Mrs. McLean within the boundaries of the District of Columbia, the jurisdiction to pursue the possible fraud went to J. Edgar Hoover’s Bureau of Investigation. A review of the McLean complaint led to the issuing of a warrant for Gaston’s arrest, which BI agents couldn’t serve unless he was on D.C.’s turf. Means obliged them on May 5, by rolling up in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. The great car was promptly cut off by BI special agents, who arrested him. The smooth-talking and amusing Means, who had been dismissed from the BI years before by J. Edgar Hoover, was questioned by a man with absolutely no sense of humor: J. Edgar Hoover. Gaston professed profound shock that Mrs. McLean’s money hadn’t been returned to her. His light-hearted assurances that he wouldn’t sue the BI for false arrest were wasted on J. Edgar, who had him locked up.
Charles Lindbergh not only knew that Mrs. McLean had given Gaston Means a hundred thousand dollars to pay the kidnapping gang, but he had tacitly endorsed the transaction. On Friday, May 6, while still aboard the Marcon, which bad weather had kept in port most of the week, he received word of Means’s apprehension.
For the public at large, the Means arrest was one of the few stories to appear in the papers regarding the Lindbergh kidnapping that weekend. A lack of manhunt hard news had allowed local, national, and world events to reappropriate the country’s headlines and front pages. As often as not, no mention at all was made of the crime.
The New York Herald Tribune continued to run daily boxes of two and three paragraphs on the inner pages that summarized the previous day’s events in “The Lindbergh Case.” The Trib’s Tuesday, May 10, recapitulation for May 9—“the sixty-ninth day since the baby was snatched from its crib”—reported that the sea-search negotiators who were trying to contact the kidnappers had “shifted their activities,” and Vincent Ogle was apprehended and held for questioning after coming off a boat in Boston with his infant son, who bore a “faint resemblance to the Lindbergh child.” Father and child were later cleared and released.
Because of the rough seas the week before, Lindbergh, Curtis, and their party had switched from the yacht Marcon to the more durable Cachalot, an eighty-five-foot ketch. On Monday, May 9, the Cachalot found no trace of the Mary B. Moss in the vicinity of Five Fathoms Banks off Cape May—the latest location where the gang was supposed to be waiting, according to what Hilda had told only Curtis. Back in port at Cape May the morning of May 10, Lindbergh, to avoid lingering newsmen, remained aboard, where he kept abreast of progress in other aspects of the investigation through coded cables from Schwarzkopf. Curtis had left the boat and gone to sort matters out with Hilda. The news he returned with was not good. Hilda had told him that a bitter dispute had split the gang into two groups. Her husband, Dynamite, headed the one that wanted to cancel their arrangement with Curtis and offer the baby to the highest bidder. John opposed him. Sam had worked out a compromise that kept the gang intact. The rendezvous would have to wait until the sea calmed.
The New York Herald Tribune’s May 11 two-paragraph Lindbergh-case summary reported that the day before, John Hughes Curtis and his aides were still absent from Norfolk, Virginia, another attempt to extort ransom money from Lindbergh had failed, and the unknown extortionist had eluded the trap set for him.6
A second extortion plot being more extensively reported in a different Trib story on May 11, as well as in other newspapers, involved new accusations against Gaston B. Means. Only a few hours after his being indicted for defrauding Mrs. McLean of $104,000, authorities were investigating allegations that he had bilked much more money out of Mrs. Finley Shepard, the daughter of robber baron Jay Gould, by claiming he could provide information on a Communist plot that imperiled her child and her fortune. By May 11, Mrs. McLean had heard from another would-be extortionist-go-between. His name was Arthur L. Hitner, a convicted con man who, under the alias of Markle, wrote a come-on letter to Mrs. McLean that ended up in the hands of the Bureau of Investigation.
16
Eagles Depart
Lindbergh was away May 12, 1932, when the news reached Sorrel Hill that put an end to the chaos surrounding his son’s disappearance.
At approximately 3:15 P.M. that rain-swept afternoon, Orville Wilson stopped his truck along a section of the Princeton-to-Hopewell highway known as Mount Rose Hill so that his forty-six-year-old black helper, William Allen, could go into the woods and relieve himself. The two men had come from Princeton with a load of lumber destined for Hopewell. The spot where Wilson chose to park was on high ground one mile beyond Mount Rose, a tiny farming hamlet of twelve houses. Allen made his way up through the dense tangle of underbrush, thick stands of scrub oak, second-growth maple, and locust trees. If he had continued to the top of the rise and weather permitted, he would have had a clear view of the Lindbergh house some four miles across the valley. After passing a large, rotted stump of an oak tree, Allen ducked under a low-hanging limb, did a take, and cautiously approached what looked like a “skull lying in a hole.”1 It was a baby’s skull, a section of which was broken.
Allen rushed to the truck, got Wilson, and brought him back. The body lay face down in a hollow, and except for a protruding foot was almost completely covered by leaves and dirt. What looked like a dress or underwear was bunched up on the child’s back. Not all that far away in the underbrush was the auxiliary telephone cable from Princeton that led to the police command post in the Lindbergh garage and had been laid during the opening days of the manhunt.
Walsh, Keaten, and Coar were taken to the dead baby in the woods by the trooper and detective at approximately 3:45 P.M. Frank Kelly, the state-police fingerprint expert, and a crime-scene photographer arrived soon after, and then Detective Warren Moffat of the Newark PD. Leaves and dirt were cleared away. The body was lying in a natural hollow. It was partially clothed and badly decayed. The left leg was missing, apparently devoured by small animals. The right forearm was gone, as was the left hand. Parts of the face were recognizable, and there was a tuft of curly blond hair on the head. It seemed to be the Eaglet, but Walsh wanted to be sure. He and Moffat drove across the valley to the Lindbergh estate. Without revealing that they had found a body, the two officers talked with Betty Gow and got a detailed description of what the baby was wearing the night it disappeared, as well as samples of thread and the flannel used in one of the garments.