The Sixteenth Rail

by Adam Schrager

  And so when Arthur Koehler picked up his Wisconsin State Journal on March 2, 1932, his attention wasn’t drawn to the story about the record temperature of 56 degrees set in his hometown the day before, nor to the follow-up report about three men rescued after having falling through the ice on Lake Mendota. He didn’t focus on the notice that Albert Einstein, “famous scientist and ardent pacifist,” could be speaking later that spring on campus nor on the Ripley’s Believe It or Not feature about two men from Rhode Island who played dominoes continuously for twenty years.

  On the spring day in 1929 when Lindbergh accepted an honorary degree from the school that had flunked him out, Arthur Koehler was receiving his master’s degree in forestry on the same Camp Randall Stadium stage. (Courtesy: George E. Koehler)

  No, like other folks in the 98 percent of Madison homes that subscribed to the local paper, Arthur Koehler was captivated by the double-decker headline: “Lindbergh Ready to Pay $50,000 Ransom Demanded for Return of Kidnaped Baby.” And he reacted like any father with a son—his was just forty-eight days older than Charles Jr.—would.

  “I looked across the breakfast table at my smallest child, a baby son, and I suppose I shuddered,” he’d later tell The Saturday Evening Post.

  His next reaction was less predictable:

  Then, I read further in the newspaper about that homemade ladder left behind by the fellow who had done the crime and I grew excited. You see, that ladder, because it was made of wood, seemed just like a daring challenge.

  Within a few days after that I wrote a letter to the Lindbergh baby’s father, saying I thought it might be possible to trace that ladder’s members until the wood matched up with other wood so as to compromise the man involved. Of course, I’m no Sherlock Holmes, but I have specialized in the study of wood. Just as a doctor who devotes himself to stomachs or tonsils or human vertebrae narrows down his interests to a sharp focus on the single field of his pet passion, so I, a forester, have done with wood.

  Koehler didn’t hear back. Lindbergh was receiving thousands of similar offers to help, “each writer,” as Koehler would later describe it, “adding to the task of those who tried to sift the grain of that correspondence from the chaff.”

  The problem for the New Jersey State Police from the beginning was the lack of investigative “grain.” But this much was certain: on March 1, 1932, sometime between the hours of 8 and 10 pm, the twenty-month-old with the golden curls had been taken from his crib in his second-story nursery. Left behind was a smudge of yellow mud, then another and another, leading to a bedroom window whose shutters remained open. On the radiator grille that comprised the window sill was an envelope containing a ransom note demanding $50,000, of which $25,000 was to be in twenty-dollar bills, $15,000 in tens and $10,000 in fives.

  Arthur’s own son, George, was 48 days older than Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. Koehler said when he read about the kidnapping, he “looked across the breakfast table at [George] . . . and I suppose I shuddered.” (Courtesy: George E. Koehler)

  Flipping on the light just as his wife arrived at the nursery, Lindbergh would turn to Anne, seven months pregnant with their second child, and utter the words that would crush parents around the world.

  “Anne, they have stolen our baby.”

  Lindbergh had purchased the five hundred acres perched high on the south face of New Jersey’s Sourland Mountain specifically because it was both remote and close to New York City. He had flown over the area and picked the spot from the air, as it was marked by a large oak tree along the edge of the woods where he would eventually build their home. Neighbors would call that tree the Lindbergh Oak. The land was the highest point in New Jersey; indeed, it was the highest point between New York and Philadelphia.

  The simple two-story whitewashed stone home north of the village of Hopewell would soon be overwhelmed by New Jersey State Police officers, reporters, and gawkers. A mud-spattered press corps traipsed all over the active crime scene and were allowed to use the garage as a headquarters, where Lindbergh’s personal attorney, former WWI army officer Colonel Henry Breckinridge, served them coffee as they filed their stories for worldwide consumption. They speculated more than reported, though, due to the lack of concrete information.

  It had to be an inside job, they wrote, after Anne’s mother wondered how a kidnapper would know the family was still at Hopewell and not back in New York or at her home. Reporters mentioned that police were scouring the area over Sourland Mountain “into the dense tangle around Devil’s Cave and Roaring Rocks, an isolated region which rumor says is inhabited by numerous moonshiners.”

  They passed along Anne Lindbergh’s “heart-broken appeal” to the kidnappers about the diet she had been feeding her son since he began fighting the cold that had kept them in Hopewell that night. It included milk, cooked cereal, one egg yolk, and two tablespoons of stewed fruit. That story ended with the reporter writing, “Follow her request and you may in some small part redeem yourself in the eyes of a contemptuous world.”

  Hyperbole was not at that moment in the vernacular of Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who ran the New Jersey State Police. He went on live radio the night after the crime to state quite plainly that “It behooves every law-abiding citizen to co-operate with the police.” Further, he encouraged people to report any sightings of unfamiliar infants in their neighborhoods and said, “Failure to solve this crime will jeopardize every home and strike terror in the hearts of all parents.”

  Congress immediately went to work, calling back to its calendar previous legislation two lawmakers from Missouri had introduced as local authorities were becoming increasingly frustrated by different state statutes governing kidnapping and ransom requests. The bill, which sought to prohibit the interstate transportation of kidnapped persons, had been bogged down by supporters of the Tenth Amendment, which states that powers not expressly granted to the federal government by the Constitution are in the purview of the states.

  That opposition quickly faded, though, after what became commonly referred to as the Lindbergh kidnapping. The Federal Kidnaping Act would be passed the next month and signed into law by President Herbert Hoover, who immediately offered New Jersey authorities the support and assistance of the federal government’s Bureau of Investigation, run by J. Edgar Hoover.

  The original “Major Initial Report,” filed by Corporal Joseph A. Wolf, one of the first officers to arrive at the Lindbergh estate the night of the kidnapping, illustrated the problem for detectives. Wolf wrote, “The Kidnappers consisted apparently of a party of at least two or more persons.” Yet, after detailing the description of the crime and the premises, the column next to “COMPLETE LIST OF SUSPECTS” read “None at this time.”

  Further, the “COMPLETE LIST OF EVIDENCE” listed only three items. Police at the crime scene had found a ransom note and a carpenter’s ¾-inch wood chisel that measured 9½ inches in length with a wood handle and a cast steel blade. The biggest piece of evidence left behind was a ladder, found sixty or so feet from the home, lying on the ground. It was a three-piece sectional ladder—that much anyone could have deduced. One of the bottom two sections was split where it joined the other, indicating that it had been broken during its use in the crime. Again, it didn’t take an expert to figure that out.

  Police immediately placed the ladder up against the nursery window on the east side of the home in what reporters called “part of their frantic efforts to solve the mystery.” It appeared that only the bottom two sections had been needed to ascend to the nursery, but police displayed all three sections for the news photographers.

  Trooper Frank Kelly, New Jersey State Police’s fingerprint expert, dusted the ladder and found no apparent fingerprints. Investigators found an imprint from the ladder left in the mud and an ambiguous footprint left by a moccasin or a sock, but nothing conclusive. Any other physical evidence could have been overrun by the lack of sensitivity to the crime scene by the re
porters, the authorities, and others visiting the Lindberghs at Hopewell.

  Over the next week the Lindberghs would receive two more ransom notes, one by mail and the other delivered to Lindbergh’s attorney, Colonel Breckinridge. One upped the ransom demand to $70,000, and the other rejected any intermediary the family would appoint to negotiate for the safe return of their child.

  Shortly thereafter, Dr. John F. Condon, a retired Bronx school principal, wrote a note to his local paper offering to act as a go-between for the Lindberghs and the kidnappers and to contribute $1,000 of his own money if it led to Charles Jr. coming home safely. Condon’s request was granted by the kidnappers via a letter sent back to the newspaper. He adopted the code name “Jafsie,” a play on his initials, in his interactions with the kidnappers and was told to keep the police out of the negotiations for the boy’s safe return. Lindbergh approved of Condon’s intervention, even if the authorities did not.

  This poster was distributed to law enforcement agencies nationwide for help solving the crime. Col. Norman Schwarzkopf, the head of the New Jersey State Police, said, “If the kidnapper came into this room and told me he had kidnapped the baby, I’d have no case against him.” (Courtesy: New Jersey State Police Museum)

  Meanwhile, police were probing the Lindberghs’ servants with questions and forcing them to provide alibis. Henry “Red” Johnson, the boyfriend of the baby’s nursemaid, Betty Gow, was immediately taken in for questioning, but all authorities discovered was that he was in the country illegally.

  Koehler wasn’t the only one who read the initial United Press report, which stated, “With cold daring, the actual kidnaper crept up a short sectional ladder into the second-floor nursery,” saw the accompanying picture, and felt compelled to share his personal observations on the evidence with either Lindbergh or the authorities investigating the crime.

  O. A. Ross, a consulting engineer with offices in Los Angeles and New York, sent a typewritten letter to Lindbergh on March 3 advising him that “this form of telescoping ladder is extensively used by WINDOW WASHERS. Have you recently had such a man working for you? Also have you recently had any common labor working on the grounds? I am an investigator and from facts disclosed believe that the ‘job’ is a local one and that your child is not far away, perhaps in Trenton.”

  He went on to “suggest that at least a part of the ladder be taken apart for inspection of the nails used. The manner in which the nails were driven should indicate wether [sic] a skilled carpenter or not made up the ladder. A skilled carpenter can tell you this.” He concluded by offering to come to “Hope well” and help “without expense to you, if you so wish.”

  Ross followed up by sending “Col. N. Schwartzkoph” a note the following day suggesting that “as the ladder seems to be the only tangeable clew left by the perpetrators, this article should be analized from every angle possible.”

  And if the New Jersey authorities weren’t busy enough, Ross suggested “the questioning of all milk delivery men in the territory of Hopewell” as it might disclose if a customer was taking an additional quart of milk daily.

  L. Hyman from Atlantic City sent in the second of his handwritten notes on Saturday, March 5, suggesting that the ladder is similar to those “used in the Bronx ship yard. Ascertain if it is one of those and which men used that ladder at the ship yard. All the ladder handlers at the ship yard should be questioned. Note if any of those men are missing and their whereabouts Tuesday night. Only those men using that kind of ladder could put one of them together and set up at the house.”

  Thomas Bow sent in a note from Congers, New York, with a hand-drawn front view of the ladder and a side view. Pointing to the front view, he asked whether the ladder rungs had been removed “and [the] underside—at joints . . . examined for fingerprints?” Pointing to the side view, he said, “No two wood chisels will make the same markings on wood—The same type of peculiarities exist as on a bullet discharged from a gun.”

  Alfred Hearn wrote to authorities from Providence, Rhode Island. As someone who had worked in the lumber business, he said, “I am writing this not as a crank but, in the spirit of doing what little I might to restore Little Lindy.” After describing what he surmised from the pictures, he explained, “The fact that the rungs are flush with the uprights shows the ladder was originally meant to be telescopic. Boats that pull up to a wharf or dock use this type of ladder due to the fluctuation of the tide.”

  There was, as the Bureau of Investigation would later state, a “mass of misinformation received from the well-meaning but uninformed, and a deluge of crank letters written by insane persons, nitwits, persons with a degraded sense of humor and others with fraudulent intent.”

  The Lindberghs believed the crank letters were “standing in the way of progress,” and some politicians proposed adding crank letter writing to the kidnapping legislation Congress was forwarding to the president.

  The authorities were doing what research they could on the ladder, taking it first to Assistant Director of Construction Squire Johnson with the New Jersey Division of Architecture and Construction. Johnson was the first person with any wood knowledge to look at the ladder. He declared the ladder’s rungs in all three sections to be white pine and all of its runners or rails to be shortleaf yellow pine. He identified the dowels attaching the three sections of the ladder as maple.

  Johnson’s initial notes state that he “wouldn’t say it was a good carpenter that made it. One man did the entire job.” He also believed the person who made it “either got tired while making it or was in a hurry to finish the job,” because the runners were marked for saw cuts that were never made and that “the ladder was made especially for the purpose.” Further, despite somewhat large distances between the ladder’s steps, “it is an easy ladder to climb for any person used to climbing.”

  Finally, he stated that the wood used in all but one of the ladder’s runners came not from a building, but from crating used in shipping machinery or some similar object or material.

  Yet, when he issued his final report to Schwarzkopf a couple of days later, Johnson dispensed with much of what he had earlier reported. His March 10 report told the colonel that “this ladder was constructed by two different persons,” not one as he had earlier believed.

  Besides a ransom note and chisel, this telescopic ladder provided the only physical evidence left behind at the scene of the crime. Numerous times, detectives simulated how someone could have entered through the toddler’s second-floor nursery window. (Courtesy: Dr. Regis Miller/Forest Products Laboratory)

  Further, he now said he believed the two smaller portions of the ladder “were constructed by a left handed person, inasmuch as the saw cuts on the rungs of these two sections, by virtue of the splintering or break which occurs at the bottom of every saw cut, indicate that they were sawn by a person who wielded the saw with his or her left hand.”

  More evidence leading to his conclusion was that the ladder “had been placed on the right hand side of the Nursery window which would be the normal side for a left hand person to work from.”

  He expanded about the type of person who could operate a ladder like this. “This would be an extremely difficult and if not impossible ladder for a short person or a tall person unversed in climbing to have negotiated. It is considerably more difficult to descend a ladder of this description than to ascend, particularly if both hands are not free.

  Also intriguing was Johnson’s revelation that a three-foot-long piece of maple “of the identical size and quality as that used in the dowels for assembling the ladder was discovered today in the corner of the Library in Colonel Lindbergh’s [home].”

  But the most concrete lead Johnson offered stemmed from his original belief that the runners were possibly “part of a crate used for protecting bath tubs in transit.” He came to that conclusion because, he said, the wood used in the runners was a “cheap common variety of yellow pine and i
s not the size or grade commonly used in building construction. It is more commonly called box wood . . . used for the construction of crates.” He told authorities that material of a similar grade and age had been found at the State Village for Epileptics at Skillman, New Jersey.

  It was the investigation’s most tangible lead related to the ladder. Johnson and Sergeant William T. Gardiner of the NJSP headed to Skillman to meet with the head of the facility. The two checked the wood pile and all the wood on the grounds. They found two pieces of the same material but not of the same length as the runners used on the ladder.

  The next day, March 8, they procured the names of men who worked on jobs at Skillman and who lived in that vicinity. Gardiner and Johnson interviewed Fred Tomaske, Pete Messenio, Joseph Del Vilchio, Frank Amalfitano, and Joseph Ruggear. They searched each man’s wood piles and found no crate lumber.

  The nursery window where Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. was abducted held few clues for law enforcement officials. The first ransom note to the famous family was found on the window sill. (Courtesy: Dr. Regis Miller/Forest Products Laboratory)

  The next day they checked yet another man’s home and came up empty in the search for crate lumber, so they went back to Skillman to see if they had missed something. They hadn’t.

  Two more days led to more home wood pile searches, one toolset inspection, and a pile of dead ends. Five days in all following up on Johnson’s crate lumber theories had led to nothing.

  So now detectives were left looking for a left-handed carpenter who wasn’t too tall or too short and who knew how to climb and who had access to crates that might have transported materials like bathtubs.