Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (22 page)

The FBI acquired a comparison microscope and helixometer to complement its national fingerprint file, and the agency was now moving into the modern age of crime investigation. That same year, Thomas Gonzales applied the first test for gunshot residue on the hands of someone suspected to have fired a murder weapon, while at the Berlin Technical University in Germany, Max Knoll and Ernst Ruska had already developed and utilized the transmission electron microscope, which relied on a focused beam of fast-moving electrons to “see through” a specimen. This invention enabled scientists to see much smaller objects than had been possible with a light microscope, enhancing the science of trace evidence examination. But the next headline-grabbing case involved many different types of evidence analysis, as well as a tragic death that affected people the world over.

NINE

ELUSIVE IDENTITIES

On a cold March evening in 1932, in a recently constructed luxury home near Hopewell, New Jersey, Charles and Anne Lindbergh were preparing for the night. Lindbergh had won fame with his solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, and he was considered a representative of America’s best. Thus, he was a vulnerable target as well, and on this night he would learn the price of fame. The Lindberghs typically returned on Mondays to Anne’s parents’ home in New Jersey, but they remained in Hopewell on this particular Tuesday because their baby, twenty-month-old Charles Lindbergh, Jr., had a cold. As Lindbergh read in the study, he heard a loud
crack
, like a box falling, but he attributed it to the high wind blowing outside.

Upstairs, the baby had just been placed into his crib in the second-floor nursery. His nurse returned to check on him and discovered the crib empty. She asked Lindbergh if he had the child, but he did not, so he checked with Anne and they ran to the nursery. The child was clearly gone and an envelope on the windowsill told the story: The “princeling” had been kidnapped.

During those years of the Great Depression following the stock market’s collapse in 1929, kidnapping was fairly common. Over the past three years around the country, there had been more than 2,500 such incidents, terrorizing America’s wealthy. Lindbergh was just one more victim.

Although several police departments got involved, Lindbergh ran the show. Given his financial means to hire experts, the investigation would become a showcase for several areas of technical expertise; it also showcased some inept handling.

On the night of the kidnapping, the Hopewell police searched the house and grounds, finding a carpenter’s chisel near several foot impressions leading from a ladder that had been used to access the nursery window. Less than a hundred feet away, a wooden extension ladder lay on the ground in three sections, one of which was split along the grain. Farther away, near a small dirt road, police found tire tracks, but no one thought to measure their width or make a cast. The same neglect was exercised on a footprint located in the wet ground below the nursery window, although one officer compared his own size-nine shoe and found the print to be larger.

Inside the nursery, detectives opened the note to reveal a threatening message:

Dear Sir!

Have 50000$ redy with 25 000 $ in 20 $ bills 1.5000 $ in 10$ bills and 10000$ in 5 $ bills. After 2–4 days we will inform you were to deliver the Mony.

We warn you for making anyding public or for notify the Police the child is in gut care.

Indication for all letters are singnature and 3 holes.

At the bottom-right-hand corner was a drawing of two interlocking, penny-sized, blue circles. The areas where they intersected had been colored red, and three small holes were punched into the design, at the left, right, and center. That would prove to be the signature.

In trying to reconstruct the incident, investigators could not understand why the kidnappers had taken such a risk, rather than wait an hour or two until it was certain that everyone was asleep in the house. The fact that the dog had been removed that evening to another part of the house brought suspicion on the domestic servants; they were also aware that the Lindberghs had changed their plans to return to New Jersey at the last minute. Yet some investigators believed it could easily be the job of an outsider. The house had been featured in magazines all over the country, complete with floor plans, so it was easy enough to learn where the nursery was, and whoever had brought the chisel had not known that the window shutter could not be locked. In addition, the family’s movements could be easily monitored from the woods.

On March 5, a second letter with the same interlocking signature scolded Lindbergh for involving the police, and upped the ransom demand to $70,000. In all, fourteen such notes would be received over the course of the investigation. They were signed with the same symbol and often contained the same handwriting, misspellings, and grammatical errors. One note agreed on a go-between, a retired teacher named John F. Condon, and another gave instructions for the type of box that must be made for delivering the money.

Condon met their representative, but before offering money he insisted on a token of proof, and soon the baby’s sleeping suit arrived at the Lindbergh home, with the following note:

Dear Sir: Ouer man faill to collect the mony. There are no more confidential conference after we meeting from March 12. Those arrangemts to hazardous for us. We will note allow ouer man to confer in a way like befor. circumstance will note allow us to make transfer like you wish It is impossibly for us. wy shuld we move the baby and face danger. to take another person to the place is entirely out of question. It seems you are afraid if we are the rigth party and if the baby is allright. Well you have ouer signature. It is always the same as the first one specialy them 3 holes.

On the reverse side was:

Now we will send you the sleeping suit from the baby besides it means 3$ extra expenses because we have to pay another one, please tel Mrs. Lindbergh note to worry the baby is well. we only have to give him more food as the diet says.

You are willing to pay the 70000 note 50000 $ without seeing the baby first or note. let us know about that in the New York-American. We can’t do it other ways because we don’t like to give up ouer safty plase or to move the baby. If you are willing to accept this deal, put these in paper.

I accept mony is redy.

Ouer program is:

After 8 houers we have the mony received we will notify you where to find the baby. If there is any trapp, you will be responsible what will follow.

In preparation for identifications, fingerprint expert Dr. Erastus Mead Hudson applied a silver nitrate solution to the baby’s toys to get a set of the child’s fingerprints. These were photographed with a special fingerprint camera. He then worked on the ladder and came up with over five hundred prints, many of which were full latents. Eight were clear enough to be useful, but aside from one that belonged to a trooper, none could be matched to anyone.

The IRS offered a brilliant idea: Put the ransom money into gold certificates, because the government would be recalling them, and these could then be used to track the kidnappers when they tried to spend them. The prescribed box contained $50,000, and a second package contained the additional $20,000. The bills were not marked but the serial numbers had been secretly recorded, and the smaller package contained large bills that would be easy to spot.

On March 31, Condon handed over the money, but he received only another note to the effect that the baby was being held on a boat at Horse Neck Beach, near Elizabeth Island. Lindbergh got into his plane to search for this elusive boat, while the Treasury Department distributed the serial numbers of the ransom money to area banks. The boat was not located, so Lindbergh returned home, disheartened. He and his wife could only hope that someone was taking good care of their child.

Then on May 12, 1932, at 3:15
P
.
M
., a truck driver, William Allen, stopped on Princeton-Hopewell Road about one-half mile outside Mount Rose. He walked into the woods about seventy feet and saw a small white skull and a leg sticking up out of the ground. He reported this and the remains were identified from their size and the style of the garments as Charles Lindbergh, Jr. The cause of death was a massive fracture of the skull. The child was dead and the killers had gotten away. Once this discovery made the news, it seemed likely the kidnappers would stop communication, and they did. But the investigation continued.

The ransom and instruction notes were sent to several analysts, who all concluded that they had been written by the same person. The misspellings and English mistakes were consistent, as was the odd inversion of letters like
g
and
h,
and there were references in some to earlier notes or events, so the collection had internal consistency. They also believed that the same instrument had been used to punch the holes that created the signature symbol, and stated that the letters had been written on the same kind of paper with the same ink. The writer’s nationality, inferred from the phraseology, was probably German. One expert, Albert S. Osborn, the author of the definitive
Questioned Documents
, composed a paragraph for the police to use with suspects, to ask them to write out certain words that could be compared with the notes, such as
our
,
place
, and
money
. But Osborn insisted that the paragraph had to be dictated, not copied, or a comparison would be pointless.

From time to time, as ransom bills turned up, they were examined for trace evidence. Most had been folded in a certain manner, and New York’s toxicology lab found particles of glycerine and emery, which pointed to the possibility that the individual in possession of the money used an emery wheel to grind tools. Many bills had lipstick or mascara marks, and a few had traces of blonde, red, and brunette hair. The bills also bore a musty odor, as if they had been stored, but none yielded discernible fingerprints.

Investigators hoped to use Leonarde Keeler’s polygraph, for which he claimed an accuracy rate of 90 percent, to interview Lindbergh’s servants. However, Lindbergh refused to allow it. It was not clear whether he did not wish to believe anyone in his employ might be guilty or whether he simply did not accept the polygraph’s purported reliability.

But Keeler did have his shot just then with another case. As the Lindbergh investigation wore on with no new leads, a reporter invited Keeler to participate in another incident involving a murdered child. It was a cold case from 1911 that had occurred in Madison, Wisconsin. Seven-year-old Annie Lemberger went missing from her bedroom and three days later her body was found in a pond near Lake Monona. The police quickly arrested a neighbor, John “Dogskin” Johnson, who had a record of molesting children. He confessed to the crime but then retracted it, saying he’d felt pressured by the threat of mob violence. Still, he had offered details that the police had withheld from the press, such as the fact that the child’s nightdress was torn. Then townspeople began to have doubts, wondering how Johnson could have opened a window and made off with a girl her size without anyone in the house hearing it. The press ran stories about this “real-life mystery.”

New suspicions centered on Martin Lemberger, Annie’s father, and rumors spread that he had killed her by hitting her. Nevertheless, there was no evidence and Johnson remained in prison for the next decade. Then Johnson’s lawyer, Ole Stolen, got him a hearing for a potential pardon, because he had located a witness, May Sorensen, who was a neighbor to the Lembergers. She claimed that Annie’s mother and brother had admitted that Martin had indeed struck the girl, accidentally killing her.

Since the statute of limitations for manslaughter had expired, Lemberger was not prosecuted, but Johnson gained his freedom. Then on November 16, 1932, Robert Bishop, from the
Chicago Daily Times,
managed to arrange for Keeler to give the lot of them polygraph examinations. Lemberger, Johnson, and Sorensen all agreed, and Johnson and Sorensen in particular hoped to find support from the “lie box,” because they expected money from Johnson’s lawsuit against Wisconsin for false imprisonment.

On January 6, 1933, in the Lorraine Hotel in Madison, each person was hooked up, one by one, to Keeler’s machine. Keeler started with Annie’s parents and found their responses to be truthful. Johnson did not fare as well, but the results were inconclusive, so Keeler decided that he might have “guilty knowledge” of something connected to the incident. But it was May Sorensen who proved to be lying. When confronted, she alleged that Johnson’s defense attorney had paid her to help him win the case. In addition, an examination of Annie’s autopsy indicated that the child had died from asphyxia, not a blow to the head. Lemberger was exonerated and Keeler won publicity and fame for his machine, but the questions raised about Annie’s murder remained unanswered.

During this time, America and other parts of the world were struggling through economic collapse. In the United States, the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed, ending Prohibition but bringing little relief. A series of bank robbers with names like Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, and Pretty Boy Floyd came on the scene, glamorizing this crime and bringing entertainment in the form of newsreels and media stories. But soon Bonnie and Clyde were ambushed in Louisiana, shot more than fifty times each, and police gunned down the notorious John Dillinger outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago. An examination of his corpse revealed that he’d attempted to have his fingertips surgically removed—which only made them even more unique.

In Germany, Adolf Hitler declared the Third Reich, setting out to restore his country’s power, and three years later Spain entered a civil war. Italy and Japan acquired leadership in Benito Mussolini and Hirohito, respectively, and these countries collectively shared resentment toward the World War I Allies. World tension increased, and the Lindbergh case, likewise, neared its explosive resolution.

BACK TO LINDBERGH

On September 15, 1934, a gas station manager in Manhattan called in the license plate for a man who had used a gold certificate to pay for gas. The car belonged to Bruno Richard Hauptmann from the Bronx and a search of his wallet turned up another gold certificate from the ransom money. Coincidentally, it was discovered that he had quit his job on the day the ransom had been paid. Yet Hauptmann maintained that a man named Isador Fisch had given him the money before departing for Germany, where he had died not long afterward. Once Hauptmann had realized that Fisch was dead, he had used some of the money, because Fisch had owed it to him. No one believed him and he was arrested.

During interrogation, Hauptmann was instructed to provide samples of his handwriting, as well as to copy the ransom notes as closely as possible (the method that Osborn had explicitly said not to use). Detectives made him write for hours, until he fell asleep at the table. He wrote his statement seven times, and nine sheets of dictated writing were taken to Osborn’s son, Albert D. Osborn, also a handwriting expert. Hauptmann had been required to write with three different pens, with some samples written upright and some slanted. The end result was that there were more discrepancies between some of his writing samples than between his samples and the ransom notes. Osborn examined the statements, initially unconvinced that Hauptmann was the writer of the ransom notes, but he kept samples for further analysis. The police then instructed Hauptmann to write more statements, inappropriately dictating the spelling of certain words. “I was told to write it exactly as it was dictated to me,” Hauptmann would later claim in court, “and this included writing words spelled as I was told to spell them.” (In Hauptmann’s other writings, such as letters, he did not misspell these words.)