Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  It was little more than a mile to the Woodlawn station at the end of the IRT’s Jerome Avenue line. There was no confusion finding the next set of instructions. Heading back toward the car, Condon stood beneath a streetlamp to read the note aloud, so that Al Reich could hear it as well. “Cross the street and follow the fence from the cemetery direction to 233rd Street. I will meet you.” The tall, heavy-iron fence staked the western border of the four-hundred-acre Woodlawn Cemetery, separating the historical graveyard from Van Cortlandt Park. As Al Reich drove Condon toward the main entrance of the cemetery, he nervously kidded, “When they shoot you, they won’t have to carry you far to bury you.”

  Condon waited at the big front gate, rereading the instructions and checking his watch. It was 9:15. A man approached him on Jerome Avenue, but walked right by. After another fifteen minutes in the cold, Condon saw a white handkerchief being waved through the bars of the gate from inside the cemetery. Condon approached, as the man with the handkerchief darted among the gravestones. He was bundled in an overcoat, had the brim of his fedora pulled down over his eyes, and held the handkerchief over his nose and mouth. “Did you gotted my note?” he asked. “Have you gotted the money?” Condon, recognizing the voice from their telephone conversation, said no, that he could not bring the money until he saw the baby. Suddenly, both men heard footsteps inside the cemetery. The man in the shadows feared the police. Condon insisted that he had not involved them; but in an instant, the stranger climbed over the fence, said it was too dangerous to meet, and ran up Jerome Avenue.

  It had been a uniformed cemetery security guard. After assuring the guard that everything was all right, Condon pursued the man himself. Well into Van Cortlandt Park, at the southern tip of its lake, the man let Condon catch up with him. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” Condon reported having said. “No one will hurt you.” But the man worried that he could be sentenced to thirty years if caught, that he might even “burn.” And, he explained, he was only a messenger from the actual kidnappers.

  With his hat pulled down and his coat collar turned up, the man walked with Dr. Condon to a bench near a tennis shack, where they sat. “What if the baby is dead?” the man asked, voicing a thought nobody in the case had yet uttered. “Would I burn if the baby is dead?” Taken aback, Condon asked why they were meeting if the baby was dead. The man with the concealed face assured him that the baby was not dead, that, in fact, he was being fed better than the diet in the newspaper had prescribed. Still he wondered, as he asked again, “Would I burn if I did not kill it?” He hastened to add that the Colonel need not worry, that “The baby is all right.”

  Condon tried to ascertain that he was speaking with someone in direct contact with the child. “You gotted my letter with the singnature,” he said. “It is the same like the letter with the singnature which was left in the baby’s crib.” Condon hesitated, because he understood the ransom note had been left on the windowsill. But it reminded him to produce the safety pins he had taken from the crib and to ask the man if he had ever seen them before. The man correctly identified them as the pins fastening the blankets to the mattress.

  According to Condon, they entered into a friendly chat. The man imparted that his name was John, that he was from Boston, that he was a sailor, and that he was Scandinavian, not German. Condon did his best to engage “John,” hoping to disarm him enough to provide information and perhaps a good look at his face.

  They talked for more than an hour. John seldom lowered his guard, but Condon was at least able to discern that the man before him was probably in his mid-thirties, a lean five-foot-nine, a middleweight of 160 pounds, with a smooth, unblemished triangular face—high cheekbones and a small mouth, and deep-set, almond-shaped, blue-gray eyes. John said that the baby was on a “boad” some six hours away by air in the care of two nurses. He said the gang included a head man, who would take $20,000 of the ransom, while his three henchmen and two nurses would receive $10,000 each. He said neither “Red” Johnson nor Betty Gow was involved in the crime. Condon tried to get John to turn on the gang and come clean with the police, but he resisted. He said this crime had been planned for a year, and he stuck to his mission of convincing Dr. Condon to come forth with the money. To prove to his leader that he had performed his task, he told Condon to take another ad in the Bronx Home News, saying, “BABY IS ALIVE AND WELL. MONEY IS READY.” Because Condon insisted on a “cash-and-delivery” deal, John said that on Monday he would send proof that his gang was holding the actual baby. The two men shook hands on their agreement. At 10:45 John stole off into the woods almost as mysteriously as he had appeared.

  Reich drove Condon home to Decatur Avenue, where Henry Breckinridge waited to hear every detail. The attorney was struck by John’s saying that the crime had been planned for a year, for that repeated what had been said in one of the ransom notes that Condon had never seen. Breckinridge was convinced that they were in touch with the actual kidnappers. Al Reich added that he got the distinct impression that the man who had walked by Condon on Jerome Avenue—whom he described as medium-sized and Italian—was in cahoots with “Cemetery John” and had probably signaled Condon’s approach. Although he was never able to see John’s face completely, Condon asserted that he could identify him if he saw him again.

  Lindbergh refused to allow himself to believe the best, but he told his wife and mother-in-law that he considered the situation “very very good.” During this crucial period of secret negotiations the press banged out new stories, which threatened to frighten the kidnappers back into hiding. Gangster Mickey Rosner was suddenly telling interviewers that the baby was all right. Then, without anyone’s foreknowledge, the New York Daily Mirror anounced that prominent attorney Dudley Field Malone would act as an official intermediary delivering a $250,000 ransom. That seemed sure to stop the kidnappers from accepting the pittance they were about to settle on. Further rumors circulated that the Daily News itself may have engineered the kidnapping, because, as Betty Morrow noted in her diary, “the tabloids hate C. so!”

  For several days everybody waited. As instructed, Condon placed an ad in the March thirteenth Bronx Home News: “BABY ALIVE AND WELL. MONEY IS READY. CALL AND SEE US. JAFSIE.” It brought no response. On March fourteenth, they ran another ad, stating: “MONEY IS READY. NO COPS. NO SECRET SERVICE. NO PRESS. I COME ALONE LIKE THE LAST TIME. PLEASE CALL. JAFSIE.” Getting no reply, they ran it the next day. Still receiving no reply, they amplified the statement: “I ACCEPT. MONEY IS READY. YOU KNOW THEY WON’T LET ME DELIVER WITHOUT GETTING THE PACKAGE. PLEASE MAKE IT SOME SORT OF C.O.D. TRANSACTION … YOU KNOW YOU CAN TRUST JAFSIE.”

  The kidnappers might have had doubts. During those anxious days of waiting together, Condon and Breckinridge shared two minor suspicious incidents. One day a short, young Italian came to the house selling needles. The two men answered the door and Condon purchased some. When the Italian departed, Breckinridge observed that he left the block without stopping at a single other house. An hour later, another Italian appeared at the Condons’, this one carrying grinding equipment. Breckinridge thought he “looked the part of a scissors grinder,” and so they gave him a knife and a few household items to sharpen, for which Condon paid him a quarter. Like the needle salesman, the scissors-grinder left the block without soliciting any other business. Breckinridge believed one or both men were emissaries of the kidnappers, determining how guarded the house was.

  Back in New Jersey, H. Norman Schwarzkopf was taking heat from the public. Having acceded to Lindbergh’s demand that he say nothing of the covert operation in the Bronx, he appeared to be making no progress in the Lindbergh case. All the sources of his State Police—both legitimate and underground—were drying up. Spitale and Bitz and Rosner were coming up empty-handed. Police from New Jersey were being routinely dispatched to Maryland, Tennessee, and Kentucky to check on sightings of the Lindbergh baby, but none returned with encouraging news. Schwarzkopf even took to the radio, appealing for the nation’s assistance.
Lindbergh continued to trust him “absolutely,” finding him wonderful to deal with despite “hundreds of complications and difficulties, pressure of the press, petty jealousies, interference of politics, etc. etc.” With the first warm days of March, tourists flocked to the Lindbergh house. Barnstormers operating out of Hopewell’s emergency airfield offered sightseers the opportunity of flying over the estate for $2.50.

  On March 16, 1932, a package mailed from Brooklyn arrived at Dr. Condon’s house. Recognizing the handwriting, he notified Breckinridge, who came from his office and opened it. Inside was a laundered, gray wool Dr. Denton sleeping suit, size 2. Breckinridge called Lindbergh and asked him to come to the Bronx to identify it. An accompanying note, complete with the signature of interlocking circles, said that circumstances now forbade the direct swap Condon had proposed, that the baby was well, and that eight hours after receiving their $70,000, the kidnappers would notify Condon where to find him. “If there is any trapp,” it concluded, “you will be responsible what will follows.” At 1:30 in the morning Lindbergh—in the hunter’s cap and large glasses he had worn to slip by the reporters—arrived at Dr. Condon’s. He examined the sleeping suit and said, “It looks like my son’s garment.”

  Lindbergh was so excited he wanted to pay the ransom immediately. Condon asked if they should not see the baby before paying; but the boy’s father felt time was becoming their greatest enemy, as it infuriated the kidnappers and gave the press the opportunity to discover these secret negotiations. They would have to take the kidnappers at their word. Condon proposed that their ad at least suggest the need for “some sort of C. O. D. transaction”; but Lindbergh was adamant. The March eighteenth edition of the Bronx Home News ran the simplest response possible: “I ACCEPT. MONEY IS READY. JOHN, YOUR PACKAGE IS DELIVERED AND IS O.K. DIRECT ME.”

  In his anxious efforts to move the “transaction” along, Lindbergh made a heartfelt plea to the press. He said that he believed the return of the baby was being delayed by the “vast amount of space devoted to the case by the press of the country.” He asked, in this most sensitive moment, “that beginning at once the papers confine their accounts of the case to three hundred words each day, and that these brief stories be printed in single column form to effect a minimum of typographical display.” The request was observed, for a while: “Telephone calls are fewer, letters are fewer—the reporters no longer trail us,” Anne wrote her mother-in-law—“the publicity is dying down…. things are quieter every day—so we sit & wait & hope. C. is cheerful.”

  As for herself, Anne had been rendered virtually devoid of feeling and suspended in time. Since the night of March first, she had hardly experienced all the emotional ups and downs because she had entered a kind of trance state, for self-protection. Charles had kept her uninformed about most of the efforts being made to retrieve their baby and he still insisted she cry alone, whenever she found the energy. “I have a sustained feeling—like a high note on an organ that has got stuck—inside me,” she wrote her sister Elisabeth. “The time since then has been all in one mood or color, no variation … It is just that night elongated. Of course, it has superficially been different. Every second, like a dream, the whole scene swings, melts, changes. Personalities change from black to white, faces look different, tones are different, the tempo of the activity speeds up and slows down, but always that high note that got stuck in the organ Tuesday night!”

  On March twenty-second, at one o’clock in the morning, Lindbergh called his house from New York to say that someone was coming out in Colonel Breckinridge’s car. He said the passenger especially wanted to see her and Betty Gow, and also Whateley and Elsie. He asked Anne to be awake and dressed and to admit the visitors at once. Although Charles spoke in his usual guarded tone, Anne could not help reading between the lines of her husband’s message. She excitedly awakened her mother, who was staying at the house, and they prepared themselves, feeling their ordeal was almost over. They lay on Anne’s bed until three in the morning, when they heard the car pull up the driveway.

  But when they rushed down to see the baby, they found instead “a dark dreadful looking man”—one Murray Garsson of the Labor Department. He and his assistant were investigating the kidnapping, claiming they could solve the mystery in forty-eight hours. They vigorously questioned everybody in the house until dawn. The worst part, observed FBI Special Agent J. M. Keith, was when Garsson “ordered Mrs. Lindbergh to show him the furnace, accompanied her to the cellar, and in her presence began poking around in the ashes … leaving the plain inference that the Lindberghs themselves had killed the youngster and burned the body.”

  The Jafsie ads continued to run in the Bronx newspaper, but they elicited no response. Meantime, Condon picked up a wooden box he had ordered, made according to the specifications the kidnappers had dictated, while Lindbergh worked with the Morgan Bank on the box’s contents. Speaking only to Morgan partner Thomas W. Lamont, then considered the most powerful man on Wall Street, Lindbergh had the bank bundle the first $50,000 worth of ransom as stipulated in the notes. For three restless days, Condon kept the money in his house. Then he took it to the Fordham Branch of the Corn Exchange Bank, where he learned that no special account had to be opened, that it was simply there subject to his call.

  The case dragged toward its second excruciating month, with Lindbergh still calling all the shots. He listened to his inner circle of advisers, but the only man to effect any change in his behavior proved to be the unimposing head of the Law Enforcement Division of the Internal Revenue Service. Elmer Irey, who had the further distinction of being the man who had outfoxed Al Capone, understood Lindbergh’s intention to hand over money without any guarantee that the baby would be returned. But he insisted that the serial numbers of the bills be recorded.

  Irey further suggested that America would probably be going off the gold standard soon, calling in all its gold coins and currency. That being the case, he suggested that the ransom be paid in gold certificates, virtually identical to regular bills except for a round, yellow seal. Even if the country did not change standards, Irey suggested that the gold certificates would be easier to spot. Surely, Irey argued with Lindbergh, if the baby were returned, there was no reason the state should not exercise its duty to pursue the criminals. Lindbergh allowed the bundled money to be removed from the Bronx to J. P. Morgan & Company, where more than a dozen bank clerks and Treasury agents tied and banded another 5,150 bills, divided in two packets. They kept samples of the string and bands they used, for future identification in the event that the money should be recovered.

  Seeing how any dealings forced Anne to face the reality of the crime, Charles continued to shield her as much as possible, excluding her from most of the details. She knew almost nothing, for example, of the meeting Charles held in the house with Admiral Burrage, Reverend Dobson-Peacock, and John Curtis, who arrived from Norfolk. Lindbergh did not believe that Curtis was in contact with the actual kidnappers; but, as always, he kept creating options for himself. He asked Curtis to obtain either a current photograph of the baby or a message with some kind of symbol that might suggest they were the right party. If nothing else, Lindbergh knew his meeting with the three men from Virginia would shift public attention to them and away from the secret negotiations in the Bronx.

  Anne took part in a séance in the nursery with a medium from the New York Society for Psychical Research—who spoke intriguingly of three men and two women being involved, including Italians, Germans, and Scandinavians; but the episode only made her withdraw further from the specifics of the case. She chose to focus instead on the future. Mid-pregnancy, she realized that was the only way she could keep herself healthy for her second child. She thought of the white tulips she had planted—“so pure and clear and fresh”—and could hardly wait for them to flower, as though they harbingered happier times. As March came to an end, she resumed “regular life” as best she could. With the first tips of flowers poking through the warming ground, she exercised patien
ce, even though the ad from Jafsie declaring “MONEY IS READY” had appeared every day for a week without a response. Anne’s mother did not tell her that one afternoon a black crow had flown into the nursery and perched on the baby’s crib.

  The last day of March abounded with good omens, even though they were at cross purposes. In Washington, Gaston Means had given Evalyn Walsh McLean every reason to believe that the $100,000 she had surrendered was about to bring the Lindbergh baby home. Meantime, John Curtis was claiming that he had just received a letter from the gang with which he had been dealing, and they had lowered their demand to $25,000. That night Colonel Schwarzkopf told Anne and her mother that the police had made contact with a man who claimed to have seen the baby and that he was “safe & well,” that they knew who the kidnapper was, and they were just waiting for the baby’s return before apprehending him. And after a month of hundreds of people canvassing the Lindbergh estate, Betty Gow discovered one of the baby’s thumbguards along the gravel driveway, which everybody grasped as a talisman. Lindbergh himself quietly left for a Morrow townhouse at 2 East Seventy-second Street, where he said he would be staying for several days, the surest sign to Anne that the exchange was at last imminent.

  On Friday, April first, Condon received a letter which contained another addressed to Lindbergh. It instructed him to have the money ready—“in one bundle”—by the following evening, at which time he would be given further instructions. If this was acceptable, the note read, he should state in the New York American, “YES EVERYTHING O. K.” The ad appeared the next morning. Lindbergh informed Colonel Schwarzkopf that the drop was about to occur, but he forbade the police chief from taking any part in the operation.