Books: Nightmare Remembered

KIDNAP (597 pp.)—George Waller-Dial ($6.95).

Tuesday, March 1, 1932, was raw and windy in central New Jersey. The baby in the still incomplete new house at Hopewell had caught the sniffles, and Nurse Betty Gow was careful to rub Vicks ointment on his chest before she put him to bed at 8. Two hours later, she tiptoed into the nursery to look in on her sleeping charge. But even before the light was snapped on, she sensed that the crib was empty.

So began a case that became, as no other crime ever did. a national nightmare. It had been nearly five years since “the Lone Eagle” had made his flight, and gangly, shy Charles Lindbergh was still an authentic, legendary U.S. hero—a prop-age astronaut. In an excellent piece of historical journalism, George Waller, sometime magazine editor, has vividly reconstructed both the facts of the case and the spirit of the era. Although the torrentially reported crime could scarcely be more familiar to readers over 40. the author’s retracing of the events builds up an effective ersatz suspense that makes the crime once again seem full of horror and mystery.

Cruel Hoaxes. Amid the nationwide uproar—President Herbert Hoover asked the fledgling FBI to help, and Commander Evangeline Booth of the Salvation Army, mindful of the “miraculous accomplishments” God had wrought through the army’s lost and found department, urged her pious legions to keep an eye out for the missing 2O-month-old child—there were countless cruel hoaxes and honest if hysterical mistakes by people who claimed to have made contact with the kidnaper. One report came from John F. Condon, a retired New York schoolteacher who, aroused by the crime, had written to the Bronx Home News offering his life’s savings in exchange for the child. Condon got an answer in fractured English and bearing the same curious signature—two overlapping blue circles with three crude square holes cutting across the design—that had appeared on the ransom note.

Meticulously, the author describes how Condon met a wiry, nervous young German immigrant who called himself “John.” With Lindbergh’s approval, Condon gave him $50,000, mostly in marked gold certificates, receiving in exchange a note about the baby’s supposed whereabouts that proved completely phony. Five weeks later, the decomposed body of the child was discovered five miles from the Lindbergh home.

Pine Slats. For the eventual conviction of the elusive John, the book largely credits a brilliant, scholarly xylotomist named Arthur Koehler, whose principal job was analyzing the one unmistakable clue left by the kidnaper: a crude wooden ladder that had been used to reach the nursery window. Koehler proved that the Southern pine slats in the ladder could only have been honed in one factory in South Carolina with a defective pulley on the planer, then traced the boards further to a lumberyard in The Bronx.

Indirectly, Franklin Roosevelt also helped, by taking the U.S. off the gold standard—which meant that the kidnaper would sooner or later have to turn in the gold certificates. On Sept. 15, 1934-a Manhattan gas station attendant noted a customer who sheepishly handed over a $10 gold certificate to pay for five gallons of gas. A German-born Bronx carpenter named Bruno Richard Hauptmann was quickly arrested. He denied his guilt, but in his garage police found $14,600 of the ransom money, and a slat in his attic flooring matched one section of the ladder wood that Arthur Koehler had analyzed.

Wall of Privacy. In dreamlike slow motion. Author Waller unfolds all the false leads, the endless waits, the newspaper clamors and police tricks of another day—and finally the bitter legal battles over reprieve and execution stays that Caryl Chessman might have admired for their exploitation of the law’s delay.

Sloppily conducted by both sides, the Hauptmann trial raised more questions than it answered, and Waller can do little more than separate the obvious loose ends: Had there been a gang involved? How could Hauptmann, without inside help, have known that the Lindberghs would be at Hopewell on that particular night? Why had one of the family’s servants killed herself?

As for Charles Lindbergh, he was convinced that Hauptmann had, for whatever reason, taken and killed his child.

But in his mind, as Author Waller suggests, millions of others shared Haupt-mann’s guilt. “They,” he had told his wife when it happened, “have stolen our baby.” To Lindbergh, “they” meant the clamoring public, seeking to haul down the wall of privacy that he sought desperately to erect about his family life.