As that investigation was underway, an even bigger break appeared to investigators. First, sometime between April 21 and April 29, fifty ten-dollar gold certificates were turned into the Federal Reserve by the Manufacturers Hanover Bank in New York. On April 29, twenty-four ten-dollar gold certificates of the Lindbergh ransom money were turned over to the Federal Reserve by the Chemical National Bank and Trust Company.
Then on May 2, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found 296 ten-dollar gold certificates and one twenty-dollar gold certificate, all from the ransom money. They had apparently been part of a single deposit a day earlier to teller James P. Estey. The deposit ticket in question bore the name “J. J. Faulkner, 537 West 149th Street.”
The officers who raced to that address quickly discovered no one by that name living there. Police would interview a Jane Faulkner who had lived at that address some years back, but they could prove no connection.
Frustratingly to Finn, Estey said he had been very busy on the day of the deposit, as it had been payday for federal workers and he was in charge of counting the deposits from the armored cars. He said he didn’t remember what “J. J. Faulkner” looked like or even whether it had been a man or woman.
Finn’s efforts to discover who J. J. Faulkner was would be in vain. In hindsight, he likely knew he should have planned for a big expenditure of the gold certificates on May 2, as May 1 was the deadline President Roosevelt had set for citizens to turn in their gold certificates without penalty or punishment.
Meanwhile, the drip-drip emergence of the ransom bills continued. Clothing salesman Sidney Jacobson deposited a five-dollar bill at his local bank in early June. Jacobson remembered getting the bill from a woman for a fifty-nine-cent pair of gloves. He said she looked at him “in a very suspicious manner,” but he couldn’t remember anything else about her.
A ten-dollar gold certificate that came in from the First National Bank in Cooperstown, New York, was eventually traced back to a Mrs. John O’Neill, the wife of an East Springfield, New York, farmer, who used it to buy dry goods from another local farmer. Her husband said he had received the certificate from his local bank earlier that year, but no further leads came about, as the bank had closed in March.
And then the trail went dry for another five months until November, when bills once again turned up in banks, deposited from places like Penn Station and the Sheridan Square Theatre. At the latter, one of the cashiers remembered receiving the five-dollar bill in question because the man who spent it “virtually threw it, folded, through the ticket office window, causing her to look up at him in some anger.” She hadn’t talked with him but remembered him as being thirty to thirty-five years old, slender, about five-foot-eight and 155 or so pounds, with a thin face, light brown hair, high cheek bones, and “apparently American.”
Other dead ends popped up between December and January. And then the leads went cold.
As the months passed and the calendar turned to 1934, hope faded. After February 13, no bills were discovered through the spring and early summer. The gap drove Finn crazy, with little to do other than study the three-foot map of Manhattan and the Bronx that started at his waist and traveled above his head. He looked at the bunches of pins and once again tried to make sense of it all. There was a thick clump of pins in Yorkville, a working-class neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Yorkville had significant populations of Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, Irish, and Hungarian residents, but it was known for its German flavor. Its main artery, East 86th Street, was sometimes referred to as the “German Broadway,” with popular restaurants and ballrooms for waltzing and polka. The alleged kidnapper, Cemetery John, was described as having a German accent. Other clusters of pins were found across the Harlem River, in the east Bronx, and along the Lexington Avenue subway line in Upper Manhattan.
Finally the dry spell ended on August 20, when the Bank of Sicily and Trust Company turned in a ten-dollar gold certificate. Since Finn was on vacation with his wife and two daughters, federal investigators and a representative from the New Jersey State Police tracked the money back to the bank and discovered that seven of the last eight gold certificates found had been sequential.
Agent Sisk determined in his report that the sequential certificates indicated “almost beyond question that the person passing the ransom money was passing the gold certificates one at a time and still had in his possession a large part of the gold certificates paid as ransom.”
Sisk and other federal agents visited all the banks in New York City and the surrounding area, hundreds in all, to ask them to check for gold certificates matching the ransom numbers. Nine certificates turned up from local branches; another four were turned in to the Federal Reserve. A few were traced to corner grocery stores.
When Finn returned to work the first week of September, it was decided each organization, the NYPD, the Bureau of Investigation, and the New Jersey State Police, would place six men, eighteen men in all, undercover in the Yorkville neighborhood, where it appeared the ransom bills were now being passed. No two men from any organization were teamed up together. Despite fears they would bring more attention, the bureau stationed an additional ten undercover agents to watch street corner vegetable and fruit stands.
The net appeared to be tightening as more and more clues emerged. A ten-dollar gold certificate was traced back to the Charles Aiello & Sons fruit store on 2nd Avenue near East 83rd Street, and Aiello had a decent recollection of the man who gave him the money on September 5.
A twenty-dollar gold certificate was tracked back to the Exquisite Shoe Corporation, where it had been used for merchandise sold on September 7. Employees could provide no description, and the four customers who spent twenty dollars or more and whose names were known all checked out.
On the morning of September 18, Finn, New Jersey State Police Corporal William Horn, and the Bureau of Investigation’s Special Agent William F. Seery visited the Wieland Bakery and Lunch Room at 1993 Webster Avenue. It had turned in a ten-dollar gold certificate as part of a deposit to the Irving Trust Company.
Finn interviewed Wieland, his family, and their employees about the customer who might have spent that ten-dollar gold certificate. He would head back to the office frustrated once again.
NYPD headquarters, at 240 Centre Street, was a Baroque-style palace completed in the early twentieth century by architects influenced by the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. It featured a beautiful, ornate dome on top and a fenced park along its north end.
For Finn, though, the building had been a source of frustration for the last thirty months. He was surrounded by clues and simultaneously by the realization that they hadn’t amounted to anything concrete. A little boy was dead, and his parents, the world’s most famous couple, remained frustrated at the lack of apparent progress in the case.
Finn, Horn, and Seery were back out after lunch when they got word to call the Bureau of Investigation headquarters. They were told that a ten-dollar gold certificate, serial number A-73976634-A, had been turned in to the Corn Exchange Bank Trust Company at the corner of Park Avenue and 125th Street.
When they arrived at the bank, the assistant manager, F. C. Dingeldien, gave them the bill in question. Finn looked at the front and saw nothing out of the ordinary, but when he turned it over he saw, written in pencil in the margin, “4 U 13-41.” It was a license plate number that the bank workers hadn’t noticed written on the bill.
The investigators got the list of deposit tickets from gas stations, figuring those businesses would have been most likely to take down a driver’s license plate number, on September 17 and came up with Lind & Glantz at 2481 First Avenue, Dluka Garage, Inc., at 1725 Park Avenue, and Warner-Quinlan Oil Company, on the east side of Lexington Avenue between East 127th and 128th streets. The latter, a filling station, was closest geographically to the bank, so that’s where Finn, Horn, and Seery went first.
There they met station manager W
alter Lyle, with a dark mustache almost as big as the belt buckle on his uniform. He wore a black cap and black bowtie with his shirt sleeves rolled up over his elbows. Lyle told them he remembered the bill in question and the man who passed it. He had bought five gallons of special gasoline for a total of ninety-eight cents. When he presented the ten-dollar gold certificate, Lyle had questioned its value, to which the customer had said, “I have a hundred more just like it.”
Not wanting to have to make good to the company, Lyle had written down the license plate number just in case the bank refused to accept the bill.
Lyle’s paranoia would be Finn’s good fortune. One call to the State Motor Vehicle License Division led to as solid a suspect as the case had had since March 1, 1932.
But if tracking the ransom money throughout late 1933 and early 1934 had produced leads, tracing the wood had not.
After finding the Bronx lumber yard where he believed the North Carolina pine in Rails 12 and 13 was sold and then discovering that the company took only cash, thereby dashing any hope of following that trail to a suspect, Arthur Koehler had turned his attention to tracing the Douglas fir rails. However, finding matching Douglas fir seemed as likely as finding a particular tree in a national forest. There were no defining planer marks on those rails. Koehler felt as if he was spitting into the wind.
As he wrote to his wife, “I can never be so sure of the fir as I was of the pine because it has no marks and no showing of a defect in the planer. Only the width of the knife cut is all I can go by.”
That wasn’t much of a lead at all.
As for the birch dowels used to connect the three sections of the ladder, Koehler believed they could have been part of a gymnastics apparatus. It wasn’t very dirty, but the film on it suggested it had been handled a great deal. Maybe it had been held by sweaty hands.
On December 9, 1933, Arthur wrote to Ethelyn, reminding her that it was almost five weeks since he had left Madison.
“I suppose George has nearly forgotten me,” he lamented. “Anyhow I am going to stick with this job just as long as they let me (except to come home for Xmas of course). They haven’t said much till lately, but now they are letting out the magnitude of this job and what it means. It’s an honor to be in on it but much more to have given them real aid and that is something that no one can beat me out of unless the N.Y. Police solve the mystery along different lines before the N.J. Police can make use of my findings.”
As the New Jersey police force investigated the workers at the National Lumber and Millwork Company, Koehler was getting restless. He suggested to Lamb that they should check all the building permits taken out in the Bronx in the winter of 1931–1932, as he felt “quite strongly that the lumber was stolen on a construction job and not bought or stolen at a lumber yard.”
Lamb rejected his attempt to play detective because to ask New York City officials for that list would lead to them asking why. Lamb and Schwarzkopf didn’t want them to know why. The circle of people who knew what Koehler was working on was small: Schwarzkopf, Lamb, Lieutenant Keaten, Bornmann, DeGaetano, and maybe another detective or two, but that was it. No one from the NYPD or the Bureau of Investigation knew what Koehler was doing.
Koehler didn’t listen. He followed his hunch to the New York City Public library, where besides the list of building permits he found “a lot of foreign looking and smelling people” as well as an “emaciated bed bug” crawling on his copy of The New York Times.
He, too, would get a map of the Bronx, hammer it to a piece of plywood in his Hotel Lincoln room, buy some colored pins, and plot the locations where the buildings were constructed. Unaware they were using similar methods, he and Finn were drawing the same conclusion about where the suspect lived. Koehler figured he studied that map often enough that he “could qualify for a taxi driver in New York if I should be without a job.”
After finding out what Koehler was up to, Keaten once again reminded him of “the importance of keeping our work quiet.”
Still the scientist pushed on, traveling on the train to Mosholu Parkway and the block of Decatur Street where John F. Condon lived. The former principal’s involvement in the case seemed curious to all three of the law enforcement agencies trying to solve the crime. Koehler was equally suspicious.
“I was surprised at the old buildings on the street and the thought occurred to me that rail 16, which has cut nail holes in it, might possibly have come from one of those houses, or more likely a barn in which it was used to seal the inside against cold,” he detailed in his official report.
“I talked to no one while in that section of the city,” he added to reassure his New Jersey bosses that he was not drawing attention to himself. That wasn’t good enough, and Lamb told him not to go into the Bronx again until other investigations there were complete. He wasn’t able to go back to the yard where he had discovered the pine sample that matched Rails 12 and 13.
Instead, he was stuck going over more than 7,500 slips recording the Dorns’ sale of Douglas fir to lumber yards. It was slow and tedious work, leading to hunches but not much more.
His letters home grew more sentimental as Christmas approached and he missed and worried about his family. “I’ve been wanting to mention for some time,” he wrote Ethelyn on December 14,
but always hesitate that it might be well for you folks to look out that you don’t get kidnapped before I come home. It may sound far fetched and egotistical to infer that someone might try to kidnap you to get me off the job, and so it is—at least far fetched. Nevertheless, the kidnappers have nearly $50,000 to spend to avoid getting caught. However the idea is very remote, especially in view of the common belief among officials here that the kidnappers were a very amateurish bunch and not at all professionals. Just a little extra precaution might be well, especially with George. There, I got that off my mind.
To lighten the mood, he shared with her his dining experiences, with Bornmann, in particular, who liked to go to “high faloutin” restaurants since he was on “actual expenses,” and Koehler was on a flat federal government reimbursement. Troop C Headquarters would further frustrate him by stating that if he wanted to go home for Christmas, he’d have to pay for the ticket himself.
“In a way, I don’t blame them for that is what I would have to do if I were on a strictly Lab job if they wanted me here again after Xmas but since they are getting my time for nothing, they might overlook that,” he wrote Ethelyn on December 19, the day before he was set to board a train for Madison. “What’s more we don’t know what to do next. That lumber yard in the Bronx seems to be OK.”
Lamb would concur with that position, sending Koehler a wire in care of the Forest Products Laboratory on January 12 suggesting that he stay in Wisconsin until the situation warranted another trip out east. Over the next few months, Koehler would send letters to Lamb, trying to find a way to help but never quite matching the success and eventual dead end he had encountered with the North Carolina pine rails.
He kept up his investigation of Rails 14, 15, and 17, the Douglas fir uprights, and found lumber mills on the West Coast that had planer marks that were similar to those on the kidnapping instrument. Rail 14 had marks similar to those made at the Blanchard Lumber Company in Seattle, Washington, but its marks were “faint” and not as reliable as those on Rails 15 and 17.
Rail 15 had planer marks like those made by the Bloedel Donovan Lumber Mills in Bellingham, Washington. Rail 17 had planer marks like those made by Clark and Wilson Lumber Company in Linnton, Oregon.
Maybe more importantly for the investigation’s purposes, all of those companies had sold 1x4-inch Douglas fir to three lumber yards in the Bronx: Butler Brothers; the Church E. Gates Company; and Cross, Austin and Ireland. Koehler had visited all three yards during his last couple of weeks out east and had acquired wood samples and sales slips in the process.
While at Cross, Austin and Ireland on December 1
4, he and Bornmann were going over sales slips in manager Arthur A. Tinker’s office when two men, a large one and a small one, came in to buy a three-ply ¼-inch 24x48 fir panel for forty cents. They offered the sales clerk a ten-dollar bill to pay for it. It had been company policy during the Depression to avoid taking such large bills due to the numerous counterfeits in circulation, so the clerk asked if they had anything smaller.
The men said no, at which point the yard superintendent, William J. Reilly, passed the bill to the company treasurer in the next room to look over the bill before going to the safe to make change. The customers watched her, and before she made it to the safe the smaller man asked for the bill back. He pulled a five-dollar bill out of his pocket, for which the treasurer gave him five singles. He then pulled forty cents out of his pocket.
“Our queer customers,” as Tinker would later describe them, next said that they were going to get something to eat at the lunch wagon across the way, and they’d be back for the panel afterwards. Reilly found the whole act “strange” and wondered why they didn’t give him the change in the first place. What made it stranger is that the men disappeared, leaving their forty-cent panel behind, and their forty cents as well.
Reilly was suspicious enough that he looked out the window and wrote down the license number of the car the two men had driven to the lumber yard. Reilly said later that the number ended up matching the one written down on the ten-dollar gold certificate turned in by the gas station manager nine months later “although,” as Koehler later questioned, “how that can be is not clear since the two occurrences were in different years,” and drivers changed license plates each year.
Either way, Koehler had had no way of knowing his proximity to a potential suspect at that moment.
Now that he was back in Madison, Koehler asked Lamb to send him Rungs 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, and 10, all made of Ponderosa pine, so he could study their planer marks. Under the light available to him in New Jersey, he hadn’t been able to identify their distinctive markings, but at the lab in Madison he had “various kinds of controllable natural and artificial lighting by means of which I can bring out the planer marks much better.”
The Sixteenth Rail Page 15