4
When Charles Augustus Jr. arrived on June 22, 1930—his mother’s twenty-fourth birthday as well—radio programs were interrupted to spread the news, and a song composed for the event aired within the hour. President Hoover and world leaders sent congratulations, as did tens of thousands of ordinary people. So many gifts were received that the family could no longer fit them into the room assigned them. The press dubbed baby Charles the Eaglet, and the entire nation of France “adopted” him as its own. The demand for photographs was enormous. Lindbergh provided them only to journalists he deemed friendly, which prompted one blackballed editor to offer a bounty of five thousand dollars for a picture of the baby.
Dwight Morrow, the Eaglet’s grandfather, was also making news. An often-mentioned presidential candidate by anti-Hoover Republicans, Morrow had entered the New Jersey senatorial race. The fifty-seven-year-old former ambassador, who advocated repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, won the GOP primary by three hundred thousand votes, the statewide election by two hundred thousand, and took office in December of 1930. By then Lindy and Anne lived in a rented farmhouse outside of Princeton, New Jersey, but had purchased a 360-acre tract of land they spotted from the air. It was on the southern slope of the nearby Sourland Mountain, and construction of their house was under way.
In a Saturday Evening Post magazine article that appeared in early summer of 1931, Lindbergh disclosed that even though his fan mail was down to a hundred letters a day, he and Anne had recently taken to wearing disguises, since it was the only way they could go out in public without attracting a crowd.1 Another revelation was that the Lone Eagle often referred to his son and heir as It. An attempt was made by the story’s author to answer charges of Lindy’s being a mean-spirited practical joker who had intentionally splattered mud on fans watching him taxi his plane along a runway and, in another moment of mischief, had intentionally put a passenger-filled plane he was piloting into a nosedive. The magazine attributed to Lindbergh an “inflexible policy” of dealing only with the conservative metropolitan press and of having made a “clean break” with his old nemesis, the exploitive newspapers that continued to infringe on his personal life even though he would issue them an occasional press release. The story left no doubt that the new home they were building near the remote Sourland Mountain would provide him and his family with the privacy he had so long sought and so well deserved.
In February of 1931, pretty Bessie (“Betty”) Mowat Gow came to work at the Lindberghs’ home near Princeton. A highly recommended nursemaid for the baby, Betty joined a household staff that consisted of herself and two other servants: Ollie Whateley, the family butler-chauffeur, and his wife, Elsie, who was the Lindberghs’ cook. The Whateleys were English; Betty Gow, Scottish. With the onset of summer and the Lindberghs preparing to embark on an extended flying expedition, Betty and the baby went to the Morrow vacation home at North Haven, Maine. Whether in New England or Princeton or at his grandmother’s estate in Englewood, it was an isolated existence for the Eaglet. The Lindberghs and the Morrows were different: richer, more famous and sought after, more adored and hated. For every letter of adulation the Lone Eagle or his family received, there seemed to be another containing threats and expletives.
Charles and Anne Lindbergh were back in the news. It was the end of July 1931, and with a Lockheed Sirius floatplane checked out and supplied, they began an epic air flight over the top of the world. The journey was to be an unscientific assessment of the commercial aviation possibilities of what was being called the Great Circle Route to China via Canada, Alaska, and Japan. Anne, by now a licensed pilot, acted as the radio operator. Because the Sirius had pontoons rather than wheels, they could land only on water. The Lindberghs flew from North Haven, Maine, to Ottawa, Canada, and later landed at Moose Factory, Ontario. Then they followed the northwestern shore of Hudson Bay to Churchill, Manitoba. The next night they reached Baker Lake in Canada, a place so far north the sun never set and they had no problem spotting a welcoming committee of Eskimos, a Northwest Territories mounted policeman, and several Caucasian trappers. The visage of Anne in the eternal twilight fascinated two small Eskimo boys, who had never seen a white woman before. The following day’s eleven-and-a-half-hour flight to Aklavik, Canada, was the longest leg of the journey to date. Three days after that, flying over the fog-choked Alaskan coastline of the Arctic Ocean, they lost radio contact with Point Barrow, the northernmost stop on their travels. They were too far from Aklavik to turn back, and they couldn’t see to land. The Lindberghs continued blindly on by instrument. The Barrow radio finally beamed gratuitous word that the weather was lifting. They set down safely on a Point Barrow lagoon.
Eighteen days later the Lindberghs landed in Nemuro, on Japan’s island of Hokkaido. By September 17, they were in Osaka, Japan. Two days after that they landed on Lotus Lake, in Nanking, China. The country was being ravaged by disastrous floods. Told that their aircraft was the only one in the country with sufficient range, Charles and Anne spent the balance of the month making survey flights over the inundated terrain for the Chinese government and shuttling doctors and medical supplies to isolated areas. They took off and landed on the Yangtze River. On each return the Sirius was hoisted onto the British aircraft carrier Hermes for the night. While being lowered back into the river one morning, with Charles and Anne inside, the plane was spun around by the rapid currents and capsized. The Lindberghs swam to safety and were given doses of castor oil to protect against the Yangtze’s contamination.2 The plane was lifted onto the aircraft carrier badly in need of repair.
News that U.S. Senator Dwight Morrow, Anne’s father, had died on October 5, after only ten months in office, ended any chance that America’s First Couple would continue their journey. They returned home on the state-of-the-art transportation of the period, a ship.
Over the summer the Eaglet’s nursemaid, Betty Gow, found herself a beau. He was a twenty-five-year-old Norwegian seaman by the name of Finn Henrik Johnsen, better known as Henry (“Red”) Johnsen. They met when Thomas W. Lamont’s yacht, Reynard, on which Red worked, was berthed at North Haven. In mid-October, Betty and the Eaglet moved from North Haven to the Morrow estate in Englewood. With the Reynard in dry dock and not expected back in service until March of 1932, Red was soon a regular visitor to Englewood, where he took a room at a local boardinghouse. When he wasn’t in Englewood, he stayed with his brother in West Hartford, Connecticut.
On October 23, fresh from the Orient, the Lindberghs reached Englewood and were reunited with their baby son. Two days later, Sunday, October 25, accompanied by Mrs. Morrow and Anne’s older sister, Elisabeth, they visited the new estate near Hopewell. Work was still under way, and since there were no beds in the newly constructed house atop Sorrel Hill, they returned to Englewood the same day. The next Saturday, October 31, Anne, her mother, Elisabeth, and the baby spent their first night at Sorrel Hill. Betty Gow was not along, and the women tended to the child with help from Elsie Whateley. Elsie and her husband, Ollie, had moved from the Lindberghs’ Princeton house three days earlier and were now in permanent residence at the new estate’s servants’ quarters.
The Lindberghs had a suite of rooms at the Morrow estate, Next Day Hill, but with their child under the watchful eyes of Betty Gow and Anne’s mother, Anne was able to work on a book about their trip to Asia, which when published would be titled North to the Orient. She was also active on behalf of Chinese flood relief. Charles spent time in New York City, where he had an office in the law firm of his attorney and close friend, Henry Breckinridge.
For Charles Jr. life provided an unexpected trauma. Anne’s older sister, Elisabeth, who was still unmarried, had founded a Montessori-type preschool in Englewood that Mrs. Morrow seemed determined that her grandson attend. Named the Little School, it catered to children between two and five years of age. Anne was not keen on the idea and protested that her son was too young to enroll. Anne’s resistance may have also been rooted in her ongoing competition with Elisabeth, who was vivacious, charming, and beautiful and who, prior to Anne’s marriage to Lindbergh, had been romantically linked in the newspapers to the Lone Eagle. Family pressure and assurances from the school staff that Charles Jr. would receive special care made her capitulate. His first morning there he got punched in the back by a fellow classmate. Charlie did what any well-protected, unworldly sixteen-month-old could be expected to do: He sat right down and cried. The Eaglet continued on at the Little School, being chauffeured back and forth to the Morrow estate, often in the company of Aunt Elisabeth.3
During November and the early part of December, the Eaglet’s weekends were usually spent at Sorrel Hill with his parents. Very often the Lindberghs brought him from Englewood themselves. On other occasions he was driven there by one of Mrs. Morrow’s chauffeurs. After missing three weeks in December, the Lindberghs and their baby returned to Sorrel Hill for New Year’s Eve. With them was Lindy’s mother. Anne, Charles, and Charles Jr. were back the weekends of January 16, 23, 30, and February 6. Because Anne and the baby came down with a cold, the weekend visits of February 13 and 20 were canceled.
Charles Lindbergh’s bent for order and routine was reflected in the trips to Sorrel Hill. The family always arrived on Saturday morning and never stayed overnight beyond Sunday. Monday mornings usually saw Lindy drive to his office in New York City while Ollie Whateley chauffeured Anne and the baby back to Englewood. This changed drastically the weekend before leap year day, February 27, 1932. So did Lindbergh’s meticulous record of never missing an appointment. Manhattan newspapers carried word that the coming Tuesday, March 1, New York University would be celebrating its one hundredth anniversary with a gala dinner for eighteen hundred guests. Lindbergh was to be a guest of honor, and he confirmed the date before the weekend began.
For what was to happen next, history, to date, has relied solely upon the word of Charles and Anne Lindbergh and their staff.
Weekend before Leap Year Day 1932
According to Anne Morrow Lindbergh,4 on Saturday afternoon, February 27, she and the baby were driven from Englewood to Sorrel Hill by Charles Henry Ellerson, one of Mrs. Morrow’s two chauffeurs. Since Betty Gow had weekends off, they were accompanied by Miss Root, also of the Morrow household staff. They arrived at the Hopewell estate at approximately 5:30 P.M. Anne, Miss Root, and Elsie Whateley fed, undressed, and washed the baby and had him in his crib by 7:30 P.M. About the same time, Lindbergh arrived from New York by car with the couple’s weekend guests, Henry and Aida Breckinridge. Anne checked on the baby at 10:00 P.M. He was sneezing, and she held him for a time. An hour later, accompanied by her husband, Anne checked on the child and put some medication in his nose.
On waking the next morning, Sunday, February 28, the baby was attended to by Elsie Whateley. After breakfast he seemed fretful. Anne put him back to bed and stayed with him in his room most of the day. After treating him for his cold, she tucked him in for the night. Anne joined her husband and her guests for supper. Following the meal, she and Lindy drove the Breckinridges and Miss Root to the Princeton Junction railroad station. The Lindberghs returned home at approximately 9:00 P.M. Anne called her sister Elisabeth at Englewood and told her of the child’s cold. At 10:00 P.M. she gave the baby nose drops and other medication. Then the nursery lights were turned off and the shutters closed, but a French window was left open.
On Monday morning, February 29, leap year day, Lindbergh drove off to New York City. Finding that the baby “was quite miserable with his cold,” Anne, rather than motoring to Englewood after lunch, called her mother’s estate and informed Betty Gow that she intended to stay on at Sorrel hill so her son could remain in his room.5 Except for two short walks, Anne was with the ailing Eaglet throughout the afternoon and early evening. He was medicated and tucked in for the night at 7:00 P.M. Three hours later Lindbergh called to say he was spending the night in New York City. Learning that Anne was unsure as to when she and the Eaglet would return to Englewood, he said he would join them wherever they were the next evening. Anne and Elsie again medicated the baby. The cold had moved down to his chest, which Anne now rubbed. She slept with the connecting door open between her bedroom’s bathroom and the nursery. It was the first time ever that a family member had stayed overnight on a Monday.
When by midmorning Tuesday, March 1, the Eaglet’s cold was still relatively thick, Anne had Ollie Whateley ring up Betty Gow at Englewood. Once on the line with Gow, Anne instructed the young Scotswoman to come to Sorrel Hill and help with the baby.
Gow had been to the Hopewell estate on three previous occasions. Twice, while the house was under construction, she had been driven there by her boyfriend, Red Johnsen. These were Sunday sightseeing excursions, and on one of them the Whateleys gave the young couple a tour of the home. Betty’s only working assignment at the new estate had come on New Year’s Day 1932. Again she had been driven there by Johnsen, who dropped her off. On March 1, it was Mrs. Morrow’s second chauffeur, Henry Ellerson, who drove her to Hopewell. Before leaving, Betty called Henry (“Red”) Johnsen, at his boardinghouse. She had a date with him for that night, which now had to be canceled. Henry wasn’t in. Betty left word with his landlady, Mrs. Sherman, for him to call her at Sorrel Hill.
Betty Gow arrived at the Lindbergh estate at 2:00 P.M., had a quick bite of lunch, then went upstairs, took the baby out of his crib, and dressed him. His cold had improved, and Betty minded him as he played in the nursery. Anne and Elsie Whateley joined her around 4:30 P.M. Later, at Anne’s suggestion, Betty and Elsie brought the baby downstairs to the living room. It was about 5:00 P.M., and Anne was having tea. Anne took the child while Betty and Elsie went to the servants’ sitting room, off the kitchen, and had their own tea with Ollie Whateley. They were back in the kitchen when the baby ran in, babbled “hello Elsie” at Elsie, and began to race around the table. Betty caught him, took his hand, and led him upstairs to the nursery. She read to him until about 6:00 P.M., left for two minutes to go downstairs and fetch some cereal, and fed him his dinner. Anne came in and helped Betty ready the little boy for bed. They took off his clothes, put drops in his nose, rubbed his chest and gave him a physic. The two women decided to replace the flannel bandage he was wearing with a flannel nightshirt. Anne brought in scissors and thread and played with her son while Betty cut and sewed together a garment. Wearing the newly fashioned flannel shirt over his Dr. Denton sleeping suit, he was put into his crib. Anne and Betty now moved to the windows and locked the shutters. A shutter at the back of the room was warped and wouldn’t completely close. When Anne departed, Betty went to the French window fronted by the warped shutter and pulled it halfway open. She then put out the light, closed both doors to the nursery, and left. The time was approximately 7:30 P.M. She washed some of the baby’s clothes in the baby’s bathroom and looked in on him again.6 He was fast asleep and breathing comfortably. She took two large safety pins and fastened the covers over him to the mattress. It was now about 7:50 P.M. Betty turned off the light in the bathroom as well as in her own room, which was across the hall from the nursery; then she went down into the cellar to hang up the clothes she had washed. According to subsequent statements by the Lindberghs and their staff, Betty was the last one to see the child alive.
Anne was at her desk in the living room when Betty entered to say that the baby had fallen asleep quickly and was breathing easily. Because Lindbergh had called at around 7:00 P.M. to say that he would be a little late, Ollie Whateley decided that the staff should eat before his return. Ollie snacked first; then Betty joined Elsie for supper in the sitting room. The weather outside was nasty, and the wind had begun to howl. Even so, Anne, who was still at her desk, thought she heard the sound of car wheels on a gravel driveway. It was about 8:15 P.M., but no one arrived. Ten to fifteen minutes later the sound of an auto horn was clearly heard in the sitting room. Knowing that Colonel Lindbergh had arrived home, Elsie Whateley went to the kitchen and helped Ollie in preparing dinner. Anne heard the horn as well and also the sound of her husband’s approaching car.
Lindbergh parked in the garage, entered the house through the back door, passed the sitting room, and crossed the kitchen. Anne accompanied him as he went upstairs to wash his hands. Their bathroom connected to the nursery, but they did not look in on their son. At 8:35 P.M. they were served supper in the dining room. Ollie took the phone call that came in at approximately 8:45 P.M. It was Red Johnsen wanting to speak with Betty. She came into the kitchen and got on the line. Red said he was sorry he had missed her at Englewood and that he would have liked to have seen her before she left. He also told her he was going to West Hartford. Betty returned to the sitting room and turned on the radio. Whether or not the family dog, Wahgoosh, who usually slept outside the nursery door, was with her would become a point of contention.
Charles and Anne finished dinner shortly after 9:00 P.M. and retired to the living room, where logs were burning in the fireplace. They sat talking on the sofa. Charles heard a noise, which he attributed to something dropping in the kitchen, such as a wooden orange crate. In the dining room the Whateleys cleaned away the dishes without any mishaps. After spending some five minutes in the living room, the Lindberghs went upstairs to their bedroom. They chatted for ten to fifteen minutes; then Lindy took a bath. Having finished washing the dishes, the Whateleys went to the sitting room, where Betty was reading a book and listening to the radio. His day’s chores done, Ollie sat down to peruse the newspapers. Elsie took Betty up to their bedroom to inspect a newly purchased dress. After bathing, Lindbergh dressed and went downstairs to the library to read. Upstairs, Anne drew a bath for herself. Discovering that she had run out of tooth powder, she went into the baby’s bathroom and, without turning on the light, appropriated the needed powder. Returning to her own bathroom, Anne brushed her teeth and then summoned Elsie, whom she asked to prepare some hot lemonade. Elsie went downstairs to do as she was bade. Anne took her bath. It was approximately 10:00 P.M.—time for Betty Gow to check on the baby.
Betty used the kitchen staircase to reach the second floor; then she followed the hall past a pair of facing guest bedrooms, the Lindberghs’ master bedroom, and on into the baby’s bathroom at the end of the passageway. There was a chill in the air, so she turned on a heater. She entered the unlighted nursery. It was also too cold for her liking. Betty closed the window and activated the heater. She headed for the crib, from which no sound of breathing could be heard. She reached down to pick up the baby—and felt around inside. The blankets were still pinned to the mattress, and the pillow was in place. But the child was gone.
Anne had finished her bath and was in the master bedroom when Gow entered. Not wishing to alarm her mistress, Betty asked if by any chance Anne had taken the baby or if Colonel Lindbergh might have him. Anne thought it possible that the child was with his father, who was downstairs.
Anne, in a letter to her mother-in-law, would say that her first reaction was that her prankster husband was playing another of his infamous and often not-too-funny practical jokes on her.7 Betty Gow also thought it might be a trick. She ran downstairs into the library and asked the master of Sorrel Hill. “Colonel Lindbergh, do you have the baby? Please don’t fool me.”8
“No, of course not,” he answered. “Isn’t he in his crib?”
“You must have the baby,” she told him, “he’s gone.”9
Lindbergh ran upstairs with Gow at his heels. Anne was coming out of the nursery as her husband rushed in. He went to the empty crib, then hurried into the master bedroom and took a Springfield rifle from the closet. He was back in the nursery along with Anne. Whether they saw the envelope resting near the window on this or on their previous visit remains confused, but Lindbergh had no doubt what had happened and told his wife, “Anne, they’ve stolen our baby.”10 Anne hastened back to her own room and, she later related, without thinking what she was doing, threw open the window and leaned out. She thought she heard what sounded like a cry in the general direction of the woodpile. Elsie thought it was a cat or possibly the wind.
The underground telephone line to Sorrel Hill was encased in metal tubing. Even so, Lindbergh reacted as if the wire may have been cut.11 He strode from the nursery to the top of the stairs and shouted down to Ollie Whateley to see if the phone was working. When Whateley reported that it was, Lindbergh ordered him to call the Hopewell sheriff. By now Anne was dressed and, along with Gow and Elsie, began a desperate search for the baby. They started with the nursery closets and continued on through the house. Lindbergh, Springfield rifle in hand, went out on the private drive leading to the house. It was too dark to see. Whateley started up the car and trained the lights along the roadside as Lindbergh searched. The process was cumbersome. Lindbergh ordered him to drive into town and buy a flashlight so they could explore the area more thoroughly. Ollie was nearing the front gate when a car carrying Chief Wolfe and Constable Williamson entered the grounds. He turned around and escorted them up to the house atop Sorrel Hill.
And so the record read for sixty years. Little or nothing was challenged. Authorities established the brief period between 8:30 P.M. and 9:00 P.M., when a “crash” was heard, as the probable time when the kidnapping was perpetrated, without giving much thought to what a narrow time frame this allowed the criminals to steal the child. Also ignored or downplayed was the fact that the Lindberghs and their child never stayed at Sorrel Hill past Monday morning. This negated theories that the crime was long and meticulously planned. The fact that it happened on a Tuesday, when even the Lindberghs hadn’t expected to be there, pointed to a crime of opportunity—and immense luck.
Another event to which investigators and the media would pay little or no attention was taking place some sixty miles away, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, in New York City: New York University’s All Alumni Centennial Dinner. Eighteen hundred guests, including scores of prestigious names, graced the 111 tables and thirty theater-style boxes. Considering that it was the worst year of the Great Depression, the gala offered a dignified but not garish menu of grapefruit with Maraschino cherries, cream soup St.-Germain with toasted croutons, celery, olives, a choice of escalope of bass in lobster sauce with parsley potatoes or breast of roasted chicken with new green peas in butter, salad with California angel dressing, coffee, and a dessert of frozen log écossaise. Songs were to be provided by the Chapel Choir of the New York University Glee Club. The seating list placed nineteen men on the dais, seven of whom would speak and two of whom were guests of honor. One of the guests of honor never appeared: Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh.
Organizers of the centennial celebration had given up a frenzied quest to locate Lindbergh, and the dinner proceeded without him. The main obstacle to locating Lindy was that his phone number at Hopewell was unlisted. Henry Breckinridge had been reached in New York and said he’d do what he could to find his missing friend and client. If Henry did phone Hopewell, no mention of this seems to be have been made by Anne or the staff to the arriving Lindbergh, not according to their sworn statements in court or to state-police investigators. Anne says nothing of it in her published writings. If the Lone Eagle prided himself on anything, it was that he never forgot an appointment. Lindy would never acknowledge that he had overlooked the speaking engagement at the Waldorf.
Nearly two years later the FBI Summary Report would claim Lindbergh sent a telegram of apology to the NYU banquet that very night. The bureau was not the prime investigator of the crime, did not have direct access to Lindbergh, and had not officially questioned him. A search of the entire bureau file on the crime, from which the summary was extracted—some 140 volumes of three hundred pages each plus appendixes—produced no agent’s report or other verification that such a telegram was sent, nor was any mention made of the NYU dinner or if Breckinridge was a go-between. It appears only in the 407-page summary.12
Henry Breckinridge would maintain that Lindbergh had been misinformed about the date of the New York University dinner. The organizers of the tribute could probably have proved otherwise, but no one cared.
Other, more spectacular, events were occupying the police and the media.