Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  After spending Friday night in Hopewell, Lindbergh drove to the Bronx early Saturday afternoon, carrying $50,000 with him. As a security measure, he sent a package of $20,000 in another car. Lindbergh tried to pack all the ransom money into the wooden box Condon had ordered, but it would not fit. It could accommodate all $70,000 only by raising the lid and tying the box shut with cord. For the next six hours Lindbergh, Condon, Breckinridge, and Al Reich waited. Lindbergh, like Condon’s wife, feared for the old man’s life and assured him he no longer had to proceed with his duties. But Condon would not hear of backing out, saying, “I want to see those little arms around his mother’s neck.” Lindbergh, who intended to be his driver, was carrying a small handgun.

  At 7:45 a letter arrived by cab—instructions to Condon to proceed to a flower shop at 3225 East Tremont Avenue in the East Bronx, where further orders would be waiting under a rock. Lindbergh drove Al Reich’s Ford to the address, J. A. Bergen Greenhouses, where Condon found the next message. He returned to the car and they read the note by flashlight. Several people walked by, but one of them—about thirty years of age, five-foot-nine, 155 pounds, with dark complexion—in a brown suit and brown felt hat with a snap brim caught Lindbergh’s attention. “He walked with an unusual gait rather awkwardly and with a pronounced stoop,” he later recalled in a confidential statement to the New Jersey police. “His hat was pulled down over his eyes. As he passed the car, he covered his mouth and the lower part of his face with a handkerchief, and looked at Dr. Condon and at me.” The note told Condon to cross the street and walk to the next corner, then to follow Whittemore Avenue.

  Lindbergh wanted to accompany Condon, but the latter pointed out that the note said to come alone. Instructions to the contrary, Condon did not carry the money with him. He walked to Tremont and Whittemore, which marked the northern tip of St. Raymond’s Cemetery. He spoke to a man with a little girl at the unmarked intersection, asking if that was Whittemore Avenue, but they did not know. Seeing nobody else around, he headed back to the car. Halfway across the street, a voice came from the cemetery. “Ay, Doctor,” he said. “I could hear the call distinctly,” Lindbergh would later affirm, even though he was a few hundred feet away, “and the ‘Doctor’ was pronounced with a definite accent.” Condon walked down Whittemore on the cemetery side of the street.

  Condon could see the man cutting across a road within the cemetery. When they finally caught up with each other, the man cried, “Here I am, Doc.” Standing just a few feet apart, Condon recognized the man as “John” from Woodlawn Cemetery. “Have you gotted the money?” he asked. “Yes, it is in the car,” he replied.

  John asked who was in the car, and Condon told him Colonel Lindbergh. John asked if he was alone, and Condon replied that he always kept his word. He asked John where they had met before, and John correctly said at Woodlawn Cemetery. When John asked for the $70,000, Condon explained that times were hard and Lindbergh had a difficult enough time raising the $50,000 the kidnappers had originally asked for. “Well, I suppose that we will be satisfied to take fifty thousand,” John told Condon, “and in six hours I will send you the note telling where the baby is.” Condon said he could not agree to that, that he would rather go with John as a hostage until they were satisfied with their money. Short of that, Condon suggested a simple exchange of the directions for the money.

  Back at the car, Condon explained to Lindbergh that he had talked John out of the extra $20,000. Lindbergh appreciated the gesture but did not wish to upset the kidnappers in any way. Condon returned to the hedge where they had just met and waited for John. From his vantage point, Lindbergh could not see either man; but he did see, across the street, the same man he had seen earlier near the Bergen greenhouses. Using his handkerchief, the man blew his nose—loudly enough to be heard by Lindbergh and, he presumed, anyone else in the area.

  Down Whittemore Avenue, Condon handed the box with $50,000 over the hedge to John with his left hand and accepted a sealed envelope with his right. John thanked him and said that “all were satisfied” with his work. He got down on his knees and inspected the money, pulling out a sheaf of bills from the middle of the box. He arose and told Condon not to open the note for six hours. He shook Condon’s hand over the hedge, thanked him, and disappeared among the headstones in the dark. As Condon hastened back to the car, Lindbergh noticed the man blowing his nose did not put his handkerchief in his pocket but threw it down instead, beside the sidewalk. Then he disappeared.

  “The baby—where is the baby?” the anxious father asked. Condon handed Lindbergh the sealed note and told him of his promise to wait before opening it. To Condon’s surprise, Lindbergh resisted tearing the envelope open, even as they drove off. Not far from the cemetery, they approached Westchester Square, with its Kiddy Corner. Condon suggested they pull to the side of the road. He argued that while he had given his word not to open the letter, Lindbergh had made no such promise. Out of the envelope he pulled a six-by-five-inch scrap of paper with five short sentences—the first definitive indication in thirty-two days of his son’s whereabouts.

  The boy is on Boad Nelly. It is a small boad

  28 feet long. Two person are on the Boad. The

  are innosent. you will find the Boad between

  Horseneck Beach and gay Head near Elizabeth Island.

  Lindbergh knew those waters—between Martha’s Vineyard and the Massachusetts mainland—from his honeymoon.

  They returned to Condon’s house in the Bronx, where they informed Breckinridge and Al Reich of the transaction. Word was transmitted in code to the house in New Jersey that the money had been handed over. But those in Hopewell did not understand that “no tooth” meant they did not have the baby.

  Lindbergh, Breckinridge, Condon, and Reich drove to the Morrow town-house on Seventy-second Street, where they met several investigators from the IRS. A chuffed Condon boasted that he had saved Colonel Lindbergh $20,000 by withholding the smaller packet of money. Elmer Irey, the IRS crime-buster, explained how Condon had blundered, that the smaller packet was composed of fifty-dollar bills which had purposely been banded together because they would be easiest to spot.

  Lindbergh went to the telephone to arrange for Navy airplanes to assist in the search for the boat Nelly. He asked that a Sikorsky seaplane be brought to the airport at Bridgeport. At two in the morning, Breckinridge, Irey, Condon, and Reich drove with him to the Connecticut airstrip, from which they took off at sunup. Al Reich remained on the ground, driving Lindbergh’s car to the Aviation Country Club on Long Island, where a trusting Lindbergh intended to land with his baby.

  All morning, Lindbergh buzzed the water, circling the tiny Elizabeth Islands low enough for his passengers to get a good look at every boat that even approximated the description of the Nelly. A half-dozen Coast Guard cutters joined in the search. As noon approached, they became less choosy in their pursuit, chasing after anything afloat. As night fell, they landed on Long Island and piled into the car, silent and empty-handed. Lindbergh deposited his passengers in New York before continuing alone to New Jersey. As he dropped off Condon and Reich, he spoke at last—saying, “We’ve been double-crossed.”

  Upon arriving in Hopewell, he spared Anne as much as possible, relating the last day’s events in hopeful obfuscation. He suggested that the kidnappers invented the story about the Nelly as a ruse to buy them extra time to escape or perhaps as a lever to pry more money out of them.

  The next day Lindbergh and Henry Breckinridge took off from Teterboro Airport in Lindbergh’s Lockheed Vega. They returned to the area they had scoured the day before, widening the circumference of their scope with each hour. By dusk, they found themselves off the coast of Virginia.

  After Charles’s second day of futile searching, Anne’s mood changed dramatically. For the first time in the five weeks that her baby had been missing, her mother observed, “she acts as if she had given up hope.” With Lindbergh’s approval, Dr. Condon placed a new ad in the Bronx Home News, which woul
d run for the next two weeks: “WHAT IS WRONG? HAVE YOU CROSSED ME? PLEASE, BETTER DIRECTIONS. JAFSIE.”

  Since the kidnapping, the Lindberghs had received almost forty thousand letters. While some included contributions toward the ransom, most contained useless information and advice. The most preposterous of those who wrote were divided into several categories of their own, including “wheels” (mental cases, whose wheels one could see spinning) and “butterflies” (clues that led nowhere). The hundreds who claimed they would deliver the child if the Lindberghs would only pay them slowly awakened Anne from her nightmare—in anger. With the mail at last dropping to a few hundred letters a day, even the newspapers had run out of articles to write. “We have been rather gloomy lately,” Anne wrote her mother-in-law in early April. “We are now living from day to day but realize we must look forward to weeks.”

  The press pieced together much of the preceding week’s scenario. Reporters had sighted Lindbergh looking despondent; and people in the Bronx wondered if John F. Condon was not the Jafsie whose cryptic messages had been appearing in the paper all month.

  Lindbergh felt a statement had to be released to the press. Colonel Schwarzkopf officially acknowledged that a $50,000 ransom had been paid and that the kidnappers had failed to return the baby or identify his whereabouts. Privately Lindbergh conferred with the major press services, asking them to soft-pedal the story, especially that the Treasury Department was actively hunting for the marked bills, distributing to banks a fifty-seven-page pamphlet listing the serial numbers. Within a day, the kidnapping was again front-page news. “That we can’t keep anything private is most discouraging,” Anne wrote Charles’s mother. “Although things are bad they are not hopeless,” she added, clinging to her husband’s Gibraltar-like optimism.

  The mysterious “Jafsie” came out of hiding, thriving on every minute in the limelight. To keep his phone from ringing off the hook, he had his number unlisted. While Lindbergh appreciated Condon’s diverting attention from Hopewell, he regretted that it rendered him useless any longer as a go-between.

  With little beyond stray clues to follow, the police returned to the Lindbergh and Morrow houses, where they again questioned members of the staff. They delved especially into the personal life of the evasive Violet Sharpe, but they came up with nothing.

  Nobody followed the new barrage of stories more closely than Evalyn Walsh McLean. After reading of the Jafsie drop in the Bronx and hearing about John Curtis in Norfolk, she demanded that Gaston Means account for himself and her $100,000. Means told her that Curtis’s gang, Jafsie’s gang, and the one to which he was an intermediary, were all one and the same, and that the only reason the baby had not been returned was that the gang realized the money was “hot.” Insisting he had actually held the Lindbergh baby in his arms, he offered to take Mrs. McLean on his next mission to recover him. After accompanying Means to South Carolina and El Paso, and being told that the gang was demanding another $35,000, she realized that she was being swindled. When she demanded her $100,000 back, he said that it was too late, that he had just given it to one of the kidnappers. Mrs. McLean called her attorney, who called J. Edgar Hoover. Means would soon be indicted.

  For days, no important leads surfaced, and despondency engulfed the Lindbergh estate. Then, on April sixteenth, John Curtis of Norfolk announced that the baby was safe!

  Two days later, Lindbergh received Curtis in his study in Hopewell and heard a new installment to his story of the gang—five Scandinavian men—with which he had been communicating. Like Gaston Means, he said there was but one gang, and the man named John, whom Dr. Condon had met, was its leader. The conspiracy also included a German woman, a trained nurse, who wrote the ransom notes. Curtis said he had met John at his house in Cape May, at the southern tip of New Jersey.

  According to Curtis, John said the plot to kidnap the baby originated “in the household,” with an employee, and that the kidnappers had been to the scene of the crime two or three times before March first. He said he and another man had climbed the ladder, chloroformed the baby, and carried him through the house and right out the front door. He said that the baby had been taken directly to Cape May and later by boat to the Martha’s Vineyard area. When Curtis insisted to John that he would need some proof for Lindbergh, John showed him ransom money, comparing serial numbers to those printed in the newspaper. Curtis admitted he had no tangible evidence of either the child or the kidnappers. Furthermore, he said John wanted another $25,000 and that it had better come soon, because there was a new wrinkle in this plot.

  As Lindbergh later wrote it down, “The kidnappers told Curtis that a very powerful underworld organization was attempting to get the baby and was offering huge sums of money.” As a result, the baby was about to be transferred again, from a small boat near Martha’s Vineyard to a larger one—an eighty-foot-long two-master closer to Block Island. Neither Schwarzkopf nor his men believed any of Curtis’s story; neither did Colonel Breckinridge nor Anne. Lindbergh felt they had to play along.

  On the night of April nineteenth, Lindbergh drove to a hotel in Cape May Court House. Curtis preceded him to arrange the meeting. Schwarzkopf, believing no harm could come from what he considered a bogus operation, agreed to hold his forces back, giving Lindbergh and Curtis as much elbow room as possible. Over the next three weeks this plan for Lindbergh to connect with the kidnappers and his son kept changing. After each disappointment, Curtis inflated Lindbergh’s hopes with an abundance of credible details.

  While Lindbergh fundamentally felt Curtis was lying, lack of any alternative impelled him to buy into his far-fetched story. Charles kept “expressing faith in it,” Anne observed, “though never absolute faith. Still he has been rather encouraging, for him.” Anne was starting to open her eyes to certain realities, but her trust in Charles was enough to sustain her a little longer. “I have, of course, great confidence in his judgment,” she wrote Charles’s mother, “but I do not dare hope too much, especially in the face of the tremendous body of evidence which seems to say, ‘Don’t trust these people.’ In the meantime there is nothing else here.”

  In all this time Colonel Schwarzkopf’s continuous investigation had turned up nothing of value in New Jersey. Nobody had heard another word from any of the gang in the Bronx. On May eighth, Mother’s Day, Lindbergh spent the night in New York City at the Morrows’ apartment with Anne—their first evening alone since the ordeal had begun. The next day, Anne went to her doctor who said both she and her baby, due in three months, seemed healthy. Charles left for the New Jersey shore, believing the meeting with the kidnappers was at hand.

  In Atlantic City, Lindbergh met Curtis and a friend, who was lending them his eighty-five-foot ketch, the Cachalot. Curtis said his contact with the gang told him to meet them near Five Fathom Bank, off Cape May, and that the gang was aboard a black-hulled Gloucester fisherman called the Mary B. Moss. The Cachalot cast off at seven o’clock that Monday night. They reached the rendezvous point five hours later and spent the next six hours sailing in circles. When the Cachalot returned to port Tuesday morning, Lindbergh remained on board so that reporters would not see him.

  He spent most of the next day, Wednesday, alone on the ship, waiting, while Curtis said he would try to reestablish contact. He reported that the gang-members were fighting among themselves over settling for so little money. Thursday, the twelfth, was rainy and windy. After lunching with Lindbergh on the Cachalot, Curtis left for Atlantic City. The weather showed signs of clearing, and he spoke of a rendezvous for that night.

  At 3:15 that drizzly afternoon—the seventy-second day into what the Trenton State Gazette called “the most widespread search ever conducted in police history”—two men were driving along the Hopewell–Mt. Rose Highway. It was a little-traveled, muddy road. At a particularly isolated spot near the summit of a hill—about a half-mile out of the hamlet of Mt. Rose and two miles southeast of Hopewell—the passenger, a forty-six-year-old man named William Allen, asked the driver, Orv
ille Wilson, to pull to the side of the road so that he could relieve himself. Allen wandered into the thick, damp woods about sixty feet. “I went under a branch and looked down,” Allen later recounted. “I saw a skull sticking up out of the dirt, which seemed to have been kicked up around it. I thought I saw a baby, with its foot sticking out of the ground.”

  Allen called Wilson over to the macabre sight. “Well,” Wilson asked, “what are you going to do about it?” Allen said he was going to report it to the Hopewell police. They headed into town, where they found Patrolman Charles Williamson at the barber shop. Upon hearing Allen’s account, Williamson leapt from the chair. Within minutes, Allen and Wilson had led a team of New Jersey policemen to the Mt. Rose road.

  There at the edge of Mercer County was a clear view of the Lindbergh house, some four miles away—its white walls plainly visible by day as its lights would have been by night. Upon exiting their cars, two of the officers observed a burlap sack—worn and bloodstained—on the ground just off the side of the road. Allen guided them into the woods. The police took one look down and asked Allen to go home, where they would question him later.

  The officers had a badly decomposed child’s body before them, face down in the dirt. The size of the body, the shape of the skull, the still golden, curly hair all suggested the Lindbergh baby. More police were summoned to the makeshift gravesite. They carefully turned over what proved to be an incomplete corpse. Not only had the figure blackened severely, but its left leg was missing from the knee down as was the right arm below the elbow and the left hand. The body parts had probably been eaten by animals, as had most of its viscera. But the eyes, the nose, and the dimpled chin left little doubt as to the corpse’s identity. The clothes were in bad condition, but intact.

  Before imparting the news of their discovery to the Lindberghs, one of the inspectors suggested they get a description of the baby’s outfit on the night of his disappearance. Two officers went to the Lindbergh house and questioned Betty Gow, who provided not only the details of every item he wore but also the remnant of flannel and the spool of blue thread with which she had sewn his undershirt.