Murder of the Lindbergh baby
Charles Augustus Lindbergh junior, only son of the first man to make a non-stop solo flight across that Atlantic, was put to bed at his usual time of 7.30 p.m. on Tuesday 1 March 1932. The 20-month-old toddler had had a bad cold, so Colonel Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne, had decided to stay on at their new country home near Hopewell, New Jersey, even though the builders were still there. Usually they went back during the week to New York, where they stayed with Anne’s mother, Mrs Dwight Morrow, on her estate in Englewood.
Sitting after dinner with his wife, Colonel Lindbergh heard a cracking sound outside the house. He remembered it was shortly after 9 p.m. Anne put it down to a branch snapping in the high wind, and they thought no more about it. Later they would bitterly regret not going to investigate.
At 10 p.m. nanny Betty Gow, who had been summoned from Englewood to the isolated house on windswept Sourland Mountain, went in to check on Charles junior. His cot was empty. Betty went down to Mrs Lindbergh’s room, thinking she must have the child. But little Charles was not there either. The two women hurried to the library, where Lindbergh was working. Perhaps his father had taken the toddler in there. But Charles A. Lindbergh junior was nowhere to be found.
Colonel Lindbergh called the police and his lawyer. Then the man the press called ‘the Lone Eagle’ rushed out into the night with a loaded rifle to search for his son. He found nothing. The Lindbergh’s went back to the nursery to wait for help to come, and it was then that they spotted an envelope on the windowsill.
Ransom note
The police had already warned Lindbergh that nothing should be touched, so for more than two hours the note remained unopened. Meanwhile the news of the kidnap of ‘Little Lindy’ was being broadcast over the wires across the entire north east of the United States. Local police and state troopers began arriving at the house, together with the advance guard of an army of 400 reporters. Lindbergh was one of Americas greatest heroes, and the kidnap of his only child was very big news indeed.
At last, when the fingerprint men had tried unsuccessfully to lift prints from the envelope, the note was opened. It was handwritten in strange, stilted English, full of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. It demanded $50,000 for the child’s safe return, and finished: “After 2-4 days we will inform you were to deliver the Mony. We warn you for making anyding public or or notify the Police / the child is in gut care.”
The note was unsigned except for a symbol made up of two intersecting circles with a red blob in the middle and perforated with three neat holes. This, the kidnapper said, would be on all future notes to prove their authenticity.
The kidnap of ‘the Little Eagle’ was immediately a national obsession in America. It drove the war between China and Japan off the front page, and the whole country was gripped by the fate of the golden haired child whose picture was in every newspaper. Offers to help was well as thousands of crank calls flooded into the Lindbergh home. But the publicity appeared to only annoy the kidnapper. On 5 March a second note arrived at Hopewell: the ransom had been raised to $70,000. Then the following day, Dr John F. Condon, a 72-year-old retired head teacher living in the Bronx district of New York, decided that he should take a hand.
Condon put an advertisement in the Bronx Home News adding $1,000 of his own money to the ransom, and proposing himself as intermediary between Lindbergh and the kidnappers. Just three days later he received a letter from the kidnapper with a note for Lindbergh enclosed. Condon had apparently been accepted as a go-between. In a series of meetings, he delivered a ransom of $50,000 dollars, and was told by an apparently Germanic kidnapper that the boy was on a ‘board’ called ‘Nelly’ of New Bedford.
Searching for his son
For two days Lindbergh flew over the bay off the Massachusetts coast, where the Nelly should have been. He found no ‘board’ and no trace of his son.
In the meantime, the police had been following a completely different line of enquiry. Underneath one of the nursery windows a roughly made ladder had been found discarded in the mud. Nearby a search had revealed a chisel, which could have been used to open the window. So here was how the kidnapper had got into the house. The sound of wood snapping that Lindbergh had heard was also explained: the ladder had one rung broken.
But the police were convinced the kidnapper must also have had inside help. How else could he have known that the Lindbergh’s had changed their plans, and stayed on at Hopewell? How else could he have known where the nursery was, and which of its windows had a faulty shutter, which would enable him to get in? So they began their enquiries with the servants, both at Hopewell and at Mrs Morrow’s house in Englewood.
On 10 March Violet Sharpe, a 28-year-old English maid on Mrs Morrow’s staff, was questioned. She said she had been at the movies on the night of the kidnap. But she could not remember what film she had seen or even its plot, nor could she remember the name of the man she had gone with or the names of the couple who had accompanied them. A search of her room revealed cards from a taxi firm north of the Bronx. This looked promising. The second ransom note had been posted in the Bronx, and ‘John’ had answered as ad in a Bronx newspaper. Then the hunt for the missing child turned into a murder enquiry.
On 12 May a truck driver stopped to urinate on the road between Hopewell and Princeton. Seventy-five feet from the road he spotted a small, naked corpse, partly covered with a few leaves. The body was badly decomposed, in fact scarcely more than a skeleton. The left leg was missing below the knee. The left hand and right arm were also missing, as were the internal organs apart from the heart and liver. Cause of death was established as “fractured skull due to external violence”.
Betty Gow was able to identify fragments of clothing found nearby as belonging to Charles Lindbergh junior. The following day Colonel Lindbergh himself identified the body after no more than the briefest of glances as that of his only son.
Police interrogation of Violet Sharpe got tougher. On 10 June she was due to be taken in once more for questioning. She shut herself in her room, and refused to go. When the door was opened Violet was found to have taken cyanide. Police told reporters they regarded the suicide as an admission of guilt.
But if Violet Sharpe had been part of the kidnap plot, then who else had been involved? While Condon was conducting his fruitless negotiations with ‘John’, Lindbergh had also been contacted by a man called John Hughes Curtis, president of a boat-building company in Norfolk, Virginia. Curtis said he had been approached by the kidnappers, and asked to act as go-between. But after the body was found in the woods near Hopewell, Curtis admitted he had made the whole thing up.
Obstructing the police
Curtis was tried and convicted of obstructing the course of justice, and it may have been partly this fraud that started the police suspecting Dr John F. Condon as well. Desperate now for some solution to the crime, police questioned Condon repeatedly. His house was searched, and the grounds around it dug up. He himself suspected that his phone was being tapped and his mail intercepted. But once again the police could establish nothing definite against their suspect
On 5 April 1933, more than a year after the kidnapping, President Roosevelt issued an order calling in all gold currency. $15,000 of the ransom money had been in notes with a gold seal. Might this be a chance to trap the kidnapper?
All the serial numbers on the ransom notes had been taken, but the distinctive gold notes were the easiest to spot. A few single notes had turned up here and there, but whoever was putting them into circulation had been too cautious to be caught.
But now on 1 May, the last day for gold to be exchanged for ordinary currency, someone changed $2,980 of Lindbergh’s gold notes at the Federal Reserve Bank. The name on the slip was J. J. Faulkner, 537 West 149th Street, NYC. But no-one remembered Faulkner at the bank. There had been too much of a last-minute rush.
There was no-one of that name at the address given, but the police soon established that back in 1913 one Jane Faulkner had lived there. She had married a man called Carl O. Geissler, and they were now living with Jane’s sister and her husband Alvin Weigler just north of the Bronx. Both Geissler and Weigler were German.
The whole family, including Geissler’s two grown-up children by a previous marriage, were soon under suspicion. Geissler’s daughter, Phyllis, suddenly left for Canada under an assumed name. she was searched at the border, but no ransom money was found. Then in October her husband, Henry Liepold, after repeated police questioning, committed suicide. As with Violet Sharpe, the police took this as an admission of guilt.
But despite strenuous efforts the police were unable to make a definite connection between the Geissler’s and their relatives and the ransom money. Nevertheless, over a year later they were still the main suspects in a case that was now a major embarrassment to all law-enforcement agencies involved, when an apparent answer was found to the whole tangled mess.
Suspicious gold bill
On 18 September 1934 the Corn Exchange Bank at the corner of Park Avenue and 125th Street received a $10 gold bill with “4U-13-41, N.Y.” written in pencil in the margin. They called the police. The writing looked like a car licence number.
Checking at the petrol station nearest to the bank, the police got lucky. The attendant remembered noting down the number the previous Saturday, when a man paid for petrol with the gold bill. He had commented to the man that you don’t see many like that any more. “No,” the man replied, “I have only about a hundred left.” Suddenly after being so cautious, the extortionist seemed to be bragging.
Licence records gave the name and address of the owner of the car. He was Bruno Richard Hauptmann, 1279 East 222nd St, in the Bronx. Hauptmann had given his occupation as carpenter. Lately chemical analysis of the notes passed had shown traces of emery dust in oil, suggesting they had been handled by a carpenter. Wasn’t that the most likely trade too for whoever had made the ladder?
At dawn the next morning police were waiting outside Hauptmann’s house. A man came out at 8.55 a.m., got in his car from the garage, and headed towards Manhattan with the police following. The car was a dark blue four-door Dodge sedan, licence number 4U-13-41 N.Y. The police were hoping to catch their man passing another bill. But finally, afraid of losing Hauptmann in the traffic, they pulled him over, and placed him under arrest. “What is this?” Hauptmann demanded. “What is this all about?” In his wallet police found a $20 gold bill from the Lindbergh ransom.
The next day, after finding nothing in Hauptmann’s apartment, the police started to search his garage. There they found two bundles wrapped in newspaper, hidden in a concealed shelf on the wall. Both contained gold notes. Inside a one-gallon shellac can in another concealed shelf were more bills. They totalled $13,760, and each and every note was from the Lindbergh ransom.
Hauptmann had initially denied having and gold notes. Now he changed him story. His business partner, Isidor Fisch had, he said, gone back to Germany in December 1933, leaving a couple of suitcases and a shoe box with him for safe keeping. Hauptmann put the box on the top shelf of his broom closet. Then in March 1934 Fisch died in Leipzig, owing Hauptmann $5,500. In August, after a heavy rain storm, Hauptmann went to get a broom from the closet. Accidentally he poked the shoe box, which turned out to be soaking wet from a leak in the roof. The box broke open. It was then that Hauptmann saw the money inside.
Hauptmann dried the sodden money in batches in the garage, and then began spending what Fisch owed him. He had no idea, he told police, that it was kidnap money. He thought it must be Fisch’s profits from their partnership in fur trading and stocks.
“The Fisch story”
The police didn’t buy it. In fact, they called it derisively “the Fisch story”. They were certain they had them man solely responsible for the Lindbergh kidnapping, and investigation of all other suspects was halted. They also began feeding the story to the newspapers, all of which were proclaiming Hauptmann’s guilt long before he came to trial.
The evidence police amassed to convict Richard Hauptmann of kidnap and murder looked impressive. It certainly turned out to be impressive enough to convince the jury in Flemington, New Jersey, where the trial began on 2 January 1935.
With an ugly crowd outside chanting, “Kill Hauptmann! Kill Hauptmann!”, there was never much doubt about the outcome of the trial. Hauptmann was found guilty, and sentenced to death. But there were already those, including New Jersey Governor Harold Hoffman, who believed a miscarriage of justice could have taken place. Hoffman repeatedly put back Hoffmann’s date of execution, but he had no power to grant a pardon, and finally, on 3 April 1936, Hauptmann died in the electric chair in the New Jersey state prison in Flemington. He protested his innocence to the last.
The case continues
However, the case did not die with him. For years afterwards people continue to believe that Hauptmann could have been framed by police and prosecution. Under continuing scrutiny all the evidence that had seemed so convincing in 1935 began to look increasingly threadbare.
Three witnesses testified that they had seen Hauptmann in a car near Hopewell before the kidnap. But one described a car that was nothing like the Hauptmann’s; another had initially claimed to have seen nothing suspicious, and then changed his story to the police; and 87-year-old Amandus Hochmuth, who said he had seen Hauptmann speeding near the Lindbergh estate with a ladder in his car on the very day of the kidnap, was described by social services in June 1932 as “partly blind”.
Sam Perrone, the cab driver who delivered the first note to Dr Condon, identified Hauptmann as the man who had handed it to him. But he was hardly reliable. He had also identified a series of other man as the extortionist in the past three years.
Cecile Barr, a cinema box-office attendant, identified Hauptmann as the man who had given her a carefully folded gold note on the evening of 26 November 1933, Hauptmann’s birthday, when his wife said he had been at home having a party with friends. But Cecile had initially described the man from his accent as “apparently American”, whereas Hauptmann’s German accent was so strong as to be virtually incomprehensible.
Albert S. Osborn, a handwriting expert, testified that Hauptmann had definitely written all the ransom notes. But he based this almost exclusively on a comparison with sample writings the police had obtained from the defendant. On the night of his arrest Hauptmann was kept awake all night writing out over and over the same paragraph, containing key words and phrases from the notes. But rather than dictating the paragraph to check whether Hauptmann reproduced spontaneously the peculiar spelling mistakes of the ransom notes, the paragraphs was given to Hauptmann to copy exactly as written, mistakes and all.
All the notes were written in what the experts call the vertical round hand system, while Hauptmann wrote naturally in the Palmer-Zaner system. Osborn claimed Hauptmann had disguised his writing, but in his own book on the subject he wrote that it is impossible to disguise penmanship from one system to another.
A language expert at the German embassy in London later suggested that the notes had in fact been written by someone pretending to be German. No real German, he said, would use a spelling like “boad”, when the German word is boot.
Police discovered that part of one floorboard in Hauptmann’s attic was missing. A section of the kidnap ladder, the prosecution claimed, exactly fitted the gap in the boards, right don to the nail holes. This was one of the main pieces of evidence tying Hauptmann to the abduction itself. However, two experts on wood wanted to testify that the section from the ladder could not possibly have ever been joined to Hauptmann’s floorboard – its Knots apparently were too dissimilar. Edward J. Reilly, who conducted a distinctly lacklustre defence, told them their testimony was unnecessary.
Manufactured evidence
The fact that the gap in the attic boards was not discovered in eight days of repeated searching, but only when Detective Lewis J. Bornmann, now living in the apartment, went back to have another look on his own, suggests that this piece if evidence may have been manufactured by Bornmann himself.
Confronted in court with the jerry-built ladder he was supposed to have made, Hauptmann’s professional pride was hurt. “I am a carpenter,” he commented, to the spectator’s amusement. Arthur Koehler, the prosecution’s wood expert, testified that chisel marks in the ladder had definitely been made by the ¾ inch chisel found at the scene of the crime. He was then asked to look inside Hauptmann’s toolbox for a ¾ inch chisel. In a highly dramatic moment he told the court he could not find one.
Though this seemed suggestive, it really proved nothing. The marks on the ladder could have been made by any chisel of that size, and a search of police records by investigative reporter, Anthony Scaduto, later revealed a police inventory of Hauptmann’s tools from 29 September 1934 which included the words: 1” – cold chisel ¾ inch – National Tool make”. Some time between then and the trial, someone had removed Hauptmann’s chisel to make him look guilty.
Journalist’s story
Written on the boards inside a closet in Hauptmann’s 11-month-old son’s nursery, Inspector Henry Bruckman, Chief of Bronx detectives, found Dr Condon’s address and telephone number. Here surely was more proof of Hauptmann’s connection to the crime. But Tom Cassidy, reporter with the New York Daily News, boasted to all and sundry that it was he who had written inside Hauptmann’s closet to make a new story for the paper.
In court Dr Condon definitely fingered Hauptmann as ‘John’, yet the original line-up he had been unable to identify him. Even after talking to Hauptmann for some time, he was only able to say: “He resembles the man. I can see a resemblance, but I cannot swear to it.” At the trial Condon explained his change of heart by saying he had in fact recognised Hauptmann at the line-up, he had simply withheld saying so. A more likely explanation is that Condon, under pressure from the police who were threatening to arrest him as an accessory to extortion, “improved” his memory.
Interviewed after the trial, a number of jury members said they had made up their minds about Hauptmann’s guilt after hearing Lindbergh testify that he recognised the defendant’s voice as ‘John’s’. Yet Lindbergh had only ever heard ‘John’ shout two words: “Hey Doctor.” While he was in custody, the police arranged for Hauptmann to shout the crucial words several times while Lindbergh listened, but the flying ace said he was not sure. It was only when presented with all the other evidence found (or manufactured) against the man, that Lindbergh changed his mind.
Much of the ‘evidence’ against Richard Hauptmann was either distorted or manufactured, but other evidence that might have helped to clear him was deliberately suppressed or altered by police and prosecution.
Prosecutor David Wilentz proved that Hauptmann’s total expenditure between the payment of the ransom and his arrest, added to his own wealth, came to $49,950, almost the exact amount of the ransom. But Hauptmann’s ledger of his dealings with Isidor Fisch, which could have confirmed the large amounts of money Fisch had put into the partnership, as well as profits from fur trading and the stock market, was suppressed from evidence by the prosecution.
The first police report after the kidnapping said that two sets of footprints were found leading from below the nursery window to the road, where tyre tracks were also seen. This destroys the prosecution story of a lone criminal genius – Hauptmann – yet this police report was never disclosed to the defendant.
Notes from the Lindbergh ransom money passed before the beginning of 1934 (shortly after Fisch left for Germany) were all folded in an unusable manner and bore traces of gold and brass dust. But none of the notes definitely linked to Hauptmann were folded, and all bore traces of emery dust rather than particles of metal. This suggests someone else passed the earlier notes.
Condon, Lindbergh and Reich all saw other men at St Raymond’s Cemetery, whom they suspected were ‘John’s’ lookouts. None testified to this in court, so as not to spoil the story that Hauptmann had acted alone.
Altered records
Hauptmann claimed to have been working as a carpenter at the Majestic apartments on 1 March 1932, the day of the kidnap. But prosecutor Wilentz used Hauptmann’s work records at the trial to prove that he had not worked until 21 March. However, a close examination of these records later suggested that they may have been altered.
Anna Hauptmann confirmed her husband’s alibi for the day of the kidnap, as well as for the night the ransom was handed over. After work on 1 March, she said, Richard had come to the bakery, where she had always worked late on a Tuesday, and waited until she had finished at 9 p.m. Then they had gone home, and gone to bed. On the night the ransom was paid, a Saturday, Hauptmann had had one of his regular musical evenings with his friend Hans Kloeppenburg. Both Anna and Hans confirmed the story, but their testimony was discounted at the trial.
So, if it wasn’t Hauptmann who kidnapped and murdered the Lindbergh baby, and extorted $50,000 from ‘the Lone Eagle’, then who did?
Police had their suspicions of Dr Codon, as did Lindbergh himself. Lindbergh’s friend Robert Thayer took Condon’s initial call to the house in Hopewell. Condon told Thayer that he had received a note “signed with the sign of the Mafia”. Thayer then told him to open the other letter addressed to Lindbergh. But in fact only the letter to Lindbergh bore the symbol of the kidnapper, so how did Condon know about it before opening the letter? Was he part of the plot?
Handwriting experts said that Carl Oswin Geissler’s writing was identical to that of J. J. Faulkner’, who changed nearly $3,000 of Lindbergh ransom money on 1 May 1933. A somewhat tenuous link was even established between the Geissler’s and Dr Condon. Condon’s son-in-law, Ralph Hacker, was a friend of a friend of Henry Liepold, Geissler’s son-in-law, who later committed suicide. Hacker himself assisted in the ransom pay-out, helping to make the special wooden box for the money and a plaster cast of a footprint ‘John’ had left in a freshly dug grave in the cemetery.
Hauptmann’s story of the shoe box points to Fisch as the most likely suspect, and there is independent evidence that Fisch had Lindbergh ransom money. Hauptmann lent Fisch $2,000 for his trip to Germany in December 1933. Banking records show that the withdrawal was made at 3 p.m. on 14 November. But Fisch actually paid for his tickets and foreign currency at 11 a.m. that morning. And he paid for them in Lindbergh ransom money.
Detective’s theory
Ellis Parker, chief of Detectives in Burlington County, the next jurisdiction from Hopewell, believed the whole plot had been masterminded by a local man, Paul Wendel, a disbarred lawyer with a grudge against the world. Wendel had once acted for Isidor Fisch, getting him off a charge of drug smuggling. Parker got a confession from Wendel, part of which states that Fisch had cheated him out of the Lindbergh ransom. He also claimed to have taken the signature symbol from a similar sign on some law books. But the confession was discounted by the Grand Jury, as it had apparently been obtained under duress.
There is also the strong possibility that the kidnap and extortion plot were carried out by different people. Lindbergh paid a gangster named Mickey Rosner $2,500 to help in making contact with the underworld. Rosner took the second ransom note to New York, and copies were soon circulating freely. Other criminals could then have copied the style and signature of the kidnapper to mount their own extortion plot.
It had been suggested that even if Hauptmann weren’t the kidnapper, he could still have been part of the extortion plot. But after his conviction he was offered $100,000 by Hearst newspapers and the commuting of his death sentence in exchange for his full story. Even then he continued to maintain that he knew nothing whatsoever about any aspect of the crime. Either Hauptmann was stubborn enough to die rather than confess his guilt, or he was totally innocent.
End
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