by Noel Behn
Walsh and Moffat returned to the grave site. Walsh took a stick and attempted to maneuver the body so he could cut off the clothing. The stick slipped and punched a hole in the decomposing skull below the right ear. The garments were finally removed and laid out. They fit the description given by Gow, and the flannel sample seemed to match the material in a segment of one of the undershirts. It was 4:30 P.M. when Walsh reached the Lindbergh estate and presented the clothes to Schwarzkopf, saying that there was no doubt the little corpse was Charles Lindbergh, Jr.
The Mercer County coroner was ordered to the scene, and Betty Gow was brought to Schwarzkopf and shown the two flannel undershirts, which she identified as being the baby’s. Gow refused to believe the child was dead, insisting that Lindbergh was about to meet the kidnappers’ boat off Cape May, the boat on which the baby had been all along. Schwarzkopf telephoned the news to Henry Breckinridge in New York, and a procedure was decided on.3 Schwarzkopf cabled Lindbergh that his baby’s remains had been found; then he went into the main house and informed Anne Lindbergh and her mother, Mrs. Elizabeth Morrow.
Calls were placed to Gebhart’s Hotel in Hopewell and the statehouse press room in Trenton, notifying media people of a 5:30 P.M. press conference to be held at the very place from which they had been barred since the second day of the investigation: the Lindbergh estate.
Big, bald Mercer County coroner and privately practicing mortician Walter H. Swayze arrived at the drizzle-logged grave site on Mount Rose Hill. He made an abbreviated examination of the corpse and the area, transferred the remains to a body bag, and headed back to the county morgue, which was located at his mortuary, on Greenwood Avenue in Trenton. After he left, troopers raked the area and collected ten barrels of material, which when later culled would produce tufts of blond hair, pieces of clothing, a toenail, and twelve small bones, four of which would be determined to have come from the baby’s foot and six of which were not human.4
Reporters, who had assembled in the dining room of the state-police command post in the Lindbergh garage, were noisily speculating on what the press conference was about and why it was taking so long to get under way. During the delay Schwarzkopf called Governor Moore and informed him of the baby in the woods, as well as of the impending press conference. Moore relayed the news to a young statehouse reporter who was passing his office. The journalist, Francis Jamieson, telephoned the scoop in to his employer, the Associated Press—a scoop that would weigh heavily in his winning the 1933 Pulitzer Prize for reporting for his coverage of the Lindbergh case. After tipping off Jamieson, Moore made his own formal announcement to the media that the infant had been found.5
The baby’s corpse reached the Swayze Funeral Parlor shortly past 6:00 P.M. Betty Gow arrived soon after. She spent no more than three minutes viewing the remains before identifying them as those of Charles Lindbergh, Jr., by means of an overlapping toe on the right foot.6
The first media announcement of the dead child’s being found came at 6:12 P.M. over New Jersey radio station WOR. Minutes later a bulletin was traveling across the Times Square moving display board. By 6:30 P.M. NBC and CBS were broadcasting the word nationwide. At 6:45 P.M. H. Norman Schwarzkopf went before the press corps waiting in the garage command center. “We have to announce that apparently the body of the Lindbergh baby was found” was all he got out before pausing.7 Gasps of disbelief filled the room as he returned to his written statement, saying that the body was discovered at 3:15 P.M. by “William Allen, Negro, of Trenton, who was riding on the Mount Rose Road toward Hopewell. He was riding with Orville Wilson on a truckload of timber. They stopped the truck so he could answer a call of nature.” The New York Times would discreetly amend this sentence to read “They stopped the truck so Wilson [sic] could go into the woods on the Mount Rose Hill in Mount Rose, N.J.”8
Henry Breckinridge and Dr. Philip Van Ingen arrived at the morgue shortly after Betty Gow made her identification. Van Ingen was the New York City pediatrician who had examined Charles Lindbergh, Jr., ten days before he disappeared from his crib. Now the highly esteemed doctor studied the tiny body on the morgue table. There wasn’t that much left to go on. The sex organs were missing, along with other internal and external parts. Sixteen teeth could be counted, eight uppers and eight lowers. The pediatrician acknowledged that the corpse bore certain similarities to the Eaglet, but despite the overlapping toe he refused to identify it as that of Charles Lindbergh, Jr.9
Dr. Charles H. Mitchell, the official physician for Mercer County, reached the morgue at 6:45 P.M. Swayze, as county coroner, had authority to declare people dead and sign death certificates, but in the case of sudden, questionable, or violent death, the county physician was to conduct the examination. A large, windy man with small steel-rimmed glasses, dark gray hair, and a silver pompadour, sixty-year-old Charles Mitchell had once been the assistant surgeon at Trenton’s St. Francis Hospital. For the last eleven years he had served as the Mercer County physician. Though he wasn’t a forensic pathologist, Mitchell had performed over a thousand autopsies, a hundred of which had been done on children. Forensic expertise was available and nearby, but Mitchell never gave it a thought. He didn’t dare.
When the autopsy began, Dr. Van Ingen was surprised to see the county coroner, Walter Swayze, rather than Dr. Mitchell, pick up the medical instruments. Only the three of them were present, and Mitchell confessed to Van Ingen that he suffered from severe arthritis and could hardly move his hands. If news of this got out, he told Van Ingen, he would lose his position as county physician. He and Swayze had worked out an arrangement whereby Swayze, who was a mortician with no medical or forensic training, would perform autopsies under Mitchell’s direction. Van Ingen had four choices: leave and tell the world about the fraud, leave and tell no one, stay and later tell everyone, stay and tell no one. Van Ingen opted for the final choice. The deception, which would cause both Mitchell and Swayze to commit perjury, was to remain a secret for another fifty-eight years.10
Coroner Swayze began his superficial examination under the direction of Mitchell and with Van Ingen looking on. A leg, an arm, and a hand were missing. The lower portion of the body had been eaten away by animals. A section of skin on the right foot had kept its color—the victim was of the “white race.”11 The lips were swollen and pulled back on the teeth, sixteen of them. The large toe on the right foot completely overlapped the first and second toe. Van Ingen and Swayze assisted as Mitchell began the physical autopsy. The tiny mouth was pried open and the tongue and throat examined. The brains had turned to a stinking thick soup, which spilled out onto the autopsy table when the skull was sawed open.
Besides listing the missing body parts and saying that the sex of the dead child was undetermined, Dr. Mitchell’s autopsy report stated that the abdominal organs except for the liver were missing, that the thoracic organs except for the heart were missing, and that the skin of the head, face, and right foot was discolored and decomposed. There was evidence of a hemorrhage on the inside of the skull along the left-side fracture line. A perforated fracture the size of a bullet hole was noted near the right ear. The autopsy report’s final paragraph read, “Diagnosis of the cause of death is a fractured skull due to external violence.”12 Because no one present at the grave site had reported that Inspector Walsh accidentally poked a stick through the corpse’s skull near the right ear, Dr. Mitchell was left to assume that the small hole could have been caused by a number of objects, including a bullet, which is what he said during a post-autopsy interview.13
A two-foot-high brick wall, constructed around the grave site by troopers, as well as continued state-police patrols, had effectively preserved the scene where the body had been discovered. Whatever the security measures at Swayze’s funeral parlor-morgue in Trenton might have been, a reporter and photographer managed to gain entry, force open the casket, and take pictures of the body, copies of which would soon be on sale. For Lindbergh the ghoulish incursion was the media’s ultimate affront to him, to his family
, and to common decency.
Schwarzkopf had tried to spare Lindbergh the pain of viewing the body by assuring the Lone Eagle that the remains had definitely been identified as his son. Lindbergh’s decision not to see the baby was widely reported. Then he changed his mind. Shortly before 4:00 P.M. Saturday, May 14, Schwarzkopf drove Lindbergh and Henry Breckinridge into an alley and up to the back door of the funeral home. The three men slipped in unnoticed by the crowd and newspeople around in front. Lindbergh was led to the room where the corpse lay covered. “Take that off,” he requested. The cover was removed.
“Colonel Lindbergh, are you satisfied that this is the body of your baby?” asked Erwin E. Marshall, the Mercer County prosecutor, who was looking on.
“I am perfectly satisfied that it is my child.”14
The finding of a dead baby in the woods posed questions that would fascinate future historians. Beyond the fact that the tiny corpse was five and a half inches longer than Dr. Van Ingen’s measurement for the Eaglet ten days before his disappearance, an inference that it was older could be derived from an observation Dr. Mitchell, the county coroner, entered into his autopsy report under the category of “Special Characteristics”: “Unusually high and prominent forehead and cranium, apparently greater in circumference than would be found in child of this age. The eight lower teeth and eight upper teeth were not only the normal number for a twenty-month-old child, but for a child up to twenty-four months of age.”15
The possibility that the victim may have been dead longer than the seventy-two days since the Lindbergh baby had been first reported missing was contained in this autopsy sentence: “Body shows evidence of prolonged exposure and usual decomposition that would occur in the course of approximately two or three months’ time.”16
Arguably the manner in which the child was identified warranted reappraisal. Certainly Betty Gow had credibility. She had helped sew one of the garments by which she identified the body. Could she have lied in saying the corpse was that of the Lindbergh baby? Or was it possible she had mistaken the badly decomposed infant for Charles Jr.? Had someone removed the garments from the Lindbergh child and put them on the remains that were found in the woods? Assuming that County Detective Ellis Parker, Sr., was right and that the cadaver wasn’t Charles Jr., how could this explain Betty Gow’s final means of identification: the overlapping toes on the right foot? Wouldn’t that be the definitive way of telling who it was? Apparently not.
According to Country Prosecutor Erwin E. Marshall, Lindbergh had examined both the teeth and the overlapping toe and made his identification on the teeth alone. But how much could Lindy have known about teeth, even those of his own son? Was he that perceptive? He hadn’t been in other things relating to the missing child’s description early on. When he passed out pictures of the Eaglet in long, curly tresses, Lindbergh hadn’t remembered that his son’s hair had been cut. He had been contradictory in describing the child’s habits. Or were these distortions conjured up by the press? Could Lindbergh tell by the teeth? Tell in three minutes—which, like Gow, is all the time he spent examining the corpse?
What of Dr. Philip Van Ingen’s inability or refusal to identify the child he had examined ten days before he disappeared? Who would have known better than Van Ingen if it was the Eaglet in the morgue? The toes and teeth had made no difference to him. He didn’t say it wasn’t the Lindbergh baby, but he wouldn’t say it was. Why had he been so reluctant, and why had Betty Gow and Lindbergh been so fast and sure? Gow had viewed the body immediately after it arrived at the funeral home from the woods, which meant it might still have been caked with dirt and grime. In that condition the only identifiable thing may have been the toes.
Breckinridge had brought Dr. Van Ingen from New York to the Trenton morgue. By all accounts they got there shortly after Betty Gow left, at 6:15 P.M., and before Dr. Mitchell arrived, at 6:45 P.M. Had Breckinridge tried to pressure Van Ingen into making a positive identification? Was that what Schwarzkopf was anticipating, why he kept the roomful of reporters waiting in the Lindbergh garage? Most of the newspeople had arrived for the press conference between 5:30 and 6:00 P.M., and Schwarzkopf could have read his statement regarding the discovery of the body then, or he certainly could have read it after Betty Gow made her identification at approximately 6:15 P.M. But Schwarzkopf didn’t begin for another half hour, not until 6:45 P.M., the approximate time that Dr. Mitchell reached the morgue. It seems at least plausible that with Mitchell’s appearance Henry Breckinridge abandoned attempts to elicit Van Ingen’s identification and instructed Schwarzkopf to proceed with the press conference. Would Schwarzkopf have dared to proceed without Breckinridge’s permission?
Why was it that Schwarzkopf didn’t mention Betty Gow’s positive identification of the body at the 6:45 P.M. press conference but did at a second meeting with reporters that evening? Sometime between 4:30 and 5:00 P.M., and based on Gow’s earlier identification of the garments, he had told Mrs. Lindbergh and her mother that it was positively their baby in the woods, so why not mention Betty Gow’s name at the 6:45 P.M. conference? Didn’t he know that Gow had identified the body at the morgue? He was in touch with Breckinridge, who was at the morgue. Could it have been that Breckinridge didn’t want to go with Gow’s statement alone? Or, once again, was the delay in the initial press conference and the corresponding arrivals at the morgue coincidental?
What of Lindbergh’s decision to view the body after he had announced he would not look at it? Was the change of heart that of a father desiring to see his child one last time? Or, as again seems likely, did Henry Breckinridge suggest that it would be better if someone in addition to Betty Gow vouched for the baby’s being the Eaglet, particularly after Van Ingen’s failure to do so?
For the doubting and suspicious the seeds of a conspiracy were easily culled from the events surrounding the May 12 discovery of a tiny corpse in the woods.
At 4:25 P.M., May 13, with flash lamps popping, newsreel cameras rolling, and several hundred onlookers watching, the gray hearse bearing a small oak coffin left the Swayze Funeral Parlor. Lindbergh, Breckinridge, and Schwarzkopf followed ten minutes later. The cortege of hearse and car reached the Rose Hill Cemetery and Crematory in Linden, New Jersey, at 5:30 P.M. Lindbergh and Breckinridge waited in the home of the cemetery superintendent while Schwarzkopf accompanied the hearse to the crematory. Reporters followed. No religious ceremony was performed, and by 6:15 P.M. the cremation was complete. Lindbergh drove home to Hopewell, leaving the ashes behind. A spokesman said that the family would provide an urn and that Lindbergh planned to spread the ashes over the Atlantic Ocean. It was also explained that the family had decided on cremation rather than burial because they feared that if the child were interred, the grave might be disturbed by souvenir hunters.
For all intents and purposes, Charles A. Lindbergh’s interest in, and control over, the investigation of the crime had come to an end. Not until after the arrest of the case’s first suspect, some two years and four months later, would a new group of investigators suspect that there may not have been a kidnapping, that the child died at Sorrel Hill on Saturday, February 27, 1932, three days before he was reported missing, that Charles and Anne Lindbergh and Betty Gow were not at the estate when the death occurred but the Whateleys were—and so was someone else.
Book Three
HOUSE OF CARDS
Prelude
It seemed that the meticulous scenario concocted by Charles Lindbergh had successfully established March 1 as the estimated date of the child’s death. The New Jersey State Police and a handful of local law-enforcement operatives had blocked larger and more skilled agencies from examining the facts firsthand. A smattering of media attention focused on the whereabouts of the family and staff immediately prior to the first, but nobody suggested, or ever dreamed, that the death had occurred on Saturday, February 27, as is quite likely the case.
The conspiracy scenario had another objective: that the crime be put behind Lindbergh and his fami
ly as quickly as possible so they could return to a normal life. For a brief moment that seemed possible. He and Anne abandoned Sorrel Hill, taking up permanent residence at Mrs. Morrow’s estate in Englewood.1 Anne prepared for the arrival of a second child, expected in August. Lindy returned to the experimental work he was doing at Rockefeller Institute with the French biologist Dr. Alexis Carrel—developing a blood pump for an artificial heart. He began charting new routes for both Pan American Airways and Transcontinental Air Transport, for whom he acted as an adviser.
Charles Lindbergh miscalculated. Time, he had hoped, would diminish the public’s fascination with the crime. But the very artifice intended to shift attention away from the Lindbergh clan and staff helped perpetuate national interest: the ransom.
If Lindbergh had held firm to his original desire to pay the ransom in unmarked currency, chances of catching up to the extortionists would have been nearly impossible. But in a rare capitulation, he gave in to Irey and Jimmy Finn and allowed the recording of the ransom-loot serial numbers. Within days of its payment, bills from the fifty-thousand-dollar payment began to surface and went on surfacing for two and a half years. Public interest in the alleged kidnapping waned but never abated. Lindbergh was as far from the case as he would ever get.
The chapters to come present a greater logic, one that raises doubts about the guilt of the man who was charged with the extortion and kidnapping-death and points a finger at who the real extortionist probably was. It also renders Lindbergh, the master puppeteer, a lethal bystander, along with the New Jersey State Police. If a convincing case can be made for the innocence of the man executed for the kidnapping-murder of the child—and evidence was brought forward indicating that the extortionist in all likelihood was another—then two questions remain stronger than ever: Who murdered the baby, and who left the original ransom note on the windowsill?