"A Hard Case"

(See front cover) "It is an unashamed admission that the police are helpless against the power and unity of a huge criminal class which is able to play ducks & drakes with almost every paragraph of the social code of the United States."--Buenos Aires Standard.

"Cases of this kind unfortunately are not rare in America since the ridiculous law of Prohibition has dulled the consciences of so many people."--Paris Liberte.

"The crime is one. of most inhuman character, in which the kidnappers are attempting to capitalize one of the dearest human emotions--the love of parents for their children."--Rome Giornale d'Italia.

"The Old World is used to shocks, but it will sit up and gasp at this. The crime illustrates that gangdom in the United States is now virtually in control."--London Daily Mirror.

"Since Lindbergh is the American approximation of the Prince of Wales, the crime is particularly astounding. ... It is a deplorable conclusion, but it is irresistible, that unless prompt steps are taken to end the disgusting tyranny under which the great country apparently groans, it will become increasingly difficult to count America any longer among the forces of modern civilization." -- London News-Chronicle.

"What newspapers! What Police! And what a country!"--Montreal Herald.

Such was the tenor of worldwide comment on the disappearance of Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. from his father's Sourland Mountain home in Western New Jersey on the windy night of March 1. Last week the case passed into its third month with the child still missing, the abductors still uncaught. No national wave of kidnapping had followed. Children of the late Speaker Nicholas Longworth, James Joseph ("Gene") Tunney and Lady Willmott Lewis (daughter of President Frank Noyes of the Associated Press, wife of the London Times's Washington correspondent) had been reported threatened. But the Burns and Pinkerton detective agencies reported no increase in orders for private protection. The U. S. Press and Public had not ceased to gasp at the enormity of the Lindbergh case, yet they seemed confident that their country remained as civilized as it was on Feb. 29. Agitation in the Congress to have interState kidnapping made a Federal offense had died out completely. If many people realized that the Lindbergh kidnapping of 1932 must surely loom as a social and criminal milestone to the U. S. historian of 1982, no one but foreign editors and a few vigilant U. S. patriots were saying or doing much about it. Among the vigilant patriots were some American Legionaries in California who stirred Connecticut's Hiram Bingham to suggest on the floor of the Senate last week that the kidnapping of the country's most celebrated baby was a colossal plot to get the country's most celebrated criminal, Alphonse Capone, out of jail in Chicago.*

Last Week. If alive, the Lindbergh child became 22 months old last week. Col. Lindbergh made a two-day journey from his lonely estate. He was seen at Milford and Bridgeport, Conn. The "Jafsie" notes disappeared from the newspapers. The Norfolk triumvirate--Rev. Harold Dobson-Peacock, John Hughes Curtis, Rear Admiral Guy Hamilton Burrage, U. S. N. retired--continued their activity. Mr. Curtis effected his weekly disappearance in a naval plane; the Episcopal minister, not very successfully incognito as "H. Pearson," alighted from an airplane at Newark Airport and was reported in consultation with the child's parents. When they were reunited at the end of the week the Norfolkers had nothing to say to the Press. John F. ("Jafsie") Condon, the retired schoolmaster who paid $50,000 of Col. Lindbergh's money in a Bronx cemetery to someone who said he was the kidnappers' agent but who failed to secure the infant's return, went boating in Pelham Bay, capsized, got an icy ducking, went home to recover from the shock.

The week was not without its crop of rumors. At Syracuse, N. Y. there was a flurry when it was discovered that a baby favoring the Lindbergh child had arrived on a nearby farm. A Lockheed low-wing monoplane alighted at Newark Airport and its two passengers electrified spectators with a package containing "something alive." The plane, it developed, belonged to Asa Candler ("Coca-Cola") of Atlanta, Ga. "Something alive" was a pair of small monkeys which Mr. Candler was sending to friends in New Hampshire.

For the inquiring reader of 1982 the comparative calm of the Lindbergh Case last week was important. The scum of early reportorial confusion--result of keen newspaper competition and official impatience with the Press--had begun to be skimmed off the story. Facts hitherto obscured by haste and hysteria were clear. Also, it began to seem as though trails to the solution were converging.

Snatch. The Lindbergh family's movements during the several hours preceding the kidnapping could be nailed down finally. On the evening of March 1, Col. Lindbergh, having overlooked a speaking engagement in Manhattan, arrived home within a few minutes of 8 p. m. It was a Tuesday, the first time the Lindberghs had remained beyond a week-end at their new, square-faced home, ten miles north of Princeton, since it was completed last autumn. The Lindberghs ate dinner and within a very few minutes of 9 p. m. Col. Lindbergh sat down at a desk in his living room facing a window. This window was directly under the one through which the kidnappers entered the nursery upstairs. Their ladder had been in direct view of the chair in which Col. Lindbergh later seated himself. Therefore, it is safe to say that the kidnapping occurred during the brief period between the time when Nurse Betty Gow last saw the child, while the Lindberghs were at dinner, and the time when the child's father sat down at his desk--probably less than an hour. Mrs. Lindbergh, who went upstairs after dining, was bathing in a bathroom separated by only one wall from her baby's bed, empty but still warm.

Much misinformation has been published about the events which immediately followed discovery, at approximately 10 p. m., of the child's disappearance. Nurse, wife and husband rushed to the nursery. What they saw may be reconstructed as follows: two shuttered windows; a third, facing east, was not shuttered because one shutter was warped and would not close; mud, apparently from shoes, lay on the floor and on the shutterless windowsill below which, contrary to previous report, there was no piece of furniture; an empty crib standing in its position toward the centre of the room. The parents and nurse may have discovered the original ransom note, but it was not opened until the chief and deputy chief of police arrived from Hopewell, three and a half miles away, summoned at once by the excited parents. By various police leaks the contents of the ransom note and its identifying "token"--a simple affair used often by criminals the world over--was soon in the hands of most metropolitan newspapers and news services. Hundreds of newsmen discussed it though they did not publish it.

At 10:50 p. m. word of the kidnapping was flashed over the New Jersey State Police teletype system. Press services sent out the news split seconds behind.

Investigations during the next twelve hours, while the entire Atlantic seaboard mobilized public and semi-public posses to catch the kidnappers, revealed no vital clue. A ladder in three sections was discovered abandoned in shrubbery near the house. Officials satisfied themselves that it was the one used to gain access to the nursery. Contrary to original report, the female footprints found nearby have never been connected with the crime, might have been made by servants or family on routine missions about the grounds. Two sets of male footprints--sizes No. 8 and No. 10--were found about the ladder and under the nursery window. They were muffled by socks, rags or moccasins. Those closest to the inquiry believe that one man climbed into the nursery, handed the baby to the other at the top of the ladder. The tracks led off across a field toward the south of the Lindbergh property, in the opposite direction from the main entrance. They stopped at a road where the abductors must have boarded their automobile. That roadside spot was as far as any known person had definitely trailed the Lindbergh baby up to last week. But the search fanned out as far as Sweden, Spain, France, Austria, the Pacific Coast. During the search the case leaped dizzily into fantasy.

Among names to figure in the case were: Herbert Clark Hoover William Thomas Ortiz Rubio Manning

John Pierpont Morgan Patrick Cardinal Hayes

Thomas William Roscoe Conkling

Lamont Patterson

Arthur Harry Moore James Michael Curley

Albert Einstein Matthew Woll John Grier Hibben

Servants in the Lindbergh home were, of course, immediately examined. They were Oliver Wheatley, the English butler, and his wife and Betty Gow, 26, who immigrated from Scotland four years ago and had been with the Lindberghs more than a year. Scotland Yard double-checked their records abroad. The New Jersey Police exonerated them publicly. Nurse Gow might still be implicated, for Major Charles Schoeffel went to England a month after the abduction on a mission whose nature was not explained. And it was Nurse Gow who brought Henrik Finn ("Red") Johnsen into the case.

Late in the afternoon of March 1, the nurse's friend, a member of the summer crew of Morgan Partner Thomas Lament's yacht, communicated with her. They later said that she told him that since the baby had a cold she would not be able to keep an engagement with Sailor Johnsen that evening. Soon after the kidnapping Sailor Johnsen was arrested at the home of a brother in a suburb of Hartford, Conn. Much attention was directed toward Johnsen because his automobile was found to harbor an empty milk bottle, the suspicion being that the sailor might have fed the baby while transporting him somewhere. No amount of interrogation by Hartford officials could break down Johnsen's alibi for the night of March 1. The alibi was substantiated by one Johanssen Junge, husband of a trusted seamstress in the Morrow home at Englewood. Junge was described by Connecticut authorities as a cold, "steely" character. Both remained under informal surveillance. Johnsen was found to have jumped ship in Brooklyn several years ago and last week he was at Ellis Island awaiting deportation.

Underworld. On the fourth night after their baby's disappearance the Lindberghs, whose legal adviser is Col. Henry Breckinridge, Wilsonian Assistant Secretary of War, descended suddenly and startlingly to the underworld for assistance. The designation by the nation's hero and the daughter of a onetime Ambassador, of Salvatore Spitale and Irving Bitz, two Manhattan 'leggers, to be their accredited agents was widely viewed as a desperate admission that the nation's police system had knuckled under to the nation's criminals. It was at this point that prominent gangsters began trying to enter the case in pursuit of either public sympathy or publicity. Owney Madden of the Manhattan beerage offered his support. Scarface Al Capone posted a reward for the child's return, expressed a wish to Hearst Editor Arthur Brisbane that he be let out of his Chicago jail long enough to direct the release of the child. Last week this offer was renewed in more positive form through a Capone agent to Col. Lindbergh. Capone promised to return the baby "in two or three days" if Col. Lindbergh could get him free that long. This new Capone offer supported a theory, held by even those closest to Col. Lindbergh, that the proper criminals got Col. Lindbergh's $50,000 and then proceeded to turn the baby over to another gang. This gang could use the child as an instrument for extorting further ransom. Or it might make a favorable impression on the nation's prosecutors by returning the child gratis. It might use the child as a hostage, returnable for the freedom of some potent hoodlum (the Senator Bingham theory).

Another character with underworld connections flashed across the horizon of the Lindbergh case during its first fortnight. He was swart, Semitic Morris Rosner, one-time Government operative. Congresswoman Ruth Pratt of New York was supposed to have been one of his sponsors. Mr. Rosner's connection with the case, however, paled into obscurity when the three Norfolkers came on the scene during the last week of March.

Shipwright, Preacher & Admiral, they were an incongruous assortment. Preacher Dobson-Peacock, often in Norfolk headlines, had a church in Mexico City when the late Dwight Whitney Morrow was Ambassador there. John Hughes Curtis, a builder of small boats, had had professional dealings with rum-runners. Admiral Burrage, who commanded the cruiser Memphis when it brought Col. Lindbergh triumphantly home from France five years ago, is noted for taciturnity and exactitude. His sailors, made to keep their socks up, used to cill him "Ma."

As early as March 9 a 'legger visited Mr. Curtis with information purportedly from the kidnappers. Mr. Curtis was unable to reach Col. Lindbergh himself, so he enlisted the aid of two fellow townsmen who knew the family. The triumvirate repeatedly maintained that they were dealing with a different group from the one which "Jafsie" Condon encountered. Cols. Lindbergh and Breckinridge appeared to put most faith in the "Jafsie" trail. With Mr. Curtis and Mr. Dobson-Peacock operating last week in the same area as Col. Lindbergh, there was inference that the two trails were beginning to converge.

"Jafsie." John F. Condon, 72, became associated with the case in its second week. He is a retired public school teacher of The Bronx who once did social service work at Sing Sing and has occupied himself from time to time during his later years with writing letters to the newspapers. At the outset he had announced in The Bronx Home News that he would be glad to help restore the child to its parents.

To a little rummage shop which he runs for charity came a woman, two months ago, who mysteriously whispered for him to meet her a few days later in the Tuckahoe, N. Y. railway station. Thither went Mr. Condon on the appointed day, accompanied by Al Reich, onetime pugilist. There the woman told him to go home and await a letter. When the letter came it contained an enclosure for Col. Lindbergh. Mr. Condon read the enclosure over the telephone to Col. Lindbergh who said he recognized the identifying '"token." Under the authorship of Mr. Condon there began a series of more than 30 bizarre notes in the personal columns of newspapers directed to the parties whom he believed held the child:

Money is ready. Jafsie.

I accept. Money is ready. You know they "won't let me deliver without getting the package. Please make it some sort of C. 0. D. transaction. Come. You know you can trust: Jafsie.

Inform me how I can get important letter to you. Urgent. Jafsie.

Thanks. That little package you sent was immediately delivered and accepted as real article. See my position. Over 50 years in business, and can I pay without seeing goods? Common sense makes me trust you. Please understand my position. Jafsie.

Through Mr. Condon, negotiations progressed satisfactorily to Col. Lindbergh up to the time that "Jafsie" turned over $50,000 to the supposed kidnapping representative. The man informed him that the baby was safe aboard a boat moored off Gayhead. at the southern tip of Martha's Vineyard. Two trips to that locality convinced Col. Lindbergh that his child was not there. It was then that the serial numbers of the 5,150 bills, in $5, $10 and $20 denominations, which made up the ransom were broadcast through the Treasury Department. In Greenwich, Conn., New York City and, last week, at Havana, 111., pieces of the recorded currency have been identified without revealing a clue.

Last week the "Jafsie" notes ceased, with a repetition of: What is wrong? Have you crossed me? Please, better directions. Through the newsreel Mr. Condon, a small man with a grey mustache and bowler hat, reiterated that he had not given up hope of renewing his dealings with those who duped him. But his inexplicable movements, so perplexing to newshawks who watched his little frame house night & day after the ransom was paid, diminished. On one occasion he had seized a small U. S. flag, waving it frantically over his head as he ordered reporters off his premises. Another time he pretended to threaten them with an imaginary revolver--curious behavior which keyed well with a case chock full of strange actions.

Press. Sharply criticized for its part in the Lindbergh case has been the U. S. Press. Having played it up as the greatest newsstory of all time, the nation's newspapers laid themselves open to the charge of obstructing the child's return. Prime point in question was the publication of the story that the ransom had been paid and that a lookout had been posted to trace the bills, plainest warning to the criminals of Col. Lindbergh's countermove.

"My own notion," wrote famed Pundit Walter Lippmann in the New York Herald Tribune last week, "is that when the American people finally arouse themselves to take action against lawlessness, one of the many things they will have to attend to is the practice of printing news which might interfere with the detection of a crime. I think I appreciate the importance of a free press. But I am quite unable to believe that the Press would be less free if some reasonable restraint were put upon its right to make instantaneous copy out of clues which are vital to the detection of a crime. . . . It is often said that hard cases do not make good law. The Lindbergh case is certainly a hard case. . . .

*Last week Scarface Capone's petition for review of his eleven-year prison sentence for tax evasion was before the Supreme Court of the U. S.

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