17
Charles Lindbergh had opposed the two prime means investigators had for identifying and apprehending the unknown kidnapping gang. He insisted on keeping all law-enforcement personnel far away from the site selected to pay the ransom, thereby frustrating attempts to follow the felons. Nor would he allow the serial numbers of the ransom currency to be recorded.
Two members of the Sorrel Hill inner circle, Jimmy Finn of the New York Police Department and Elmer Irey of the IRS, had energetically urged Lindbergh to allow the listing of serial numbers. Charles Lindbergh had never changed his mind regarding an investigation decision. It didn’t look as though he would in this instance, either. Elmer Irey was persistent in reminding Lindy that not recording serial numbers was a grave mistake—and one likely to evoke strong criticism. Public credibility was high on the Lindbergh-Breckinridge agenda.
Lindbergh did not particularly like or trust two Internal Revenue men assisting Irey: Frank Wilson and Arthur Madden.1 Part of this may have had to do with the perception that, recorded or unrecorded, the IRS was obligated to track down the ransom loot after the money was paid—and would live up to this obligation. There was also pressure on Lindy from Jimmy Finn to list the serial numbers, but who was to say any of the bills would turn up in New York City, the only place Finn had jurisdiction. No, it was Irey who posed a potential credibility threat. But listing the bills could set off a nationwide treasure hunt that might heighten and prolong the case after the baby was found. Though perhaps not if only financial institutions and selected retail businesses were given lists of the numbers—lists that did not specify the bills came from the ransom, as Irey had been suggesting.
Lindbergh, for the first time since his son was reported missing, reversed himself on a manhunt decision. Serial numbers of the loot could be recorded. The following night, April 2, 1932, fifty thousand dollars of the seventy thousand dollars in recorded currency disappeared into St. Raymond’s Cemetery.
Three days later, on April 5, the first bill of the ransom loot, a twenty-dollar gold certificate, was detected in New York City at the Ninety-sixth Street and Amsterdam Avenue branch of the East River Savings Bank of Manhattan. The man into whose account it had been deposited had no idea where he had got it. Four days after that, as the result of a news leak, Lindbergh had Schwarzkopf acknowledge that a ransom had been paid. By now papers around the world were reprinting a breakdown of the ransom-money serial numbers sent to banks and certain businesses—a breakdown that showed the fifty-thousand-dollar payment contained 4,750 bills, of which 2,000 were in the denomination of five-dollar bills, 1,500 in tens, and 1,250 in twenties. The five-dollar bills were U.S. Treasury notes, which bore red seals and red serial numbers. America was still on the gold standard, and the majority of ten- and twenty-dollar bills were U.S. gold certificates.
On April 14, a second ransom bill surfaced, this one a five-dollar note. Like the twenty-dollar certificate, it was discovered by a teller in a New York City bank. Not until after the body of the baby was found, nearly a month later, did more money appear: two five-dollar bills at different New York City banks on May 19, another five dollars, again at a Manhattan bank, on May 23. The May 19 money was traced to a Sinclair Oil Company in Brooklyn and a Bickford’s Restaurant next to the bank where it had been deposited. The May 23 bill was tracked to a dry goods store on Orchard Street in Manhattan. No one at any of the establishments remembered who had passed the notes.2
The great American money hunt was on—and the New Jersey State Police’s jealously guarded control of the investigation had all but eroded. So had Lindbergh’s hope that the matter would quickly be forgotten. Adding to Lindbergh’s despair, and prolonging and often escalating interest in the case, was the internecine competition among law-enforcement personalities.
New York City and its police department, not the New Jersey State Police, had the jurisdiction to track down whoever was spending the bills. The commissioner of the New York Police Department, no fan of H. Norman Schwarzkopf’s, was only too happy to inform the media, loud and clear, that his boys in blue were on the trail. Named to head the unit of NYPD investigators assigned to the money chase was a fifty-one-year-old detective who had been the department’s liaison with Lindbergh: Jimmy Finn.
Finn had been a fixture at Sorrel Hill from early on in the case and had learned firsthand he was on a one-way street when dealing with Schwarzkopf and the Jersey troopers. They accepted much of the information he and the NYPD gathered but shut them off from their own investigatory activities. With ransom bills surfacing only in New York City, the shoe was now on the other foot—Detective Jimmy Finn’s. The state police could pitch in and help with the New York money hunt if they liked, but Jimmy intended it to be the NYPD’s ball game. The troopers dispatched a twelve-man unit to New York, but submitting to someone else’s guidelines wasn’t always easy.
The Bureau of Investigation also had a presence in New York City. It had opened a Manhattan office at 370 Lexington Avenue, to which a detachment of fifteen special agents was assigned. The agent in charge was Thomas H. Sisk, who quickly established an amicable working relationship with Finn and the NYPD. Like the Jersey troopers, the bureau lads preferred doing things their own way when possible.
It was Elmer Irey and his T-men who were under the greatest strain regarding the money chase, but not from Jimmy Finn, with whom the IRS man had a practical working relationship. Irey had developed an antagonist as awesome as one could find: J. Edgar Hoover. It was nothing personal, just plain old terroristic interdepartmental rivalry à la the BI director. Back on Friday, May 13, 1932, a day after the child’s body was found, President Herbert Hoover named J. Edgar to oversee and coordinate the activities of all federal agencies involved in the Lindbergh investigation. J. Edgar’s first move was to kick the Internal Revenue Service and the Secret Service off the case. Lindbergh, taken aback by the arbitrary dismissal of Irey, who had become a Sorrel Hill insider, telephoned the secretary of the treasury. Irey and his operatives were reinstated, but J. Edgar Hoover remained in charge.
A March 18 meeting in Trenton between the New Jersey State Police, the county prosecutor, the IRS, and the BI saw J. Edgar again come up short. The troopers, it was announced, would continue to run the manhunt, and the federal agencies would provide whatever assistance was asked for by the state police. The final blow to Hoover’s bid for jurisdiction came with the June 22 enactment of the Cochran bill, a federal statute against kidnapping, which was immediately known as the Lindbergh law. It was not retroactive. The kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh, Jr., was still a state matter, with H. Norman Schwarzkopf and his troopers retaining control of the investigation.
J. Edgar Hoover had won more than he lost. His department finally had a significant criminal law to enforce and was well on its way to becoming a national police agency with teeth, or as it was usually called by the press, “a federal Bureau of Investigation,” but the official name change would take time.
Due in part to Jimmy Finn’s urging, Lindbergh had agreed to the Treasury Department’s issuing a fifty-seven-page, two-columns-to-a-page list of ransom-money serial numbers on April 6, 1932—four days after the loot disappeared into St. Raymond’s.3 Before the month was out, the New Jersey State Police abandoned the Treasury booklet and issued their own modified list on a single printed page, which measured seventeen by twenty-five inches and included the troopers’ phone number. One hundred thousand were distributed across the land—sixty thousand went to post offices—along with news of a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward offered by the governor of New Jersey.
As the money chase ended its second month, May, only 6 of the 4,750 ransom bills had surfaced in New York in sixty days—a twenty-dollar gold certificate and a five-dollar note in April, three five-dollar notes in May, one five-dollar note in early June. Jimmy Finn seems to have feared the fifty-seven page Treasury booklet of serial numbers was too cumbersome to be used effectively by the bank tellers, but it was almost a full year before he took action.4
Finn, whose office was on the second floor of the NYPD’s Greenwich Street station house, off Hudson Street in lower Manhattan, had over a dozen officers assigned to assist him in the dollar chase.5 Even so, he personally followed up on every reported ransom bill. He also telephoned the Fed each day to see if any listed money had turned up. As an extra incentive for bank tellers to be on the alert, Finn helped persuade Lindbergh to offer a two-dollar bonus for each bill that was reported. Much later on he got the city of New York to do the same thing.
H. Norman Schwarzkopf had always smelled a conspiracy, if not necessarily to steal the baby, then certainly to extort ransom money. Another likelihood was that a horrible hoax had been perpetrated. His three candidates for these possibilities were John Hughes Curtis, Morris Rosner, and John F. Condon. Part of his reaction may have been borne out of frustration: being excluded from Lindy’s dealings with the trio. Even if Lindy hadn’t voluntarily abdicated from the manhunt, public outcry would have forced H. Norman to take some type of action. As it was, he told Lindbergh that he had to deal with the three go-betweens as prime suspects.
Late in the afternoon of May 12, the day the baby was found in the woods, the state police escorted John Hughes Curtis from Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Schwarzkopf’s office at the Lindbergh estate. Waiting for him in addition to H. Norman were Captain Lamb and Lieutenant Keaten of the NJSP, Jersey City PD’s Harry Walsh, Detective Warren Moffat of the Newark Police Department, IRS agent Frank Wilson, and Anthony M. Hauck, the Hunterdon County prosecutor who would most likely be trying the murderers when they were apprehended. The contentious welcoming committee made it clear to Curtis that they had questions to ask and that truth was the commodity they sought. His suggestion that they wait for Lindbergh to arrive was brushed aside. The grilling was harsh and direct. The men in the room had never been privy to the Lindbergh-Curtis activities; now they were. Detailed descriptions of Nils, Eric, John, Dynamite, Hilda, and the others deepened suspicions that Curtis was what Schwarzkopf, Lamb, and Keaten would later claim they had always believed: a fraud or worse. When Lindbergh finally reached Sorrel Hill, he asked Curtis what he made of the death. The bankrupt shipyard operator had no answers but suggested that he and the Lone Eagle hurry and catch up with Hilda and Sam, who might know. The advice was ignored. Captain Lamb took over the questioning of Curtis, whom the state police planned to keep away from the media as long as possible. On May 17, after five days of intensive interrogation, John Hughes Curtis confessed to having perpetrated a hoax on Charles Lindbergh and was taken into custody by the troopers.
John F. (“Jafsie”) Condon was questioned the next day, Friday, the thirteenth of May. As always, he was garrulous and his statement slightly discrepant. The NYPD and the BI wanted time with him as well. So did the Bronx County attorney and, of course, the press. Whatever investigators may have been told by him, the public was reading of yet another encounter Dr. Condon claimed to have had, this one with four of the actual kidnappers. It occurred on a boat off City Island, a popular Bronx recreational park. Condon claimed he had gone there to expedite the ransom-release of the baby. On seeing that the four men were armed, he proclaimed, “Gentlemen, I come to you as an umpire of a baseball game. I am not armed and have no occasion to fire.”6 Three of the men put away their guns. Condon described the fourth man in great detail. His name was Doc, and he seemed to be Scandinavian. What exactly happened to Doc’s gun was not mentioned, but there was no doubt that he was John.
On May 21, four days after the arrest of John Hughes Curtis, a Bronx grand jury began an inquiry into the ransom payment at St. Raymond’s Cemetery. Among those slated to give secret testimony were Jafsie Condon, Henry Breckinridge, Max Rosenhain, Milton Gaglio, Al Reich, and Joseph Perrone, the cab driver who had been paid a dollar to deliver a ransom letter to Condon’s home.
The New Jersey State Police left their initial questioning of Condon to Jersey City PD’s Harry Walsh. Lindbergh and Breckinridge had publicly vouched for Condon, but after reading in one of the papers Jafsie’s own account of meeting with Cemetery John, Inspector Walsh was convinced that the old man hadn’t told the truth and that he was directly implicated in the kidnapping and murder.7 The Jersey City cop was also confident he could get a confession from him. Jafsie was brought to the state-police barracks at Alpine, New Jersey, on June 2, 1932, where Walsh’s blunt, accusatory style resulted in a raucous four hours of confrontation but no admission of guilt from the imperious former school principal.8 Subsequent searches of Condon’s Bronx home and summer shack, phone taps, and mail surveillance resulted in the old man’s receiving a clean bill of health from the state police, but he remained the target of a great many skeptical lawmen, a number of whom suspected he was nothing more than another Gaston Means, John Hughes Curtis, or Morris Rosner.
Schwarzkopf had not been privy to most of what had transpired between Lindbergh and the various go-betweens. Now, as interrogators began to elicit the facts, many a lawman was startled, if not alarmed, by what was learned. One of the most troubling disclosures came from Morris Rosner. Like John F. Condon, he was interrogated on Friday, April 13, at Sorrel Hill. The unnerving fact revealed by Mickey was that copies had been made of the original ransom note found in the nursery the night the child disappeared and that these copies were then circulated in the New York City underworld. The avowed motive for this was to try to identify the unknown author of the messages that Lindbergh and Breckinridge had so ardently denied existed. According to Rosner, many criminals had viewed the reproductions, including forgers and bunco artists. The possibility now existed that someone other than the actual kidnappers may have sent the last twelve ransom notes, that this someone had examined a copy of the nursery message and forged the writing style to extort fifty thousand dollars from Lindbergh.
On May 27, after having analyzed the handwriting evidence the New Jersey State Police had sent him, seventy-one-year-old Albert Sherman Osborn submitted his findings. He was the second, and by far the best-known, expert on questioned documents with whom the troopers had checked. Eleven of the thirteen messages contained “signatures” of three interlacing colored circles dotted by three perforation marks, and according to Osborn’s findings, all thirty-three perforations seemed to have been made by the same instrument, perhaps a nail. The inks used in drawing the circles were commonplace and provided no clues as to where they had been obtained. The same was true of the paper and envelopes. Osborn felt that a German-English dictionary had been referred to while the messages were being composed. He found characteristics of German sentence structure and phraseology throughout the text. The addressee on one of the envelopes, “Mr. Doctor John F. Condon” was distinctly German.9
Like that of the previous expert from whom the state police had received an opinion, Osborn’s general conclusion was that only one person had written all thirteen messages. But this was not unequivocal. Osborn did concede that there was a difference between the writing in the first note, found in the nursery, and that in the subsequent twelve—as would be elaborated on at the trial. He felt this may have been due to the author’s intentional attempts to disguise his handwriting in the first note or perhaps because if was composed under difficult physical conditions, such as in an automobile.
Despite the state police’s acceptance of Osborn’s single-writer theory, another body of thinking held that an extortionist had got hold of a copy of the first ransom note, imitated the writing style, and in an effort to obtain the money, had sent the next twelve messages received by Lindbergh, Breckinridge, and Condon. Put in simpler terms, two different criminal elements were involved with the tragic death: the kidnapper-murderers and the extortionists. There was nothing unique about this in 1932. Several newspapers pointed out that the burgeoning rash of kidnappings for money over the past several years had been accompanied by a dramatic rise in the interception of ransom payments by sharp-eyed forgers and con men. In years to come, newsmen as prestigious as Edwin Newman would cite the two-different-party theory regarding the Lindbergh ransom notes and payment.
Ellis Parker, Sr., Burlington County detective and arguably New Jersey’s greatest crime buster, was leaning toward a single-writer, single-kidnapper theory. He was pretty certain who it was, but he wanted confirmation. He had samples of his suspect’s penmanship, and on August 22 he wrote to H. Norman Schwarzkopf, requesting a photostatic copy of the original ransom note, which he promised to show to no one. The trooper boss wrote back on August 24:
Permit me to acknowledge receipt of your esteemed communication of recent date and with reference thereto, would state, that we are not authorized to give out any copies of any of the ransom notes other than those officially released for publication.
If you have any documents which you wish to compare with the original note, if you will submit them to us we will have the comparison made by the experts working on the case and inform you of the findings.
Regretting that we cannot comply with your request, I beg to remain,
Very truly yours
H. Norman Schwarzkopf
Colonel and Superintendent,
New Jersey State Police10
Two days after that, on August 26, Parker sent a letter to Governor A. Harry Moore, in which he enclosed a copy of H. Norman’s response to his request. The state’s chief executive was reminded that early on in the investigation he had urged Parker to study the Lindbergh case. Parker wrote that he had and that he now knew the “calibre” of the kidnapper. He then complained that
it looks to me as though the State Police do not intend to let any officer, outside of their own, have any information that might clear up this case, as they will not release anything for fear some one else will solve the problem and they are using this method to get them to bring any information to them.
Early in this case, the various police organizations and County Detective organizations appealed to me. I did not want to do anything that was unethical and felt the State Police should have full sway.
If I had a photostat copy of the ransom note, that I might study it, I would know for certain whether my deductions are right.
You will note in the Colonel’s letter, where he says, “that we are not authorized to give out any copies of any of the ransom notes other than those officially released for publication.” I don’t know who he means by “we” and that is the reason I am writing to you.
If this case is in charge of some other individual, I would certainly be pleased to receive a communication from you, informing me who they are, that I might get in touch with them.
I have always labored under the impression that the State Police were conducting this investigation.
Trusting you will use your power to see that I get a photostat copy of the original ransom note and I assure that it will not be given out to anyone. I only want to study it.
I remain,
At your service.
Ellis Parker Sr.11
There is nothing to indicate that Parker was given a copy of the original note. The man he now suspected to be the kidnapper-murderer, as well as author of the ransom notes, was the go-between he himself had recruited: Paul Wendel.
Charles Lindbergh emerged from private life and once again became involved with the crime, this time at a federal courtroom in Washington, D.C. It was June 8, and Gaston B. Means was on trial for extorting $104,000 from Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean. The BI was in charge of the case and didn’t seem much concerned that Gaston was now claiming he had returned all the money. Lindbergh testified as to the kidnapping, for dramatic effect more than for substantive purposes. He attended every session of the trial and resided at Mrs. McLean’s sumptuous home during his stay. On Monday, June 13, the jury retired. It took only two hours for it to find Means guilty. On the fifteenth of June 1932, the judge sentenced him to fifteen years in prison.
A dozen days after that, the trial of John Hughes Curtis began at the Hunterdon County Courthouse in Flemington, New Jersey. Curtis was charged with obstruction of justice in the Lindbergh case. Defending him was a local lawyer by the name of C. Lloyd Fisher. As had been the situation at the Means trial, Lindbergh was present. He sat at the table of the prosecuting attorney, Anthony Hauck, the Hunterdon County district attorney. Since the act of reporting false information was not a crime in New Jersey, the state would have to link it to a circumstance that was prosecutable. Hauck did this by claiming that Curtis, rather than perpetrating a hoax, was in touch with the actual kidnappers and in an effort to frustrate their apprehension had provided authorities with false information. The media made it blatantly evident that Curtis had concocted the story about a gang, but the prosecution dealt with the mythical criminals as if they were flesh and blood. Two and a half days later the jury found Curtis guilty as charged. The judge sentenced him to a year in jail and fined him a thousand dollars.
If Lindbergh estimated the crime was now finally behind him, he was wrong.
H. Norman Schwarzkopf and Inspector Harry Walsh were certain that Violet Sharpe, a Morrow household maid, was connected to the kidnapping-murder. Mrs. Morrow’s entire twenty-eight-person contingent of maids, cooks, chauffeurs, grounds keepers, and others had been brought from Morrow’s New Day Hill in Englewood to the Lindbergh home at Sorrel Hill in the weeks following the disappearance. The chauffeur Henry Ellerson was one of the first to be interviewed because he had driven Betty Gow to Sorrel Hill on March 1. Like Ellerson, almost all other Morrow employees passed their interviews with flying colors. Not Violet Sharpe. She had not told the truth in the opinion of Harry Walsh and Schwarzkopf. Why else would she lie about her whereabouts the night of the kidnapping, unless she was implicated? Well, not exactly lie, just not be able to remember the name of the man whom she went out with that night and the other couple who was along. There were other inconsistencies as well. And what about her hostile attitude at being questioned about her private life? They thought she was guilty. Of what, Walsh wasn’t all that sure. But he was not about to let her get away with it. Lindbergh was reported to have been incensed at the suggestion Sharpe had premeditatedly abetted the kidnapper-murderer, but he did allow that this might have happened without her knowledge.
Violet underwent her third state-police interrogation on May 23. It was conducted by Walsh with Lindbergh and Schwarzkopf looking on. Little was accomplished. Lindbergh noted that Violet was scared and upset but did nothing to stop Walsh from having at her again.12 Seventeen days later, on Thursday, June 9, Walsh resumed his questioning—and would later admit that he was “shocked” by Violet’s deterioration since their last encounter. She had lost fifty pounds and was generally wasted. This did not keep him from grilling her, ostensibly about one Ernest Brinkert, whose business cards had been found in her room. Violet became hysterical. Walsh resented the fact that a doctor was called, and he refused to leave. The doctor attested that Violet was on the verge of a breakdown and ordered the questioning to end. Walsh was incensed. To him she was faking.13
At 10:00 the next morning Walsh phoned the Morrow house with news that Lieutenant Keaten would pick up Violet and take her to the state-police barracks at Alpine for further interrogation. Panicked at the prospect, she hurried upstairs to her room, took a can down from her wardrobe closet, and poured some of the white powder it contained into a glass, which she filled with water and drank. She made her way downstairs and collapsed. A doctor was there in a matter of minutes. It was too late. Violet Sharpe was dead from the cyanide chloride she had ingested.
Walsh was unrepentent about the death. Schwarzkopf, in an effort to downplay the incident, distorted some facts, held back on others, and tried to point the blame anywhere but at himself and his organization. Violet’s demise, in the opinion of the trooper boss, was confirmation of her possible involvement in the crime. A tribute to Schwarzkopf’s sublime shortsightedness in regard to public relations was his confidence that the distortions and half-truths had vindicated his actions and effectively stemmed any criticism that might have been raised against him and the trooper investigation.14 H. Norman was wrong again.
Headlines across the nation and in many European countries condemned the state police for killing Violet Sharpe and demanded the organization be held accountable and punished. The banner of the London Daily Telegraph saw the death as a DISGRACE TO AMERICAN JUSTICE. Anne Lindbergh was moved to wonder what a crude and imperfect world we live in—that we understand nothing.15 Publicly, Lindy and Henry Breckinridge stood behind Schwarzkopf.
Evidence that the business cards found in Violet’s bedroom—the pretext Walsh had used for grilling her the day before her death—were probably planted did not help the troopers’ cause. The three people whose names she could not remember came forward and identified themselves. None was connected with the kidnapping-murder. The state police still wouldn’t concede Violet’s innocence, a posture they maintained until they were able to perform a slight bit of character assassination and contend that she had lied to them to cover up a series of sexual affairs with various men. History was to show little sympathy for the troopers’ point of view. Sharpe’s death remains a despicable black mark against the New Jersey State Police.
Good news for the Lindberghs arrived Tuesday morning, August 16, at Mrs. Morrow’s New York City apartment. Anne gave birth to her second child, a seven-pound, fourteen-ounce boy to be named Jon. Few in the media commented that Jon was not all that dissimilar from John, the infamous presence who allegedly received the ransom money in St. Raymond’s Cemetery.