Stolen Away (49 page)

“You are cruel.”

“Sometimes. But not foolish. Goodbye, Evalyn.”

And I hung up.

I just sat there for a while, and then I slammed my fist on the desk, and the phone jumped, and I split a fucking stitch. It hurt like hell. I unbuttoned my shirt and there was blood on the bandage. I’d have to go back to the hospital for a little outpatient number. God, it hurt. I started to cry.

I cried like a baby for several minutes.

I told myself it was the wound. But there are all kinds of those.

1936–1990

I never saw Evalyn again.

She continued investigating the case, and wrote a series of articles about her experiences for
Liberty
magazine in 1938; but eventually her obsession subsided. Her husband died in an insane asylum in 1941. In 1946, Evalyn’s daughter—who shared her mother’s first name—took an overdose of sleeping pills and never woke up; Evalyn was heartbroken and died, technically of pneumonia, the next year. Sad as that sounds, there was a typically madcap aspect to Evalyn’s last hours: her bedside was surrounded with as many famous friends and relatives as one of her star-studded dinner parties.

Many of the people in the case I never saw again. My uneasy “friendship” with Frank Nitti, on the other hand, continued no matter what I did to try to stop it, until he stopped it himself, with his suicide-under-suspicious-circumstances in 1943.

He and Ricca and Campagna and a few others had just been indicted in the Hollywood movie-union extortion case; the general belief was that Nitti couldn’t face going back to prison. In fact, the recent death of his beloved wife Anna had depressed Nitti, and finally allowed the forceful Ricca to make his move. It was a peaceful overthrow, the force of Ricca’s personality compared to that of the faltering Nitti bringing the Boys over to the Waiter’s side.

Nitti’s suicide was an act of defiance toward Ricca, whose reign as Chicago crime lord began with a prison sentence.

The ruthless Waiter, as Nitti predicted, eventually did learn a lesson about fathers and sons. His own son became a drug addict and Ricca, during his rule, banned the Outfit from narcotics trafficking. Ricca became inclined toward concentrating on victimless crimes, like gambling. He spent his declining years using legal tactics to avoid deportation, and died in his sleep in 1972 at the age of seventy-four.

Capone, of course, never did make his comeback; syphilis caught up with him, and after his stay in Alcatraz, he died a near-vegetable in 1947.

Some of the minor crooks, like Rosner, Spitale and Bitz, I never had contact with again; no idea what became of them. Some of the cops I ran into now and then, of course.

Eliot Ness fought syphilis in a different way from Capone—he was the government’s top vice cop during World War II. But Eliot’s glory days faded in the postwar years, after he lost a mayoral bid in Cleveland, where he’d once been so successful as Director of Public Safety. He died an unsuccessful businessman in 1957, right before his autobiography
The Untouchables
made him posthumously a legend.

Elmer Irey became the coordinator of the Treasury Department’s law-enforcement agencies, not only the Intelligence Unit but the Secret Service and agents of the Alcohol Tax Unit, Customs, Narcotics Unit and Coast Guard Intelligence. His integrity was unquestioned, and he attacked various investigations regardless of their political implications; because he’d put away Missouri’s political boss Tom Pendergast, he retired in 1946 rather than tangle with the in-coming Truman administration. He died a little over a year later.

Frank J. Wilson did become the head of the Secret Service, later in 1936, and remained such till 1947. His major accomplishment in that office was cracking down on counterfeiters. After retiring he became security consultant for the Atomic Energy Commission. He died in 1970 at age eighty-three.

Schwarzkopf was fired by Governor Hoffman in June of 1936. The ex-floorwalker rebounded in an unexpected way: Phillips H. Lord, the radio producer, hired Schwarzkopf at the same rate as his old state-police salary to be an “official police announcer” on Lord’s famous show
Gangbusters.
During the same period, Schwarzkopf became a trucking executive in New Jersey; good research for a guy working on
Gangbusters
, I’d say. Like a number of Lindbergh cronies, Schwarzkopf served in unspecified ways overseas during World War II, in Italy and Germany—possibly in the OSS. Anyway, he became, of all things, the chief of police of Iran for five postwar years; doing more OSS/CIA-type stuff? Who knows.

Ultimately, Schwarzkopf wound up back in New Jersey, heading a newly created law-enforcement agency investigating financial irregularities in state government. Schwarzkopf’s first major investigation was into the Unemployment Compensation Committee, and he soon discovered that the committee’s director had been embezzling. The director’s name? Former Governor Harold Hoffman.

Hoffman, it seemed, had been embezzling for years, starting with a bank he’d been president of in South Amboy long before he became governor. He’d lost his reelection bid in ’37, tried again in ’40 and ’46, losing both times, the Wendel case coming back to haunt him. During World War II, he managed to join the ranks of the many Lindbergh-case colonels, serving in the Army Transport Command.

Harold Hoffinan was a dedicated public servant in many respects, and he threw his career away on Bruno Richard Hauptmann, either because he was gambling on the fame he’d win if he managed to clear the guy; or because he sincerely felt Hauptmann was innocent. He liked wine, women and song, too well apparently, and died in a hotel room in 1954 while under investigation by the man who brought him down—Colonel Norman Schwarzkopf.

Schwarzkopf died in 1958 of a stomach ailment.

The Wendel case also brought Ellis Parker down, of course. He and his “deputies” all went to jail. The new “Lindbergh kidnapping law” got ’em. Both father and son went to the federal prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Parker never changed his tune about Wendel’s guilt, and the Cornfield Sherlock’s supporters were lobbying for a presidential pardon when he died in the prison hospital of a brain tumor in 1940. I hear his son died a few years ago.

Wendel himself had a burst of fame: for one national magazine, he went into a photo studio with actors and posed melodramatic reenactments of the tortures he claimed to have endured. He published a book about his captivity and became something of a celebrity, even a hero. Then he faded into obscurity and I don’t know what the hell became of him.

Gaston Means, in a prison hospital in 1938 after a heart attack, found FBI agents at his bedside, sent by J. Edgar Hoover to inquire once again about Evalyn’s money. Means smiled his puckish smile at them, winked and passed away.

John H. Curtis tried for years to have his conviction overturned, but was turned down by the New Jersey Supreme Court. He remained in the boat-building and marine business and was quietly successful. In 1957 he supervised the construction of three replicas of colonial-period British warships that sailed at a major Norfolk festival. He died in 1962, a respected citizen of his community.

Another prominent Norfolk citizen, Admiral Burrage, never again spoke publicly of the Lindbergh case; he died in 1954. Reverend Dobson-Peacock died in England in 1959.

The Bull of Brooklyn, a.k.a. “Death House” Reilly, alias Edward J. Reilly, only occasionally appeared in court after the Hauptmann trial. He alternated between living at home with his mother and being institutionalized at the King’s Park state mental hospital, his drinking and three failed marriages taking their toll. He died of a blood clot on the brain, at King’s Park, on Christmas Day, 1946.

David T. Wilentz fared much better. While the run for the governorship that was rumored during the Hauptmann case never materialized—he was a Jew, after all—Wilentz became a major political boss among the New Jersey Demos. He continued with his law practice, but his real job was that of power broker. By 1950 he was influencing national politics, including the selection of Democratic vice-presidential and presidential candidates. There were those who said Wilentz had mob ties, and in his later days he was representing Atlantic City casinos. He died July 7, 1988, at ninety-three.

Wilentz’s star witness, John F. Condon, who like Wendel enjoyed notoriety by writing magazine articles and a self-promoting book, died of pneumonia at age eighty-four with his wife Myra and daughter Myra both at his bedside—exactly ten years from the day that Hauptmann went to trial.

Some of the others, I lost track of. I don’t know what happened to Gerta Henkel and her husband. Nor do I know what became of Martin Marinelli and his wife Sister Sarah Sivella. Edgar Cayce went on to great fame, of course; in Virginia Beach, in January 1946, on his deathbed, he predicted he was about to be healed.

Colonel Henry Breckinridge remained friendly with Lindbergh, and continued on as his lawyer. Having run for the U.S. Senate in 1934, and lost, Breckinridge took a shot at the presidency in 1936; he was an anti-New Deal Democrat. I guess you know how he fared. After that, he devoted himself primarily to his law practice. He died in 1960 at age seventy-three.

Slim Lindbergh went on to have something in common with Dick Hauptmann: both of them suffered due to anti-German sentiment. Lindbergh, while living in England, was invited by Major Truman Smith, military attaché at the American Embassy in Berlin, to inspect the German air forces, with the blessing of General Goering, head of the Luftwaffe. Here began Lindbergh’s ill-fated association with Germany—he at one point accepted a Service Cross from Goering—which resulted in his isolationist stance concerning the war in Europe. He was branded pro-Nazi by the press and public who had so recently idolized him; after America’s entry into the war, he flew as a test pilot and on combat missions—but the Nazi-sympathizer image stuck. Perhaps this wasn’t all bad—he finally could have the anonymity and privacy he’d craved. He continued his research on matters aeronautic and otherwise, including inventing an early artificial heart. He and Anne raised four more children. In 1974, he died on the island of Maui, where he had lived, and where he is buried.

Some of the others are, as I write this, still alive. Several of the cops and reporters. Betty Gow, still in England. Anne Lindbergh, whose literary skill has won her fame of her own. Anna Hauptmann, who after quietly raising her son in obscurity, reentered the public eye in the 1970s, fighting in the press and in the courts to clear her husband’s name.

Over the years a number of men came forward claiming to be, or expressing the suspicion that they might be, Charles Lindbergh, Jr. One of these was an advertising executive from Michigan who, starting four or five years ago, contacted me several times for information about the case.

His name was Harlan C. Jensen—the “C” stood for Carl—and he was always quiet and respectful in our several phone conversations; he seemed not at all a crank, but I wasn’t terribly cooperative. I did hear him out on a couple occasions.

He had been raised in Escabana, Michigan, by Bill and Sara Jensen. When he was a young boy, he was told (by an uncle) that his mother and father were not his natural parents; naturally, he wondered about this, and as a young teenager confronted his father, who said only that “you’re legitimate.” Before he went to Korea, for combat in 1952, his mother’s cousin had confided in him that “family rumor” had it that he was Charles Lindbergh, Jr.

Several years later, on his honeymoon, Harlan and his wife had been in a boatyard in Wickford, Rhode Island, where they were enjoying the nautical scenery while they waited to catch the ferry to Cape Cod. An elderly woman approached, with a redheaded woman in her twenties, and introduced herself as Mrs. Kurtzel. She said to Jensen, “You were with us as a baby—I helped care for you. This is my daughter—she was like your sister.” Jensen had been understandably taken aback, but then the woman said, “May I feel the dent in your head?” Shocked that a stranger knew about this defect, which he’d been told was from a slip of the forceps during delivery, he allowed her to touch the back of his head.

“You are the Lindbergh baby,” she said. “I helped care for you.”

At this point, the ferry arrived, and Jensen and his bride left, covering their confusion and fear with nervous laughter.

He began to read about the Lindbergh case, but rejected the notion that Bill and Sara Jensen were not his real parents. He never talked to them about the “family rumor,” but on their respective deathbeds, each parent had tried to tell him something. His mother had become ill while he was in Korea and had lapsed into a coma before he could get home to be at her side; his father, suffering a stroke in 1967, struggled to give his son some message, but could not make himself understood.

Years later, in a medical exam for recurring headaches, Jensen was shown X-rays and told by a doctor that his skull had been severely fractured in his early childhood. Also, the doctor asked why he’d had so much plastic surgery as a child—Jensen said that he wasn’t aware that he had. But the doctor demonstrated on the X-rays that reconstructive surgery had taken place beneath his eyes and on his chin, possibly removing a cleft.

He had begun, then, in earnest, making a search for his identity his spare-time obsession. Unlike the others who claimed to be Charles Lindbergh, Jr., Jensen had disclaimed any rights to the Lindbergh estate, putting that in writing in a letter to the probate judge on Maui.

There was more, but I wouldn’t let him tell me. I told him I was retired from the detective business, that the Lindbergh case was something I didn’t think about anymore, and had no interest in discussing with anybody. He called, I think, three times, telling me a little more of his story each time.

About a year ago, I was sitting in my little condo in Coral Springs; my wife—my second wife, but who’s counting—was out, playing bridge with some of the other old girls who live in this same complex we do. Occasionally I fish, but most days I either read or write or watch TV. That afternoon I was watching a videocassette of an old Hitchcock movie. Well, hell—I guess all Hitchcock movies are old, at this point. Like me.

Anyway, I answered the door and found a slender man in his mid-fifties standing there, looking shy and a little embarrassed. He wore a yellow sweater over a light blue Ban-Ion shirt; his slacks were white and so were his rubber-soled shoes—he looked like somebody on vacation.

Which he was, as it turned out.

“I’m sorry to drop by unannounced,” he said. For a man in his fifties, he had a youthful face; not that it wasn’t lined—but the nose, the eyes, the mouth, were boyish. “My wife and I are visiting her mom down here and…look, I’m Harlan Jensen.”