Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  The officers returned to the corpse with Colonel Schwarzkopf. Under his direction, an inspector cut and peeled off each layer of the baby’s clothes, manipulating the body with a stick. He accidentally pierced the softened skull, leaving a small hole below the right earlobe. Each article of clothing was exactly as Betty Gow had described, down to the scalloped flannel undershirt with its blue thread. A visible skull fracture suggested a violent blow to the head had been the cause of death.

  Back in his office at the Lindbergh house, Colonel Schwarzkopf called the coroner, then approached Betty Gow with the two undershirts they had just removed from the baby’s body. Betty recognized them at once and asked from where they had come. He broke the news to her, which she fought hard against believing. A little before five o’clock, Schwarzkopf approached Anne’s mother, who had buried her husband but six months prior. She took the news calmly, immediately realizing that the baby had been dead since that first night and that the kidnappers had kept his sleeping suit as a bargaining chip.

  With Colonel Schwarzkopf, she went upstairs to find Anne in the master bedroom. “The baby,” she said, approaching her daughter, “is with Daddy.” Anne sat there bravely, as her mother comforted her. Then she confessed that since the first night she had thought he had been killed.

  Lindbergh was still in the dark—alone on the Cachalot off Cape May awaiting word from John Curtis. Colonel Schwarzkopf told Anne that men were en route to southern New Jersey to deliver the news to him in person. Upon learning from two members of the Curtis party that his son had been found, dead, Lindbergh asked if his wife knew and if she was all right. Then he left for home.

  Colonel Schwarzkopf summoned the reporters hanging out at Pop Gebhart’s general store to the Lindbergh garage for an important announcement. It took the better part of an hour before their colleagues from Trenton arrived. Not until everybody had gathered did the somber police chief read his press release. He had not finished the first sentence before several of the men bolted for the door; but Schwarzkopf insisted that nobody leave the room until the entire statement had been read. Before dinner that night, the story had been broadcast across the country on all the major radio networks.

  The baby’s corpse was removed to 415 Greenwood Avenue in Trenton, Swayze & Margerum, Funeral Directors. Walter H. Swayze was a mortician as well as the Mercer County coroner. Because the victim had met a violent death, state law required the county physician to perform an autopsy. While waiting for him to arrive, Betty Gow identified the remains in the embalming room. Although wholly unprepared for the grotesquerie of what she saw, she recognized the baby not only from his facial features and hair but also from his sixteen teeth, especially the eyeteeth, which had just cut through the gums, and the way in which the second toe almost overlapped the big toe. “There was absolutely no doubt,” Betty Gow would recall sixty years later, “this was my Lindbergh baby.” Dr. Philip Van Ingen, the pediatrician who had attended the child shortly before his kidnapping, also positively identified the body.

  The autopsy by Dr. Charles H. Mitchell revealed no signs of strangulation or bullets. With so much decomposition to the body, there was little for him to add beyond the supposition that “the cause of death is a fractured skull due to external violence.” Because blood had been found nowhere near the crime-scene, not even on the chisel left behind, it seemed logical that when the ladder had broken, the baby had met his death smashing against the side of the house or onto the ground.

  Lindbergh did not reach home until two o’clock in the morning, and he went directly to his wife. By then raw emotion had overtaken her, and she wept uncontrollably. On this occasion, Charles made no effort to stop her. He said little, but Anne clung to every measured word. “He spoke so beautifully and calmly about death that it gave me great courage,” she would write his mother afterward. He grasped any straw of consolation that he could find. That their baby was dead from the beginning meant that nothing they did could have made any difference in sparing his life. Learning that he suffered a blow to his head, Charles commented, “I don’t think he knew anything about it.”

  Anne had a long sleepless night in bed, but she got more rest than her husband. Charles sat in a chair beside her the entire time, watching her. “His terrible patience and sweetness and silence—terrifying,” she noted the next day.

  In thinking of the immediate future, Lindbergh told Colonel Schwarzkopf that Friday the thirteenth that he wished his son to be cremated. With vendors already selling food to the parade of tourists on the Mt. Rose road, he knew a gravesite would become nothing less than a carnival sideshow. Most distressing of all, a photographer had broken into the morgue in Trenton and snapped a picture of the dead baby, copies of which were being peddled for five dollars each.

  Lindbergh felt he should view the body. Colonel Schwarzkopf assured him that the corpse had been positively identified. But Lindbergh insisted. That afternoon Colonels Schwarzkopf, Breckinridge, and Lindbergh drove up an alley to the back door of Swayze & Margerum, while a crowd of mourners congregated in front. Lindbergh ordered the sheet removed from the little body lying on the examining table, leaned over to inspect the teeth and toes, and walked out of the room in silence. A number of public officials were present when Lindbergh told the County Prosecutor, “I am perfectly satisfied that is my child.”

  The body was wrapped in a shroud, placed in a small oak coffin, and driven by hearse to the Rosehill Cemetery and Crematory in Linden, New Jersey. Rubberneckers strained to look in the window of the car, hoping to get a glimpse of Lindbergh; others merely touched the car as it pulled away. Lindbergh and Breckinridge stayed inside the mortuary until the crowd had dispersed, then went to the house of Rosehill’s proprietor. Schwarzkopf followed the casket, to protect its contents. Until he could take to the air to scatter the ashes, Lindbergh requested that they remain at Rosehill.

  For days, Anne could not help reliving her every minute with her child—“I am glad that I spoiled him that last weekend when he was sick and I took him on my lap and rocked him and sang to him. And glad that he wanted me those last days….” She heeded Charles’s words and considered it a blessing that the baby had not lived beyond that first night: “He was such a gay, lordly, assured little boy and had lived always loved and a king in our hearts. I could not bear to have him baffled, hurt, maimed by external forces. I hope he was killed immediately and did not struggle and cry for help—for me.” She found it nearly impossible to speak without crying.

  Charles’s grief, Anne discovered, was different from hers. He kept talking about the bigger picture, how they must “find some way of making Time go backwards,” so that they could reclaim who they were before this catastrophe. He felt diminished by the whole experience—deceived and degraded. “And the security we felt we were living in!” he remarked, resolving never to be so naïve again. “Everything is chance,” he said. “You can guard against the high percentage of chance but not against chance itself.” Perhaps, he thought, America had become so barbaric that Lindberghs could no longer live there. In a rare unguarded moment, he said to Anne, “I hoped so I would bring that baby back.”

  Charles insisted they start rebuilding their lives. Anne decided to concentrate on her new baby; Charles thought of returning to his scientific work. Future children, she believed, could not take little Charlie’s place; but she felt that he had “made something tremendous out of our marriage that can’t be changed now. And for the world, too, perhaps, the sacrifice will bring something.” Anne and Charles had never been so close as they were at his birth—except, she now observed, at his death.

  Two images from this abysmal period haunted Anne forever. The first was of her white tulips, which finally struggled through the packed ground—even though countless policemen had trampled the flower beds. What was terrible, Anne wrote years later, “was that they all came up crooked…. crooked and misshapen and wizened, half-formed, faceless—not one erect and perfect and whole.”

  The second image w
as even more chilling, a sight she regretted never witnessing. Anne Lindbergh never once saw her husband cry.

  11

  APPREHENSION

  “Individuals are custodians of the life stream—temporal manifestations

  of far greater being, forming from and returning to their

  essence like so many dreams.”

  —C.A.L.

  THERE WAS AN OUTPOURING OF SYMPATHY—SOME SAID THE greatest public display of grief since the assassination of Lincoln. Others, such as Henry Breckinridge, suggested that the sentiments cut deeper and wider than that because “Lindbergh’s popularity knew no boundaries. This touched everybody—the most famous baby in the world had been brutally killed.”

  Over one hundred thousand telegrams and letters, plus hundreds of bouquets, arrived in Hopewell. The Lindberghs received official messages of sympathy from President and Mrs. Hoover, the Prince of Wales, General and Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek, Mexican President Ortíz Rubio, and Benito Mussolini. “IT IS WITH DEEPEST REGRET THAT THE PEOPLE OF LITTLE FALLS LEARNED OF YOUR GREATER SORROW,” telegraphed their mayor, echoing the sentiments wired by the mayors of practically every major American city.

  As civic organizations had rallied behind Lindbergh in 1927 with congratulations, so now they gathered with condolences—the B’nai B’rith of Atlantic City; the Dutch Girl Scouts in Ossterbeek, Holland; the Australian Motherscraft Society in Sydney; the Germiston Methodist Church in South Africa; the Kiwanis Club of Hope, Arkansas …

  Lindbergh heard from his elderly aunts in Minnesota and even his estranged half-sister Eva, who wrote, “Father told me once ‘no sorrow on earth is so great as the loss of a child’—And the needless loss of your beautiful little son seems to me the cruelest in history.”

  The general public felt the same. Thousands of strangers sent the Lindberghs letters and tributes, many suggesting that the baby had died for their sins. They included Biblical quotations, pictures of Jesus, and the suggestion that their son “offered himself as a helper of humanity, as the Christ did when he incarnated in the body of Jesus.” One James Spink of Buffalo, New York, wrote, published, and distributed a pamphlet called “The Little Eaglet,” in which he rendered the lad’s tale, paralleling his Passion with appropriate citations from Scripture. The Hungarian Jew, a periodical published in New York, wrote in its next editorial that “not Lindbergh, but we were the sinners. We tolerated lawlessness in the land until it grew to diabolical proportions…. The baby’s blood is upon our heads.”

  The next wave of Lindbergh poems—elegies and threnodies—appeared. Then came the songs—the Lindbergh marches and foxtrots of yesteryear replaced by such dirges as “Bring My Darling Baby Back” and “The Eaglet Is Dead.” Popular novelist Kathleen Norris wrote a syndicated newspaper column urging every American woman to “build a monument to little Charles Lindbergh Jr.”—not a monument of stone and marble but one of spirit, a promise to feed and clothe the thousands of desperate children in orphanages and tenements.

  Without Miss Norris’s provocation, entire communities enshrined the child: Jacksonville Beach, Florida, unveiled a memorial to the baby and dropped roses from airplanes onto the site; the Girl Scouts of Stonington, Connecticut, planted a five-foot weeping willow tree in his honor; the town of Charlotte, North Carolina, held a mass memorial service; the schoolchildren of San Juan, Puerto Rico, raised money for a wreath to be placed upon the baby’s grave.

  One woman living in Canada was moved enough to send the Lindberghs pictures of her one-year-old son—“who resembles the lost little angel almost 100%”—and to offer them the child for adoption!

  The Lindberghs sleepwalked through the next few days, trying to ignore the New Jersey State Police, still stationed in their garage, spending hours each day working with a replica of the ladder up against the baby’s window, trying to reconstruct the crime. While Anne could not stop replaying every moment she spent with her child—bringing him back by touching his clothes and imagining the feel of his curls—Charles could not keep from monitoring the police as they formulated an array of theories. He found the cold details therapeutic.

  On Saturday, May 21, 1932, Charles and Anne drove to Long Island, to spend a weekend with the Harry Guggenheims. The serenity of Falaise produced a jumble of emotions for them. Exactly five years earlier, the young airmail pilot had arrived in Paris thirty-three hours after leaving Long Island; and on this very night Amelia Earhart recaptured the nation’s attention by becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, departing from Newfoundland and landing in Ireland. The choice of date was no accident. Earhart’s husband and promoter, George Putnam, had evidently selected it to stoke the publicity fires.

  Although they did not know her well, the Lindberghs liked Amelia Earhart, finding her lively company if not an especially able flier. Her success would only draw more attention to aviation and the advances in aeronautical technology since Lindbergh’s more challenging crossing. While she was perhaps coiffed and costumed to look a little too much like Lindbergh, he was grateful to have “Lady Lindy,” as the press called her, filling the front pages. He was incredulous that anybody would actually crave such attention. Charles relaxed enough that weekend to joke that he had “heard Amelia made a very good landing—once.”

  During long walks at Falaise, the Lindberghs spoke of their future. “We have an intense yearning for a quiet life, free from publicity—at any price,” Anne wrote. “Nausea at the sight of newspapers. We are starting all over again—no ties, no hopes, no plans.” After her own three years in the spotlight, albeit in her husband’s shadow, she had come to share his aversion to fame and the toll it exacted. She wished her husband could detach himself from the kidnapping case. “I would like him to get back into the Institute work,” Anne wrote his mother; “it would be a definitely constructive thing for his personal life. It is quiet, absorbing work and he is happiest now when he speaks of it.” Charles needed no convincing. He was already talking of severing all his ties to aviation, because they inevitably led to publicity. Giving up $16,000 a year in salaries from TWA and Pan American seemed a small price for privacy.

  Almost overnight, Charles and Anne’s great attachment to their new house turned into a stronger repulsion. In addition to the constant reminders of Charlie, it had become a magnet for the morbidly curious. After several more weekends at Falaise, they found themselves returning not to Hopewell, but to Englewood—where misfortune followed them.

  Elisabeth Morrow had been laying as low as possible for the past few months, but her heart began acting up. Charles had recommended a doctor at the Rockefeller Institute, who examined her, and his report was extremely discouraging. A second physician said the twenty-eight-year-old Elisabeth had lesions on her heart valves which would only worsen and that he doubted she would live to forty. For whatever time she had left, Elisabeth would have to curtail her activity so as never to exert herself. She decided to convalesce in England, where she had previously found peace and quiet among friends in Somerset.

  Coming just six months after the death of her father and three months after the death of her son, the news stupefied Anne all over again. “There’s nothing in this world can give me joy,” she wrote in her diary, wondering what effect this “terrible apathy of mind, spirit, and body” must be having on her unborn child. Charles returned to his laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute, where he designed a new centrifuge.

  Even though Charles had never felt comfortable amid his mother-in-law’s hyperactive social life in Englewood, he and Anne appreciated the gates and security guards at Next Day Hill. Even there, however, the ramifications of the kidnapping followed them. Violet Sharpe, the English maid whose alibi at the time of the kidnapping always seemed suspect, was subjected to further interrogation. Extremely agitated, she refused to answer many questions, as the police probed into her personal life. On Friday, June tenth, she was told to prepare herself for another inquisition later that day. Before the officers could take her to the Hopewell p
olice station, she went upstairs with some cleaning solvent—cyanide chlorine—and swallowed it. Upon returning to the pantry, she fainted and died.

  Further investigation revealed that Violet was hiding nothing related to the kidnapping, only an embarrassing relationship with the Morrow butler. Within a year, forty-eight-year-old Olly Whateley, the Lindbergh butler, would die from a perforated duodenal ulcer, adding to the endless rumors surrounding the Lindbergh kidnapping. While no law-enforcement agency ever found a link between any of the Morrow or Lindbergh servants and the crime, their sudden deaths would stir future conjecture.

  At the end of June 1932, the Lindberghs returned to Hopewell. Charles had been called to testify in the trial of John Curtis, which was being held in the small Hunterdon County courthouse in Flemington. It proved to be a brief but bizarre trial in which the prosecution had to refashion its argument to fit a peculiarity in New Jersey state law. Even though Curtis had broken down and confessed to Lindbergh of having fabricated the whole gang of kidnappers with whom he said he was in contact, it was not illegal to report false information to the police. Lindbergh testified for the prosecution. The jury found Curtis guilty of obstruction of justice, and the judge fined him $1,000 and sentenced him to one year in jail.

  With that, the Lindbergh case disappeared from the newspapers. There were no suspects, no leads, and a poor economy, which forced New Jersey to lay off dozens of state troopers. Although the case was still active—the FBI working in conjunction with the New York City and New Jersey police forces—investigators were chasing phantoms. Colonel Schwarzkopf sent handwriting specimens from the ransom notes to law-enforcement officials and wardens of penal institutions across the country, asking them to compare the handwriting of all their prisoners. The Treasury Department tried to detect a pattern as some smaller bills of the Lindbergh ransom gradually surfaced in New York.