The Lindbergh rebuke became the talk of the nation. As one “plain citizen” wired Stephen Early, “TO CHARGE LINDBERGH WITH SEEKING PUBLICITY WILL CERTAINLY TICKLE THE AMERICAN SENSE OF HUMOR.” Over the radio Will Rogers spoke highly of Lindbergh’s knowledge of aviation and urged him and the President—whom Rogers described as the two best-loved men in America—to come together to sort out the problem. But Roosevelt would not back away from his position.
On February 18, 1934, the president of TWA furloughed all its personnel and attempted to develop a minimal schedule for passengers that would keep the company alive. Other major airlines suffered similarly. The Army had even worse problems.
As Lindbergh had tried to explain, they were not prepared to handle the mail. Although the Army had close to one thousand planes available at the time, fewer than 150 of them were suitable mail carriers, and they could transport only a fraction of the load that the commercial planes could. But a bigger problem, Lindbergh knew, was that flying the mail required special skills.
Three days before the Army took over the airmail schedule, three of its pilots were killed on practice runs, two crashing in a snowstorm over Utah, another over Idaho. Another Army pilot barely escaped death crashing near Linden, New Jersey. By the end of the Army’s first week with its new assignment, another three pilots were killed, five more critically injured, and eight planes had washed out, accounting for property damage of $300,000. Lindbergh feared more disaster would follow “as the Army spirit is to push on in spite of everything and that is just what kills pilots in bad weather.”
The final weeks of that year’s winter turned unusually inclement, one of the most foggy, rainy, and snowy in the nation’s history. Each day brought another horror story. Superintendent of the Aerial Mail Service Benjamin Lipsner tried for days to speak to the President, and when he finally got through, on March eighth, he begged him to “stop those airmail deaths.” Roosevelt agreed to curtail the airmail service, but he would not hear of returning the mail to the commercial airlines. The next day four more Army mail pilots were killed. Roosevelt held his ground, calling a moratorium on airmail service. As the bodies of Army pilots mounted, so did pressure against the administration.
Secretary of War George H. Dern assembled a special committee to study and report upon Army aviation in relation to national defense, and he invited Lindbergh to serve on it. Lindbergh sensed this was an administration ploy to enlist his support. He replied to Dern that he stood ready to contribute whatever he could toward the maintenance of an adequate national defense, but he would not join this committee because he believed “that the use of the Army Air Corps to carry the air mail was unwarranted and contrary to American principle.”
The next day, March 16, 1934, both the Black Committee and the Department of Justice tried to induce Lindbergh’s support. For more than two hours, Lindbergh sat in the big red leather witness chair in the largest caucus room in the Senate Office Building. The room was packed with cameras and microphones and scores of people who wanted a glimpse of their hero. In answering even the toughest questions about commercial irregularities, he remained measured and articulate, insistent that “these contractors should have been given the right to trial before being convicted.” The New York Times reported, “Whenever his face flashed in the familiar, winsome smile, a murmur of approval ran through the hall. He seemed still to be one of the world’s most fascinating figures.”
The same day he testified, Carl L. Ristine, Special Assistant to the Attorney General, asked Lindbergh to confer privately with him “about some matters pertaining to air mail contracts and controversial subjects.” Lindbergh appeared in his office at the Post Office Department Building in Washington that evening. Upon his arrival, Lindbergh found not only Ristine, but also A. G. Patterson, chief investigator for the Black Committee, and a stenographer. Sensing that he was being set up, Lindbergh placed a call to Henry Breckinridge in New York.
Breckinridge advised his client to make no statement and to have no conversation before anyone representing the Black Committee without a subpoena, witnesses, and counsel present. He also told Lindbergh that if the inquiry were by an accredited representative of the Attorney General of the United States, it was his duty “to give freely any facts in his possession that had to do with any offense against the laws of the United States.” Lindbergh replied, “Check.” Breckinridge asked to speak to Ristine, who explained that Patterson had only stopped by and that the stenographer was, in fact, a personal secretary of the Attorney General. If Ristine would agree to furnish a transcript of the proceedings promptly, Breckinridge said he did not object to Lindbergh’s being questioned.
The interrogation quickly turned testy, full of hypothetical questions and hostile insinuations. Lindbergh felt that Ristine was not interested in an investigation of facts so much as a confirmation of his opinions that laws had been violated. But he also felt so confident about his position that he answered questions for close to three and one-half hours, thwarting Ristine at every turn. At times he seemed to enjoy toying with him, making him lose his temper by restraining his own. In the end, Ristine learned nothing that advanced his cause. Almost a month later, Lindbergh telegraphed Ristine reminding him that he still had not received the transcript of their conference.
By then it would have been imprudent for the Department of Justice not to comply. The Army was delivering the mail on a greatly reduced schedule, and a twelfth pilot had just crashed. Radio, newspapers, and newsreels all offered Lindbergh platforms from which to address the nation.
An editorial in the New York Times asserted that Lindbergh was “as fine a witness as one could find searching the whole world over.” Everyone from the man on the street to William Randolph Hearst concurred. Congressman Hamilton Fish, who represented the President’s home district, said his constituents’ mail had been running ninety-seven percent in favor of Lindbergh ever since the “discourteous treatment” shown by Stephen Early in replying to the Colonel’s initial telegram. Walter Lippmann, like many other Washington pundits, found it “shocking” the way in which “overzealous partisans of the Administration” set out to discredit Lindbergh—“to investigate his earnings, to make out that he was a vulgar profiteer who was disqualified and had no right to be heard.”
On April 20, 1934, Postmaster General Farley—the unwitting appointee who took the fall for the Administration’s political blunder—called a conference of commercial airlines for the purpose of accepting new bids for the old airmail routes. To save face, Farley said that no line would be granted a contract if it had been represented at the “Spoils Conference” of 1930, at which Walter Brown had parceled out the original contracts. The major airlines responded by reorganizing, mostly by changing their names: American Airways became American Airlines; Eastern Air Transport became Eastern Airlines; United Aircraft became United Airlines; and Transcontinental and Western Air became Trans World Airlines. Lindbergh found the solution “reminiscent of something to be found in Alice in Wonderland.”
Some of the leading personnel at each company had to be sacrificed in the “purge,” including Lindbergh’s friend Richard Robbins at TWA. Lindbergh himself wrote a letter of resignation, because he did not want to be part of a company “based on injustice and which necessitates the resignation of officers who have contributed so greatly to its development”; but management persuaded him to stay. On May 8, 1934, TWA was flying the mail again, and Charles Lindbergh had emerged as the one figure both the public and the industry believed they could turn to serve as their watchdog.
The “Air-Mail Fiasco,” as Lippmann referred to it, had deep repercussions for the President. For the first time since he had taken office, his authority had been effectively challenged, making him appear both fallible and impenitent. Neither Roosevelt nor Lindbergh would ever forget the other’s behavior during that skirmish, nor would either forgive.
By summer, Lindbergh was restless again. He let the New York apartment go and placed an order for a
new plane, a single-engine, 125 h.p., two-place high-wing monoplane built by the Monocoupe Corporation in St. Louis. In August, the Lindberghs picked it up and proceeded to the West Coast to visit Anne’s invalid sister.
The Lindberghs joined the Morgans at Will Rogers’s 250-acre ranch in Pacific Palisades. Away on a trip, Rogers had made the spread available to Elisabeth, then desperately trying to recuperate. On Wednesday, September 19, 1934—after only three days together—the Lindberghs were abruptly summoned East again. Colonel Norman Schwarzkopf telephoned from New Jersey to tell Lindbergh that the kidnapping case had been cracked and a man he believed for certain had been involved in the crime had been apprehended—a German carpenter from the Bronx. “Oh God,” Anne said upon hearing the news, “it’s starting all over again.” “Yes,” Charles replied, “but they’ve got him at last.”
The Lindberghs moved back to Next Day Hill, still their safest refuge from the press. The media was so frenzied in its reporting on “the crime of the century” that each new revelation ignited a wildfire of rumor, in some cases forever clouding aspects of the story. But as the smoke cleared, certain tangible truths about this case revealed themselves:
Since the spring of 1932, the wood technologist Arthur Koehler had been analyzing the kidnap ladder. He began by completely disassembling it, numbering each rail and rung. Several types of wood—pine, birch, fir—went into the ladder’s construction, each with its own internal markings of rings and knots and its own external markings from the machinery that milled the raw timber into lumber and from the tools used to build the ladder. One piece of wood—identified as “rail number 16”—was especially interesting because it had four nail holes in it that had no connection with the making of the ladder, thus suggesting prior usage. Of low-grade sapwood, with no signs of weathering, it suggested that the rail had been previously nailed down indoors and used for rough construction, perhaps in the interior of a garage or attic.
There were dozens of other clues that kept Koehler on the investigative trail. The rungs of this homemade ladder, for example, were of soft Ponderosa pine but showed no signs of wear, indicating that the ladder had been built for this particular job. The marks on those rungs from the planer that dressed the wood revealed an unusual combination of cutter heads. Koehler mailed a form letter to 1,600 lumber mills on the East Coast, asking if their lumber planers shared the same characteristics. Positive replies came from twenty-five mills, which were asked to send sample boards. From them, Koehler was able to identify the Dorn Lumber Mill in McCormick, South Carolina, as the source of the boards that became the ladder’s siderails. Twenty-five lumberyards had received shipments of Dorn’s southern pine since the fall of 1929. Through scientific deduction, Koehler whittled the list down to the National Lumber and Millwork Company in the Bronx, which had bought its shipment in December 1931, three months before the kidnapping.
In November 1933, after eighteen months of investigation, Koehler needed only the sales records of the Bronx lumberyard to close in on the likely builder of the ladder. Unfortunately, National Lumber was largely a cash business and kept no such accounts. There, in the middle of the Bronx, Koehler’s investigation reached an apparent dead end.
Meantime, the FBI, New Jersey State Police, and New York City Police Department had continued to follow every lead. Gradually, a cluster of clues surfaced in the form of ransom bills, which began appearing within two weeks of their having been paid in St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx. Each was traced as far back as possible—usually from a New York bank to a shop to a customer, who was then investigated. On April 5, 1933, a Presidential Order increased the flow of Lindbergh ransom money: To combat the growing Depression practice of hoarding gold, Roosevelt directed that all gold coin and certificates valued at more than one hundred dollars be deposited or exchanged at a Federal Reserve Bank by May first. It would not become a crime to save or spend gold certificates, for the crime lay only in possessing more than one hundred dollars’ worth; but they suddenly became less common and thus easier to spot.
On May first the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at Liberty and Nassau received $2,980 from a man who signed his name as J. J. Faulkner. When the bank realized that it was Lindbergh ransom money, the police searched the address on his deposit slip. But Faulkner was never found. Another ten bills turned up during the year, most of them in Manhattan. On the occasions when the recipients of the bills could recall who had passed them, they repeated the same characteristics—a white male of average height, blue eyes, high cheekbones and pointed chin, a German accent.
On September 18, 1934, a teller at the Corn Exchange Bank in the Bronx checked a ten-dollar gold certificate against the list of Lindbergh ransom money and found a match. He notified the authorities, who noticed writing in the margin of the bill—“4U-13-14 N.Y.” The police investigators speculated that the bill came from a nearby gas station. One of the bank’s clients was the Warren-Quinlan service station on Lexington Avenue and 127th Street. The manager there, Walter Lyle, remembered the customer who had paid for ninety-eight cents’ worth of gasoline with the bill. When Lyle had looked askance at the gold certificate, the customer had said in a decidedly German accent that the money was good—that, in fact, he had about one hundred more just like it at home. The New York Motor Vehicle Bureau provided the police with the name of the owner of that car—Bruno Richard Hauptmann of 1279 East 222nd Street, the Bronx. In addition to information about his dark blue 1930 Dodge sedan, the registration card indicated that he was German-born and a carpenter.
The police staked out his house, which was within minutes of Woodlawn Cemetery, St. Raymond’s, Dr. Condon’s house, the National Lumber and Millwork Company, and the area in which most of the ransom money had been passed.
On the morning of September nineteenth, three black sedans carrying Special Agent Thomas Sisk from the FBI, “Buster” Keaten of the New Jersey State Police, and James Finn of the New York Police Department, among others, parked down his street. The officers watched Hauptmann through binoculars as he left his house and walked around the corner to his locked garage, from which he removed his car. They tailed him as he drove up Tremont Avenue; and, before losing him in traffic, one of the officers pulled him over. In an instant, the suspect was surrounded by police brandishing guns. They removed his wallet and found that this was Bruno Richard Hauptmann and that he was carrying a twenty-dollar gold certificate, the serial number of which they instantly found on the master list. When they asked where he got the gold note, he said from his house, where he had another three hundred of them. The police asked if he had not recently told a gas station attendant that he had one hundred such bills at home, and Hauptmann admitted that he had lied to the attendant.
In an apparent attempt to display his honesty, Hauptmann quickly revealed that he had entered the country illegally, on his third attempt as a stowaway. Since his arrival, he had worked at various jobs before marrying a German-born waitress, fathering their child, and finding regular work as a carpenter.
Although Hauptmann had suggested he was a crooked man gone straight, once the police got him back to his second-floor, five-room apartment, they developed a growing sense of his guilt. Most of the Hauptmanns’ furniture looked new and expensive, incongruous in its humble surroundings. The centerpiece of the room, for example, was a luxurious floor-model Stromberg-Carlson radio, worth hundreds of dollars. When Hauptmann’s wife, Anna, entered the apartment and saw her husband in handcuffs, he tried to calm her in German, saying that the police were there because of an incident involving his gambling. An officer who spoke German picked up on the fib. An inspection of their bedroom turned up hundreds of dollars worth of promissory notes, new ladies’ shoes, five twenty-dollar gold pieces, and an expensive pair of field glasses. The police asked Hauptmann point-blank where he had the rest of the Lindbergh ransom money. The suspect denied knowledge of the money or the case, other than what he had read in the newspaper. The police ripped open his mattress but found only stuff
ing inside.
Hauptmann explained that his fortunes had recently changed, that he had not been a carpenter for several years and that successful Wall Street investments had allowed him to purchase his few luxury items. In the living room, the police found ledger sheets of stock transactions—as well as road maps of New Jersey and other states along the Eastern seaboard. Hauptmann’s landlady was ushered upstairs with two ten-dollar gold notes that Hauptmann had given her toward his current rent. They were Lindbergh ransom bills. While the police turned his apartment inside-out, Hauptmann sat impassively—occasionally stealing a glance out the window.
Sisk of the FBI walked to the window. There was nothing of interest outside, just the small, crude garage fifty feet away. “Is that where you have the money?” he asked. Hauptmann said that he had no money. Sisk, Keaten, and Finn went to investigate the garage anyway.
Finn noticed that two of the floorboards there were loose, and when they pried them up they noticed fresh dirt. Grabbing a shovel, he dug until he hit a jar. Inside was nothing except water. Convinced that it had once contained ransom money, Finn confronted Hauptmann with his accusation again. Hauptmann reiterated that he had no ransom money, that he did not know what Finn was talking about. With that, they collected some of Hauptmann’s papers, with specimens of his handwriting, and carted him off to the 2nd Precinct police station on the lower West Side for questioning. A few hours later, they brought in Anna Hauptmann.
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