by Noel Behn
The author believes that more than likely, Henry Breckinridge came to Sorrel Hill on Saturday, February 27, but not as a casual weekend guest. He had been called because of the baby’s death, summoned to advise Lindbergh on how to save Elisabeth and the family. At long last, and possibly with the assistance of William J. Donovan, the idea of turning the death into a kidnapping was arrived at and a plan worked out.
The author was unable to find records that indicate the whereabouts of William J. Donovan over the February 27 weekend of 1932. He was no more successful developing information of this sort regarding Miss Root, the nursemaid who accompanied the baby and supposedly went home Sunday evening. Aida Breckinridge’s movements also remain a mystery. But there was one pronounced snafu that several members of the conspiracy inadvertently participated in, thanks to the man who prided himself on never forgetting an appointment: Charles Lindbergh.
According to the writer Joyce Milton in her recently published biography of the Lindberghs, Loss of Eden, Henry Breckinridge was actually at the NYU All Alumni Centennial Dinner and had telephoned Lindbergh, who was scheduled to speak at the gala, but failed to appear.5 The source of Milton’s material seems to be the FBI’s 407-page Summary Report of the crime, in which it is inferred that Henry was in attendance.6 There are reasons to question the summary’s information. First off, the bureau had been effectively cut off from the investigation. While special agents eventually gained access to many peripheral characters, like Condon and Thayer, they never officially interviewed the Lindberghs or Breckinridge and very often went on rumor and hearsay. A second reason is that the Summary Report is reputedly gleaned from individual agent’s reports, but a search of the entire bureau documentation on the case, an estimated 140 individual volumes consisting of an average of three hundred pages each plus various appendixes, which was conducted by this author’s representative, lawyer Joel Starr, during the month of February 1993, uncovered no mention of the NYU banquet, Breckinridge being there, or Lindbergh not attending. New York University’s seating list of the centennial’s eighteen hundred guests does not include Breckinridge’s name, but it places Lindbergh on the nineteen-man dais, not as a speaker but as one of two guests of honor.7 The FBI Summary Report is dated February 16, 1934, a year and eleven months after the fact, and goes into exquisite detail, backing up the proposition that Lindy got the date of the Waldorf banquet wrong because he was misinformed.
Daniel J. Guggenheim had been Lindbergh’s benefactor and friend. It was Guggenheim’s Foundation for the Promotion of Aeronautics that had sponsored the Lone Eagle’s post-France flights across America in The Spirit of St. Louis and helped make him a wealthy man. At the alumni dinner Guggenheim was to receive a special tribute for the good work he had done on behalf of American University from the Chancellor of NYU, Elmer Ellsworth Brown.8 Lindbergh accepted an invitation to be one of two special guests. The fete was to take place at New York City’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on March 1, 1932, and thanks in part to Lindbergh’s announced appearance, it had received advance publicity in the local newspapers. On the Friday before the big event, an NYU secretary called to remind Lindbergh’s office, possibly speaking to Elizabeth Sheet, Lindy’s secretary, of his commitment that coming Tuesday. Festivities were to get under way between 6:00 and 6:30 that evening, and the caller was assured that he would be prompt.
One of the first things Lindbergh did after discovering his child was gone was call Henry Breckinridge. Did he call him at the Waldorf-Astoria? Most likely not. But if he did, why wasn’t Henry, who claimed to have rushed straight to Sorrel Hill, in dinner clothes? The Waldorf event was formal—and no newspaper account of Henry’s arrival at the estate says he wore formal garb.
The FBI Summary Report states that once at home, Lindbergh called the Waldorf and apologized for his absence. The author could find no corroboration for this.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, in her published correspondence and diaries for the evening of March 1, 1932, makes no mention of the missed NYU alumni celebration or of anyone’s attempting to reach her husband regarding the waiting dinner guests at the Waldorf-Astoria. If, as the evening’s sponsors had believed, Henry Breckinridge was trying to reach Lindbergh regarding his absence, would Anne, forty years later, have bothered to include it with the other events of that critical night? The answer is most likely no. But why not incorporate it into her 1932 sworn statements of March 11 and 13 to the state-police investigation team that was trying to ascertain everything that occurred at the house March 1, including that evening’s incoming phone calls. The signed transcripts for Anne, Charles, and the staff contain no reference to such a call from Breckinridge or to Lindy’s phoning the Waldorf. But they mention a call from Betty Gow’s boyfriend, Red Johnsen, at around 9:00 P.M.—and another that came in earlier, from Charles Lindbergh, who told Anne he would be late for dinner.
Lindbergh’s call to Anne, saying he would be late, had been received at approximately 7:00 P.M., an hour after the NYU sponsors, who didn’t have his unlisted number in Hopewell, were so desperately attempting to locate him.9 Where had he been calling from? The first assumption would have to be New York City, the place he usually went to work each day. He had claimed to have remained overnight in Manhattan the previous evening, February 29, and there had been no indication he left the city prior to his 7:00 P.M., March 1, call to Hopewell. Charles Lindbergh was not a frivolous fellow and certainly not one who displayed a high profile. The two most likely New York locations at which to find him would have been the office he maintained at Henry Breckinridge’s law firm and the East Side Morrow apartment, where he and Anne stayed when in the city.
If Lindbergh had been in New York City until 7:00 P.M., March 1, why couldn’t Henry Breckinridge find him when the panicked sponsors of the NYU centennial dinner contacted Henry about their missing guest of honor? The call from NYU came in at around 6:00 P.M., which would have given Breckinridge a full hour to get to Lindbergh. It was reported in the newspapers that the dinner’s sponsors had talked directly to Henry—by phone. Would they have phoned him when he was right there attending the function? Could the phone conversation not have happened? Had they only left a message for him? If they had left such a message—say at his office—wouldn’t whoever answered the phone have known that Lindbergh was there, assuming he was, or that he was over at the Morrow apartment? Wouldn’t it seem reasonable that Breckinridge, having gotten direct or indirect word of his client’s failure to appear at the Waldorf-Astoria, could have reached Lindbergh, if Lindbergh was still in the city? Obviously Henry had not. But had he even tried? Or had he known that Lindbergh was somewhere else, tending to more serious business? Could Henry have been with him? There was a saying among cold war espionage operatives that a lie stays in place, and the truth shifts. Could 7:00 P.M., Tuesday, March 1, have been a lie? Could it have been part of a rehearsed cover story meant to mislead investigators and the media—a fib that backfired by staying in place when the truth began to emerge? In later press accounts even the NYU sponsors tried to push back the time the event began.
Green inferred a simpler and more predictable explanation of the NYU matter. In the rush to prepare their grand conspiracy, Lindbergh and Breckinridge had completely overlooked the alumni dinner until Henry received the sponsors’ phone call. With the curtain about to go up on their grand conspiracy, the Waldorf-Astoria gala was ignored. At 7:00 P.M., Lindbergh could very well have been at Hopewell, or he may have driven back into the city so he could turn around and motor home again, making it appear as if he had just come from work. Henry Breckinridge may have driven back to New Jersey with him or stayed on in Manhattan, waiting to be called back out to Sorrel Hill after the feigned discovery of a bogus kidnapping.
During the deluge of early media coverage of the child’s disappearance, Breckinridge had done what he could to quash the NYU snafu by having the dinner’s sponsors agree that they had given Lindbergh the wrong date. The explanation turned out to be vintage Lone Eagle-Colonel Henry s
leight of hand. Reporters, rushing off in all directions after nonexistent kidnappers, paid little heed to a missed dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. The Lindbergh-Breckinridge news blackout was once more firmly in place, with friendly publications being fed what the conspirators wanted them to write and with hostile journalists reduced to secondhand sources and wanton rumor. It was left for reporters far less sophisticated than the Lone Eagle and Colonel Henry had anticipated to discover another weak link at the very root motive of the conspiracy’s master plan: Elisabeth.
If it was to protect Elisabeth and the Lindbergh-Morrow family names that a conspiracy was conceived and carried out, the deception had been amazingly successful. Elisabeth was not mentioned in any sworn statements given to official investigators by Charles and Anne Lindbergh, Ollie and Elsie Whateley, Betty Gow, Henry Breckinridge, or even Henry Ellerson, the Morrow chauffeur who allegedly drove her to the estate on Saturday, February 27. In the files of the official state-police investigation as well as in the records of the attendant inquiries, such as those conducted by the Bureau of Investigation and the New York Police Department, there is nothing to indicate that Elisabeth had been at Sorrel Hill that weekend.
Henry Breckinridge controlled the flow of the crime and manhunt information emanating from investigation headquarters at the Lindbergh estate and in Trenton. Aida Breckinridge was the unofficial press secretary for Anne Morrow. Family spokesmen, such as Arthur Springer, secretary of the Morrow estate, made sure Mrs. Dwight Morrow, Constance Morrow, Dwight Jr., Lindbergh’s mother, and other relatives were protected from the media. The spokespeople also issued press releases concerning each of their wards, often with direct quotes, and allowed an occasional interview and photograph. Mrs. Morrow had been the most quoted, then came Lindy’s mother, and for a time, Elisabeth.
Confusion about Elisabeth’s whereabouts occurred from the outset. Many publications reported that she had gone to Sorrel Hill in the wake of the kidnapping; others said she hadn’t or made no mention of her. Arthur Springer confirmed for the Evening News of Newark that on the morning of March 2, Elisabeth had accompanied her mother, Mrs. Dwight Morrow, to the Lindbergh estate, where they planned to stay. The story appeared in the paper’s early edition for the second. In a later edition that day, Springer was quoted as saying Elisabeth had remained in Englewood while her mother and her mother’s sister had gone to Hopewell. On March 3, the Bergen Evening Record, a local New Jersey publication with excellent area sources, forced Arthur Springer to admit that he didn’t know where Elisabeth was.
The story in the Bergen Evening Record that prompted Springer’s admission was datelined March 3. It ran on page two and was captioned ELISABETH MORROW NOT IN ENGLEWOOD, FAMILY REFUSES TO DIVULGE HER WHEREABOUTS. The text went on to say that
the whereabouts of Miss Elisabeth Morrow, sister of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and an aunt of Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., is carefully guarded from the public by her family.
Members refuse to divulge where Miss Morrow is staying, though admitting that she has not attended her Little School on the Englewood Hill for the last few days. At the nursery school at the Memorial House, which Miss Morrow volunteered to supervise this year, it was said that Miss Morrow has not been seen there for the last week.
Rumors that she is ill began to circulate last Tuesday, when she became indisposed following the extraction of an infected tooth.
Arthur Springer, secretary of the late Senator Morrow, today said that he did not know her whereabouts, and refused to try to find out.
Miss Morrow’s absence was first discovered this morning when teachers at the Little School on the Englewood Hill told reporters that she had not appeared at the institution yesterday and that she was not expected today. The Englewood Memorial Building nursery school reported that she has been absent for the last week.
When approached shortly before noon today, Springer said that he does “not know where she is,” and swept the matter aside by stating that if “Miss Morrow were any place where the family would feel apprehensive for her safety, I would know.”
Mr. Springer was called to the telephone as a last resort, when two other secretaries were unwilling to satisfy inquiries. It was at first said that Miss Morrow had not been seen at the Morrow estate during the last few days.
The page-two March 3 exposé in the relatively obscure Bergen Evening News divulging that Elisabeth was missing and that her current whereabouts were being kept a secret was ignored by a media intent on deluging the public with every iota of information, verified or rumored, that directly related to the manhunt and kidnapping and to whom Anne Lindbergh’s older sister appeared to be only a peripheral character in the tragedy. Nonetheless, what appeared to be a minor media blitz to establish that Elisabeth was not in the least missing also began on March 3 with the New York Mirror, which claimed that she had remained at the Morrow Englewood estate and had forgone teaching her kindergarten class the previous day. The New York World-Telegram, an afternoon publication, ran a page-nine article, again on March 3, entitled CHILD’S AUNT TELLS CUTE THINGS HE DOES, which quoted Elisabeth as reputedly saying about her nephew, “He used to come to the school a great part of the time to play with other little children, although he wasn’t enrolled. He would play in the swings and slides and he was always very cute and lively.” On the following day, the New York Telegraph ran essentially the same story on its front page. A March 5 release from the Associated Press placed Elisabeth at Hopewell, doing what she could “to aid” and reporting that she had gone to her private school in Englewood only long enough to transact necessary business.10 A March 10 newspaper release included a 1929 photograph of Elisabeth along with the news that she had remained behind at Englewood and had taken “the reins from Anne” in regard to a critical function at Sorrel Hill: supervising the Morrow household staff, which prepared the meals for personnel manning the investigation headquarters set up at the Lindbergh estate.11
The post-March 3 newspaper accounts that claimed Elisabeth was at Englewood—and, ergo, not missing—appeared to be general press-release material and contained nothing to indicate that a reporter had actually talked to her. Nowhere in the text of these releases was there anything to effectively counter the Bergen Evening News claim that Elisabeth was not at Englewood when the child was reported stolen.
“They had taken her away somewhere,” contended Harry Green, who was certain that the Morrow household staff had been sworn to secrecy in the matter. Green further believed that Elisabeth had been brought back to Englewood after a week or so, in an attempt to establish that everything was normal, and that later she was again sent away. This jibed with the first actual sighting of Elisabeth, reported March 9 in the Bergen Evening News, which stated she had been seen walking rapidly from the Morrow house shortly after 11:00 that morning.
An indication that the Green-Hoffman scenario had taken into account the information in the March 3 Bergen Evening News article surfaced in Los Angeles on June 25, 1986. Green, who was lunching with the author, said, “Look at the Evening News. They printed the story. We already knew it.”
Green later indicated that photographs of Elisabeth taken before and after the child’s demise would provide further proof of her implication. The earliest postdeath picture the author could locate was an Associated Press photo taken June 13, 1932, showing Elisabeth disembarking from the ocean liner S.S. Mauritania at Plymouth, England. She was wearing a black armband in memory of her nephew—and she had changed dramatically, aged and transformed to the point where she was almost unrecognizable. The eternal smile was gone, and her face was gaunt and masklike.
“People who knew her said she was never the same after her nephew’s death,” Green contended. “She never forgave Anne for marrying Lindbergh. She got even and paid the price.”
On March 1, 1932, the whereabouts of an object, not a person, was to cast its own shadow on the Lindbergh plot. The ransom message, sealed in an unmarked envelope, was the instrument intended to establish that a k
idnapping had been perpetrated and to steer investigators away from truth regarding the Eaglet’s death. At first, Lindbergh and Breckinridge officially denied that a letter had been found. Later they claimed a ransom envelope was discovered when Lindbergh, Anne, and Betty Gow first rushed into the childless nursery.12 By March 21, 1932, an announcement revealed that the ransom message was found some hours after the baby’s disappearance.13
Lindbergh, Anne, Gow, and the Whateleys, who were in and out of the nursery until constable Charles Williamson and Chief Wolfe arrived at 10:55 P.M., made no mention of seeing the ransom letter in their sworn statements. However, a short time later Lindbergh pointed to an unopened, unmarked envelope on a sill in the nursery and told the two Hopewell policemen it contained word from the kidnappers. How did he know? And who left it there? Apparently not Anne and the staff, who still weren’t aware that a message existed. Was it placed there by the nonexistent kidnappers? When opened, the envelope did contain a ransom message. So Lindbergh was right again, just as he had been earlier when viewing the empty crib and telling Anne, “They’ve stolen our baby.”14
Charles Lindbergh was a creature of discipline, so it was understandable that he calmly waited out the hour or so it took for fingerprint experts to arrive, dust the envelope and letter, and then have the message read. In this instance, Lindy certainly gave the impression that fingerprints were important to the police’s case. But seldom again. Lindy and Breckinridge treated the next twelve messages with near reckless abandon vis-à-vis fingerprints.
In their 1993 book Crime of the Century: The Lindbergh Kidnapping Hoax, Gregory Ahlgren and Stephen Monier are also troubled by the appearance of the first ransom message. Ahlgren, a criminal defense lawyer and Monier, a veteran chief of police, ask why, if the note had been left by the kidnappers, wasn’t it seen earlier?15 They postulate that perhaps it wasn’t seen earlier because it wasn’t there. What the two crime experts find atypical is that the message was left on a windowsill. In their experience, a professional criminal would have been more likely to leave the note in the empty crib.