Popular Crime

by Bill James

  Charles Lindbergh was the most famous man in the world, or if he wasn’t, at least I have copious references for the error. The first generation of airplanes had made local heroes of local fliers. In 1927 Lindbergh, alone, took a flimsy airplane across a great ocean, and by so doing became a hero on both sides of the Atlantic. The feat required intelligence, imagination, and tremendous courage, as several men had perished in similar efforts. Lindy didn’t, and the world adopted him. Every stride of his shoes was tomorrow’s news.

  And he married Anne Morrow, and they had a baby, and somebody stole the baby, took the baby into the cold night and murdered him. March 1, 1932. A late-winter drizzle was falling in the Sourland Mountains of New Jersey, where Lindbergh had built a retreat, hidden close to New York City on 500 acres of private land. A few minutes past nine o’clock, Lindbergh heard something crack. “What was that?” he asked his wife. She had heard nothing.

  He had heard, it is thought, the breaking of a ladder. Someone used a makeshift ladder to climb into the nursery on the second floor. As the kidnapper was leaving, or perhaps as he was entering, a rung snapped. A note was left in the nursery:

  Dear Sir

  Have 50000$ ready 25000$ in 20$ bills 15000$ in 10$ bills and 10000$ in 5$ bills After 2–4 days we will inform you were to deliver the mony We warn you for making anyding public or for notify the police The child is in gut care Indication for all letters are singnature and three holes

  The blue-and-red three-hole design, kept secret through the negotiations, would identify the kidnappers. A homemade three-part extension ladder was recovered near the house. Four things were initially surmised about the kidnapper(s):

  1) They had used the ladder to enter the nursery.

  2) The kidnapper was either German, or pretending to be German. He wrote the dollar sign after the amount of money, as the Germans do, and used the German word “gut” instead of the English “good.”

  3) The crime was not the work of a sophisticated criminal enterprise. An experienced group of criminals would have asked for more than $50,000. They probably would not have left a handwritten note. They probably would not have abandoned evidence at the scene.

  4) The kidnapper(s) may have had inside information. They apparently knew where the nursery was. They apparently knew that the Lindberghs would be there on that evening. The Lindberghs normally spent Tuesday evening at the home of Anne Morrow’s parents, closer to New York City; they had changed their plans at the last moment.

  Suspicion fell immediately upon the household staff. A follow-up note—we will call it the second note—was delivered with the mail on March 4; it raised the ransom demand to $70,000.

  There followed an awful roar from the nation’s media, which descended on Hopewell, New Jersey, in almost unimaginable numbers, and a terrible stillness from the kidnappers. For several days, while uncounted words were published in speculation, nothing was heard from the men who held the baby.

  Enter John Condon, stage left. Dr. Condon was a seventy-two-year-old physical education instructor; he lectured at Fordham on pedagogy, which at that time was not a criminal offense. Dr. Condon was a physical marvel, a tower of strength and energy, an inveterate writer of letters to the editor, and an incurable blowhard. When the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped Dr. Condon got very exercised about the subject, and decided to let off steam in his traditional way: he wrote a letter to the editor. He offered to act as an intermediary between the kidnappers and the Lindberghs, and also to put up his life savings—$1,000—to augment the reward. The Bronx Home News printed the letter as they had printed several of his previous efforts.

  To the astonishment of everybody, the kidnappers answered. They sent him a note; OK, you can be the intermediary, signature with three overlapping holes. Condon was dumbfounded, didn’t know what to do at first. After a few hours he called the Lindbergh estate. It was agreed that he would act on behalf of the Lindberghs throughout the negotiations with the men who held the baby.

  They built a special box in which to send the money to the kidnappers, a box that could be easily recognized. Before the money was ready a note came, delivered by a cab driver, directing Condon to a rendezvous in a cemetery. Condon went, without the money. The cab driver provided the first description of a suspect in the crime. The man Condon met in the cemetery fit the description: light complexioned, German or Scandinavian. The man gave his name as John—Cemetery John, they began to call him. Condon had taken the pins, by which the baby had been fastened to the bed. He asked Cemetery John what they were. The man recognized them immediately. Then he asked a curious question.

  “Would I burn if the baby is dead?”

  The baby was not dead, he assured Condon. The baby was in good hands, gut hands. He presented himself as a go-between, a part of a large and well-organized plot. Condon demanded to see the baby. John said he couldn’t allow that, but would send the baby’s sleeping suit.

  The garment came in the mail, and was identified by Colonel Lindbergh as the genuine article.

  The $70,000 was put together. A series of tense messages was sent back and forth, Condon sending his messages through the Bronx Home News. He used the code name Jafsie, from his initials, JFC. A second rendezvous was arranged for Saturday, April 2. Condon again met John in the cemetery. Lindbergh stood nearby in the shadows; he heard the man call out “Hey Doctor.” A pause. “Hey Doctor, over here!”

  Condon demanded the baby. John said he couldn’t deliver the baby until he had the money. Condon said $70,000 was too much; Lindbergh could only raise $50,000. John agreed to accept fifty. An exchange was made; John got $50,000; Condon got a set of directions, where he could find the baby.

  The directions proved worthless.

  Directing the investigation for the state of New Jersey was Colonel Norman Schwarzkopf, the father of the man who would direct American troops against Iraq. There was at least one other line of negotiations still open, with another group claiming to hold the baby. Schwarzkopf investigated the other line of negotiations and pronounced the information there worthless. Lindbergh, desperate to recover his son, continued to pursue the alternative negotiations.

  On May 12, 1932, the baby’s body was found less than two miles from the Lindbergh house, half-buried in the spring mud.

  The household staff had been subject to relentless police scrutiny. Every one of them, everyone they knew, everyone they had contact with became a potential subject of the investigation. Violet Sharpe, a maid of the Morrow family (Anne Lindbergh’s family), had had a date with a mysterious stranger the evening of the kidnapping, a man she seemed to know almost nothing about, and a man that the police were at first unable to identify and interview. It was a double date, she said; she had gone out with some friends and this other guy. She wouldn’t say who the friends were. This was naturally regarded as suspicious, and Violet Sharpe was questioned repeatedly by the police, and told that she was suspected of involvement in the crime. Informed that she was to be questioned again on June 10, she committed suicide on the evening of June 9, 1932.

  At the time, this seemed likely to break the case open, and her circle of friends and acquaintances was investigated even more intensely in the following days. Eventually, however, the friends and the date were identified, and it turned out that her story was true. She had refused to talk about it because a) she was engaged to another man, and b) the date may have been a little more interesting than she wanted to talk about. It is painful to have one’s secrets exposed. It is painful to see one’s relationships crumble. It is stressful to be a suspect in a criminal investigation. It is stressful to be at the epicenter of a media storm. Putting it all together, it was more than the high-strung woman could deal with. Numerous other people associated with the case also committed suicide over the next decade.

  Brief digression. On June 30, 1860, a four-year-old boy named Saville Kent was taken from a wealthy family in England, near Trowbridge. Like little Charles Lindbergh, the boy was taken from his crib and brutally
murdered in the middle of the night; it is one of the most famous crimes of 19th century England.

  Charles Lindbergh’s nursemaid—to whom he was reportedly more attached than his own mother—was a woman named Betty Gow. Saville Kent’s nursemaid, to whom he was similarly attached, was a woman named Elizabeth Gough. The two names are really the same; “Betty” is a nickname of “Elizabeth,” and “Gow” and “Gough” could be variant spellings of the same name. Like Betty Gow, Elizabeth Gough was suspected of the crime and was mercilessly harassed by police and by public speculation, in both cases for no real reason other than her proximity to the crime. It seems so odd, that these two women who really have the same name play identical roles in somewhat similar crimes.

  At this point (returning to New Jersey) the narrative of the Lindbergh kidnapping breaks into a myriad of small strands, forming a kind of medieval tapestry with a mind-boggling array of storylines. There were extortion plots playing off the kidnapping, some more famous than others. There were false arrests, many of them making headlines. There was the exceedingly strange story of Ellis Parker, a famous private detective who commissioned a band of thugs and kidnapped an innocent man, holding him prisoner until he confessed to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby. Parker and his cohorts went to jail, but no information about the crime was produced.

  There have been dozens or hundreds of books and thousands of magazine articles written about the Lindbergh kidnapping and/or related subjects. The case was so famous in its time that everyone who was touched by the case became something of a celebrity, his life changed forever after. If a cop worked on the investigation in some meaningful capacity, that fact alone was enough to make the memoirs of his career publishable after he had retired. If a journalist covered the trial, and hundreds of journalists did, that made his or her memoirs publishable. The maze of issues into which the case divides, as it moves forward in time, is almost without limit.

  Seventy-five years later, this remains true: No other police investigation in the history of the country was ever so extensive. Maybe the 9/11 investigation. Massive resources were invested in solving the Lindbergh kidnapping, by the New Jersey State Police, the FBI, the Treasury Department, every local police department, county sheriff, every cop on the beat, every ambitious private detective with a spare moment, by the press, and by the public. The story never really died down, even in the two years when nothing happened; it required but the faintest aroma of a breakthrough to pitch it back onto the front page.

  One of the most clever things was the work of Arthur Koehler, an expert on wood, to trace the materials of the ladder; I’ll sketch that story later. The main focus of the investigation was the money, the bills that had been turned over. All of the serial numbers had been recorded. Better yet, the money was in gold certificates, which were being taken out of circulation. The serial numbers of the ransom bills were distributed throughout the nation, posted on the walls of hundreds of thousands of small shops and large banks, where clerks from Miami to Seattle could routinely check the numbers on any bill that came across their counter.

  Ransom bills surfaced on a fairly regular schedule, one or two a week, and Treasury agents tried to trace each one back to its source. Often this proved impossible, as the bank would not be able to say where a bill had come from. As fewer and fewer gold certificates remained in use, however, it gradually became easier to spot the Lindbergh money. On numerous occasions police did trace a bill back to the business where it was used—almost always in the New York City area—and were able to get a description of the customer who had brought in the gold certificate. Many of these descriptions meshed: a man of average height, about 5'9'', clear blue eyes, high cheekbones, wide, flat cheeks, a small mouth, strong German accent.

  This description, submitted independently by twenty or more clerks, matched Dr. Condon’s description of Cemetery John. Treasury agents began a program of urging all clerks in the New York area who received gold certificates to get some form of identification from whoever brought in the bill. Knowing that the kidnapper had to have an automobile, they particularly emphasized that service station attendants should note the license plate number of anyone using a gold certificate.

  On Saturday, September 15, 1934, a man bought 98 cents’ worth of gasoline at a service station at 127th and Lexington, and paid for the purchase with a $10 gold certificate. The clerk stood behind him as he pulled away, and wrote his license number on the edge of the bill.

  The bill was deposited in the bank on the following Monday, September 17. On Tuesday, September 18, the head teller identified the gold certificate as a part of the Lindbergh ransom money. Checking the deposit slips in the same stack, Treasury investigators concluded it had come from one of three filling stations. The manager of one of those stations confirmed that he had written the number on the edge of the bill, and that it was, in fact, a license plate. He remembered very clearly the man who had given him the bill.

  It was Cemetery John.

  Bruno Richard Hauptmann was taken into custody the next day. Treasury and FBI agents had decided to arrest him, if possible, away from his home, speculating that he would be carrying one of the bills with him, which would be incriminating. He was, in fact, carrying one of the ransom certificates. He said it was the only one he had. Police, searching his garage, found $14,000 of the ransom money hidden there.

  Dr. Condon and Joseph Perrone, the taxi driver, both identified Hauptmann as the man they had met two years earlier.

  Handwriting analysts testified that Hauptmann had written the ransom notes, all of them.

  Arthur Koehler testified that one of the rails of the ladder found at the crime scene had been made from a board taken from Hauptmann’s attic.

  Several people testified to seeing Hauptmann in the vicinity of Lindbergh’s estate in the days before the kidnapping.

  A bookkeeper reconstructed his finances, and claimed that Hauptmann had $50,000 of unexplained income. Hauptmann never confessed, but was convicted of the crime on February 13, 1935, and was executed by the state of New Jersey on April 3, 1936.

  The governor of New Jersey, Harold Hoffman, was uncertain whether Bruno Richard Hauptmann was guilty, and tried unsuccessfully to save his life. Hoffman’s doubts, in time, have fueled an industry. In the last thirty-five years, numerous books have been written claiming that Hauptmann was framed.

  Hauptmann was not framed.

  Hauptmann was clearly and absolutely guilty of the crime.

  The trial of Richard Hauptmann had several serious flaws, owing mostly to the very great attention that was focused on the case. Attention creates pressures that lead to abnormal actions. If you and your colleagues at work were to get together in the morning and decide that all of tomorrow you will pay a great deal of attention to Marcia, the clerk in the corner, the extremely predictable outcome of that would be that, by the end of the day, Marcia would be acting in some extremely atypical manner, and probably would do inappropriate things. Attention creates pressure; pressure distorts behavior.

  The trial of Hauptmann had one central defect, and the prosecution case against Hauptmann had one major problem and a series of minor problems. The central defect of the trial was the pervasive intrusion of the media. The major flaw in the prosecution’s case was that Hauptmann was convicted of carrying out the crime alone and un-aided, when there is a substantial possibility that he had confederates.

  Beyond those problems, the case against Hauptmann had the following substantial errors:

  1) An old man named Amandus Hochmuth was allowed to testify that he had seen Hauptmann near the Lindbergh estate days before the kidnapping, when in reality he almost certainly had not.

  2) Other persons also testified to seeing Hauptmann near the Lindbergh home. This testimony is unconvincing, and there is little reason to believe that any of them actually saw Hauptmann there.

  3) Accountants reconstructed Hauptmann’s finances, attempting to account for the remainder of the ransom money by showing unexplaine
d income. This was speculative, and does not really rise to the level of “evidence.”

  4) A timesheet from Hauptmann’s employer, which was used to attack his alibi for two critical dates, suggests the possibility of tampering, and probably should not have been entered into evidence.

  These are not trivial failings. On the other hand, setting all of that aside, there is much more than sufficient reason to believe that Hauptmann was guilty.

  1) Hauptmann was found in possession of the money. He was noted passing a bill, was arrested carrying a bill, and denied having any more of the money, but $14,000 of the money was found hidden in his garage.

  2) Police had developed a Level Five description of Richard Hauptmann, based on descriptions from numerous people, before they had identified Hauptmann as the suspect.

  3) Numerous experts identified the handwriting of the ransom notes as Hauptmann’s, and Hauptmann himself acknowledged very directly that the handwriting of the notes was identical to his.

  4) Dr. Condon, who had met with the kidnapper three times and had handed the money to him, positively identified Hauptmann as the man who took the money.

  5) Joseph Perrone, the taxi driver who had been instructed to deliver a letter to Dr. Condon’s house, also positively identified Hauptmann as the man who sent the note.

  6) Dr. Condon’s phone number was found scribbled on a piece of wood inside the Hauptmann house. Hauptmann acknowledged writing the number there, explaining that he was “a little bit interested in the case.”

  7) Hauptmann quit his job essentially the day the ransom money was delivered to the kidnappers.

  8) Hauptmann had a long criminal history in Germany, and had come to the United States (illegally) after escaping from jail in Germany.

  9) While the precise accounting of his income is questionable, Hauptmann clearly had more income in the early 1930s than any other itinerant carpenter in the country.

  10) Arthur Koehler, the wood expert, had traced the wood used in the construction of the ladder to the exact lumberyard where Hauptmann regularly did business, and had done so long before Hauptmann was identified as the suspect.