The Cases That Haunt Us (19 page)

The house at 92 Second Street in Fall River is still standing. Since 1996, it has been open as a bed-and-breakfast. The curious or morbidly inclined can actually stay in the John Morse Guest Room, the site of Abby Borden’s murder. That room and the downstairs sitting room where Andrew was killed have been furnished to look just as they did on that warm, humid day in August of 1892.

Lucky Lindy up in the sky,

Fair or windy, he’s flying high

Fearless, peerless, knows every cloud,

The kind of a son makes a mother feel proud.

Plucky Lindy rides all alone

In a little plane all his own.

Lucky Lindy showed them the way

And he’s the hero of the day!

A
s these 1927 song lyrics suggest, from a May morning of that year and well into the 1930s, Colonel Charles Augustus Lindbergh was the most famous man in the world. He was in his midtwenties and exceedingly handsome, of solid Midwestern stock, the son of a former U.S. congressman. He was brave, daring, and visionary, yet at the same time modest and shy. And he had done what was supposed to be impossible—flying solo for thirty-three death-defying hours, from New York to Paris in his tiny, silver, single-engine
Spirit of St. Louis.
Instantly he became the Lone Eagle, Lucky Lindy—in short, the ultimate hero, a hero who embodied all of America’s best qualities. Then, during of tour of Mexico, this most famous, most eligible bachelor in the world met Anne Spencer Morrow. She was the shy, sensitive, and beautiful daughter of multimillionaire businessman-diplomat and ambassador Dwight Whitney Morrow, the financial whiz who had taken over as senior partner at J. P. Morgan upon the death of its founder. Charles proposed to Anne, and the American public settled down to live vicariously the lives of its new royalty.

The kidnapping of their baby firstborn son instantly became “the crime of the century,” unquestionably the biggest news story since Lindy’s historic flight five years earlier. And for many, despite the subsequent atom-bomb spy ring, the John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations, the Manson family murders, the slayings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, and so many other cases, this remains the crime of the century.

The facts and the evidence have been so persistently and painstakingly sifted for so many years that there are probably no completely “new” theories left to present. And like the Whitechapel murders, this case is a perfect example of the emotional tendency to come up with a scenario, then arrange and organize facts and evidence to fit it. What we want to do here is start from the opposite side—the only proper side for an investigator—to work our way through those facts and evidence in an attempt to arrive at an explanation that makes sense … whether or not it conforms to the official record. There are literally millions of pages of accumulated evidence, reports, and testimony, and no one person could possibly go through it all. Keep in mind as you read along, though, that every element presented is, or may be, significant in determining what happened, and who caused it to happen.

Like the Ripper case, the Lindbergh case is about the potential for random and unexpected evil to appear at any time. Like Lizzie Borden’s case, it is about what can happen behind the closed doors of the most proper and upstanding home. And as much as anything, it is also about the potentially malignant consequences of celebrity and fame.

Charles Lindbergh had a complicated and troubled relationship with his own celebrity. He accepted the adulation and the ticker-tape parades, the meetings and receptions with world leaders, the endless testimonial dinners, the appointments and commissions and consultancies. An exhibit of his awards and trophies in St. Louis attracted a million visitors a year. He understood that his opinion on anything was instant news, and each daring new exploit—whether it was opening up a new aviation route or testing a new piece of technology—only further burnished his gleaming image. And yet he was suspicious of it all, wary of any emotional intrusion, resentful that the press just wouldn’t leave any aspect of his existence unexamined. In the midst of a life lived under the unrelenting spotlight of a public’s interest and attention, privacy became an obsession for Lindbergh.

When they weren’t traveling around the world, the Lindberghs lived at Next Day Hill, Dwight and Elizabeth Morrow’s palatial estate in Englewood, New Jersey. For their own home, the Lindberghs selected a secluded 425-acre tract of wooded hills in New Jersey’s Sourland Mountains a few miles from Hopewell. The property overlapped the Hunterdon and Mercer County lines. Lindbergh had spotted the site from the air and thought it would offer the refuge they sought. He also liked that the land was suitable for a private airfield. The couple built a traditional-style, $80,000, twenty-room, whitewashed fieldstone house with a thick slate roof and all the modern technological advances. It was designed by Chester Aldrich, the architect of Next Day Hill. Here, Charles and Anne hoped to start and then raise their family. During the construction, they rented an old farmhouse between the property and Princeton.

After months of rumors eagerly reported by the press, the world got the news it had been waiting for. On June 22, 1930—Anne’s twenty-fourth birthday—she gave birth to a seven-pound-six-ounce baby boy at Next Day Hill. They named him Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. and called him Charlie. But in the headlines he soon became “Little Lindy,” “Eaglet,” or “the Baby Eagle.” Telegrams, letters, and gifts poured in from around the world. If his father was the earth’s most famous man, Charlie was the most famous baby. Every detail of the baby’s day-to-day existence was grist for the papers. In his outstanding 1998 biography,
Lindbergh
, A. Scott Berg reported that there was a standing offer of $2,000 for any “secrets of the household.”

So thick were rumors that the reluctant Lindbergh felt himself forced to call a press conference in New York to clarify matters. He had personally barred five newspaper chains, including Hearst, which had published stories speculating that the baby was deformed or somehow imperfect. When he was asked what he hoped his son might grow up to be, Lindbergh replied testily, “I don’t want him to be anything or do anything that he himself has no taste or aptitude for. I believe that everybody should have complete freedom in the choice of his life’s work. One thing I do hope for him, and that is when he is old enough to go to school, there will be no reporters dogging his footsteps.”

THE
HOUSE
NEAR
HOPEWELL

The Lindberghs began staying at the nearly completed Hopewell house on weekends, returning to the Morrow compound fifty miles away on Monday mornings. The Lindbergh’s full-time staff consisted of an English butler, Aloysius “Olly” Whateley, and his wife, Elsie. In February, 1931, the Lindberghs hired Betty Gow, a recently emigrated Scottish woman of Anne’s age, to be Charlie’s nursemaid. She had been highly recommended by another member of the Next Day Hill domestic staff. Charlie had developed a head full of golden curls and had his father’s distinctive cleft chin, and Anne was pregnant with a second child. She had also begun to seriously consider her goal of becoming a professional writer and had been recording her experiences of her and Charles’s recent trip to the Orient. Her chief domestic concern was that despite their attempts at security, unless the baby was watched every moment of the day, photographers might sneak in and take pictures of him.

The narrative of the few days before the crime is well documented by Scott Berg. As had become their custom, during the afternoon of Saturday, February 27, 1932, the Lindberghs left Next Day Hill and drove from Englewood to Hopewell to spend the weekend at the nearly completed house. But by Sunday, little Charlie, now twenty months old, had developed a cold, which left him sneezing, stuffy, and feeling ill. On Monday, February 29, the baby was still sick, and after lunch Anne called Betty Gow at Next Day Hill and said they’d stay in the Hopewell house until Charlie was feeling better. That evening, Lindbergh called from New York to say that he’d be spending the night in town and planned to return the next night. He had been pursuing his interest in biological research at the Rockefeller Institute.

On Tuesday morning, the baby seemed to be a little better, but Anne herself had come down with the cold. She called Betty Gow again and asked her to come to Hopewell. Gow arrived early in the afternoon and spelled Anne so she could get some rest. A little before 3 P.M., according to Berg, the two women went into the nursery together and found Charlie much improved. He played in the living room until around 5:30, then Gow took him back upstairs to the nursery, which, as you approach the house, was the room in the far left rear of the second floor. Gow fed him some cereal, then around 6:15 Anne came in and they prepared him for bed.

They rubbed his chest with Vicks VapoRub, then Gow quickly made a simple undershirt for him out of some leftover cream-colored cotton flannel. They put on his diapers, a woolen vest-style shirt, and a gray, size-2 Dr. Denton’s sleeping suit. Lindbergh did not want him to suck his thumb, so he’d outfitted his son with wire thumb guards at night that clipped onto his sleeves. Betty laid him down in the dark wooden four-poster crib and pulled up the blankets.

Anne tried to close the shutters but found the ones on the corner window too warped. She left the room around 7:30, and Betty Gow stayed another few minutes, opening one window about halfway for some circulation before turning out the light and leaving to wash the baby’s clothes. After that, she went in again to check on him and safety-pinned the blanket to the mattress to keep him warm. She then went to the basement to hang up the things she had washed and joined Elsie Whateley for dinner in their sitting room at about 8 P.M.

Twenty-five minutes later, Lindbergh arrived home. Actually, he was supposed to be at a dinner hosted by New York University at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, but there had been a scheduling mix-up, so he had driven home to Hopewell. He came from the garage through the kitchen. He and Anne sat down for dinner together around 8:35. After dinner, they went into the living room, which occupied the central area of the ground floor on the back side of the house.

Just after 9 P.M., Lindbergh thought he heard a strange sound, which he later described as similar to a wooden orange crate breaking. He thought maybe it had come from the kitchen on the right front side of the house, in line with the dining room in the back. Anne recalled that about fifteen minutes before Charles drove up to the garage, she thought she’d heard the sound of car wheels crunching the gravel of the driveway. But no one had been there. The Lindberghs’ dog, Wahgoosh, had not barked at any point, and so Anne had paid little attention.

During this time, Betty Gow got a call from her boyfriend, Henry “Red” Johnson, a Norwegian sailor who was currently working as a deckhand on a yacht. They were supposed to have gone out that evening, but had to cancel the date when Gow was called to Hopewell. Instead, Johnson told her, he was going to drive up to Hartford, Connecticut, to see his brother.

After sitting in the living room for a little while, Anne and Charles went upstairs to their bedroom, which was just above the living room at the rear of the house and connected to the nursery by a short hallway that led past their bathroom. Charles bathed, then dressed again and went downstairs to read in the library, which was next to the living room at the left back corner of the house and directly under Charlie’s nursery. Meanwhile, Anne bathed and went to bed around 10 P.M.

At around the same time, Gow went back to the nursery to check on Charlie. She didn’t want to disturb his sleeping so she only turned on the light in the bathroom. It was now cold enough outside that she closed the half-open window and plugged in an electric heater.

But as she approached the crib, she was alarmed that she couldn’t hear the baby breathing. In the dim light, he didn’t look to be in the crib, but she felt all over with her hands to make sure.

She went through the connecting door to the Lindberghs’ bedroom and found Anne as she was coming out of the bathroom. “Do you have the baby, Mrs. Lindbergh?” Gow asked anxiously.

“No,” Anne replied, confused. Perhaps Colonel Lindbergh had him, she suggested, then went into the nursery while Gow ran downstairs to the library.

“Colonel Lindbergh, have you got the baby?” Gow asked. Then, since Lindbergh was known as a notorious practical jokester, she added, “Please don’t fool me.”

Lindbergh expressed surprise that Charlie wouldn’t be in his crib, getting up quickly to examine the nursery for himself. He strode into his and Anne’s bedroom, went to the closet, grabbed his rifle, and loaded it. Then, with Anne, he went back to the nursery.

The crib was empty and the room was surprisingly cold. Lindbergh glanced over and realized the corner window—the one with the warped shutter—was unlatched and slightly open. On top of a radiator enclosure just under the window, Lindbergh noticed a small white envelope. He had the restraint and presence of mind not to touch it before authorities arrived.

“Anne,” he said, “they have stolen our baby.”

“MY
SON
HAS
JUST
BEEN
KIDNAPPED”

At about 10:25 P.M., Olly Whateley called the Hopewell Sheriff ’s Office to report the crime. Lindbergh himself called his attorney and close friend, Henry Breckinridge, in New York City. Then he called the New Jersey State Police in Trenton, where he spoke to Lieutenant Daniel J. Dunn. “This is Charles Lindbergh,” he said. “My son has just been kidnapped.”

Dunn asked him when it had happened and for a description of the baby and what he was wearing. After hanging up, Dunn described the call to Detective Lewis J. Bornmann. They discussed the matter briefly and, to make sure it wasn’t a prank, decided Dunn should call the Lindbergh house to confirm that the voice he had spoken to was, in fact, the colonel’s. When Lindbergh answered the phone, Dunn reported that the police were on their way. Meanwhile, Lindbergh went outside, hunting for signs of the intruder, but found nothing.