Read Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life Online
Authors: Susan Hertog
You think there are no angels any more—
No angels come to tell us in the night
Of joy or sorrow, love or death
…
Oh, do you not recall
It was a tree
,
Springing from earth so passionately straight
and tall
,
That made you see, at last, what giant force
Lay pushing in your heart?
And was it not that spray
Of dogwood blossoms, white across your road
That all at once made grief too great a load to bear?
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While Anne turned the searchlight inward, the police hunted for the gang, four men and one woman, who may have acted as nurse. They reasoned that the baby was stolen for money and killed in panic.
8
As pressure mounted for them to find the “vermin,” a danger to the “freedom and security of every little child among us,”
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Condon was getting nervous; he went to Charles for help. Now that hell had broken loose and everything was up for grabs, he was afraid that he would be pegged as the murderer. On May 15, three days after the baby’s body was found, Lindbergh wrote Condon a letter, a copy of which he released to the press:
My dear Mr. Condon:
Mrs. Lindbergh and I want to thank you for the great assistance you have been to us … Our sincere appreciation for your courage and cooperation.
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But, in truth, the Lindberghs no longer knew whom to trust. They woke up several times each night, in need of sharing their thoughts and feelings. Security, they had come to believe, was a delusion—a matter of self-deception, something only fools would trust. The “god of chance,” Anne wrote, reigned upon the earth.
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She would look for Charlie forever, in the face of every child she met.
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The police were living a different nightmare: they could not find the face of the kidnapper anywhere. They wore Condon out, moving him from one police station to another to look at photographs that might be Cemetery John. Fantastic rumors filtered through the press. Like novelists in search of the perfect crime, reporters fabricated elaborate theories, accusing Condon of being the killer and Betty Gow his accomplice.
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Anne, disgusted by the publicity, turned to her diary; it became both her laboratory and her primer, a place to learn how to mourn and to find a new purpose in life. Here she could re-create Charlie, watch him play and walk and smile, touch his face and curls, hold him in her arms and carry him up to bed.
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For so long, Anne wrote, the terror had been outside her. Even before they took their trip, she had feared that they would be punished for their happiness. She had desperately wanted her mother-in-law to stay with Charlie in Maine while she and Charles were away. It was as though she had had a premonition; no one else saw the possible effects of the relentless publicity on the baby’s safety. If only she had had the courage to voice her fears. Now, she vowed to confront the terror and find the courage to let Charlie go. He was whole and real, and yet untainted by the outside world.
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But thoughts of the new baby brought her comfort; when he was born, she could begin again.
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She would sort out the infant clothes and perhaps make some, she said, but she could not write her book, the account of their trip to Asia. It would force her to face her sorrow and her fear. She would fly with Charles and she would play the piano—nursery songs, like those she might have played for Charlie. But something else had died with her son. “I’ll never believe in anything again … faith and goodness and security in life.”
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Even words lost their meaning. Language, the articulation of civilized life, held no power. There was nothing to say, no place to hide, nowhere to rest. They were still fighting the “war,” said Charles.
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And John Hughes Curtis was intent on proving him right.
Schwarzkopf, who now had Curtis in custody, was afraid that Lindbergh would use his clout to set him free. Even after the baby’s body was found, Lindbergh had welcomed Curtis at Hopewell. When Schwarzkopf finally made it clear to Lindbergh that Curtis was a suspect, Lindbergh reluctantly agreed not to interfere with the investigation. In the end, it was Lieutenant Walsh who made Curtis crack. Broken and ashamed, Curtis released an official statement. He had been driven insane by financial worry, he said. The “gang” had never existed; it comprised merely “creatures of a distorted mind.”
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The finding of the body brought the police and press back to Hopewell and back into the Lindbergh’s living room. Anne again locked herself in her bedroom while Charles immersed himself in the details of the investigation. On May 18, Charles called a meeting of the chief investigators to stage a re-enactment of the crime. Schwarzkopf, playing the kidnapper, climbed up to the nursery window on a ladder and began to climb down with a burlap bag containing a thirty-pound weight, simulating the baby. Amazingly, the ladder split at the sixteenth rung as he was on the way down—the exact spot at which the original ladder had split. The burlap bag dropped on to the concrete foundation just below Charles’s study, leading Schwarzkopf immediately to suggest that the baby had died from the fall on his head.
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Anne was appalled. “I will never climb out of this hell that way,” she wrote.
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Charles’s grief was expressed far differently. He sought justice; Anne sought to redeem her faith. While he pursued the criminals with fanatical passion, Anne longed to recapture her innocence, her belief that life was good and safe and that Hopewell could once again be her home. The investigation, though, was essential for Charles to diffuse his helplessness and rage.
But where was Anne’s rage? Was heightened awareness enough? Where was her anger at Charles for demanding her constant presence on his flights, for taking her away from Charlie and home, leaving him vulnerable to harm? Where was her rage against the press, which had exposed every detail of their private lives, whetting the appetite of malcontents and madmen? Where was her anger at her mother for not keeping her promise to care for Charlie in Maine? He had been alone with the servants long enough for an outsider to penetrate their tight circle, to learn everything about Charlie and the family. And what about the servants? Why did she not want to question their loyalty?
For Anne, rage was not a possibility; it was not part of her lexicon. It was too extreme. And, like Charles, she felt that she somehow had been complicit. Anne’s God was the Calvinist God of her parents. Justice was not ethically bound to man. Good deeds did not necessarily bestow happiness; evil did not always lead to suffering. She could blame herself, but even that was self-indulgent. Either you were “saved” or you weren’t; “grace” was a state you could not earn. Had her father been alive, he would have counseled forbearance; nothing could change the finality of Charlie’s death. Duty remained.
The police continued to produce nothing. Everyone was frustrated and blaming someone else. The FBI blamed the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS blamed Schwarzkopf. Schwarzkopf was beginning to turn on Condon, and Condon blamed Curtis for getting in the way of Cemetery John and his gang. The press hurled accusations at Schwarzkopf for missing the obvious—five miles outside the Lindberghs’ front door. Criminal experts all over the world aligned themselves for or against Schwarzkopf. Everyone was eager to find the
real killer, and the obvious fact was that Schwarzkopf had produced nothing. Governor Harry Moore endorsed Schwarzkopf’s efforts, but his statement summed up the situation: “The cop who arrests the murderer of the Lindbergh child is made for life.”
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While the whole world was intent on re-creating the crime, Anne sat in the quiet of her room, trying to confront its reality.
On the 25 of May, two weeks after the body was found, Anne walked through the nursery door to find “her boy.” Like an explorer braving the jungle, Anne opened his closet. Expecting fear, she was instead flooded with warmth. The description of her feelings as she discovers his clothes explodes with Charlie’s vitality. When she found his shoes, coat, and mittens, she felt as though she has touched his skin. Through her tears she had found the joy she wanted.
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Despite her grief, Anne took pleasure in the victory of Amelia Earhart.
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In a plane twice as fast and as powerful as Lindbergh’s, Earhart had sought to commemorate his flight of five years earlier with a transatlantic flight of her own.
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While the international press heralded their new heroine, the reporters at Hopewell yawned with boredom.
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But in the “lull” between suspects, another blow hit the Morrow family. A report from Rockefeller Medical Center revealed that the damage to Elisabeth’s heart valve had become severe. She would be increasingly susceptible to infectious disease, and there was little chance she would survive beyond five years.
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Once again, Anne felt helpless in the face of death.
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Determined to put the past behind him, Charles went back to work. He resumed his research at the Rockefeller Institute and his duties at TAT. In Anne’s little Cessna, he flew to Mitchell Field on Long Island for his annual transport license exam. While their lives assumed the semblance of normality, Anne had lost her will to fight. She was tired of excitement. Tired of talk. Tired of putting up a front. Elisabeth buoyed up her own spirits by parading in a polka-dot chiffon dress, Con came home from college bursting with possibility, but Anne stood on the periphery of life at Next Day Hill, lonely and heartbroken.
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Once again the uninvolved observer, she let life wash over her. She sat in the
sun as the colors, sounds, and stirrings of nature filled her mind and smoothed the wrinkles of memory.
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Frozen in time, unable to write, Anne “plunged deep into the face of silence.”
Elisabeth, as usual, was the mistress of charade. The more her health faded, the more she exhibited style and flourish. With her hat atilt and her furs on her arm, she set off to visit family friends in England.
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Anne remained in Englewood, a prisoner of her own solitude, condemned to live.
The police, meanwhile, stalked Violet Sharpe. After a bout of tonsillitis, Violet was physically enervated. But something had happened to her mind as well. Along with her vitality, her spirit had dwindled. Her doctor warned Schwarzkopf’s officers against further questioning.
Defying the doctor, the irrepressible Inspector Walsh arranged an interview with Violet at the Morrow home. On May 23, in the presence of Schwarzkopf, Keaton, and Lindbergh, Walsh again put Violet’s memory to the test. Under the gaze of the august tribunal, Violet not only changed her story, but dismissed her lies as unimportant. She had originally told the police that she went to a movie with a stranger on the night of the kidnapping. Now the movie became a roadhouse, and the stranger a man named Ernie. When pressed, Violet alluded to her relationship with the butler, Banks. She admitted that Banks had a drinking problem, but she refused to reveal details of their relationship. The police, however, had already uncovered at least five sexual liaisons between Violet and men she had met at local bars, one a reporter for the
Daily News
, who had tried to bribe her for photographs and news of the Lindbergh baby. The situation, Violet said, made her sad.
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When the interview was over, Lindbergh still refused to consider Violet a suspect. But Inspector Walsh, intent on hooking Violet, called on her again on June 9. Although it was only seventeen days since he had seen her, Walsh was shocked at Violet’s appearance. Since March, she had lost forty pounds.
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The vivacious young woman now looked haggard and old. In the company of one of the Morrows’ secretaries, Laura Hughes, Walsh showed Violet photographs of a man named Ernest Brinkert, a taxi dispatcher from White Plains, New York, whose
business cards had turned up during an early search of Violet’s room. With a strange nonchalance, Violet confirmed that Brinkert was the man she had been with on the night of the kidnapping. And now her manner turned bizarre. She trembled and cried when speaking, she screamed her answers when pressed. Frightened when Violet’s tears turned to uncontrollable sobs, the secretary defied Walsh and called Violet’s doctor. He arrived ten minutes later to find Violet collapsed in the secretary’s arms. Casting Walsh an accusing look, the doctor examined Violet and then stated that she could be questioned no further. She was, he said, on the edge of “hysteria.” Walsh dropped the questioning but told the doctor he would be back the next day.
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As Violet rose to walk out of the room, she flashed a sly smile at Laura Hughes and gave her a wink.
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That wink would forever haunt those who knew Violet. The next day, she committed suicide.
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The police interpreted Violet’s suicide as a sign of her possible complicity in the kidnapping, but her friends blamed it on Banks.
37
Nearly thirty years old, without the promise of marriage or employment, with word of her possible link to the kidnapping and of her sexual liaisons about to be sent out on news wires around the world, Violet was desperate. In England, it was discovered that she had been married to George Payne, a butler in a house where she had served. He would deny the legality of their union, and the stain of adultery would deepen her shame. What was she to do? Her only choice would have been to return to her parents’ crowded cottage in Brookshire, England. When she had heard that Walsh was coming to see her again, she was terrified and went to Banks for consolation. He had turned away. Violet took a measuring cup from the pantry shelf and walked up the back stairs to her room. She dissolved in water in her bathroom cup a measured amount of the cyanide crystals she had brought from England to clean silver. Then she drank the mixture, staggered down the stairs, and collapsed in the pantry. Moments later she died at her lover’s feet.
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