Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  “The long trial at Flemington, the charge of the judge and the verdict of the jury established a crime,” wrote The New York Times the next day in its lead editorial, “but did not clear away a mystery.” Indeed, the newspaper suggested, part of the public fascination with the case was the daily hope that “either the evidence of the police or the admissions of Hauptmann would show precisely who the kidnapper was and what were his preparations and methods of operation.” Because of that lack of tangible proof, debate about the case has never stopped.

  Because apparently nobody witnessed the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, some questions can never be answered with absolute certainty. Nobody will ever know who removed the baby from his crib. Even if Hauptmann’s guilt were a certainty, one will never know whether or not he acted alone, whether or not Fisch or others (what about the Italian-speaking voice in the background of one of the phone calls to Condon?) were involved, whether or not it was Hauptmann who climbed the ladder (or even used the ladder at all), whether or not the baby was killed accidentally or intentionally. But the weakness of the defense’s case and the strength of the prosecution’s left little room for a juror to vote other than he did. Even on the first ballot, they were unanimous as to Hauptmann’s guilt, disagreeing only about the penalty. Over another four ballots, the seven-to-five vote for the death penalty reached unanimity. As Ethel Stockton, the last of the jurors to die, said more than fifty years after the fact, “The evidence submitted to the jury was overwhelming …”

  The power of Lindbergh’s testimony was undeniable. If he had expressed even the slightest uncertainty, the jury might have had reasonable doubts of their own. He had none. To the end of his life, on the rare occasions when he discussed the trial—either with family or a few intimate friends—he never wavered in his conviction.

  In the sixty years since “The Lindbergh Case,” countless theories suggesting Hauptmann’s innocence have surfaced. There is room for such hypotheses because there was never any evidence placing Hauptmann on the Lindbergh property, either outside on the ladder or inside the baby’s bedroom. But even if several witnesses had been coerced or had convinced themselves that Hauptmann was guilty and worth perjuring themselves for, even if evidence had been faked or tampered with, even if law-enforcement agencies had botched their work, even if all the expert testimony from both sides nullifed each other, even if Richard Hauptmann had been a more sympathetic witness, more at ease with the English language and less a target for a hostile press corps, even if the Court had been biased against him—there remained a veritable mountain of undisputed evidence against him, a man so chronically secretive that his own wife declared she did not even know his first name was Bruno until the tabloids smeared it across their front pages.

  “Few today deny that the trial was unfair,” wrote attorney and law professor Alan M. Dershowitz in 1988, “—not only by current standards, but by the far less rigorous standards of the 1930s. But many who acknowledge the trial’s unfairness insist that Hauptmann was plainly guilty.” Six points in the case allowed Lindbergh to sleep at night secure in the feeling that the sole offender had been brought to justice. Not only did five handwriting experts state there was no doubt that Hauptmann had written the ransom notes, but it appeared as much to the layman’s eye. There was no disputing that Arthur Koehler’s detective work had brought him to Hauptmann’s lumberyard in the Bronx more than a year before the carpenter had become a suspect. Hauptmann was never able to explain satisfactorily why Dr. Condon’s address and telephone number were written in his closet. Hauptmann had been throwing around great sums of Lindbergh ransom money at a time when he was barely earning a living. All of Hauptmann’s alibis appeared flimsy. And finally, Condon, the taxidriver Perrone, and Lindbergh himself all identified Hauptmann’s voice, which Lindbergh maintained was “a very strange voice,” and “unmistakable.”

  In his closing remarks, Reilly had tried to put the fear of God into the jury. “Hang this man and cover up our sins,” he had said. “Hang him and ten years from now, after he is dead, have somebody on their deathbed just about to meet their Maker, turn over and say, ‘I want to make a confession, I was part of the Lindbergh gang,’ and then where is our conscience, where are our feelings when we have sent an innocent man to his death, and we think about the real culprit—he must be somewhere in the world. There must be two or three of them still alive, because no one man could do this.” And yet, the next sixty years brought forth not a single confession, not a shred of evidence or testimony connecting anybody but Bruno Richard Hauptmann to the crime.

  “The trial is over. We must start our life again, try to build it securely—C. and Jon and I,” Anne wrote on Valentine Day, 1935. “I must start again, without Elisabeth, with my eyes open, without confusion or fooling myself, honestly and patiently, keeping clear what matters. Charles and a home and Jon—and work.”

  A “MOST ASTOUNDING LETTER” from Smith College the next week, offering Anne an honorary Master of Arts degree, lifted her spirits. She was reluctant to accept, thinking Smith ought to reward “people who have done things in their own rights, on their own responsibilities—women who have held a career by themselves.” But her proud husband insisted she accept it.

  With resolve that had eluded her for months, Anne returned to her writing. Ever since her article in National Geographic, publishers had been inviting her to submit books to them. One was Harcourt, Brace, with whom Harold Nicolson had been working. At the end of April 1935, she met with Alfred Harcourt and explained that she felt the time had come for a professional editor to read her first full-length manuscript, North to the Orient. Charles copy-edited each page before Anne sent it off. A few days later, Harcourt telephoned to say, “I would take it if it were written by Jane Smith. It’s a good story, it’s moving, it’s well constructed, and parts of it border on poetry.” His acceptance was one of the most satisfying moments in her life. When Charles learned the news that evening, he “beamed with pride” … and subsequently placed an advance order for nine hundred copies.

  The manuscript required minimal editing and was scheduled for publication that summer. Advance word was so positive that rumors spread that the book must have been ghost-written. Fifteen thousand copies were in the bookstores on publication day, August fifteenth. Within four months, Harcourt, Brace had 185,000 copies of the book in print, making it the number-one nonfiction bestseller of 1935. Its success encouraged her to reread her diaries of the trip to Greenland, Europe, and Africa and to make notes for a second book.

  The spring and summer of 1935 proved at least as productive for Charles, and as rewarding. He returned to his laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute and his medical experiments with Dr. Carrel. Out of the public eye, Lindbergh had designed in late 1934 a pump “by which a pulsatile circulation of nutrient fluid, properly oxygenated, could be maintained through an organ.” Using Lindbergh’s machine, Dr. Carrel performed surgeries that showed that circulation, even in such vital organs as the kidneys, could be interrupted for as long as two hours without causing permanent damage. However, despite rigorous standards and conditions, bacterial infection still invaded the apparatus and the organs.

  In the spring of 1935, Lindbergh perfected his invention, designing a new type of organ chamber. It was an intricate modern sculpture of glass—bulbs and tubes that vaguely resembled a saxophone fused on top of a wine bottle. On April 5, 1935—using the Lindbergh Pump—a whole organ was successfully cultivated in vitro for the first time. Dr. Carrel bled an etherized cat to death, removed its thyroid gland, and placed it in the organ chamber. It was perfused for eighteen days, permitting for the first time an entire organ to live outside of the body. The idea dating at least as far back as 1812—when French physiologist Le Gallois wrote of “artificially circulating a fluid through an organ”—had, thanks to the Lindbergh Pump, at last been realized.

  Over the next two months, Carrel and Lindbergh performed more than two dozen experiments with the pump. They tested spleens, ovar
ies, kidneys, and hearts. In almost all instances, they succeeded in keeping them fully viable and free of infection. This work brought two new medical facts to light: cultivated organs remain alive; and their structure and functions vary according to the composition of the perfusing liquids.

  “A new era has opened,” Carrel declared. “Physiology and medicine have acquired … a powerful tool for the investigation of the intricate relations between organs and blood … Now anatomy is capable of apprehending bodily structures in the fulness of their reality, of understanding how the organs form the organism, and how the organism grows, ages, heals its wounds, resists disease and adapts itself with marvelous ease to changing environment.” The ramifications of these experiments were endless, extending into the worlds of pathology, physiology, and anatomy. Organs affected with malignant tumors, for example, could be studied while being kept alive although separated from the human body. The effects of different perfusing solutions could be evaluated. Faulty organs might be removed from the body and repaired, to be replanted. Perhaps a similar pump could keep an entire body alive while organs from another body—perhaps even artificial organs—could be implanted!

  “Not one of the 22 great medical scientists who are members of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in Manhattan has a reputation with the man-in-the-street equal to that of a minor volunteer worker at the Institute named Charles Augustus Lindbergh,” wrote Time in the late summer of 1935. “Lindbergh is considered … exclusively as a flyer,” Dr. Carrel said in the article, “… but he is much more than that. He is a great savant. Men who achieve such things are capable of accomplishments in all domains.” These new accomplishments, of course, drew even more publicity, giving the media a new angle on the nation’s top-drawing headliner. Reporters staked out the Rockefeller Institute as well as Next Day Hill; and it became nearly impossible for Lindbergh to walk the streets anywhere in between.

  Lindbergh was sorry the public had been made aware of his only refuge, but he was pleased that Dr. Carrel was at last receiving what Lindbergh considered his due. Later in the year, Carrel published an American edition of Man, the Unknown, a subjective discourse on the human body and soul, full of scientific fact and metaphysical opinions. For the first time, the public at large got a sense of the controversial thoughts long kept confined to the select few who came in contact with him. No doubt because of his close association with Lindbergh, the book became an immediate success that year alongside Anne’s. By the following year, his book had bumped North to the Orient off the top of the charts, becoming the nonfiction bestseller of 1936.

  Having decided to put New Jersey behind him, Lindbergh spent much of the summer in the air, trying to find his bearings and a new place to settle. Poulticing their bruised marriage, he took Anne twice to Little Falls, which was not much different from when he lived there, except for the sign on the water tower that bragged, “Charles A. Lindbergh’s home town welcomes you.” He took Anne around his farm and house, which sat abandoned on what had become public parkland. He introduced her to old friends, neighbors, and relatives, including his half-sister Eva, with whom he had not spoken in years. It was a cautious meeting, devoid of bitterness. A visit with Charles’s mother in Detroit elicited a flood of memories, though he saw no reason ever to live there. They also went to Long Island several times, where Lindbergh momentarily considered Harry Guggenheim’s offer to sell some of his land at Port Washington.

  That August, while the Lindberghs were in North Haven, Henry Breckinridge’s office wired that Will Rogers had been killed, along with pilot Wiley Post, when their seaplane crashed on takeoff from a lagoon near Point Barrow, Alaska. Charles was on the telephone all day—“suddenly electrified into steely usefulness,” noted Anne. For the next three days, he pulled every string necessary to transport Rogers’s body from Alaska to Los Angeles for burial at Forest Lawn—all according to the widow’s wishes. “OF ALL THE LOVING KINDNESS SHOWN MOTHER THE WONDERFUL THING YOU DID HAS BEEN HER GREATEST COMFORT,” wired Rogers’s son Bill. The press could not resist mentioning Lindbergh in all the obituaries, linking the nation’s two greatest folk heroes.

  Lindbergh remained part of the nation’s daily conversation even when he was not generating the news, as stories related to the trial continued to consume the public. Hauptmann’s fractured defense team began the appeals process; an exhausted Edward Reilly was taken to a hospital in a strait-jacket, suffering from a “breakdown”; Jafsie took to the vaudeville circuit; and Mrs. Hauptmann went on the stump, giving speeches to raise money for her husband’s defense, for which she hired Lloyd Fisher. His appeal contested 193 points in the original trial. The Flemington jury announced that they were writing a book, each juror contributing a chapter; Hauptmann wrote a brief autobiography, but the prison in Flemington would not allow him to release it while the Appeals Court was considering his case. Lloyd Fisher’s investigators claimed to have found a child on Long Island who was “the Lindbergh Baby.”

  On October 9, 1935, the New Jersey Court of Errors and Appeals unanimously upheld the lower court’s first-degree murder conviction, thus adding to the controversy about the fate of Richard Hauptmann. The arguments raged all the way into the office of Governor Harold G. Hoffman. A detective named Ellis Parker aroused the thirty-nine-year-old governor’s interest enough to get him to call upon Hauptmann. While getting no answers about the crime, the secret meeting did raise enough new questions for Hoffman to investigate further. Word of the meeting leaked, and the New York Daily News announced, “LINDBERGH CASE REOPENED.” In early December the Daily Mirror began publishing installments of “HAUPTMANN’S OWN STORY!” While Hauptmann’s attorneys prepared their brief for the New Jersey Court of Pardons, Hauptmann wrote a personal letter to Hoffman, pleading his innocence and his willingness to take either a lie detector test or a truth serum. (The handwriting in both this and subsequent Hauptmann letters for mercy displayed similarities to the Lindbergh ransom notes.) Judge Trenchard set the date for Hauptmann’s execution—January 17, 1936.

  Supporters for Hauptmann rallied—some opposed to the death penalty in general, others believing Hauptmann received an unfair trial. (“There are millions of people all over the world waiting for you to come forward and save this man that you condemned with your erring words,” an anonymous resident of Port Chester, New York, wrote Charles Lindbergh. “Well Lindy,” wrote another anonymous New Yorker, “… here is hoping when you and your China-faced wife go up in a plane you will both come down in flames.”) Lindbergh became a target for a whole new set of irrational assailants. He received scores of letters that threatened the life of his second son. According to Lindbergh’s count, Post Office authorities arrested fourteen people in connection with them.

  Even though Next Day Hill was fenced and a night watchman had been hired to make rounds, Lindbergh heard a shout from outside one night, while he was sitting in an upstairs bedroom. He opened the window and looked down upon the pasty face of a babbling mental patient, whom the police came to arrest. Another night, the Lindberghs were returning from Manhattan to Englewood when a car tried to force them into an alley. Lindbergh quickly braked, then sharply turned left, while the other car shot ahead. Local and state police assisted the Lindberghs in these offenses as much as they could, he later wrote, “but alarming incidents still occurred.”

  Jon was attending The Little School in Englewood (the innovative nursery school Elisabeth Morrow Morgan had started and on whose board Charles sat). One morning, a teacher called Anne to tell her a “suspicious-looking truck,” covered with canvas, was parked outside the schoolyard. When the children were called in from recess, the truck left. State troopers found the truck a few miles away—full of newspaper photographers, who had snapped pictures of Jon Lindbergh through slits in the canvas. “No arrests were made,” Lindbergh noted, “because no clear violation of the law existed, and the press was so powerful politically that police authorities had to proceed cautiously. The arrest of a photographer or reporter i
nvariably brought claims that freedom of the press was being suppressed.”

  Then one day late that fall, while one of Jon’s teachers was driving him home from school, another car full of men sped up, forcing them into the curb. The terrified teacher clutched Jon, who began to cry. A man jumped out of the car and rushed toward them, thrusting a camera in the boy’s face. It was not the first such incident. Lindbergh kept his son from returning to school and hired a retired detective with a sawed-off shotgun to shadow the boy.

  That latest incursion by the media, Charles wrote his mother, was “trivial in comparison to the whole situation.” There were no laws to protect him from the American press; and fighting back would only enhance his family’s visibility, making them even more vulnerable to the ongoing kidnapping threats. On top of that, he felt a number of New Jersey officials had taken to using the Hauptmann case for political gain—specifically Governor Hoffman, who seemed to be considering clemency for Hauptmann and was eager to remove Colonel Schwarzkopf from his post. Lindbergh could no longer concentrate on his work; and leaving his family behind while he was on business trips had become unthinkable. “Between the politician, the tabloid press, and the criminal,” he wrote his mother in mid-December, “a condition exists which is intolerable for us.”

  Lindbergh secretly prepared to move his family away. On December seventh, Charles told Anne to ready herself and Jon to live abroad for the entire winter, if not longer—on twenty-four-hours’ notice. Over the next fortnight he quietly obtained passports in Washington and completed travel plans to England, because he believed “the English have greater regard for law and order in their own land than the people of any other nation in the world.” Dr. Carrel gave him a letter of introduction to an eminent surgeon there, who could open doors to England’s medical community. Aubrey Morgan sailed ahead on a fast boat, so that he could meet them when they arrived and take them to his home in Wales. And on December nineteenth, Lindbergh placed a call to Deak Lyman in the city room at The New York Times. He invited the reporter to Englewood, to discuss a matter too confidential for the telephone.