by Noel Behn
Monier and Ahlgren are further fascinated by Lindbergh’s behavior after “finding” the ransom letter: he has Betty Gow come upstairs and points out the envelope for her, thereby establishing that it is there. He then has her go downstairs and fetch a knife, ostensibly so he can use it to open the letter. With the knife in hand, he leaves the message sealed. Monier and Ahlgren find that Lindbergh’s restraint in not opening the letter until fingerprints were taken was admirable. But was it believable? The instinctive action of any parent whose child had been taken would be to rip open an envelope left behind and to learn what the contents said. In the opinion of Ahlgren and Monier, Lindbergh didn’t need to open the letter. He knew what it said because he wrote it.16 According to them, he knew something else: there was no kidnapping and the baby was already dead. Monier’s and Ahlgren’s conclusion, with which the author disagrees, is that Lindbergh knew of the death because he was responsible for the child’s demise.
On December 28, nearly ten months after the death of her nephew, Elisabeth married Aubrey Neil Morgan of Brynderwem, Llandaff, Wales, at the Morrow home in Englewood. The bride had as her maid of honor and only attendant her youngest sister, Constance. She was given in marriage by her brother, Dwight Jr. Her best man was her uncle, Brigadier General Jay J. Morrow. A description of the wedding and who attended the ceremony was not made public.
Relatively few pictures of the once-photo-prone Elisabeth appeared in the wake of her marriage. Those that did showed a decidedly different woman from that of the days before her nephew’s death. During the spring of 1933, due to continued bad health, she and her husband went to live in Pasadena, California. In mid-September of 1934, Bruno Richard Hauptmann was arrested and a month later transferred to New Jersey to stand trial for the kidnapping and murder of the baby. Less than a month later Elisabeth was reported to be acutely ill after undergoing an emergency operation for appendicitis at Pasadena Hospital. She remained hospitalized as reports appeared in the papers that her condition had been complicated by a throat infection that led to pneumonia as well as by a heart problem for which she had initially entered the hospital. By November 25, her mother was by her side, and on the twenty-seventh she was reported to be “sinking.” At 2:50 A.M. December 3, 1934, Elisabeth Reeve Morrow Morgan died at the Pasadena Hospital. She was thirty years old.17 Many of the obituaries claimed she had never fully recovered from the death of her nephew.18
“We heard rumors that it may have been a suicide,” Harry Green related. “Colonel Lindbergh had identified the German’s voice, and that was really that. It was over for Hauptmann. That could have been too much for her. We believed it was possible but couldn’t find proof.”
Governor Harold Hoffman, according to Green, never doubted that Elisabeth was implicated in the child’s death but couldn’t come up with the corroboration he considered necessary to convince a court of law—or even to delay Hauptmann’s execution one more time.
Green provided no answer as to who moved the dead child away from the Lindbergh estate prior to March 1, 1932, and what was done with the body. No suggestions were offered on who had written the first random message, which was placed in the nursery. Green, when interviewed by the author in 1986, professed to have no idea who copied the original note, forged the next twelve messages, and extorted the fifty-thousand-dollar ransom. Green had a habit of pleading senility when, in the author’s opinion, it suited his purposes. Asked directly about J. J. Nosovitsky, the old lawyer remained expressionless a moment, flashed a puckish smile, and muttered, “Oh, that fellow.” Then he nodded to himself.
30
Destinies
Walter Lyle, the gas station attendant who wrote Bruno Richard Hauptmann’s license-plate number on a ten-dollar gold certificate from the ransom loot, received seventy-five hundred dollars from the reward of twenty-five thousand dollars posted by the state of New Jersey back in 1932. He was the largest recipient.1 The second biggest payment went to William Allen, the trucker’s assistant who entered the woods on Mount Rose Hill to relieve himself and came across the decomposed remains of a child. Allen had been attempting to get his share of the reward since 1932 and prompted a degree of official consternation when he appeared in a Coney Island freak show as the man who found the Lindbergh baby. The two bank tellers who spotted the bill on which Walter Lyle wrote Hauptmann’s license-plate number each received two thousand dollars. Cecile Barr, the unflappable cashier at the Greenwich Village movie house who identified Hauptmann as giving her a folded bill from the ransom loot the night of his birthday, was rewarded with one thousand dollars. One thousand dollars went to Joseph Perrone, the taxi driver who identified Hauptmann as the man who paid him to deliver a ransom message to Condon. Another one thousand dollars went to Lyle’s assistant at the gas station the night Hauptmann passed the ransom bill. Two men responsible for placing Hauptmann near the scene of the alleged kidnapping-murder, Amandus Hochmuth and Millard Whited, were each given one thousand dollars. Charles Rossiter, a surprise witness at the trial who testified to having seen Hauptmann changing a tire on his car near the Princeton airport three days before the kidnapping, got five hundred dollars. The last three thousand dollars in reward money was divided among bank employees who had spotted ransom currency.
Arthur Koehler, the wood expert, put in a claim for a share of the reward and was turned down. Jafsie Condon made no request for any of the reward money.
Rewards were paid on the recommendation of H. Norman Schwarzkopf and with the approval of Governor Harold Hoffman. At his reward interview with the governor, Amandus Hochmuth reasserted his sworn testimony that at the time of the child’s disappearance, he had seen Hauptmann drive past with a ladder in his car and head for the nearby Lindbergh estate. During the course of the meeting, Hoffman asked Hochmuth to identify an object resting on top of a cabinet several feet away. The object was a vase of flowers. Amandus, who was seventy-seven years old and suffered from cataracts in both eyes, said it was a woman’s hat.2 As late as 1988, a state policeman who was present when Hochmuth identified Hauptmann as the driver of the car with the ladder inside insisted that the old man’s eyesight was perfectly all right in 1932.3 The governor’s investigators found documentation that Hochmuth had been determined legally blind.
Millard Whited initially told state-police investigators that he had seen no one around the Lindbergh house at the time of the child’s disappearance. He later admitted that he had repeated everything the troopers rehearsed him to say in identifying Hauptmann as being near the scene of the crime. At the Flemington trial Whited denied receiving money for his testimony before the Bronx extradition hearing on Hauptmann back in 1934. Talking to Harold Hoffman in 1936, he confessed to having been paid a $150 fee by the state police, plus $35 dollars a day for expenses and a promise of reward money.4
The U.S. Justice Department, under the so-called Lindbergh law, which was enacted in 1932 as a result of the Eaglet’s abduction and death, obtained a federal grand jury indictment against Ellis Parker, Sr., and Ellis Parker, Jr. The case was tried in the federal district court at Newark in the spring of 1937. Both men were found guilty of kidnapping Paul Wendel. The Old Chief received a sentence of six years in prison; Ellis Jr., a term of three years. On February 4, 1940, Ellis Parker, Sr., died of “an organic cerebral condition” at the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.5 He was reported to be sixty-eight years old, but there were claims that he was much older.
Murray Bleefeld, Harry Weiss, and Martin Schlossman, the abductors of Paul Wendel, were tried in Brooklyn in February of 1937 for violating the New York State kidnapping law. Found guilty, each man received a twenty-year term at Sing Sing prison in Ossining, New York. Attempts to link Harold Hoffman to the Wendel kidnapping failed, but rumors persisted that the governor knew of Parker’s scheme and did nothing about it.
In 1977, the New Jersey State Police, incessantly criticized for their handling of the Lindbergh-Hauptmann case, “reviewed” their initial investigation with new and
scientific means and found that their original conclusion was perfectly correct: Bruno Richard Hauptmann had acted alone in kidnapping and killing the Lindbergh baby. Critics were not silenced. In 1981, by executive order of New Jersey’s governor, Brendan Byrne, the case files were opened to the public with the establishment of the Lindbergh Archives at the New Jersey State Police Museum in West Trenton. Today these archives offer one of the most comprehensive sources of documentation of a crime ever assembled.6
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s documentation on the Lindbergh-Hauptmann case is composed of some forty-five thousand pages, which are available to the public, by appointment, at the FBI’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. More sensitive data can be accessed via a Freedom of Information Act application. The 407-page FBI Summary Report and promotional material regarding the Lindbergh crime give a clear impression that the bureau played a major role in successfully concluding the case.
Signs that Governor Harold Hoffman had been pursuing a secret suspect can be found in his investigatory files, much of which were garnered from the state-police records on the case. Hoffman did not return the material to trooper headquarters, and it was all but forgotten until 1985, when an estimated twenty-one thousand pages of reports and related documents were discovered in his widow’s garage and turned over to the tiny East Brunswick Museum, in East Brunswick, New Jersey, which had been assembling the governor’s artifacts and personal papers. Learning of the find, the New Jersey State Police made no immediate effort to claim the material. By the time they demanded return of the data, the museum had already begun to sort through and classify the individual items. An arrangement was worked out in which the state police copied all the material and allowed the Hoffman Collection in East Brunswick to retain the originals. As of this writing, the accommodation has deteriorated, and the state police have legally moved to recover all crime-related documents from the museum.
In 1986, based in part on material found in the newly discovered Harold Hoffman Collection, Bruno Richard Hauptmann’s eighty-seven-year-old widow, Anna, brought a ten-million-dollar civil-action suit against New Jersey officials she alleged had framed her husband. Named in the court papers were David T. Wilentz and four former state troopers who played a prominent role in the investigation of the crime: Lewis J. Bornmann, William F. Horn, John B. Wallace, and Joseph A. Wolf. Among other accusations, the defendants were said to have individually and as part of a conspiracy “suborned perjury, manufactured fraudulent evidence, concealed true facts of an exculpatory nature, and participated in bribery.”7
Anna had previously sued the state of New Jersey in 1981, accusing the state of the wrongful, corrupt, and unjust execution of her husband. The case was dismissed, and she appealed to a higher court, which upheld the dismissal. Her 1986 complaint-and-demand action in the U.S. district court was destined not to help her cause any more than the 1981 litigation. The state of New Jersey asked the court to dismiss the determined widow’s latest suit, saying that Anna Hauptmann’s quest to clear her husband’s name should be left to historians. The court agreed. Anna’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was rejected. She and her lawyer Robert Bryan continue on their odyssey to establish the dead man’s innocence.
A year after the Hauptman trial, Edward J. (“Death House”) Reilly, the chief defense attorney, entered a mental institution. He suffered from paresis brought on by syphilis. Fourteen months later he was released on application from his attorney, Samuel Leibowitz. Plagued by the incurable disease, Death House returned to the practice of law as best he could. In 1940, at the age of fifty-six, he died of a stroke.
Judge Thomas W. Trenchard retired in 1941 after serving thirty-five years in the New Jersey State Supreme Court. Though highly respected, the venerable Trenchard was still nagged by what critics, including legal scholars and fellow judges, claimed was his bias against Hauptmann during the Flemington trial. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage the following year.
In 1937, Lloyd Fisher, an assistant defense counsel during the trial and Hauptmann’s prime attorney until his electrocution, was appointed by Governor Hoffman to succeed Anthony Hauck as prosecutor of Hunterdon County. Fisher practiced law in Flemington until, at the age of sixty, he died of cancer.
On June 22, 1937, three and a half years after the death of Elisabeth Reeve Morrow, Elisabeth’s widowed husband, Aubrey Neil Morgan, took as his second wife her youngest sister, Constance. The nuptials were held at Mrs. Morrow’s summer estate in North Haven, Maine.
In 1936, Mark O. Kimberling was appointed by Governor Hoffman to replace H. Norman Schwarzkopf as superintendent of the New Jersey State Police.
When Harold Hoffman failed to reappoint him as superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who had founded the trooper organization, became president of a New Jersey bus line and attained new notoriety as the narrator of one of the golden age of radio’s most popular weekly half-hour adventure broadcasts, Gang Busters. He was back in his beloved army for World War II, where his experience with police matters resulted in his heading a nine-man U.S. military mission to Iran in 1942. He spent five years in the country.8 His primary task was the reorganization and training of the Imperial Iranian Gendarmerie, whose strength he increased from some seven thousand to twenty-one thousand men while molding them into a highly efficient national police force. Their new uniforms closely resembled those worn by the New Jersey State Police, whose outfits he had personally designed back in the 1920s. Schwarzkopf was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his work in Iran, but it seems that he was never without a detractor. The same Iranian accomplishments for which H. Norman was honored by the U.S. military came under severe criticism, this time from the Soviet Union, who called him a CIA operative.
Schwarzkopf continued on in the postwar army and gained the rank of brigadier general. He organized the constabulary and the civil-intelligence unit in the American zone of occupied Germany and later, during February of 1950, headed the U.S. military mission to Italy. He was back in Iran in June of 1953, briefly and successfully, to help in a British-, and CIA-, engineered coup that ousted the regime of Mohammed Mosaddeq and reinstalled the shah.
Following his separation from the army in June of 1951, Schwarzkopf accepted several positions in New Jersey’s government, one of which was heading an investigation into the financial dealings of his old antagonist, ex-governor Harold Hoffman. H. Norman Schwarzkopf died in 1958 at the age of sixty-three.
Thirty-three years later, during 1991, his son, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, evened the score in his father’s misadventures with the media in as dazzling a public relations gambit as has been seen in modern history. General Schwarzkopf commanded the joint UN-coalition military forces aligned against Iraq in the operation known as Desert Shield, later known as Desert Storm. His father had often appeared awkward in containing a manipulative press corps that throughout the Lindbergh affair tended to beleaguer and belittle him. During the Desert Shield campaign it was General Schwarzkopf who manipulated the media, brilliantly, into believing and reporting that part of the coalition’s strategy was to invade Kuwait by sea. Iraq believed it as well, and while a goodly number of its troops dug in and waited for the amphibious onslaught, General Schwarzkopf’s columns swept inland, entrapping the entire enemy army and giving the United States one of its most decisive, spectacular, and needed victories since World War II.
Hailed by the media, the public, and politicos as the ultimate victor in the Hauptmann trial, Attorney General David Theodore Wilentz used this new-found acclaim to gain influence within New Jersey’s Democratic party. By 1940, his Middlesex Democratic organization was second only to Mayor Hague’s Hudson County Democratic machine.9 When Boss Hague was vanquished as Jersey City’s Mayor, Wilentz and several more county leaders made their move by founding the National Democratic Club of New Jersey, which wrested power from the old party committees. The 1950s saw Wilentz and a few other leaders become so powerful that they could choose gubernatorial a
nd senatorial candidates. During the 1960s the former New Jersey attorney general became a force on the Democratic National Committee and had a say in the selection of presidential and vice-presidential nominees.
Dave Wilentz grew affluent from a prestigious law practice. Among his firm’s many significant clients were Atlantic City casinos. Wilentz’s two sons joined him in his law practice, and in 1979, one son, Robert, left to become chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court. His daughter, Norma, married Leon Hess, the billionaire founder and chairman of Amerada Hess Corporation and the owner of the New York Jets football team.
When his old friend and adversary Harold Hoffman fell on financially hard times, Dave Wilentz quietly came to his rescue with money, a fact the ex-governor’s daughter Hope revealed to the author in 1990.
David Wilentz died at his home in Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1988. He was ninety-three years old.
The much-maligned Harry W. Walsh of the Jersey City Police Department, the man who never wrote reports, recited to a co-author his inside account of the Lindbergh case for the Jersey City Journal, which published it in eight installments back in 1932. Lieutenant Jimmy Finn of the New York Police Department favored Liberty magazine with late-1935 exploits entitled “How I Captured Hauptmann.” Harold Hoffman wrote of his involvement in fourteen 1938 episodes for Liberty. They were preceded by C. Lloyd Fisher’s version of events, which Liberty ran in August and September of 1936. Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean was another Liberty magazine autobiographer. Her ten installments appeared in 1938, but not all of them dealt with the case. Paul Wendel related his experiences in Liberty with a 1938 series of articles entitled “Wendel Tells All—My 44 Days of Kidnapping, Torture and Hell in the Lindbergh Case.”