Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (30 page)

Anne did not want to be a heroine, but playing the role of Madonna served her notions of feminine virtue well. She could rail against the immorality while exonerating herself from responsibility. In her grief, Anne took the Morrows’ Victorian pose—seeing herself as a woman, pure and submissive, without independent social or moral agency. If, as she assumed, Charlie was alive, her purpose was to teach the kidnappers how to keep him healthy. Concerned that they would not feed him according to his needs or his schedule, Anne published his diet in the
Times
on March 3:

While Anne concentrated on the health of her “lamb,” Schwarzkopf reached into the lion’s den. Still convinced it may have been an inside job, he suggested to Charles that he be allowed to polygraph the servants, thereby providing conclusive evidence of their complicity or innocence.
Charles refused.
³⁶
Unable to carry out the polygraphs, he and his lieutenants pursued the servants, one by one, in direct defiance of Charles’s instructions.

Betty Gow was first. The last person to see the baby alive and the servant most intimately involved in the private lives of the Lindberghs, she was in an excellent position to act as informant. The questions centered on the movements of her boyfriend, Red Johnson.
³⁷
Betty echoed the story Red had told the police the day after the kidnapping: he had spent the night of March 1 with the Junges, taking them for a ride in his automobile to an ice cream parlor north of Englewood, and had arrived home at approximately eleven and gone to bed.

Schwarzkopf had traced him to his brother’s house in West Hartford, and had asked the local police to bring him in. Unruffled by the accusations against him, in spite of the relentless grilling of the police, he had refused to change his story or confess to the crime. “How can I confess to a crime I did not do?” he said.
³⁸
There was no hard evidence to implicate Red, but at the time of his arrest, the police had found his car, a green coupe that a Lindbergh neighbor thought he had spotted on the night of the crime, with an empty bottle of milk in the back seat. They also found a postcard, at the West Hartford post office, that resembled in handwriting and content a card sent to the Lindberghs from Newark the day after the kidnapping. The West Hartford postcard was addressed to Charles A. Lindbergh in Princeton, New Jersey. Echoing the card sent several days before, it read: “Baby still safe. Get things quiet.” Though he could not trace the cards to Red, Schwarzkopf still considered him as a prime suspect.

Red had known about the baby’s illness since the evening before, and about Betty’s need to be in Hopewell since four o’clock that afternoon, when he had called the Morrows’ house and had spoken to Marguerite Junge. It was the Junges, in fact, who gave Red an alibi—an alibi they would later reverse.
³⁹
Strangely, the Junges’ story, placing Red in Englewood with them between the hours of eight and eleven, meshed with Violet Sharpe’s story of a date with a stranger, and the police wondered whether their two stories were one. Johannes Junge told
police of seeing Violet in a car with a man just as he was driving his wife to the estate. Later, he would say the man was Red Johnson.
⁴⁰

The servants, once a tight circle of friends, now began to turn on one another. Marguerite denied her involvement, including her year-long friendship with Red. Her husband, Johannes, acted like a cornered animal, spewing forth statement after statement, oral and written, to the police, hoping to dissociate himself from Red. While he tried to protect Violet from suspicion, he portrayed Ellerson as a shady figure capable of succumbing to temptation. And Red, too, turned on his friends. When he was questioned two weeks after the crime by the Newark police, he told them it was “an inside job.” Quickly, however, he exonerated all the servants and refused to give the police any details.
⁴¹
Without further evidence, the police could not detain Johnson. And without Charles’s permission, they could not further investigate the servants. When Schwarzkopf discovered, though, that Johnson was an illegal alien, he used the information as both a hook and a threat. Unless Johnson cooperated, Schwarzkopf made clear, he would be deported.
⁴²

Charles, meanwhile, continued to take the matter into his own hands. On March 4, three days after the kidnapping, he wrote the kidnappers a message, published in the
Times
, pledging his trust and confidence and assuring them that he and his wife would accept their rules and accommodate any people they appointed for the safe return of their child.
⁴³

New Jersey Attorney General Will A. Stevens was appalled. He, too, issued a statement to the press. The Lindberghs, he said, had no power to offer criminals immunity. The State of New Jersey would exercise the full power of the law to make sure that justice was served.
⁴⁴
To Charles, that declaration was further confirmation that his own needs were not being met by the demands of the law.

Three days had gone by, with no word from the kidnappers. The
New York Times
wrote, “The world waits hopefully.” Never had the fate of a child evoked such worldwide concern. There were “no boundaries” to the grief, wrote the
Times
.
⁴⁵

Anne waited. She had come down with a severe cold and was finding it difficult to sleep. Her mother began to worry that the stress would jeopardize her pregnancy. Anne worried, too. Waiting without the power to help was more painful than she had imagined.

But at the end of the day, the Lindberghs had received another letter, bearing the same signature and insignia as the ransom note. Schwarzkopf and Charles considered the scrawling, handwritten message legitimate. It read:

The kidnappers were angry. The public and the police had intervened, and Lindbergh would have to take the consequences. Get the world out of the way, they were saying and we may comply. Later, a psychiatrist hired to study the case would interpret the allusion to “a world affair” as a kind of victory for the kidnappers.
⁴⁶
In a perverse way, they were now as famous as the Lindberghs, sharing their celebrity. But to Charles, there was only one message: cut the publicity and restrain police activity.

Anne was pleased; the baby was well. While she didn’t want to build false hope, she wrote to her mother-in-law on March 5 that she had received “word that the baby is safe.”
⁴⁷
But chaos continued to rule their home. The police and the publicity had become intolerable.

Meanwhile, Lindbergh’s man Mickey Rosner continued to work the underworld. He charged two men, Salvy Spitale and Irving Blitz, to act as intermediaries with the mob, and Charles and Anne were pleased.
⁴⁸

Spitale and Blitz were powerful men in the Mafia; their influence
among the gangs was renowned. Everyone believed they were on the right track, and everyone was convinced the baby was safe. To her surprise, the criminal kingpins seemed more sympathetic and sincere than many of the politicians who had come to call. Charles, she wrote, was more hopeful than ever.

It seemed the whole underworld was coming clean to help the Lindberghs. Offering his sympathy, Al Capone volunteered his services from his cell in federal prison. If the government would let him out of jail, he told the press, he was certain he could find the kidnappers. In a generous display of good will, he told the authorities they could keep his brother, Mitzi, as hostage.
⁴⁹
But Elmer Irey, the IRS officer who had convicted Capone, came to Hopewell to persuade Lindbergh not to comply. Irey said that Capone had already tried to pin the crime on a member of his own gang. In truth, Capone had no idea who the kidnapper was, and he was using the Lindberghs to leave jail and flee the country. Irey also believed Spitale and Blitz were nothing more than bootleggers—petty thieves preying on Lindbergh’s naïveté. Irey’s condemnation of Capone and the underworld connection stiffened Lindbergh’s view.
⁵⁰

Breckinridge, though, was convinced of the mob’s foul play, and persuaded Charles to make contact with Frank Costello, head of the Luciano family in New York. Costello was blunt. The baby was dead, he said. Tell Lindbergh not to pay the ransom. His words fell on deaf ears.
⁵¹

With all the resources of the American justice system ready to serve him, Lindbergh chose to walk the path alone. The same determination that had propelled him across the Atlantic strengthened his resolve to remain, at all costs, in control. Charles wanted to get in touch with the kidnappers, and he would defy anyone for that end. There was a strange twist to his notions of social justice; there was a hierarchy of criminals and a hierarchy of crimes. Rules and laws were meant to be broken by violators capable of justifying their cause. Like his Lutheran grandfather and his father, Charles saw the law as an artifact of man, not as the will of God. But to those around him, Charles’s defiance was hubris, obstructive
and eventually destructive. Even so, the magnetism of his confidence drew many to his side, among them Dr. John F. Condon.

Dr. Condon was a seventy-two-year-old retired schoolteacher with a walrus-sized mustache as flamboyant as his personality. Proud of his superlative moral standing, he considered himself a Renaissance man, athletic and strong yet contemplative and philosophical. He contributed poems and essays to his local newspaper, the
Bronx Home News
, and he had a reputation among his neighbors as an egotist and a grandstanding patriot. He believed that Charles A. Lindbergh represented the best of American values and youth, and that the kidnapping was a national disgrace. It was his duty, he believed, to redress the desecration and to sanctify the status of his hero.
⁵²

Against the wishes of his family, Condon wrote a letter to the
Bronx Home News
on March 7, six days after the kidnapping, offering his services as an intermediary between the Lindberghs and the kidnappers, as well as a thousand dollars of his own money to supplement the ransom. Although his children balked and his neighbors laughed, friends applauded his splendid show of patriotism. The
News
may have been unknown outside the Bronx, but an estimated hundred thousand people read it every day. Condon was certain that someone would take notice. The very next day, he was proven right.

It was the kidnappers who responded. Within hours, Condon was in Hopewell, basking in his idol’s attention. Moved by the authenticity of the kidnapper’s logo on the bottom of the letter Condon had received, Lindbergh agreed to designate him an intermediary. Schwarzkopf had once again lost control. Lindbergh was wholly in charge, accepting the word of a complete stranger. Astounding the authorities, Lindbergh also gave Condon instructions for the exchange of the ransom with a note verifying his position. That night, Condon slept on the floor of the nursery and prayed to God for help in finding the baby’s abductors. When Charles came in to see him the next morning, Condon was searching through the baby’s toys for an object the baby would immediately recognize. He took three carved wooden animals—a lion, a camel, and an elephant—and asked whether he might take the safety
pins that had secured the blanket as verification of his identity to the kidnappers.
⁵³

As stipulated by the kidnappers in the note to Condon, Colonel Breckinridge placed an ad in the
New York American
, indicating that the ransom money was ready, and signed it with an acronym of Condon’s initials—Jafsie.

More firmly than before, the press was barred from the Lindbergh estate, now blazing with light and expectancy. The reporters and national broadcasters, however, continued to grind out their bulletins, repeating to their ravenous readers and listeners the latest statements of those on the periphery of the investigation. Whatever legitimate news there was could have been printed in three-quarters of a column, but day after day thousands of words appeared on the front page of every newspaper in the country. The Associated Press, acting with restraint, sent out ten thousand words a day; the Hearst organization managed to churn out three times as many. After all, Charles Lindbergh, Jr., heralded only twenty months earlier with the fanfare of a royal prince, was “the best known baby in the world.”
⁵⁴

The lack of official information tempted the tabloids to fabricate. Often, the stories they printed were flagrant lies intended to incite public frenzy. Anne was comforted, however, by the sympathy and the indignation of hundreds of people all over the country, all hoping for the return of her baby. The collective good will of the country, Anne wrote, was heartening. In Madison Square Garden, she noted, the referees had stopped a boxing match so that all could stand and pray for the baby.