The kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby is a never-to-be-forgotten case.
President Herbert Hoover
Central to the plot of the mystery novel Murder on the Orient Express (1934) is the kidnapping and murder of a child, for which Agatha Christie drew inspiration from the contemporary publicity surrounding the infamous real-life tragedy that befell the family of a famous aviator. It sparked the world’s greatest manhunt for the abductor of ‘Baby Lindbergh’.
In 1927 American Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974), nicknamed ‘The Lone Eagle’, was feted as a national hero when he made the first ever non-stop solo transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in a single-engine aeroplane, The Spirit of St Louis. Sadly, he made international headlines again five years later when his twenty-one-month-old son, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr, was kidnapped from his bedroom in Hopewell, New Jersey, in March 1932. At the luxurious home, complete with an English butler, the perpetrator left behind a ransom note demanding $50,000 for the baby’s safe return. After protracted negotiation, intermediary Dr Condon journeyed to the Bronx and handed the ransom money over a cemetery wall to someone calling himself ‘John’. The anxious father was then directed to the Massachusetts coast, assured that his son was safe and sound on a boat. This proved to be a cruel hoax, for the distraught airman spent days flying over the area without locating a boat or his child. The ordeal of Lindbergh and his wife Anne continued until the baby’s body was found in a shallow grave in a wood four miles from their home. Death had been caused by a massive fracture of the skull from a blow delivered soon after he had been taken. A nationwide hunt for the killer was launched and the serial numbers of the banknotes used to pay the ransom were printed in newspapers across the country. It was to be over two years before one turned up when a German-born carpenter with a history of petty crime bought some petrol at a filling station in the Bronx in September 1934.
Illegal immigrant Bruno ‘Richard’ Hauptmann was arrested after the sharp-eyed filling-station attendant furnished the police with his car registration number and, despite protesting his innocence, the evidence against the accused was compelling. The ransom note contained spelling errors that suggested the writer was German, whilst a search of the suspect’s house recovered $14,000 of the original ransom money found hidden in the garage. Also, a wooden floorboard missing from the attic had been used to make the homemade ladder used in the kidnapping and Dr Condon’s telephone number was found written on a piece of paper. Hauptmann was sentenced to death in February 1935 and, after being granted three postponements, went to the electric chair fifteen months later. In the words of one reporter who witnessed the execution, the murderer paid the ‘supreme penalty’ for his heinous crime ‘without uttering a word and with a wistful smile on his pallid face’. Revulsion at Hauptmann’s crime of killing the baby affectionately known as ‘The Little Eagle’ had been felt by even hardened criminals, including Chicago gangster Al Capone, the instigator of the infamous St Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929. At the time of the kidnapping, Capone offered a $10,000 reward and volunteered his services to locate the missing baby. However, ‘Scarface’ was unable to obtain the cooperation of the government to release him from San Francisco’s Alcatraz where he was serving a ten-year jail sentence, not for any of his prohibition rackets or violent crimes, but for failing to submit tax returns to Uncle Sam!
Curiously, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express came to the forefront in a different context when the English Riviera became the first urban area to be granted Geopark status in 2007. Nick Powe, Managing Director of the prehistoric Kents Cavern, which featured as Hemsley Cavern in The Man in the Brown Suit (1924), welcomed the prestigious award recognising the area’s ‘fabulous wildlife, marine biology, sea grasses, dolphins, archaeological and geological heritage’. It would also enable the promotion of many more of Torbay’s assets, ‘including links to the works of… Agatha Christie’, whose keen interest in archaeology had brought about her meeting with second husband Max Mallowan. Two of the Geopark’s gateway sites, Torquay Museum and Torre Abbey, have permanent exhibitions celebrating Agatha Christie’s life. Furthermore, ‘The Queen of Crime’ has inspired a palaeontology theory developed by American Douglas Erwin, the world’s leading expert on the global catastrophe that occurred at the end of the Permian period some 250 million years ago when 90 per cent of all life on Earth became extinct. His books on the subject, described as ‘whodunnits for the ages’, are written from the perspective of a forensic scientist trying to piece together minute clues to determine the many possible causes of death that include asteroid impact, huge volcanic eruptions or the oceans losing their oxygen content. Unfolding as a sort of geological mystery story, Erwin describes a final possibility as the ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ scenario which, like fictional detective Hercule Poirot of the novel, proposes that the murder was committed by all the suspects.
In September 1976 a prosecutor told a court how a girl from the Isle of Wight, aged fifteen, attempted to kill her parents after becoming ‘immersed in the detective fiction of Agatha Christie’.
The girl had been adopted at the age of six and was well treated by her devoted parents, who were devastated to hear her plead guilty to deliberately damaging their car and committing arson with intent to endanger life. After failing to cause an accident by cutting what she believed was the brake line on the family car, the accused set the vehicle alight in the integrated garage. The fire spread to the house, where her parents were watching television. They escaped from the inferno after making a desperate attempt to reach their daughter’s room where they believed she was trapped. However, the arsonist was admiring her handiwork from the top of a nearby cliff and later admitted, ‘I wanted to kill Mum and Dad. They expected too much of me. They expected me to be a goody-goody all the time. I wanted to show them I was not. I wanted them dead’.
Treated sympathetically by the judge, who ordered her detention until she received treatment that would make her fit ‘to be at large in the world again’, the defence counsel added, ‘It is very difficult in dealing with a person with intense imagination to discover where play acting ends and reality begins’.