Not much to go on. The investigation continued.
Sergeant E. Paul Sjostrom of the NJSP went over the ladder thoroughly to “secure the fingerprints in the position the wood would have been held while sawing.” He tried all the positions that a ladder could have been held by a left-handed or right-handed person. He discovered five prints, two on the third rung of the first section, one on the fourth rung of the second section, and two more on the second rung of the third section. The fingerprints were then photographed by Trooper Frank Kelly.
Lieutenant Arthur Keaten interviewed Reginald Brown with the New England Organ Company in Boston. Brown reported that after his “examination of the ladder and my experience I have concluded that the manufacturer of the ladder not only possessed mechanical skills but also a knowledge of the standard type of ladder used as equipment for pipe organs.”
So now the New Jersey police were on the lookout for a left-handed, pipe organ–fitting, seasoned ladder climber. They would make one more attempt to help the ladder bear witness.
On the recommendation of the New York City Police Department, they brought in Dr. Erastus Mead Hudson, an independent fingerprint expert, to see if he could find what police could not. Mead was a specialist in body chemistry and bacteriology, but while stationed in Liverpool during World War I he had witnessed Scotland Yard detectives taking fingerprints and decided to study the science of dactylography.
Hudson used a chemical called silver nitrate instead of the traditional police method at the time of using powder to lift fingerprints. The soluble silver nitrate reacts to the salt deposits found in sweat and that are present in most latent fingerprints. Ultraviolet light shows a fingerprint in a reddish brown or black color.
Using this cutting-edge technology, Hudson found five hundred or so latent prints on the unpainted wood ladder. While most were unusable, the findings showed just how many people had handled the ladder since that cold first night of March.
The investigation turned back to tracing the ransom money and interviewing potential witnesses and suspects.
On March 16, John Condon received a baby’s sleeping suit in the mail, subsequently confirmed as Charles Jr.’s. On March 21, Condon received the eighth ransom note, in which the kidnapper insisted on total compliance and stated that the kidnapping had been planned for a year. A little more than a week later, on March 29, Betty Gow, the young boy’s nurse, found his thumb guard, which he had been wearing at the time of the kidnapping, near the entrance to the estate.
Finally, on April 1, 1932, a month after the boy had been taken, the tenth ransom note instructed Condon about where to deliver the $50,000 ransom money the following night. The eleventh and twelfth ransom notes would lead to a cemetery meeting, with Lindbergh himself watching from afar, and the passing off of the money to a man with a heavy German accent that the authorities and the press would call “Cemetery John.” After receiving the ransom money, Cemetery John gave Condon another note that provided instructions that the boy would be found on a boat named Nellie docked near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Two searches for the child, including one by Lindbergh himself, would prove unsuccessful. Meanwhile, Condon gave authorities details about Cemetery John so a police artist could create a sketch of the man.
Yet hope and clues dwindled. And on May 12, the tenor of the investigation would completely change. The body of Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. was found, partly buried and badly decomposed, about four and a half miles from the home where he had been abducted.
It was a gruesome discovery. His head was crushed, and there was a hole in his skull. Other body parts were missing. The coroner determined he had been killed by a blow to the head and had been dead for about two months.
Hudson, the fingerprint expert, offered an unsolicited theory, “without any doubt, that ladders similar in all particulars to the one used by the kidnapers, are used in South Carolina and Florida for the purpose of gathering fruit. If this is true, then there is in all probability another section of the ladder which has not been found, in which case its discovery would be of great value in establishing the identity of the kidnapper.”
Schwarzkopf dispatched Trooper Frank Kelly to follow up in southern New Jersey with various people in the fruit business. Kelly first met Dr. Frank App, the general manager of Seabrook Farms, who said he had been in the fruit business his whole life and “would not state definitely that this type of ladder is used for picking in the fruit business.”
To make certain, Kelly interviewed a number of Seabrook workers, including some who were “colored” and who grew up in the South. None had ever seen a three-section ladder constructed like that. Two sections used as a step stool, yes, but nothing like what was used in Hopewell for the kidnapping.
Two weeks later, with clues at a minimum, the New Jersey State Police offered a reward not to exceed $25,000 for information leading to the apprehension and conviction of the person or persons responsible for kidnapping and murdering the twenty-month-old.
Running out of leads locally, Schwarzkopf decided to take advantage of President Hoover’s offer of federal government resources. Trooper Kelly was dispatched by his captain, J. J. Lamb, to take the ladder and the chisel found at the Lindbergh estate and a soil sample found under the window of the nursery to US Department of Justice headquarters at 18th and Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, two blocks from the White House.
John Keith was his contact at Justice. He would take Kelly to meet men from the Bureaus of Standards, Soil, Plant Industry, and Agriculture and the US Forest Service to see if they could discern anything “of value” from the clues Kelly brought to them. Trooper Kelly stayed with the ladder until the end of the workday before it was “kept in a room locked up” and under guard until the following morning, when the investigation would continue.
Kelly would return first thing the next morning, and by ten am he’d be back in New Jersey making a verbal report to Schwarzkopf before locking up the ladder in the cellar of the Lindbergh home.
During the ladder’s trip to Washington, a Forest Service senior engineer, H. S. Betts, broke off a few small pieces of it and sent them to the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison to be conclusively identified. Upon receiving them, FPL Director Carlisle P. “Cap” Winslow, whose first job for the US Forest Service was investigative work to find better ways to preserve transmission line poles, would head to the office of the Director of Silvicultural Relations.
He closed the door and placed the samples on the desk of the country’s top wood identification expert. “Arthur, drop what you’re doing,” he likely told him. “This needs to be identified as soon as possible. Don’t tell anyone what you’re doing.”
At a lab accustomed to working with divisions of the military, secrecy was not uncommon. But this was what Koehler had written to Lindbergh about two months earlier, offering to help. As he later said, “I have spent many years studying the patterns of wood pores, the structure of its cells by species; how it grows, thickly in the years of rainfall, skimpily in years of drought. For me the world perhaps has too limited boundaries fixed by its kinds of trees and the wood they produce. I work all day on wood with microscopes, calipers, scales and even X-ray machines.”
He sent word less than a week later to Betts that he had positively identified the seven samples of wood sent for his inspection. When he personally inspected the ladder at his office in Washington, Betts had labeled the rungs of the ladder 1 through 11 and the six rails (two in each of the three sections) 12 through 17. The numbers 18 and 19 were assigned to the dowels that connected the ladder sections.
Squire Johnson’s report was flawed. While he had concluded that all the steps or rungs were white pine and all the rails or runners were shortleaf yellow pine, Koehler’s microscope yielded different results.
At least one of the step samples, Number 11, the top step, was Douglas fir, as were two of the rails, Numbers 14 and 17. Also, de
spite Johnson’s proclamation that he had found maple in Lindbergh’s library identical to the wood in the ladder’s dowels, Koehler determined that sample Number 18 was birch, not maple, and said more specifically that it was likely paper birch.
He made that determination because, as Betts would record in his report to J. Edgar Hoover at the Bureau of Investigation, microscopic inspection showed it was “covered by a thin film which gives a fatty or oily reaction with a reagent known as Soudan IV. The material, however, has not penetrated the pores appreciably, indicating that it was put on sparingly, as linseed oil or wax that might have been rubbed on with a rag. This coating also indicates that it was part of a handle. Paper birch is used to some extent for the cheaper grades of long handles.”
Further, Koehler thought he had struck gold with the discovery of a number of fibers, apparently textile fibers, “clinging to the loosened grain.” Two were golden yellow; others were deep purple or white. They appeared to be wool and/or cotton.
Investigators would later discount Koehler’s fiber evidence, because everywhere the ladder had gone to be studied it had been wrapped in woolen and cotton blankets that were golden yellow, deep purple, or white.
Hoover forwarded Betts’s report, with Koehler’s findings included, to Schwarzkopf. It did confirm to authorities that the species used in the steps and sides of the ladder were not grown in New Jersey. The Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine were western woods, while the southern yellow pine was from the southern part of the country, but all were frequently used throughout the eastern states.
Further, Betts pointed out that Rail 16 had “four rectangular nail holes made by old-fashioned cut nails.” Betts also reported that at least two of the nails had been driven in at an angle.
Dr. K. F. Kellerman, the associate chief of the Bureau of Plant Industry, also sent Hoover a report on the ladder that would be forwarded to Schwarzkopf, saying that while he had seen ladders like this occasionally used on farms or in orchards, “we do not believe this type of construction is generally used in orchard work or that it is typical of any farming section.
“There is nothing either in the construction or the material used that would identify it either by locality or profession of the maker,” Kellerman wrote, concluding, “We believe ladders of this character are used more frequently by mechanics and others doing light work around buildings than by farmers, although mechanics would almost certainly have better constructed ladders.
“We regret we can give no further or more definite information.”
When he sent the federal bureau reports to Schwarzkopf, Hoover wrote, “the information contained in the reports by the several scientists is unfortunately very meager, but probably to be expected under the circumstances.”
The investigation was, to use a metaphor Koehler and his colleagues might have, growing dormant. The leads were drying up.
But as Koehler knew, dormancy can be tricked. Without question, the growth and development in an organism’s life cycle is closely linked to environmental conditions. But that environment can change.
He was plenty busy at work, packing up the office for the move to the new building later that fall and working on projects on reducing waste in logging and lumber manufacture, lowering costs to consumers, and improving the overall usability of wood. Testimony in two more court cases, one in Toledo and another in Cincinnati, was forthcoming.
Yet he felt there was more for him to give to the Lindberghs and the New Jersey State Police. They had taken the ladder many places, “always hoping it could be made to speak.” Koehler believed he could create a “wooden witness.”
Among the many quotes relating to forests and leadership he had been collecting was one from the nineteenth-century American clergyman Maltbie Davenport Babcock. “We think that conspicuous events, striking experiences, exalted moments have most to do with our character and capacity,” Babcock once said. “We are wrong. Common days, monotonous hours, wearisome paths, plain old tools and everyday clothes tell the real story . . .
“The Work Shop of Character is everyday life. The uneventful and commonplace hour is when the battle is won or lost.”
Koehler was willing to provide many uneventful hours to this ladder. That’s what he did.
He just needed a chance.
4
Iva Marsh knew about struggle.
Growing up in Boston the daughter of a leader in the women’s suffrage movement, she had learned the power of words, the power of knowledge, and the power of standing up for women’s rights.
“Most women expect entertainment every time they leave their homes and that is something that I do not believe is right,” she said. “I feel that, if a woman has reasonably good health and a reasonable amount of time, she should give of it to her community.”
That is why when she moved to Wisconsin after the First World War, with her doctor husband and young baby in tow, she jumped right in to assume the telephone chairmanship of the Madison League of Women Voters. Roles on numerous other civic-minded committees followed, as did another child, leading to the near-constant presence of a telephone at one ear and, as she said, the smell of “the milk for the baby’s bottle boiling over on the stove.”
She was so busy one friend speculated whether she could handle any more responsibilities. To that, another friend suggested, “Sure, if we just give her a minute to put her baby in the ice box.”
Marsh still wondered if that was a compliment.
What she knew for sure, as she looked out her on her Maple Bluff neighborhood that Wednesday morning in March, was that she needed time to process her thoughts. She looked out her front window at the maple trees along the street that gave the area its name and then walked to the back of the house and out to a tranquil and semi-frozen Lake Mendota. Usually this time of year there were some fishermen on the ice, but the weather had been so unseasonably warm the first couple days of March that the police and fire departments were warning people to stay off the lake.
Like so many others, she’d read the morning paper’s news that Charles A. Lindbergh’s baby boy had been audaciously kidnapped out of his nursery window, with his parents downstairs the whole time.
Marsh’s husband was at work at the clinic and her kids were at Emerson School—coincidentally, the facility the kidnapped baby’s grandmother had taught at less than a decade earlier.
All her life, she’d been taught self-determination. It led to confidence and self-esteem. She was now the president of the Madison League of Women Voters and in that position stressed empowerment and responsibility. “Unless the people of a country have a sense of responsibility about their government, there can be no true democratic government,” she said. “All citizens must be imbued with a sense of individual responsibility for the future of the nation.”
But now as she bowed her head and closed her eyes, she felt powerless. The mother of two herself, she had read how Anne Lindbergh was trying to go through her daily household tasks without breaking down. The newspaper said the distraught mother was remembering the “flier’s motto—keep a cool head in emergencies,” but the very next sentence described her “tearful eyes.”
Marsh was interrupted by the sound of the phone. On the other end was a staffer with the local paper wanting to know what “the city’s women leaders” thought of the crime. He was working on a story for the front page of the March 3 Wisconsin State Journal.
Mrs. Harry E. Marsh paused and in a firm, resolute voice said for publication, “There is no punishment adequate. They should give the most extreme punishment to kidnapers.”
When the paper came out the next morning, her sentiments were echoed by women across Madison under a headline, “Madison Women Advocate Death for Kidnapers of Lindbergh Baby.”
Mrs. James Jackson, who was the executive secretary of the local Girl Scouts council, said, “Punishment should absolutely be death without money being spent o
n trials.”
Mrs. George Ritter, who ran the Madison Women’s Club, said, “Kidnaping is inhuman. Persons guilty should be given the maximum punishment.”
And Mrs. J. W. Madden, a member of the Madison School Board, said, “No punishment is too severe. Mothers are all in sympathy with Mrs. Lindbergh.”
Their sentiment was shared by the editors of their paper, who wrote an editorial called “We Go Primitive.” It read, “For several years there has been in the making an American revolution. It isn’t ‘red,’ it comes from the right. It has smouldered in the breast of decent Americans everywhere. It is a revolt against the rule of crime. . . . The patience of the public is exhausted. The fury that makes mobs is near the surface of the law abiding citizens today.”
Nationally, legendary humorist Will Rogers turned dark when discussing the fate of his friends’ son. “Generally speaking, I’m not in favor of lynchings and mob law and that sort of thing, but I’d gladly be a one-man lynching party in this case.”
As 1932 wore on, the authorities were getting angry as well. However, their anger was directed at the lack of credible leads and the abundance of incredible ones, like the one involving a former federal inmate named Fred Tomkins who insisted that a German acrobat, an Australian, and a powerful dwarf had pulled off the crime of the century. The story Tomkins told explained that the dwarf actually went up the ladder and into the nursery to get the baby. Of course, he didn’t know their names, and they had all left the country.
The lack of news associated with the case was bad business for an industry eager to slake the thirst of a parched public. The media swarmed in June when Violet Sharpe, who had worked in Anne Lindbergh’s mother’s home, committed suicide by swallowing poison just before she was due to be interviewed by police for a second time. The first time she had curiously and clearly lied to authorities, but after her death she would be cleared of any involvement with the abduction. Yet the papers buzzed that she must have been involved.
The Sixteenth Rail Page 7