by Noel Behn
Ellis Parker, Sr., Burlington County detective and arguably New Jersey’s greatest crime buster, was leaning toward a single-writer, single-kidnapper theory. He was pretty certain who it was, but he wanted confirmation. He had samples of his suspect’s penmanship, and on August 22 he wrote to H. Norman Schwarzkopf, requesting a photostatic copy of the original ransom note, which he promised to show to no one. The trooper boss wrote back on August 24:
My Dear Mr. Parker
Permit me to acknowledge receipt of your esteemed communication of recent date and with reference thereto, would state, that we are not authorized to give out any copies of any of the ransom notes other than those officially released for publication.
If you have any documents which you wish to compare with the original note, if you will submit them to us we will have the comparison made by the experts working on the case and inform you of the findings.
Regretting that we cannot comply with your request, I beg to remain,
Very truly yours
H. Norman Schwarzkopf
Colonel and Superintendent,
New Jersey State Police10
Two days after that, on August 26, Parker sent a letter to Governor A. Harry Moore, in which he enclosed a copy of H. Norman’s response to his request. The state’s chief executive was reminded that early on in the investigation he had urged Parker to study the Lindbergh case. Parker wrote that he had and that he now knew the “calibre” of the kidnapper. He then complained that
it looks to me as though the State Police do not intend to let any officer, outside of their own, have any information that might clear up this case, as they will not release anything for fear some one else will solve the problem and they are using this method to get them to bring any information to them.
Early in this case, the various police organizations and County Detective organizations appealed to me. I did not want to do anything that was unethical and felt the State Police should have full sway.
If I had a photostat copy of the ransom note, that I might study it, I would know for certain whether my deductions are right.
You will note in the Colonel’s letter, where he says, “that we are not authorized to give out any copies of any of the ransom notes other than those officially released for publication.” I don’t know who he means by “we” and that is the reason I am writing to you.
If this case is in charge of some other individual, I would certainly be pleased to receive a communication from you, informing me who they are, that I might get in touch with them.
I have always labored under the impression that the State Police were conducting this investigation.
Trusting you will use your power to see that I get a photostat copy of the original ransom note and I assure that it will not be given out to anyone. I only want to study it.
I remain,
At your service.
Ellis Parker Sr.11
There is nothing to indicate that Parker was given a copy of the original note. The man he now suspected to be the kidnapper-murderer, as well as author of the ransom notes, was the go-between he himself had recruited: Paul Wendel.
Charles Lindbergh emerged from private life and once again became involved with the crime, this time at a federal courtroom in Washington, D.C. It was June 8, and Gaston B. Means was on trial for extorting $104,000 from Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean. The BI was in charge of the case and didn’t seem much concerned that Gaston was now claiming he had returned all the money. Lindbergh testified as to the kidnapping, for dramatic effect more than for substantive purposes. He attended every session of the trial and resided at Mrs. McLean’s sumptuous home during his stay. On Monday, June 13, the jury retired. It took only two hours for it to find Means guilty. On the fifteenth of June 1932, the judge sentenced him to fifteen years in prison.
A dozen days after that, the trial of John Hughes Curtis began at the Hunterdon County Courthouse in Flemington, New Jersey. Curtis was charged with obstruction of justice in the Lindbergh case. Defending him was a local lawyer by the name of C. Lloyd Fisher. As had been the situation at the Means trial, Lindbergh was present. He sat at the table of the prosecuting attorney, Anthony Hauck, the Hunterdon County district attorney. Since the act of reporting false information was not a crime in New Jersey, the state would have to link it to a circumstance that was prosecutable. Hauck did this by claiming that Curtis, rather than perpetrating a hoax, was in touch with the actual kidnappers and in an effort to frustrate their apprehension had provided authorities with false information. The media made it blatantly evident that Curtis had concocted the story about a gang, but the prosecution dealt with the mythical criminals as if they were flesh and blood. Two and a half days later the jury found Curtis guilty as charged. The judge sentenced him to a year in jail and fined him a thousand dollars.
If Lindbergh estimated the crime was now finally behind him, he was wrong.
H. Norman Schwarzkopf and Inspector Harry Walsh were certain that Violet Sharpe, a Morrow household maid, was connected to the kidnapping-murder. Mrs. Morrow’s entire twenty-eight-person contingent of maids, cooks, chauffeurs, grounds keepers, and others had been brought from Morrow’s New Day Hill in Englewood to the Lindbergh home at Sorrel Hill in the weeks following the disappearance. The chauffeur Henry Ellerson was one of the first to be interviewed because he had driven Betty Gow to Sorrel Hill on March 1. Like Ellerson, almost all other Morrow employees passed their interviews with flying colors. Not Violet Sharpe. She had not told the truth in the opinion of Harry Walsh and Schwarzkopf. Why else would she lie about her whereabouts the night of the kidnapping, unless she was implicated? Well, not exactly lie, just not be able to remember the name of the man whom she went out with that night and the other couple who was along. There were other inconsistencies as well. And what about her hostile attitude at being questioned about her private life? They thought she was guilty. Of what, Walsh wasn’t all that sure. But he was not about to let her get away with it. Lindbergh was reported to have been incensed at the suggestion Sharpe had premeditatedly abetted the kidnapper-murderer, but he did allow that this might have happened without her knowledge.
Violet underwent her third state-police interrogation on May 23. It was conducted by Walsh with Lindbergh and Schwarzkopf looking on. Little was accomplished. Lindbergh noted that Violet was scared and upset but did nothing to stop Walsh from having at her again.12 Seventeen days later, on Thursday, June 9, Walsh resumed his questioning—and would later admit that he was “shocked” by Violet’s deterioration since their last encounter. She had lost fifty pounds and was generally wasted. This did not keep him from grilling her, ostensibly about one Ernest Brinkert, whose business cards had been found in her room. Violet became hysterical. Walsh resented the fact that a doctor was called, and he refused to leave. The doctor attested that Violet was on the verge of a breakdown and ordered the questioning to end. Walsh was incensed. To him she was faking.13
At 10:00 the next morning Walsh phoned the Morrow house with news that Lieutenant Keaten would pick up Violet and take her to the state-police barracks at Alpine for further interrogation. Panicked at the prospect, she hurried upstairs to her room, took a can down from her wardrobe closet, and poured some of the white powder it contained into a glass, which she filled with water and drank. She made her way downstairs and collapsed. A doctor was there in a matter of minutes. It was too late. Violet Sharpe was dead from the cyanide chloride she had ingested.
Walsh was unrepentent about the death. Schwarzkopf, in an effort to downplay the incident, distorted some facts, held back on others, and tried to point the blame anywhere but at himself and his organization. Violet’s demise, in the opinion of the trooper boss, was confirmation of her possible involvement in the crime. A tribute to Schwarzkopf’s sublime shortsightedness in regard to public relations was his confidence that the distortions and half-truths had vindicated his actions and effectively stemmed any criticism that might have been raised against him and the trooper investi
gation.14 H. Norman was wrong again.
Headlines across the nation and in many European countries condemned the state police for killing Violet Sharpe and demanded the organization be held accountable and punished. The banner of the London Daily Telegraph saw the death as a DISGRACE TO AMERICAN JUSTICE. Anne Lindbergh was moved to wonder what a crude and imperfect world we live in—that we understand nothing.15 Publicly, Lindy and Henry Breckinridge stood behind Schwarzkopf.
Evidence that the business cards found in Violet’s bedroom—the pretext Walsh had used for grilling her the day before her death—were probably planted did not help the troopers’ cause. The three people whose names she could not remember came forward and identified themselves. None was connected with the kidnapping-murder. The state police still wouldn’t concede Violet’s innocence, a posture they maintained until they were able to perform a slight bit of character assassination and contend that she had lied to them to cover up a series of sexual affairs with various men. History was to show little sympathy for the troopers’ point of view. Sharpe’s death remains a despicable black mark against the New Jersey State Police.
Good news for the Lindberghs arrived Tuesday morning, August 16, at Mrs. Morrow’s New York City apartment. Anne gave birth to her second child, a seven-pound, fourteen-ounce boy to be named Jon. Few in the media commented that Jon was not all that dissimilar from John, the infamous presence who allegedly received the ransom money in St. Raymond’s Cemetery.
18
Money Chase
Five-dollar ransom notes continued to appear throughout the summer of 1932: an additional two in June, one in July, three in August, one in September. Again the bills were passed in New York City, and most were discovered in banks. Whenever the joint task force of the NYPD, the BI, and NJ troopers was able to trace a bill to its original source, the recipient was unable to say how he or she had come to have it.
With banks closing throughout America as the Great Depression continued to worsen, a beaming new face emerged on the national political scene, that of a man with one hell of a gift of oratory. It had taken three ballots before Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the governor of New York, was nominated as the presidential candidate of the Democratic party. His running mate was old, crusty John Nance Garner. Roosevelt’s handpicked candidate to replace him in the governor’s mansion in Albany was Herbert Lehman. The GOP nominee to oppose Lehman in the November election was one of the earliest advisers to Lindbergh after the disappearance of the baby, William J. Donovan. Among FDR’s first presidential-campaign promises was a pledge to end Prohibition. Herbert Lehman also came out for the repeal of Prohibition. So did William J. Donovan, which put him in direct conflict with his party’s platform. Oddly enough, it would be one of Donovan’s campaign leaflets that coined the phrase New Deal and pledged just that in Albany. Months later FDR’s forces came up with the same rallying cry of a New Deal in Washington.
The first ten-dollar gold certificate from the ransom loot was discovered on October 22, the same day that Herbert Hoover, running for reelection, cited ten indications that the degenerating economy was getting better. October also saw the recovery of a twenty-dollar gold certificate, two additional ten-dollar gold certificates, and three five-dollar notes, for a total of sixty-five dollars, the largest monthly tally yet registered. Only five five-dollar notes were recovered in November, the month in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeated Herbert Clark Hoover for the presidency by a landslide vote and William J. Donovan got soundly thrashed in the New York State gubernatorial race by Democrat Herbert Lehman. In December a five-dollar note and a ten-dollar gold certificate surfaced.
Nineteen thirty-three began with no money being recovered in either January or February, and a solitary ten-dollar gold certificate turned up in March. The fourth day of March saw fifty-one-year-old Franklin D. Roosevelt sworn in as the thirty-second president of the United States. In his inaugural address he asserted a firm belief that the only thing he and the populace had to fear was fear itself. On March 5, FDR ordered the nation’s banks closed for a four-day “holiday,” in the hopes of saving the entire system from collapse. It didn’t take long for opponents of FDR to raise the cry that he was trying to set himself up as a dictator, just as Adolf Hitler had in Germany.1
Every ransom bill to date had been found in deposits made at various New York City banks. With the exception of that traced to a candy store and an Edison Company office in Brooklyn, a cigar store in Queens, and two people living in Irvington, New York, all the recovered money was spent in Manhattan. Unlike his counterparts heading the state-police and BI detachments in New York, Jimmy Finn insisted on going into the field and talking with each recipient of a bill. He did this accompanied by a Jersey trooper, and in most instances with a special agent from the Bureau of Investigation. The modus operandi they followed was Finn’s: to conduct the interview without revealing that the currency was from the ransom loot. This was accomplished by claiming that the money was counterfeit and inquiring as to how the interviewee had come into possession of the bogus note. Most people could not remember. But two did.
In December of 1932, a salesman in a lower Manhattan men’s sportswear shop recalled receiving a listed five-dollar note from a six-foot tall, light-complected man who spoke with an accent. On March 1, 1933, a ten-dollar gold certificate was spent at a downtown cigar store by a light-complected man who had a long, thin face, was approximately six feet tall and forty years of age, and wore a soft hat and dark clothing. Both descriptions were similar to a police profile that had appeared in the papers and on circulars regarding Cemetery John.
Investigators differed as to how many people were passing the money. Some, like Finn, thought there was only one. Several bills discovered early in the ransom hunt had been spent at restaurants, which for Jimmy, at least, indicated that the passer was using the loot to supplement his ordinary income, something a well-organized gang would not allow its members to do. There were other clues as to the behavior of the passer or passers. A few bills were traced to New York burlesque houses. Other bills showed severe crease marks, which indicated that at least one of the passers had the habit of folding a ransom note tightly in three: lengthwise through the center, then through the center crosswise, and crosswise again through the center. Such a folded note could easily fit into a watch pocket.
On April 5, 1933, in preparation for the United States’ going off the gold standard in two weeks, President Roosevelt ordered that all gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates be turned in at banks of the Federal Reserve system before May 1. With gold certificates comprising the bulk of outstanding ransom money, updated lists of their serial numbers were reissued. During the remainder of April, the Federal Reserve Bank in New York retrieved twenty-eight ten-dollar gold certificates from the Condon payment, twenty-four of which had been exchanged at the Chemical National Bank at Cortlandt Street and Broadway in New York City. On May 1, the New York Fed came across twenty-six more listed ten-dollar gold certificates that had been turned in at the same Chemical National Bank. On May 2, going through the receipts for the exchanges made the last week of April at the Manufacturers Trust Company, 149 Broadway, the New York Fed found fifty ten-dollar gold certificates of ransom loot. It was another discovery that same day that made headlines.
An exchange transaction conducted directly at the New York City branch of the Federal Reserve Bank contained 297 gold certificates, all from the ransom. One of the bills was a twenty; the remaining 296 were tens, for a total value of $2,980. The teller, who had received the money the day before, May 1, could not recall who had made the exchange, but a deposit slip was attached to the currency, on which the customer had written his or her name and an address: J. J. Faulkner, 537 West 149th Street, N.Y.C. The NYPD, Jersey troopers, and Bureau of Investigation’s special agents descended. No J. J. Faulkner existed at 537 West 149th Street.
The Lindbergh case returned to the headlines, and copies of the bank-deposit slip bearing J.J.’s signature appeare
d on many a front page. Searching the records, investigators found that twelve years earlier a Faulkner family had resided not at 537 West 149th Street but at number 547. A marriage license was located that revealed that on February 17, 1921, Jane Emily Faulkner of 547 West 149th Street had married Carl Oswin Geissler of nearby Larchmont. New York handwriting expert Albert D. Osborn, who by now had devised a test by which it could be determined if someone was the author of the Lindberg ransom messages, compared Geissler’s signature on the marriage license with that of J. J. Faulkner’s on the deposit slip and proclaimed that they were similar.2 Samples were sent to the BI’s handwriting expert in Washington, who said the same person had written the two signatures. After an exhaustive probe, Geissler, his relatives, and friends were found innocent of any complicity with the crime. With what would be the organization’s most extensive manhunt, the BI continued the search for anyone whose name sounded like that. Included among those investigated by special agents was the author William Faulkner.
A battle was brewing between a pair of supreme egomaniacs who didn’t have much use for each other: J. Edgar Hoover and H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Hoover’s special agents had pursued the mysterious J. J. Faulkner with a far larger effort than both the NYPD and the New Jersey State Police could have mounted; then the BI all but dropped out of the New York money chase, ostensibly to follow other channels of investigation. The troopers, who also were searching for clues to the kidnapping-murder in other places, never abandoned the money trail. When by August of 1933 the best lead any agency had was still the passing of ransom money in New York City, the Bureau of Investigation returned to the hunt with a vengeance and a tactic. Only now the organization had a new name and was officially the Division of Investigation, or the DI.