CRIME: Never-to-be-Forgotten

If a Negro from Marshall’s Corner N.J. had not decided to get out of his truck and relieve himself in the woods a mile from Hopewell last week, a half-dozen accredited negotiators and a hemisphere’s police would still be looking for kidnapped, murdered Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr.

At a point 75 ft. from the edge of the concrete Princeton-Hopewell Road, traveled by the child’s friends, kin and every official in New Jersey during the 72-day search, William Allen noticed something round and bright protruding from a mound of rubble and leaves. It looked like a human skull. Negro Allen ran back to the truck and summoned his white companion, Orville Wilson. It was a human skull. On it and nearby were wisps of yellow hair. Wilson hopped in the truck and made for Hopewell, where he found Charley Williams, one of Hopewell’s two policemen, in a barber’s chair. To him Wilson babbled their discovery of the Lindbergh baby. Policeman Williams notified the State Police and together they went back to the hillside spot, visible on a clear day from the Lindbergh home on Sourland Mountain, five miles away.

Careful examination indicated that the baby had been clubbed to death shortly after being snatched from his crib on the night of March 1. The badly decomposed remains, clad only in a flannel stomach band and an undershirt, lay face down in a shallow depression, possibly a hastily scratched grave. On one side was a tall oak On another was a stump. Through the underbrush 75 ft. back ran the special telephone line strung during the world-wide search. The head showed two fractures a round hole through the right temple. One leg and both hands were missing.

Nurse Betty Gow, whom the baby called “Gow,”identified the body in the Trenton morgue before sundown. More positive identification came from the Lindberghs’ pediatrician. He recognized the child’s abnormally twisted toes.

By 6 p.m. newspapermen had been hurriedly summoned from Trenton and Hopewell for the official announcement in the Lindbergh garage. The discovery made hushed after-dinner talk for most U.S. citizens, but the child’s father did not learn about it until nine hours after the body was found. It came to him by radio. Stirred on by John Hughes Curtis, charter member of the Norfolk, Va. triumvirate whose boat-building activities have placed him in contact with rum runners, Col. Lindbergh was groping hopelessly about the dark waters off Cape May, N. J.—still trying to buy his child back from its abductors. Col. Lindbergh was put ashore near Atlantic City, raced homeward by motor.

Lid Off! Now that no amount of secrecy on the part of Press or Police could return the child alive to its parents, the lid of caution abruptly blew off the case. For the first time pictures of the nursery were published. And the text of the original ransom note, which newspapers had withheld since the case entered its second day lest negotiations for the child’s return be jeopardized, was unofficially made public:

“Dear Sir,

“Have $50,000 ready, $25,000 in $20 bills $15,000 in $10 bills and $10,000 in $5 bills Have them in two packages. Four days we will inform you to redeem the money.

“We warn you for making anything public, or for notifying the police, child is in gut care.

“Identification for letters are signatures. Answer three fold. (1-2-3-4). Two rings in blue ink, with center ring of red. A blue ink line of the blue circles on the outer edge of the red. A hole on the outer edge of each dark circle, and one in the center of the red.

“Don’t publish this letter.

In New Jersey shocked indignation at the crime took the form of bitterness against the way Col. Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf and his State Police had handled the investigation. Emerson L. Richards, Republican majority leader ot the State Senate, promised an inquiry. The County Detectives Association demanded Col. Schwarzkopf’s removal: “This action will be asked entirely because of his inefficiency in the Lindbergh case. The child was found dead in close proximity to the home while hundreds of thousands of dollars were wasted in searching elsewhere. While Col. Schwarzkopf’s men were being sent all over this country and Europe, officials who were trained in investigating such cases were forced to stand on the deadlines. Col. Schwarzkopf did not appear to welcome the aid of city and county police . . . an outrage.

Hunt & Hoax. Meantime, while Congress prayed that the Lindberghs be further spared “the bread of affliction” and nations and cities all over the world poured sympathy on the bereaved young couple, the country’s law agencies took a final hitch in their belts and started on a desperate, determined man hunt. Five days’ hunting brought to light the second major hoax in the case.

Col. Schwarzkopf began examining he negotiators. John F. (“Jafsie”) Condon told how the supposed kidnappers had sent him as an earnest to secure ransom, a sleeping garment which the Lindberghs identified as the one worn by their child the night of his abduction. The fact that the child’s body was found without the sleeping garment led police to believe that the man to whom “Jafsie” Condon gave $50,000 of Col. Lindbergh’s money, in a Bronx cemetery on April 2, represented the actual kidnappers and killers. Mr. Condon described this man, said he “could pick him out of a thousand.” The district attorney of The Bronx prepared to call a grand jury and set out to find that man.

When John Hughes Curtis began to tell his tale of mysterious boat trips and constant failures to bring Col. Lindbergh into contact with the men he said were in possession of the child, Col. Schwarzkopf lent a polite, attentive ear. Mr. Curtis described and gave the approximate position of the fishing smack on which he had supposedly interviewed the child’s captors. The Coast Guard sent 39 craft and three amphibian planes to find it, with no success. His identification of the criminals by nicknames proved similarly untrustworthy. At last, early on the fifth morning after the child’s body was found, he broke down and confessed that “all the information he had given was the result of his imagination and deception, as well as his desire to make a good newspaper story that would bring lucrative returns. There was no fact or foundation on which the story was built.” He was held at Trenton although no criminal charge was immediately brought against him.

President Hoover meanwhile had ordered 5,000 Federal operatives “to make the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby a live and never-to-be-forgotten case, never to be relaxed until those criminals are implacably brought to justice (see p. 9).” The first thing the Federal men did was to re-examine the Lindbergh servants.

Ashes, It was 3 o’clock on the morning after the discovery of his child’s crumpled body that Col. Lindbergh drove up a Trenton alley and went into the frame morgue building. When he looked at the remains, one report said, he fainted. He asked for a lock of his child’s hair. Next afternoon he returned to make an official identification of the remains. Then, as mute housewives watched over their back fences, he came out of the building following some men with a small oak box. He and Col. Henry Breckinridge, his companion and legal adviser through the past ten agonizing weeks, accompanied the box to Linden, N. J. In a square, grey building with a straight black smokestack cremation took place. The ashes were removed to Englewood where Mrs. Linbergh’s widowed mother, Mrs. Dwight Whitney Morrow, lives.