5
During the late evening of March 1 and the early morning of March 2, 1932, as radios crackled with accounts of a kidnapping, the press corps descended on Charles Lindbergh as it never had before, and all the old friends and enemies were to be counted.
If indeed Lindbergh had a master plan to alter the truth, as I suspect was possible, it would have had to rely on the media’s spreading the gospel of the kidnapping according to his dictates and no one else’s. Once he had accomplished this, it would be necessary to cut himself and his family off from them as best he could. Only in this way would the fourth estate ride off in search of the nonexistent kidnappers, focus the public’s and the law enforcement’s interest on the future rather than have them looking back and perhaps becoming suspicious as to what actually occurred the previous Saturday. Skill and a great deal of luck accounted for the ease with which this strategy was implemented.
The earliest newspeople to reach Sorrel Hill were local reporters and stringers; then came the vanguard of national and international journalists. Lindbergh invited a select group of writers into his living room for a press conference he would personally conduct. They were, by and large, tried and true believers who defended his image as the Lone Eagle and tended to write what he wanted. A second group would be invited in the next day.
While Ollie Whateley provided coffee and sandwiches, Lindbergh told the journalists of his son’s disappearance, explained that he needed their cooperation in disseminating photographs and descriptions of the child to the public on the chance that someone would spot the Eaglet, as well as in persuading the kidnappers not to harm him. He revealed that the infant had a cold and was being fed a special formula, which he wanted printed and broadcast in hope that it would be followed by the kidnappers. Lindy even allowed for a brief period of questions but would not accede to reporters’ requests to talk to his wife or members of the household staff. In this first encounter with the press, Lindbergh made at least one slipup that nobody caught at the time. The missing child had recently had his baby locks shorn. The photographs Lindbergh passed out to reporters were not of his blond, short-haired son but of a long, curly-haired pretonsorial Eaglet.
Lindy’s prime contradiction involved what was in all probability his most effective ploy. While he vehemently denied to the group of reporters that a ransom note existed, he privately confirmed for several individual sources, including the New York Times, that it had been found. Despite his continued disavowal, headlines would soon be proclaiming that such a message had been left by the kidnappers—which was pivotal to Lindbergh’s scenario.
The roads leading to Hopewell and the estate were already jammed with media people—four hundred would be counted in the first twelve hours. The Associated Press had dispatched four carloads, and the United Press, three cars. William Randolph Hearst, Jr., was personally directing the activities of the ten men and one woman he had ordered to the scene. Hearst’s International News Service, which had its entire staff en route, would soon convert a pair of rented ambulances into mobile darkrooms so pictures of the kidnapping site could be printed on the spot and rushed back to town. Those newsmen who had already arrived wandered the grounds at will, as did random sightseers and state and county officials with no part in the investigation. One correspondent likened it to the circus coming to town and all the neighbors rushing over to get first looks. Radio host Long John Nebel recalled, “Down on the road the cars were bumper to bumper waiting to get in or parked there bumper to bumper. They [the New Jersey State Police] were overwhelmed. So was everyone else. There were hundreds of us walking around that place in a stupor, maybe even a thousand, if you count the folks in the woods. There were people walking all over the woods.” In the process two vital pieces of evidence were disturbed: Footprints in the ground outside the nursery were destroyed, and ladder segments were picked up and examined by curious officials and journalists.
After his need for reporters was fulfilled by the living room press conference, Charles Lindbergh’s tolerance of the marauding media came to an end. While leading a search of the grounds, he told a group of writers who approached him, “I hope you boys will excuse me, but I would rather the state police answer your questions. I’m sure you understand how I feel.”1 Major Charles A. Schoeffel, the deputy to the state-police superintendent, Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, was the designated trooper liaison with the press at the estate.
A car carrying a newswoman and several of her fellow New York City reporters reached Hopewell about 1:00 A.M. They worked for the Hearst newspaper chain and discovered that Gebhart’s Hotel and refreshment parlor in the center of the little town had opened to accommodate the influx of journalists. After getting a cup of coffee and directions, they joined the caravan of vehicles heading out for the Lindbergh estate. As they grew near, the hilly, wooden terrain was illuminated by flares being dropped from unseen airplanes. There was no trouble driving onto the grounds and walking up to the house in which every room was lighted, but they were kept from going in by state troopers wearing wide-brimmed hats, smart blue jackets, and dark motorcycle breeches. Looking through the living room windows, they saw Anne Morrow Lindbergh pacing and talking with the household staff. She was nervous but dry eyed. They returned to their car and started cruising around the grounds to see what could be found. On a steep, muddy lane they encountered another car. It stopped, and Lindbergh, hatless and wearing his familiar leather flying jacket, got out and walked up to them. On learning they were reporters, he said familiarly, “Boys, I rely on you to stay off my estate and not annoy me. For my part I promise to give you a good break.”
As they watched him walk away, one reporter commented, “Hell, that was what you call nonchalant.”
“The Lindberghs are like that,” a fellow scribe explained. “They never show any emotion.”
“Still, God Almighty, that man’s baby has been stolen—dead, maybe—in the hands of some nut or fiend,” said the only woman reporter in the group.2 Her name was Laura Vitray, and she knew that writing about Lindbergh’s nonchalance was pointless. Composure doesn’t make good copy; grief does.
Hostility between state policemen and the press became evident when the troopers regrouped and began clearing newspeople off the estate. Their methods often were not gentle, and even when they were, the media folk did not always cooperate. Well before dawn the removal was complete. Except for a few pet journalists, who were escorted up to Lindy’s home on the hill for special briefings, the press had access to nothing but a small holding area at the far end of the estate, where they had been told announcements would be made. The nearest telephone was on a five-party line in a farmhouse a mile up the road. Official statements and press releases were slow in coming. Reporters racing up to the farmhouse and waiting in a long line to make a call were not cheered at the sight of workmen laying telephone and telegraph lines to the Lindbergh garage, where a communications center was expected to be operative by morning. When complete, the lines would link the estate with Princeton, less than twenty miles away.
The Lindbergh news blackout extended far beyond Sorrel Hill. City editors intent on getting stories from Lindbergh-Morrow relatives ran into an impenetrable iron curtain, even though Lindy would later attest he had not yet informed his mother, Evangeline, or in-laws of the tragedy. Efforts to talk with the baby’s grandparents, Mrs. Elizabeth Morrow, in Englewood, and Mrs. Lindbergh in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, were intercepted by spokesmen. The missing infant’s uncle and aunt, Dwight Morrow, Jr., and Constance Morrow, refused comment. A second aunt, Elisabeth Morrow, could not be located. No one connected with the Morrow household was available to the press.
The main source of information remained the front gate to the Lindbergh property, where troopers allowed journalists to overhear them when they chatted with one another. Many of the eavesdropping correspondents began to suspect they were being intentionally misled or lied to. Others realized a news blackout was being imposed. Most reporters, in a fierce competition for any bit of information on what was already the crime story of the century, kept their grumbling to themselves, but several didn’t. Animosity between the state-police press liaison at Lindy’s estate, Major Schoeffel—Laura Vitray likened him to Napoléon—and several writers fell just short of combat. The media, which had never been overly fond of the trooper boss, Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, found him to be as uncooperative as ever.
If Major Schoeffel and the imperious Schwarzkopf were playing the role of bad cops with the media in the wake of the kidnapping, then tall, suave Henry Breckinridge, Lindbergh’s friend and lawyer, was the good cop. Breckinridge, like Schwarzkopf, had reached the estate early in the morning of March 2, and Henry had taken an immediate interest in the reporters. Whether by design or chance, he became a popular visitor with the news folk waiting at the front gate. In Laura Vitray’s estimation, he showed an evident desire to keep reporters happy. “We always looked at Breckinridge as one who had our interests at heart. He seemed to keep in mind that what keeps a story on the front page is something happening.”3
When Vitray had passed through Hopewell at 1:00 A.M. the morning of March 2, it had been a sleepy little backwater town with nothing open but the hotel. When she returned from the Lindbergh estate many hours later, Hopewell had been transformed into a Forty-second Street that overflowed with motion picture news crews, newspaper reporters, photographers, radio reporters and technicians, motorcycle police, and sightseers. Gebhart’s Hotel, opposite the railroad tracks, was the hub of the activity. Vitray’s paper had taken an office there, and sitting in the hotel’s dinette, reporters were able to compare notes.
Despite the news blackout, journalists had acquired quite a bit of information that first night and early morning: A ransom message had definitely been left; the Lindberghs only used the Hopewell house on weekends; mud was left on the floor of the nursery between the crib and an open window; ladder marks were found outside in the mud below the window to the nursery; impressions—not shoe or footprints—were also found outside in the mud, which led investigators to conclude that the kidnappers had worn socks or moccasins; a second set of footprints joined the first set near the edge of the woods; all the impressions had been destroyed because of the state police’s failure to control the crowd and preserve the area; a ladder had been discovered sixty feet away from the house. It was also reported that Anne was six months pregnant with her second child.
One of the first official press releases distributed to reporters had contained a copy of the special diet that Anne Lindbergh wrote out in hopes that the kidnappers who read it would be merciful enough to feed it to her sick baby. In a letter to her mother-in-law the next day, Anne would reveal that even thought the papers were saying the baby was sick, he wasn’t—that the infant was just over a cold and had been dressed extra-warmly that night. Was it true that the infant was not ailing, which meant the story of the illness had been concocted, or was it simply a daughter’s attempt to try to pacify an already-distraught grandmother? The letter also answered a question the press was yet to learn of and raise: why the family dog, Wahgoosh, who usually slept outside the door to the nursery, hadn’t barked during the kidnapping. Anne explained in the letter to the baby’s paternal grandmother that Wahgoosh was in the opposite wing of the house that night and couldn’t have heard anything through the howling winds from such a distance.4
Laura Vitray didn’t have access to Anne’s correspondence, but she did have a copy of the diet, which was already appearing on front pages around the country:
One quart of milk during the day.
Three tablespoons of cooked cereal morning and night.
Two tablespoons of cooked vegetables once a day.
One yolk of egg daily.
One baked potato or rice once a day.
Two tablespoons of stewed fruit daily.
Half cup of orange juice on waking.
Half a cup of prune juice after the afternoon nap.
14 drops of a medicine called Viosterol during the day.
Vitray wondered if a simpler diet wouldn’t have been more practical and more to the baby’s interest. “Or did the Lindberghs believe,” she wrote, “that their child was being cared for by persons of intellect with whom their complicated instructions for feeding would register?”5
Even though Lindbergh had moved the news corps off his property, there seemed to be more media people in the area than ever. They had rented every available house, farm, room, barn, or plot of land in the vicinity of the estate. Portable photo labs and improvised city desks rushed thousands of photographs and tens of thousands of printed words to a flotilla of dispatch cars and motorcycle messengers waiting to express the material by chartered airplanes or race it directly to New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. This wasn’t what the Lone Eagle had in mind.
On the afternoon of March 2, in a ground-floor bedroom of the Sorrel Hill house, Lindbergh again allowed himself to be interviewed by a small, select delegation of newsmen he considered as friendly and trustworthy as people of that profession could be. His face appeared tense, and his eyes were heavy lidded. He was nervous and shifted his weight from one foot to another.6 Speaking off the record, he would neither affirm nor deny the report that a fifty-thousand-dollar ransom had been demanded by the kidnappers. He pretended not to hear other pointed queries and asked his visitors to be kind enough not to ask him embarrassing questions. He then surprised the delegation by abruptly proposing that the media not only withdraw from around the estate but also from Hopewell. The reason he offered for this was that “the local telephone exchange has been swamped with calls, impairing the function of the officials who are seeking the return of the child. As a substitute it has been arranged with Captain J. J. Lamb of the state police and Governor A. Harry Moore for a trooper to be stationed at the office of the Governor’s secretary in Trenton from where all other information will be given out.”7
When the group consented, Lindy “smiled with pleasure” and, with a wave of the hand, dismissed them. State troopers were summoned to “speed the parting pressmen to the state road half a mile east.”8 Some of the delegates lingered at the front gate; others rushed to the telegraph office in Hopewell. Regardless of the agreement by the delegation, Hopewell was where most of the media would remain, in force. It was the first major rebuff of a Lindbergh dictate since the kidnapping was announced, but it didn’t affect the ultimate game plan all that much. Henry Breckinridge, Lindbergh’s confidant and aide-de-camp, went right on providing the newsmen with information at the front gate of Sorrel Hill—information he and the Lone Eagle wanted disseminated.
When Vitray and her peers compared notes on what they had seen and been told, the New Jersey State Police were not spoken of kindly. The bad blood between troopers, who in the main were from small towns or rural areas, and the predominantly big-city journalists had gotten worse. The power to deny the media access to the Lindbergh estate and to critical news lay with the troopers, and they had often used this advantage without tact. The power the media possessed was in their pens, many of which were depicting the state police as being a quasi-military force with little experience in crime detection, as attested to by their inability to find a single fingerprint in the nursery or on the ladder sections or preserve the footprints. Older scribes couldn’t resist mentioning the state-police involvement in perhaps the greatest debacle of modern-day crime fighting, the investigation of the still-unsolved Hall-Mills murders ten years before in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
A particularly fetching target for the more acrimonious reporters was the thirty-seven-year-old superintendent of the trooper organization, Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, a ramrod-stiff crew cut fellow with a blond Charlie Chaplinesque mustache who was a West Point graduate and World War I veteran. Schwarzie, as he was known, had once worked as a floorwalker at Bamberger’s Department Store, a fact writers were gleefully making the most of. Their main attack was on his ineptness at directing the investigation.
Schwarzkopf wasn’t in charge of the investigation. Lindbergh and Henry Breckinridge were. To a degree, so was a man named Donovan.