Telltale Letters

Seven days after month-old Peter Weinberger was stolen from his baby carriage in suburban Westbury, L.I. on July 4, FBI agents swiftly set up field headquarters and went to work.* Hunting down and jailing a few crackpots and hoaxers who brutally tried to extort money from the well-off Weinberger parents was the least of the police and FBI chores. The bigger job: a painstaking search of public records for handwriting to compare with that on two ransom notes.

The FBI had a little to go on: the first ransom note ("I hate to do this . . . I'm in great need. I could ask for more [than $2.000] but I am asking for only what I need") was handwritten in green ink; there were peculiarities in the m's and r's. As one crew of agents set out to track down the supplier of the type of paper that the note was written on, scores of agents started to examine a vast variety of public records. First, they vainly sorted through 75,000 fingerprint cards of people in the area with police records. Then they branched out, pored over voting registrations, auto-license applications, court records. In six weeks' time they picked over more than 2,000,000 different documents.

The Clues Add. One day last week agents turned up at Brooklyn's federal district court, began sifting through 900 probation records. They had gone through the files and were ready to leave when they were directed to three additional sets of probation papers which were not in the files because they were being "closed out." The FBI took a look. Instantly, the telltale letters jumped up in the signature of

who had been arrested two years before in a police raid on a bootleg still. Included in the LaMarca file were documents that LaMarca himself had signed in green ink. The agents rushed their evidence to field headquarters, where technicians made their analysis.

The FBI added up the clues: LaMarca's car registration showed that he owned a 1948 Plymouth of the type that youngsters had seen in the vicinity of the Weinberger home on the day of the kidnaping. The kidnaper had left some old auto-seat covers, had instructed the Weinbergers to leave the ransom under them; these covers, the FBI learned, had been manufactured to fit the seats of a 1948 Plymouth. Finally, though not conclusively, the notepaper had been traced to a supplier in the general vicinity.

Glint of a Pin. The addition done, the FBI and police arrested swarthy Angelo John LaMarca, 31, in Plainview, five miles from the Weinberger home. At headquarters LaMarca, sometime mechanic and cab driver and the father of two children, stolidly confessed. Two months before the kidnaping, he said, he had moved his family into a new $15,000 split-level home. He was broke, and the bills were piling up. He needed $2,000. On the Fourth of July he decided that a kidnaping was the only way out.

He drove to well-heeled Westbury, cruised through the area until he saw the Weinberger carriage behind the house. Hastily he left a scribbled note on the Weinberger patio, took the baby. That night, he said, he left the baby somewhere in Brooklyn (he would not say where). In the morning he took the child to Westbury, hoping to collect the money. But when he arrived police, reporters, photographers, neighbors were milling through the district (TIME, July 16).

Taking the baby to a thicket less than half a mile from his Plainview home, he laid him down on the ground in a chill, drizzling rain, abandoned him. Within a few days, though he could no longer bargain with the Weinbergers, LaMarca sent them another ransom note, telephoned them at least once--but Morris Weinberger and his wife somehow never made direct contact with him.

After LaMarca told his story, police and federal agents moved out to seek corroboration. Lined up an arm's length apart, 60 searchers began their slow walk through the thicket. After an hour FBI Agent J. Robert Boger, on his hands and knees in the underbrush, caught the glint of a safety pin. He groped again through a mass of brush and vines, found fragments of clothing, then found what Nassau County's medical examiner later identified as "the remains of an infant child."

* The Lindberg law required a seven-day waiting period before the FBI could step into a kidnaping case. Five weeks after the Weinberger kidnaping, President Eisenhower signed the law that permits the FBI to move in after only 24 hours.

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