Read Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life Online
Authors: Susan Hertog
Local, state, and federal police moved in and out of the house at will. The public rooms became dormitories and, even in her bedroom, Anne lost her privacy. The garage was converted into a command station; the west wing became a meetinghouse. Policemen lounged in the kitchen
along its walls and stairways, talking to one another, reading newspapers, and making telephone calls, and Whateley served them coffee as if they were houseguests.
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In the town of Hopewell, the local telephone exchange was forced to expand to three times its normal size, which required huge quantities of equipment and help. Temporary telephones were installed in private homes, where reporters vied for accommodations. The hotel lobby was a mass of reporters and curiosity seekers twenty-four hours a day.
Anne remained in her room, supported by her mother and sister. By the afternoon of March 2, she was tired from not sleeping but was sufficiently in control to compose a letter—straight, factual, and full of optimism—swearing her mother-in-law to secrecy. After relating the details of the crime as she knew them, Anne relayed the information that had not been released.
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The intruder knew their schedule in Englewood and Hopewell and was familiar with the baby’s room. But the search had yielded no fingerprints, because everything was handled with gloves. Meticulously done and precisely planned, it seemed like the work of a professional. “I was afraid of a lunatic,” Anne wrote.
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And so was Schwarzkopf. While Anne relayed small bits about the investigation, Schwarzkopf and his dogged investigator, Arthur T. Keaton, thought the unthinkable. They believed the baby was dead. The appearance of the crib suggested that he had been yanked from the bed sheets by his head, and the ransom note, uncharacteristically, contained no threats against the baby’s life.
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While they tried to assuage Anne’s fears, they believed that what had taken place was a cold-blooded killing—desperate and mercenary, but not the work of professionals. Nonetheless, they encouraged Anne’s guarded optimism and begged her patience and understanding. They hoped the nationwide dragnet of police along with the outpouring of media coverage and public interest would coerce the kidnappers to return the child.
In fact, the sympathy and the publicity were working against them. While the world chattered, the kidnappers kept silent. Broadcasters and reporters clogged the radio and telegraph wires with sentimental
talk devoid of substance, and the newspapers, seeking to feed the public interest, cranked out thousands of stories more imagined than real. Newspapers worldwide had made the kidnapping front-page copy. From Pittsburgh to Paris, news about the Lindbergh baby superseded issues of domestic and foreign concern. On March 2, millions of Chinese peasants were still being battered by floods as thousands of their soldiers were killed by the Japanese invaders.
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Nonetheless, all eyes were on Hopewell, New Jersey.
The rivalry grew intense among city, state, and national agencies, which vied for power and jurisdiction. Each wanted to be “the charging knight on horseback, slaying the dragon for public acclaim.”
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Since there was no federal kidnapping law permitting the police to apprehend criminals across state lines, and the crime had occurred outside the city in a rural town, the New Jersey State Police held their ground. Bent on proving that he and his troopers were worthy of their task, Schwarzkopf eschewed the help of the New York City police and the FBI. He would not share his information, and J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, was riddled with jealousy.
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He wanted the spotlight and the center stage, and was put out by his inferior status. Still, it was estimated that 100,000 policemen, including the 35,000 local officers, were searching for Charlie, as well as thousands of ordinary citizens.
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Calling the Lindberghs a testimony to American youth and decency,
Commonweal
magazine wrote, “It is hardly an exaggeration to say … these two young people … are under the whole world’s protection.”
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But Lindbergh didn’t want protection. He feared that the authorities would scare the kidnappers away and thwart his efforts at communication. To make matters worse, Governor Harry A. Moore of New Jersey had publicly announced that he would seek to make kidnapping a capital crime, and he offered a $25,000 reward to anyone who could guarantee the baby’s safe return. Deeply concerned that public sentiment would alienate the kidnappers, Charles persuaded the governor to rescind the offer.
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Charles continued to remind the police that the safety of his child, not justice, was his prime concern. Schwarzkopf, whose moves were complicated by his friendship with Lindbergh, tried
to play the middle ground. Outwardly, he complied with Lindbergh’s rules; covertly, he authorized Keaton to circumvent them.
Thirty-five policemen representing the state as well as adjacent cities and counties patrolled the Lindbergh estate, screening all visitors who entered on foot or by car. Despite an illusion of progress, by the end of the second day the police had come up with nothing. False leads abounded, yet the police could hardly ignore anyone with a reasonable story. Well-intentioned housewives, thrill-seeking teenagers, good-hearted neighbors, and observant and earnest citizens had produced nothing but false leads and further intrusion.
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Anne was the primary object of curiosity. Everyone wanted a glimpse of the bereaved mother. The press observed her every move, following her even on her daily walk. One man, suited like a “gentleman,” convinced the police as well as Charles that he had made contact with the kidnapper. He demanded to speak with Anne immediately, but once in her private quarters, he began to rant and rave, in Shakespearean cadences, about the “slings and arrows” of human fortune. He had to be tackled and dragged out the door.
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The Lindberghs received thousands of letters, requiring the efforts of two policemen eight hours a day to sort and peruse. Beginning the day after the kidnapping, the mail—about seven hundred letters a day—was dumped, pound by pound, into barrels.
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The dreams, tears, and idiocies of the public clamored for the Lindberghs’ attention, even in their grief.
Nonetheless, Anne, knowing her mother-in-law’s keen sense of order and public decorum, wrote to her on March 2 that everything was under control. Charles was remaining cool and lucid in the face of so much confusion.
In fact, nothing was under control, and nothing was happening. Frustrated by the lack of progress, Keaton quietly interrogated the servants, against Charles’s instructions. From the beginning, Charles had made it clear that the Lindbergh and Morrow servants were above suspicion. The equation was simple. To suspect them was to implicate himself—to expose his flawed judgment. Not only was his reputation
at stake; his psychological integrity was, too. If the servants had duped him, then no one was in control. That burden was more than Charles could bear, and he instinctively protected himself and Anne.
Keaton, however, pursued his theory that it was an “inside job.”
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Although it was clear that someone could have gleaned sufficient information from newspapers and newsreels and from careful observation of the patterns of the household, it was possible that some of the thirty-odd servants inside the Lindbergh and Morrow homes had worked in concert to inform the abductors or to protect their movements.
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Any one of the servants might have had reason enough; several of them could have created a phalange of lies. While coincidence is always the enemy of the truth, the servants’ relations with one another and with the Lindberghs raised questions that begged to be asked.
Except for a factor of incredible luck, it was nearly impossible to time the crime with precision. The servants had reported that no one but the baby was on the second floor between 8:35 and 9:10, and the Lindberghs’ dog, Wahgoosh,
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had not barked. Had he heard strangers, Wahgoosh, a fox terrier with acute hearing, would have made their presence known. But he had not been on guard as usual outside the baby’s room on the second-floor landing.
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Anne was haunted by the dog’s silence, but was too frightened to ask the obvious. Instead of confronting the servants, questioning why the dog had been removed, she tried to think of reasons for his not barking. The extreme force of the wind, she reasoned, had drowned the sounds of the intruders’ movements. Furthermore, Charles had designed the house with eighteen-inch-thick stone walls and reinforced concrete floors and ceilings to prevent a fire from destroying it, as had happened to his childhood home in Minnesota. Ironically, the fortress Charles built against his fears muffled the sounds that might have permitted him to save his child.
Anne continued to believe that all was well. Aside from her unanswered queries about the dog, Anne renounced any role in the investigation. Like those around her, she gave Charles complete control.
On March 3, two days after the kidnapping, Charles shocked Schwarzkopf by permitting his emissary, Colonel Breckinridge, to make contact with the underworld. Charles was ready to pay the $50,000 ransom, but he had no clue as to whom or where to bring it. The kidnappers had failed to respond to the plea he had broadcast over the open wire,
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so he resolved to find them on his own, to meet them on their terms, outside the law and beyond the auspices of the authorities. It was a desperate effort to sustain his hope. He knew that the kidnappings in 1931 were linked to an estimated two thousand criminals with ties to the mob.
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And they had never bartered for the body of a dead person.
In spite of the pleas from Schwarzkopf and his lieutenants, Charles and Breckinridge commissioned a local racketeer, Morris (Mickey) Rosner, to act on Lindbergh’s behalf. Rosner, a petty criminal with a smooth tongue and big ideas, had been recently indicted for a stock scam that cheated his “investor” of nearly $2 million. Nevertheless, Charles and Breckinridge were impressed by him. They invited him to Hopewell, made him privy to unpublicized details of the crime, and gave him $2500 dollars in cash to cover his expenses.
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In effect, Rosner became Charles’s private secretary,
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answering his calls, lounging on his sofa, and fraternizing with the family and police.
Charles’s approach to the underworld stirred a fierce national debate. It was difficult to fault Lindbergh for playing the game according to prevailing rules. Corruption in politics and business was rampant. The media rang with diatribes against capitalism and individualism gone haywire and a government too weak to control the criminal elements that threatened the bulwarks of society. The Lindbergh baby was a symbol of all that was good and innocent in America, and now he had been cruelly stolen. It was a personal crime against the body politic, one that somehow justified Lindbergh’s decision. It seemed to everyone an all-out war.
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Playing on the confused state kidnapping laws, which were based on outmoded perceptions of transportation, gangs took victims across
states lines in cars, trains, and planes in order to move beyond the state’s jurisdiction. Two decades earlier, an attempt to pass legislation making the crime a federal offense, punishable by death, had failed. As recently as one week before Charlie was abducted, there had been a new congressional effort to put kidnapping under the aegis of interstate commerce, subject to imprisonment or death. But as of March 1932, the laws were outdated and uneven. In New Jersey, the crime was punishable by thirty years in prison. In New York, it was a minor felony, punishable by only five to fifteen years. The mob played on these discrepancies, manipulating the public and the police.
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Anne supported Charles’s decision. She was convinced that the baby would be released unharmed.
While an air of optimism prevailed inside the walls of the estate, the press felt abandoned. Used only as vehicles for disseminating selected information, the newspapers jockeyed for power by creating poignant portraits of a mother in grief. Kept off the grounds of the Lindbergh estate, the reporters and photographers gathered at a closed train station in Hopewell, where they were unable to spy on the estate. They could barely discern what Anne wore on her daily stroll, let alone her thoughts and feelings, but that did not deter them from creating an image of a Madonna-like heroine, above the smut of crime and police investigation though a prime force in the recovery of her child. On March 3, the
New York Times
wrote:
Thousands of eyes have been trained on her. Thousands of telegraph wires, of typewriters tapped out the infinite detail of her private and her public life. She has always remained calm, gracious. Now she is not calm, except for the outer shell of her. For all the combined drama of her young life is as a leaf on a willful breeze in comparison with the tragedy that has come in it at the open window of her home on the mountain top. She keeps a hold on her taut nerves. She keeps her brain clear for whatever direction she may be called to give in the greatest manhunt in history. She keeps her body poised for action. She has been unable to eat or to sleep. All the first day of her baby’s absence she wore a plain navy
blue sports frock with a white collar, and she has kept a blue plaid scarf tied about her dark hair so that she will be ready to go—to the end of the world, if need be.
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In fact, except for the first night, Anne had been eating and sleeping normally. Optimistic because of the efforts of those around her, and cushioned by the company of her mother and sister, Anne was determined not to jeopardize her pregnancy. She felt no need to go anywhere; Charles had become her mind and body. It was he who would go to the “end of the world” to bring the baby home.