Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  The next morning—Tuesday, March first—the baby was better but still croupy. Anne awoke with a cold as well. She called Betty Gow in Englewood and asked her to come to Hopewell and help out. There were still no definite plans as to where they would all spend the next few nights. Just before three o’clock, Anne and Betty went into the shuttered nursery, where Charlie had been napping; his health had noticeably improved. Anne took a walk down the long driveway and spent much of the afternoon with the baby downstairs in the living room. Around 5:30, he ran into the kitchen, where Betty was sitting with the Whateleys. The nursemaid took the boy by the hand upstairs, where she read to him before feeding him some cereal. Anne entered the nursery at 6:15, by which time he had finished his dinner.

  She and Betty Gow prepared the baby for bed. After rubbing Charlie’s chest with Vicks VapoRub, they decided to make a flannel garment for him to wear beneath his nightclothes. A handy seamstress, Betty quickly ran up a little short-sleeved shirt from a remnant of cream-colored flannelette. The material had an embroidered hem in a scalloped pattern. She kept the left shoulder unsewn so that it could slip easily over the baby’s head and be pinned; the rest was stitched in blue mercerized thread. Over this the baby wore a sleeveless fine-woolen shirt, which was attached to the two diapers under his rubber panties. Over all this, the baby wore a gray, size-2 Dr. Denton sleeping suit. Betty lay him down and affixed his thumbguards. Then Betty put the baby under the covers of his crib—a dark-wooded four-poster which stood behind a portable green and pink screen with pictures of farmyard animals.

  Anne and Betty went to close the shutters; but as they had found on previous evenings, those at the corner window were too warped to close, even with both women pulling on them. Anne did not leave the room until 7:30; Betty remained another few minutes, during which time she went to the southern wall and pulled open the French window halfway. She put out the light, closed the door, and went into the bathroom, where she washed the baby’s clothes. She reentered the room and found the baby fast asleep, breathing easily. She fastened the bedcovers to his mattress with two large safety pins and left the room, turning out the bathroom light. About ten minutes before eight, she went to the cellar to hang up the clothes she had washed, then joined Elsie Whateley for dinner in their sitting room.

  Anne was in the living room waiting for Charles, who had called to say that he would be home a little late. Although his precise whereabouts that day were not recorded anywhere, he had been lost in his work at the Rockefeller Institute most of the week, completing experiments for a new technique of “washing” corpuscles, a method he was writing up for Science magazine. Some expected him at a dinner given by New York University at the Waldorf-Astoria, which was honoring Daniel Guggenheim among others; but there had, in fact, been a secretarial mix-up over his calendar, and he had planned all along to return to Hopewell.

  Anne sat at her desk, writing. The lights in the corner library, directly below the nursery, were off; and the doors between that room and the living room were closed, shut off from the rest of the house. Outside, beneath a starless sky, a wuthering wind sent the temperature down into the thirties. For a moment, Anne thought she heard the sound of car wheels, but it was not for another fifteen minutes—at about 8:25—that Lindbergh came up the gravel driveway, parked the car in the garage, and entered the house through the connecting back hall and kitchen. After washing up, he joined Anne for dinner at 8:35.

  They ate, then sat by the fire in the living room. A little after nine o’clock Charles heard a noise, which he attributed to somebody in the kitchen dropping something—“such as a wooden box.” At about 9:15, the Lindberghs went upstairs and talked for a few minutes, before he bathed, dressed again, and settled into the library downstairs to read, sitting next to the window directly below the nursery window whose shutters would not close. Anne drew a bath for herself and prepared for bed. She had left her tooth powder in the baby’s bathroom, which she retrieved without turning on the lights. After brushing her teeth in the master bath, she rang the bell for Elsie and requested a hot lemonade. It was approaching ten o’clock.

  While the Lindberghs had been eating their supper, Whateley called Betty Gow to the telephone. Henry “Red” Johnson, a Norwegian seaman whom she had been seeing ever since their meeting at North Haven the preceding summer, was on the line. Johnson, in the country illegally, worked as a deckhand on Thomas Lamont’s yacht. He and Betty had a date for that evening, which she had canceled when Anne Lindbergh summoned her to Hopewell. Sorry they could not get together, he announced that he was going to drive to Hartford to visit his brother. Upon hanging up, Betty went into the servants’ sitting room and turned on the radio; the Whateleys joined her. After a few minutes, Betty went upstairs, where Elsie wanted to show her a dress she had just bought, then looked at her watch. “It’s ten o’clock,” she said, “I have got to go to the baby.”

  Betty went into the baby’s bathroom and turned on a light. She thought of getting Mrs. Lindbergh so that they could check on the baby together, but Anne was still bathing. Betty entered the room, closed the French window, and plugged in the electric heater. Walking toward the baby’s crib, she realized that she could not hear the baby breathing. “I thought that something had happened to him,” Betty would later retell, “that perhaps the clothes were over his head. In the half light I saw he wasn’t there and felt all over the bed for him.”

  Betty raced through the passageway into the master bedroom, just as Anne was exiting the bathroom. “Do you have the baby, Mrs. Lindbergh?” she asked. Bewildered, Anne said, “No.”

  “Perhaps Colonel Lindbergh has him then,” she said. “Where is Colonel Lindbergh?” Anne instinctively went into the baby’s room while Betty ran downstairs, through the living room and up to the door of the library, where Lindbergh was sitting at his desk. “Colonel Lindbergh,” Betty said, trying to catch her breath, “have you got the baby? Please don’t fool me.”

  “The baby?” he asked. “Isn’t he in his crib?”

  Before she could answer, he had jumped from his chair and run upstairs to the baby’s room, Betty at his heels. Just from the look of the bedclothes, Lindbergh “felt sure that something was wrong.”

  He went to the master bedroom, brushing past Anne, who asked if he had the baby. “He did not answer me,” she later recounted. “Someone had already told him.” Charles went to his closet and loaded the rifle he kept there. He headed back toward the nursery, followed by Anne and Betty Gow. “Anne,” he said, now looking right into his wife’s eyes, “they have stolen our baby.”

  A chill came over the nursery. Lindbergh found its source, the southeast corner window, which was unlatched and open a crack. There, on top of the radiator case that formed the sill, he saw a small, white envelope—six and one-half by seven inches. He assumed it contained a ransom note, and he maintained enough composure not to touch it.

  Lindbergh told Betty to get Olly Whateley, who ran upstairs. At Lindbergh’s direction, the butler called the sheriff in Hopewell; then Lindbergh called Henry Breckinridge in New York and the State Police in Trenton.

  Lieutenant Daniel J. Dunn answered that 10:25 P.M. call. “This is Charles Lindbergh,” said the voice at the other end. “My son has just been kidnapped.” The lieutenant asked what time he had been taken, and the caller said, “Sometime between seven-thirty and ten o’clock. He’s twenty months old and is wearing a one-piece sleeping suit.” With that, Lindbergh hung up. Detective Lewis J. Bornmann, also on duty that night, asked what that had been about. “I don’t know,” said Dunn. “Some guy said he was Lindbergh—said the baby was kidnapped. Jesus! Now what am I supposed to do?”

  Bornmann worried that the call might not have been a prank. He suggested that Dunn call the Lindbergh house and that if the same voice answered the telephone, then they should follow up. Lieutenant Dunn called the operator, who put him through. “Hello, this is Charles Lindbergh,” said the voice he had just heard. “This is Lieutenant Dunn, sir,” he sai
d. “Men are on their way.”

  Corporal J. A. Wolf was the first man in the field to be radioed, and he suggested the dispatcher also send Troopers Cain and Sullivan, who were on patrol that night as well. At 10:46 a teletype alarm was sent across the state: “COLONEL LINDBRGS BABY WAS KIDNAPPED … IS DRESSED IN SLEEPING SUIT REQUEST THAT ALL CARS BE INVESTIGATED BY POLICE PATROLS.” By eleven o’clock, checkpoints had been established at the Holland Tunnel, the George Washington Bridge, and all ferry ports along the Hudson River. New Jersey streets were road-blocked and hospitals were alerted to report the admission of any children fitting the Lindbergh baby’s general description. Police were notified in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Connecticut.

  Single-minded missions were Lindbergh’s specialty. Now, with only the thought of his son’s safe return in mind, he believed a coolheaded, methodical approach would bring him back. Refusing to allow panic to set in, he immediately asserted his authority. From that moment on, he acted as the man in charge of a situation that steadily proved to be beyond his control.

  He issued orders that nobody was to enter the nursery or walk around the premises until the police had arrived. Betty Gow found herself searching the rest of the house, from cellar to attic, frantically opening closets and drawers along the way, finally dissolving in tears. Anne had already made one more brief check of the nursery before rushing back into her room. “Without realizing why I was doing it,” she recalled, “I threw open the window and leaned far out.” She heard what sounded like a cry, over to the right in the general direction of the wood pile. Before she could speak, Elsie Whateley said, “That was a cat, Mrs. Lindbergh.” Stunned, Anne dressed and automatically searched the house. The wind howled.

  Lindbergh and Whateley investigated the house as well, then scouted the grounds for fifteen minutes, turning up no trace of the child. Harry Wolfe and Charles Williamson, special officers of the Boro of Hopewell, Mercer County, arrived at 10:35. They glanced into the nursery, where they detected muddy clumps on a leather suitcase that sat beneath the presumed window of entry. That drew them outside, where they found impressions in the mud, indentations where a ladder had evidently been placed. About seventy-five feet southeast of the house, they discovered a wooden ladder in two sections. Ten feet beyond that they found a third ladder section. They left everything untouched and returned to the house.

  Corporal Joseph A. Wolf of the New Jersey State Police arrived a few minutes before eleven. He announced that superintendent H. Norman Schwarzkopf himself—a thirty-seven-year-old West Point graduate, who was the first man to lead the decade-old New Jersey State Police—was on his way, along with several other troopers. The two officers from Hopewell were for all intents and purposes dismissed. While some of the Lindbergh property was just outside Hopewell in Mercer County, the Lindbergh house itself stood in Hunterdon County, technically beyond the Hopewell jurisdiction.

  In command of his house and his emotions, Lindbergh calmly explained to Corporal Wolf that he suspected nobody and could recall no suspicious behavior. The dog, Wahgoosh, had been in the opposite wing of the house that night; and, as Anne later noted, he “couldn’t have heard through the howling wind all that distance.” Lindbergh pointed out the presumed ransom note to Wolf, who moved it with his penknife to the fireplace mantle. He too observed traces of yellowish clay on the suitcase and on the hardwood floor of the nursery. He questioned Lindbergh about those present in the house. Schwarzkopf arrived shortly before midnight. Because his training was in the military, he acted more as an administrator than a detective. He turned those duties over to Captain John J. Lamb, who headed New Jersey’s investigative services, and his lieutenant, Arthur T. “Buster” Keaten, the local investigative bureau chief. Detective Bornmann began interrogating the household staff.

  Students at nearby Princeton were just turning in for the night when word hit the airwaves—on WOR radio out of New York City. Henry Breckinridge’s stepson, Oren Root—a Princeton junior who periodically weekended with the Lindberghs—was returning to his dormitory room when a friend told him that the Lindbergh baby had been kidnapped from the Hopewell house. “Forget it,” Root told him. “The press is always distorting stories like that. Besides,” he added, showing off some of his personal knowledge, “the Lindberghs leave every Monday for Englewood.” A few hours later, Henry and Aida Breckinridge pounded on Root’s door, awakening him from a sound sleep. Afraid they would not be able to find the house in the dead of night, they asked Oren to guide them.

  The Breckinridges had been unnecessarily cautious. Had they just driven through the next town of Hopewell, they could not have missed the place. Through the winter-bared woodlands, the normally obscured Lindbergh house stood out for miles. “It was blazing with lights,” remembered Oren Root more than sixty years later. “We arrived around two-thirty, and every light and lamp in the house was turned on. As we approached we could see flashlights, headlamps from police cars, even some men carrying torches all lighting the place up. Everyone was in a state of contained panic, with ‘Slim’ trying to be everywhere at once, keeping a lid on the excitement, keeping his voice down.”

  Through the night the troopers worked, waiting for daylight to permit them to extend their search into the surrounding woods. Until then, activity revolved around the nursery. Corporal Frank A. Kelly dusted the envelope for fingerprints but was able to procure only a worthless smudge. He slit open the envelope and carefully removed a single sheet of paper, folded once, which he handed to Lindbergh.

  It was written in blue ink, in a strangely ornate but immature hand, full of eccentric embellishments and shaky penstrokes. “dear Sir!” it read:

  Have 50.000 $ redy 25 000 $ in

  20 $ bills 1.5000 $ 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 3 holes.

  More difficult to decipher was an odd symbol in the lower-right corner of the note. The identifying mark consisted of two interlocking, silver-dollar-sized blue circles. In the oval formed by their intersection was a solid, penny-sized red circle. In each of the circles outside the oval was a wavy, vertical line. To the left, right, and center of these inked impressions were three square holes punched through the paper, in a straight line, one inch apart. The symbol would have to be kept secret if the Lindberghs wanted to ensure that any future correspondence was being conducted with the actual kidnappers.

  Neither the notepaper nor a dusting of the room yielded a usable fingerprint, but the note itself offered enough peculiarities to provide clues about the kidnappers’ identity. The handwriting, positioning of the dollar sign, and spelling all suggested someone of European origin, probably German or Scandinavian.

  First light increased the activity outside the house. A half-dozen troopers searched the surrounding woods. After twelve hours on the scene, the police had found no trace of the baby and only three clues beyond the note. Beneath the nursery window, next to the impressions left where the ladder had stood, was a shoeprint in the mud. Closer examination revealed a textile pattern, suggesting that the culprit had worn a sock or cloth bag over his shoes, to avoid leaving footprints, just as his evidently wearing gloves had kept him from leaving fingerprints. Having no ruler with him, the detective at the scene estimated the size of the shoeprint—twelve and one-half inches long and four and one-quarter inches wide. Nobody thought to make a plastercast of the print.

  The second piece of evidence was a nine-and-one-half-inch-long, wood-handled, three-quarter-inch chisel, made by the Buck Brothers Company. It was found near the third, and most crucial piece of evidence outside the house—the ladder—which the police had brought indoors to examine more closely. Fearing somebody might walk off with it as a souvenir, they th
ought it more important to preserve the integrity of the evidence than the crime scene.

  Even to the untrained eye, the extension ladder was revealing. It was homemade, crude but cunning. Each of its three pieces measured eighty and one-half inches in length, producing a ladder of more than twenty feet when assembled. It weighed only thirty-eight pounds. Considerable craftsmanship and forethought could be seen in its construction. Each of the three pieces was of a different width, so that it could nest into another, collapsing to a portable unit of six and one-half feet.

  Part of the ladder had broken. One of the side rails of the center section had split along the grain, suggesting that while the kidnapper had been successfully able to climb into the nursery, the added weight of his victim was enough to crack the wood. The location of the break indicated that the kidnapper and the baby might have fallen as much as five feet to the ground.

  By the time Corporal Wolf left the scene to write the Major Initial Report of the crime, he believed it must have involved at least two perpetrators. “It is obvious,” Wolf wrote, “that this crime has been carefully planned and the layout … [and] routine of the Lindbergh home studied.”

  It was equally obvious, to Oren Root at least, that Lindbergh felt the need to supervise the case. The New Jersey State Police, from its chief down, was not yet old enough to have much experience in solving major crimes. One of Schwarzkopf’s detractors would later note that the only police experience he had was “as a floor-walker at Bamberger’s Department Store.” Few men on the scene that night had ever done more than write traffic citations. Corporal Kelly, dusting the ransom note for fingerprints, for example, had until recently been a road trooper. Efficient though all the police were trying to be, Root observed, “you could tell that every one of them was nervous just being in the presence of their local hero.”