11

APPREHENSION

“Individuals are custodians of the life stream—temporal manifestations

of far greater being, forming from and returning to their

essence like so many dreams.”

—C.A.L.

THERE WAS AN OUTPOURING OF SYMPATHY—SOME SAID THE greatest public display of grief since the assassination of Lincoln. Others, such as Henry Breckinridge, suggested that the sentiments cut deeper and wider than that because “Lindbergh’s popularity knew no boundaries. This touched everybody—the most famous baby in the world had been brutally killed.”

Over one hundred thousand telegrams and letters, plus hundreds of bouquets, arrived in Hopewell. The Lindberghs received official messages of sympathy from President and Mrs. Hoover, the Prince of Wales, General and Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek, Mexican President Ortíz Rubio, and Benito Mussolini. “IT IS WITH DEEPEST REGRET THAT THE PEOPLE OF LITTLE FALLS LEARNED OF YOUR GREATER SORROW,” telegraphed their mayor, echoing the sentiments wired by the mayors of practically every major American city.

As civic organizations had rallied behind Lindbergh in 1927 with congratulations, so now they gathered with condolences—the B’nai B’rith of Atlantic City; the Dutch Girl Scouts in Ossterbeek, Holland; the Australian Motherscraft Society in Sydney; the Germiston Methodist Church in South Africa; the Kiwanis Club of Hope, Arkansas …

Lindbergh heard from his elderly aunts in Minnesota and even his estranged half-sister Eva, who wrote, “Father told me once ‘no sorrow on earth is so great as the loss of a child’—And the needless loss of your beautiful little son seems to me the cruelest in history.”

The general public felt the same. Thousands of strangers sent the Lindberghs letters and tributes, many suggesting that the baby had died for their sins. They included Biblical quotations, pictures of Jesus, and the suggestion that their son “offered himself as a helper of humanity, as the Christ did when he incarnated in the body of Jesus.” One James Spink of Buffalo, New York, wrote, published, and distributed a pamphlet called “The Little Eaglet,” in which he rendered the lad’s tale, paralleling his Passion with appropriate citations from Scripture. The Hungarian Jew, a periodical published in New York, wrote in its next editorial that “not Lindbergh, but we were the sinners. We tolerated lawlessness in the land until it grew to diabolical proportions…. The baby’s blood is upon our heads.”

The next wave of Lindbergh poems—elegies and threnodies—appeared. Then came the songs—the Lindbergh marches and foxtrots of yesteryear replaced by such dirges as “Bring My Darling Baby Back” and “The Eaglet Is Dead.” Popular novelist Kathleen Norris wrote a syndicated newspaper column urging every American woman to “build a monument to little Charles Lindbergh Jr.”—not a monument of stone and marble but one of spirit, a promise to feed and clothe the thousands of desperate children in orphanages and tenements.

Without Miss Norris’s provocation, entire communities enshrined the child: Jacksonville Beach, Florida, unveiled a memorial to the baby and dropped roses from airplanes onto the site; the Girl Scouts of Stonington, Connecticut, planted a five-foot weeping willow tree in his honor; the town of Charlotte, North Carolina, held a mass memorial service; the schoolchildren of San Juan, Puerto Rico, raised money for a wreath to be placed upon the baby’s grave.

One woman living in Canada was moved enough to send the Lindberghs pictures of her one-year-old son—“who resembles the lost little angel almost 100%”—and to offer them the child for adoption!

The Lindberghs sleepwalked through the next few days, trying to ignore the New Jersey State Police, still stationed in their garage, spending hours each day working with a replica of the ladder up against the baby’s window, trying to reconstruct the crime. While Anne could not stop replaying every moment she spent with her child—bringing him back by touching his clothes and imagining the feel of his curls—Charles could not keep from monitoring the police as they formulated an array of theories. He found the cold details therapeutic.

On Saturday, May 21, 1932, Charles and Anne drove to Long Island, to spend a weekend with the Harry Guggenheims. The serenity of Falaise produced a jumble of emotions for them. Exactly five years earlier, the young airmail pilot had arrived in Paris thirty-three hours after leaving Long Island; and on this very night Amelia Earhart recaptured the nation’s attention by becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, departing from Newfoundland and landing in Ireland. The choice of date was no accident. Earhart’s husband and promoter, George Putnam, had evidently selected it to stoke the publicity fires.

Although they did not know her well, the Lindberghs liked Amelia Earhart, finding her lively company if not an especially able flier. Her success would only draw more attention to aviation and the advances in aeronautical technology since Lindbergh’s more challenging crossing. While she was perhaps coiffed and costumed to look a little too much like Lindbergh, he was grateful to have “Lady Lindy,” as the press called her, filling the front pages. He was incredulous that anybody would actually crave such attention. Charles relaxed enough that weekend to joke that he had “heard Amelia made a very good landing—once.”

During long walks at Falaise, the Lindberghs spoke of their future. “We have an intense yearning for a quiet life, free from publicity—at any price,” Anne wrote. “Nausea at the sight of newspapers. We are starting all over again—no ties, no hopes, no plans.” After her own three years in the spotlight, albeit in her husband’s shadow, she had come to share his aversion to fame and the toll it exacted. She wished her husband could detach himself from the kidnapping case. “I would like him to get back into the Institute work,” Anne wrote his mother; “it would be a definitely constructive thing for his personal life. It is quiet, absorbing work and he is happiest now when he speaks of it.” Charles needed no convincing. He was already talking of severing all his ties to aviation, because they inevitably led to publicity. Giving up $16,000 a year in salaries from TWA and Pan American seemed a small price for privacy.

Almost overnight, Charles and Anne’s great attachment to their new house turned into a stronger repulsion. In addition to the constant reminders of Charlie, it had become a magnet for the morbidly curious. After several more weekends at Falaise, they found themselves returning not to Hopewell, but to Englewood—where misfortune followed them.

Elisabeth Morrow had been laying as low as possible for the past few months, but her heart began acting up. Charles had recommended a doctor at the Rockefeller Institute, who examined her, and his report was extremely discouraging. A second physician said the twenty-eight-year-old Elisabeth had lesions on her heart valves which would only worsen and that he doubted she would live to forty. For whatever time she had left, Elisabeth would have to curtail her activity so as never to exert herself. She decided to convalesce in England, where she had previously found peace and quiet among friends in Somerset.

Coming just six months after the death of her father and three months after the death of her son, the news stupefied Anne all over again. “There’s nothing in this world can give me joy,” she wrote in her diary, wondering what effect this “terrible apathy of mind, spirit, and body” must be having on her unborn child. Charles returned to his laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute, where he designed a new centrifuge.

Even though Charles had never felt comfortable amid his mother-in-law’s hyperactive social life in Englewood, he and Anne appreciated the gates and security guards at Next Day Hill. Even there, however, the ramifications of the kidnapping followed them. Violet Sharpe, the English maid whose alibi at the time of the kidnapping always seemed suspect, was subjected to further interrogation. Extremely agitated, she refused to answer many questions, as the police probed into her personal life. On Friday, June tenth, she was told to prepare herself for another inquisition later that day. Before the officers could take her to the Hopewell police station, she went upstairs with some cleaning solvent—cyanide chlorine—and swallowed it. Upon returning to the pantry, she fainted and died.

Further investigation revealed that Violet was hiding nothing related to the kidnapping, only an embarrassing relationship with the Morrow butler. Within a year, forty-eight-year-old Olly Whateley, the Lindbergh butler, would die from a perforated duodenal ulcer, adding to the endless rumors surrounding the Lindbergh kidnapping. While no law-enforcement agency ever found a link between any of the Morrow or Lindbergh servants and the crime, their sudden deaths would stir future conjecture.

At the end of June 1932, the Lindberghs returned to Hopewell. Charles had been called to testify in the trial of John Curtis, which was being held in the small Hunterdon County courthouse in Flemington. It proved to be a brief but bizarre trial in which the prosecution had to refashion its argument to fit a peculiarity in New Jersey state law. Even though Curtis had broken down and confessed to Lindbergh of having fabricated the whole gang of kidnappers with whom he said he was in contact, it was not illegal to report false information to the police. Lindbergh testified for the prosecution. The jury found Curtis guilty of obstruction of justice, and the judge fined him $1,000 and sentenced him to one year in jail.

With that, the Lindbergh case disappeared from the newspapers. There were no suspects, no leads, and a poor economy, which forced New Jersey to lay off dozens of state troopers. Although the case was still active—the FBI working in conjunction with the New York City and New Jersey police forces—investigators were chasing phantoms. Colonel Schwarzkopf sent handwriting specimens from the ransom notes to law-enforcement officials and wardens of penal institutions across the country, asking them to compare the handwriting of all their prisoners. The Treasury Department tried to detect a pattern as some smaller bills of the Lindbergh ransom gradually surfaced in New York.

Schwarzkopf even pinned hopes on a studious man named Arthur Koehler, the head of the Forest Service Laboratory of the Department of Agriculture in Madison. Schwarzkopf had sent him splinters of the wood in the kidnap ladder, enough to allow Koehler to believe he could deduce the builder’s identity. While Koehler’s area of expertise was not considered an exact science, he had already proved himself a reliable court witness on several occasions. He had testified that lumber had specific markings as individualized as fingerprints, from which he could trace its history—where it was grown, where it was milled, where it was sold.

The Curtis trial over, the Lindberghs gave the house in Hopewell one more chance. Charles talked constantly about its virtues in design and construction as though trying to convince himself. Anne settled into a routine of piano lessons and walks, even writing—making attempts to chronicle their trip to the Orient. Every time they drove into town, however, they had to pass the spot on the hill where their baby’s remains had been found.

Concerned with making the Hopewell house safe enough for his wife and expected baby, Lindbergh seized upon the idea of a police dog. He and Anne located a breeder of German shepherds, who singled out his most intelligent animal—named Pal. Charles, who had a way with dogs since childhood, approached the “wolf” and tried to pat him, which prompted Pal to bare his teeth and growl. Lindbergh was impressed.

The trainer said it would take a fortnight before Pal would accept Lindbergh as his master; and for the first few days, the breeder warned, Lindbergh must not approach him alone, for the dog would maul him. Each caveat pleased Lindbergh even more. The breeder drove up the next day in a small paddy wagon, with Pal bolted inside. They released him into one of the garages at Hopewell, which had been turned into a large cage with heavy wire. After the trainer left, Lindbergh let their two small dogs, Skean and Wahgoosh, run over to Pal so that they could get used to him. Charles followed. By the end of the day, he had the German shepherd obeying every signal. Lindbergh renamed the dog Thor.

More than security, Thor brought joy into the Hopewell house. Charles spent most of the next week teaching him new tricks and commands. He trained the dog to fetch specific items by name, including the leash which Lindbergh would put on Skean and Wahgoosh so that Thor could walk them. The dog became fiercely protective of Anne, awakening her in the mornings by putting his nose on her side of the bed and seldom leaving her side during the day. “The devotion of this dog following me everywhere is quite thrilling,” Anne wrote in her diary, “like having a new beau.”

By August 1932, the Lindberghs stopped pretending about their feelings toward the house in Hopewell and moved—at least temporarily—back to Next Day Hill. No sooner had they settled into their wing of the mansion, with their own staff, than their little dogs ran away. In his pursuit, Charles found eight reporters chasing after him. The episode made Anne adopt Charles’s point of view, that were it not for the press attention that surrounded them, “we might still have him.”

On the fifteenth of August, Lindbergh appeared at a New Jersey airfield and tested an all-metal low-winged Northrop monoplane. It was the first time in the three months since the discovery of his son’s body that Lindbergh had flown. He went up for an hour, telling the inquiring press that his short flight was of “no particular significance.” What he told nobody except his wife was that he flew over the Atlantic Ocean, several miles out to sea, where he strewed his firstborn’s ashes.

Later that night, just after midnight, Anne’s labor pains began. In light of the public hysteria of the last six months, the Lindberghs and their doctors had agreed that it was best for her to deliver the baby in the privacy of the Morrow apartment in the city. So, at 3:45 that morning, she and Charles and her mother drove from New Jersey through the deserted streets to 4 East Sixty-sixth Street. The obstetrician, Dr. E. M. Hawks, the anesthesiologist, Dr. Flagg, and a nurse arrived moments later.

Flagg immediately administered gas, but Anne suffered nonetheless for the next three and one-half hours. She seemed always conscious of Charles’s presence, as he held her hand, stroking her wrist with his forefinger. She was not aware that she began to hemorrhage during the labor, and Dr. Hawks thought, “Oh my God, I’ve killed the second Lindbergh baby!” Flagg put her completely under, and a half hour later, she gave birth to a healthy seven-pound, fourteen-ounce baby—with big eyes, the Morrow nose, and the Lindbergh dimple in the chin.

All that day, Anne kept sighing that the baby was “all right,” until Charles said, “He has a wart on his left toe.” Such teasing was an obvious expression of his own relief. “You’ll wear the baby out, looking at it,” he said. But she did not want to dismiss her feelings of joy so readily. “The spell was broken by this real, tangible, perfect baby … a miracle,” she wrote. “My faith had been reborn.”

In an effort to see that the hysteria that surrounded his first child did not recur, Lindbergh issued an annnouncement of the birth of his second son to the press along with a request:

Mrs. Lindbergh and I have made our home in New Jersey. It is naturally our wish to continue to live there near our friends and interests. Obviously, however, it is impossible for us to subject the life of our second son to the publicity which we feel was in a large measure responsible for the death of our first. We feel that our children have a right to grow up normally with other children. Continued publicity will make this impossible. I am appealing to the press to permit our children to lead the lives of normal Americans.

Lindbergh let the press believe the baby had been born in Englewood. He filed the birth certificate with no name; and he diplomatically called the Times and the Tribune to inform them of this fact. He also said that there would be no photographs released.

Most of the reputable newspapers in the country honored Lindbergh’s wishes for privacy. Some even wrote to assure the family that they would make no effort to obtain pictures of any of them and that they would write no stories on the Lindberghs other than those based on officially issued statements. Lindbergh was pleased to read several articles about Thor and his great ferocity.

One night after they had returned to the safety of Next Day Hill, however, a local half-wit appeared at the new baby nurse’s upstairs window. Anne became as apprehensive as ever. Charles routinely called the police and calmly suggested that the baby not sleep alone, not even in the daytime on the porch. “We give in,” Anne noted in her diary. “Will this haunt us forever?”

The following week, Anne went into the city to see Dr. Hawks and to treat herself to a new hat. At Macy’s she walked by a mirror and could hardly believe how old, pale, and worried she looked. Suddenly other shoppers caught sight of her and literally mobbed her. Anne fled.

Charles refused to let his wife submit to her fears. He would accept a life of precaution but never one of paranoia. Although the season in North Haven was winding down, he thought it best to take Anne there, even though it meant leaving their one-month-old behind. He trained Thor to “Go mind the baby,” which meant lying by his crib and accosting anyone who approached other than Elsie Whateley and the nurse, who slept with him every night. At least two males of the domestic staff were ordered to remain close to him at all times, and a watchman was hired. Anne was naturally reluctant to abandon the baby, still unnamed; but Dr. Van Ingen thought it best not to move him from Englewood. Charles flew his wife from the Long Island Country Club on the afternoon of September thirteenth in his Bird biplane.

They intended to be gone but ten days, but they stayed sixteen. When he and Anne were not playing tennis or hiking on their Big Garden Island, Charles flew, chopped trees, and read. Anne found added strength in her family—Dwight Jr., home from an archaeological trip to Europe before returning to Amherst, Con about to return to Smith, and Elisabeth, back from England to announce her engagement to a Welshman, Aubrey Niels Morgan, whose family owned David Morgan, Ltd, a department store in Cardiff. She planned to live in Wales. Without saying it outright, Lindbergh experienced for the first time the healing powers of a family in a time of distress. He filled his wife’s heart with joy one night in North Haven when he commented, “I don’t know any place I like as much as this now.”

The Lindberghs returned to Englewood invigorated. They settled, at last, on a name for the new baby—Jon—which they came across in a book of Scandinavian history. It had no association to either of their families, was uncommon but not strange, and—as Charles liked to point out—“It is phonetic spelling!” He sarcastically added, “Let’s see what people say about it! It will be a scream to hear them speculating about where we got it from.”

The Lindberghs continued to reassemble the pieces of their lives. He returned to Dr. Carrel’s laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute and to his work as technical adviser in the aviation industry. He also proposed donating the house in Hopewell to the state of New Jersey for use as some kind of children’s home. It seemed the only way, Anne noted, “to make it up to the boy.”

The dreadful year ended on a note of hope. The Lindberghs and Morrows gathered for a wedding three days after Christmas, on a Wednesday afternoon at 4:30, at which time Elisabeth Morrow married Aubrey Morgan. A thick fog settled over Englewood, but inside the candle-lit library at Next Day Hill, the few dozen guests felt warm and cheery. Charles liked the groom very much and appreciated the company of another man in the Morrow matriarchy. The newlyweds embarked on a honeymoon in the south of France before settling in Cardiff.

Several weeks of socializing made the Lindberghs feel they were returning to normal life. They attended a public banquet at which Charles accepted a belated decoration from the government of Romania, a dinner with George and Amelia Earhart Putnam, and another with Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson—whom the Morrow family was considering to write the official biography of Dwight Morrow. But all feelings of security were illusory. The barking of dogs in the night was enough to keep them both awake.

With the first anniversary of the kidnapping, newspapers recycled the story. Articles recapitulated the crime and editorials reprehended the New Jersey State Police. Concealed from the public, because they might interfere with attempts to crack the unclosed case, were kidnap threats against Jon, which the Lindberghs were receiving. In his fight to keep his wife from sinking into depression at Next Day Hill, Lindbergh resorted to his lifelong elixir—travel.

A successful ten-day car trip to Detroit—during which Anne disguised herself with glasses and a blond wig and he slicked down his hair with a washable black rinse—encouraged the Lindberghs to travel more. “C. felt entirely free for the first time in six years,” Anne observed, “his freedom handed back to him. And to feel it is always there now, a hidden reserve. We can get away!” Charles made plans for their next trip.

Aviation had thus far weathered the Depression; and Lindbergh—as Technical Director of TWA, “The Lindbergh Line”—had not inspected any of its air routes in more than a year. On April 19, 1933, he and Anne left Newark for Burbank, where they intended to pick up their Lockheed Sirius, reconditioned after its 1931 spill into the Yangtze. They flew to Camden, Baltimore, Washington, Pittsburgh, and Columbus, discovering a trail of new transcontinental beacons. St. Louis felt like a homecoming for both of them, as friends as well as fans turned out to greet them. Lindbergh expressed great admiration for the city’s new terminal building and glassed-in control tower; and he visited the exhibition of his decorations and trophies at the Missouri Historical Society, adding a few more to the collection and expressing concern over their security. They spent the night with Philip Love; and in front of his old flying mate, he reverted to an immature teenager, bullying Anne in front of him, dragging her up to bed by one ear. (She learned the only way to deal with such behavior was to play along—though she did once find him so exasperating that she dumped a pitcher of water on his head.)

Crowds once again welcomed the Lindberghs every time they landed, glorying in having the gods back in their Heaven. Charles and Anne enjoyed a week in Los Angeles, then headed east, happy to be in their familiar orange-red and black plane, fitted once again with wheels where the pontoons had been. On May sixth, they got caught in a dust storm over the Texas panhandle and spent the night inside the plane. Six planes searched for them while they were “missing.” They hit page one of The New York Timeswhen they were “found.”

Once back in Englewood, Lindbergh planned their next trip, this one equal in scope to their trip to the Orient. The air routes of the world were “entering their final stage of development,” Lindbergh noted. “The countries had already been crossed and the continents connected. It remained only for the oceans to be spanned. Their great over-water distances constituted the last major barrier to the commerce of the air.” Thus, this trip’s official purpose was to survey potential transatlantic air routes and bases between North America and Europe. There were three alternatives—the Greenland-Iceland route in the north, the Newfoundland-Ireland route in the center, and the Bermuda-Azores route in the south. The northern route was most “tantalizing” to Lindbergh, for it offered the greatest safety net of land below, never more than seven hundred miles over water.

At a factory in Caldwell, New Jersey, Lindbergh modified his Lockheed Sirius. Mechanics installed a new 710 h.p. Wright Cyclone F engine and a Hamilton Standard controllable pitch propeller with two positions. These changes increased the range of the plane and the load with which it could take off from water. After testing the plane on July first, Lindbergh flew to the Edo factory on Long Island, where the wheels were once again replaced with pontoons. As with their previous expedition, the Lindberghs financed the flight themselves. Pan American supplied the best radio available at the time and sent a ship to Greenland to serve as an operations base.

Selecting equipment for this trip was at least as difficult as their 1931 voyage to the Orient. Although they would be leaving New York in midsummer, the Lindberghs had no itinerary—only the probability that they would travel both farther north and south than ever before. Again they would have to prepare for the possibility of forced landings at sea as well as on the Greenland Ice Cap. They would carry two complete radio sets, one waterproof and fitted into a rubber sailboat. This time they also compromised the plane’s performance by adding guns, a bug-proof tent, and extra food. The Sirius with full tanks would thus be so heavy as to demand both a good wind and a long runway of sheltered water to take off.

Lindbergh met with Fred C. Meier of the Bureau of Plant Industry and Weather Bureau in the Department of Agriculture to discuss the practical aspects of Lindbergh’s newest invention. His “sky hook” was a piece of aluminum tubing that contained cartridges with petrolatum-smeared slides prepared to collect microorganisms from the atmosphere along the flight. The results of these experiments would prove valuable to scientists studying the movement of air currents in northern regions and even to physicians studying hay fever by tracking the aerial movement of pollen. He also packed a Leica camera with a fifty-millimeter lens to photograph prospective air bases. Once again, “the first couple of the sky,” as the press referred to the Lindberghs, brought positive publicity to aeronautics.

Without fanfare, they began their expedition on July 9, 1933. Charles arrived at Glenn Curtiss Airport at eight o’clock that morning and spent much of the day putting his Sirius through its final tests. His presence quickly attracted the press and almost resulted in his crashing into a plane full of cameramen trying to get a closer shot of him.

After a thunderstorm passed through, Anne arrived at the airport with the Harry Guggenheims and Aida Breckinridge. Around 3:30, the big ship slid down its ramp into the water. After forty-five seconds of splashing forward, the plane took off, heading northeast. “The Lindberghs have set no definite route nor have they picked definite landing places and stopover points,” wrote The New York Times. “Furthermore, they have set no time for their return. While the flight is being undertaken as a survey of what may some day be used as an air route to Europe for Pan-American Airways … the couple proposes to enjoy the trip without the worry of keeping to schedules.” The Jelling, a Danish steamer Pan American had hired to serve as one of several support ships, had left Philadelphia the week before and had already placed gasoline and landing buoys for the Lindberghs at Halifax and St. John’s. The boat would serve as their weather scout, primary radio contact, repair shop, and occasional hotel along their journey.

The Lindberghs stopped in North Haven to say good-bye to their son and their respective mothers. More than ever, Anne was apprehensive about abandoning her baby, but never enough to pass up an opportunity to fly with her husband. And Charles was not about to let past travails curtail his future travels. On the afternoon of July eleventh, they left for Nova Scotia. Over the next eleven days, they surveyed Newfoundland. Anne’s diary recorded happy encounters with their hosts on board the support ships and on shore, while Charles’s dwelt on the topography.

Over the next twenty-four days, the Lindberghs explored Greenland—Godthaab, Holsteinsborg, Ella Island, Eskimonaes, Angmagssalik, and Julianehaab. He fished and kayaked among the Greenlanders when the fog kept them from flying reconnaissance. They thrived in the island’s little towns set among the rocky hills, fjords, and “iceberghs” (as Anne began spelling it). They flew across the ice cap—“a huge continent of ice,” populated with prehistoric-looking musk ox and polar bears.

“In those tiny, isolated outposts of the North,” Anne would later recollect, “the burden of fame fell from us and we achieved a measure of anonymity. We were strangers; we were guests; but we were not celebrities set apart from the human race.” While they felt they were blending into the daily life, they had no idea to what extent the press still monitored their movements.

One day in August, when the Lindberghs were grounded, the media lost sight of their whereabouts altogether. By nightfall, rumors of their demise had spread. At ten o’clock, Reuters in London teletyped, “IT IS REPORTED HERE THAT LINDBERGH HAS CRASHED AND BEEN KILLED IN GREENLAND.” The rumor avalanched into a global sensation, a major news item that had to be retracted, making the press themselves realize how reckless they became when writing about Lindbergh.

Another day in Holsteinsborg, where Charles was returning from a flight over the fjords, Anne watched a group of children run out to greet the plane as it descended from the sky onto the Davis Strait. “Tingmissartoq! Tingmissartoq!” they shouted, Inuit for “the one who flies like a big bird.” On their last day in Greenland, after hearing the cry throughout their stay, the Lindberghs asked a young Eskimo to paint it on the fuselage of the Lockheed Sirius.

On August fifteenth the Tingmissartoq left Greenland’s east coast for Reykjavik, Iceland. After the five-hour flight across the Denmark Strait, they found the waters in the harbor too rough to reach the capital city. A British aviator named John Grierson, then flying the northern route from England to America, came to their aid. He commandeered a ferryboat and brought the Lindberghs and their plane to a mooring near the hangar where his plane was lodged.

They spent a week in Iceland, circumnavigating the entire country before flying on to the Faroe and Shetland Islands. A five-hour flight over the North Sea brought them to Copenhagen. During their week in Denmark, mobs snowballed as word of their presence spread. Charles wanted to visit Sweden, but he knew the arrival of its favorite “son” would unloose festivities beyond his desires. To shake the press, he and Anne steered the Tingmissartoq south for several minutes before radically changing course and making their way for Stockholm.

After a few days in the city—where the Lindberghs were able to enjoy some of its restaurants, parks, and museums before photographers and crowds began following them—Charles quietly arranged to visit his ancestral home. On September seventeenth, they flew to the island of Karlskrona, in southern Sweden. A man met them in a motorboat, brought them ashore, and drove them into the Skåne countryside. They arrived in the village of Gårdlösa, a scattering of white houses with red roofs and green doors, as night was falling. There was still enough light to see green fields and windmills along the rolling hills in the distance. At last they arrived at a white house which made up one side of a cobblestoned courtyard; barns formed the other three sides. Far from any reporters, Lindbergh had reached the home-site of Ola Månsson.

Charles and Anne crossed the road to visit another farm, where they met a man whose grandfather had known Lindbergh’s grandfather. He gave Charles a pair of Ola Månsson’s eyeglasses, which Månsson had evidently sent seventy years earlier as payment on a debt. He also presented Lindbergh with papers written in Månsson’s hand, complete with his signature. Lindbergh autographed a book for the family, and the matriarch hugged it. When it was time for the Lindberghs to leave, all the people in the neighborhood gathered around them in the dark courtyard. As one of them shone a light from a bicycle on Lindbergh’s face, they broke into the Swedish national anthem.

The Lindberghs toured Europe for another two months, taking in Finland, Russia, Estonia, Norway, England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Holland, Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal—all potential airline gateways to the New World. Charles devoted much of his time to airport inspections and meetings with heads of foreign airlines, while Anne enjoyed the role of tourist. Together, they saw a ballet from the royal box at the opera house in Leningrad, attended a banquet in their honor in Moscow, and met the King of Norway in Oslo. They also spent a week in Wales with Anne’s sister and Elisabeth’s new husband, who were preparing for their imminent move to California for her health. At the Berkeley Hotel in London they bumped into Jean Monnet, an old Morrow friend, who spoke of his fears about America under the new president: “Roosevelt is trying to bring about social reforms in a period of reconstruction,” the French economist said, “and that is fatal.”

For Charles, the happiest moments abroad seemed to be when he was alone with his machinery. One night in Inverness he came in from having spent six hours in a cold rain, fixing a broken cable on the plane, which was anchored on the river Ness. Tired and soaked to the bone, he told Anne, “I’d a hundred times rather spend an evening like this than one in New York.”

On October twenty-sixth the Lindberghs slipped into Les Mureau naval base on the Seine; but once they entered the lobby at the Crillon in Paris, there was hardly a moment during the next week when Charles did not go unnoticed. “Tiens! C’est Lindbergh!” cried Parisians on the boulevards. “They still regard him as a romantic young boy—the Fairy Prince,” Anne wrote Elisabeth shortly after their arrival. “Women bang at the door of his car, crowds collect as he leaves the hotel.” With mixed emotions, Anne found that she was often ignored, for the French did not connect her with Lindbergh. “They simply can’t think of him as married,” she observed. “It is like a famous movie actor. He is Romance.” The constant hysteria surrounding him in France made Lindbergh talk seriously of giving up aviation and of never visiting another major city again.

He charted their journey home. The Tingmissartoq took them to the Azores, more than eight hours out to sea from Lisbon. Once there, however, Charles discovered that the harbor at Horta was too small for them to take off with the full load necessary to reach Newfoundland. He hoped to find a larger harbor on another of the islands, at Ponta Delgada. When it too proved inadequate, Lindbergh replotted their route, charting the equatorial waters between Africa and South America.

Anne had had enough. “I am homesick for my baby,” she told the press at Horta. “It’s time my husband took me home.” But Lindbergh remained strangely noncommittal both to the reporters and to his wife. He would say only, “My time is my own.” Ironically, once the Lindberghs had at last decided to conclude their journey, they encountered one unforeseen obstacle after another.

They turned southward and inland, toward the bulge of Africa that came closest to South America. They stopped in the Canary Islands and what was then the Spanish colony of Río de Oro on the African continent before proceeding to the Cape Verde Islands, two hundred miles closer than any port in Africa. Huge ocean rollers made landing extremely difficult; and Lindbergh realized that taking off from there for South America in their overloaded seaplane would be impossible.

He decided to forfeit their two-hundred-mile advantage and fly with a light load of fuel back to the West African coast—to Dakar, in Senegal. The Lindberghs were about to leave when they were informed by telegraph of an epidemic of yellow fever there. They learned of a safe port where they could land just one hundred miles south of Dakar—Bathurst, in British Gambia, where the Gambia River meets the ocean. They encountered absolutely no trouble putting the Tingmissartoq down on the river’s gentle waters. That stillness would prove to be a curse.

As opposed to their predicament in Cape Verde, the Tingmissartoq would need more wind or wave chop to help lift the plane’s pontoons “on their steps,” especially with the added burden of extra fuel necessary for a sixteen-hour flight. Bathurst, during that season, typically provided no wind whatever. The Lindberghs lightened their load, leaving behind such nonessential Arctic items as sealskin boots and even their anchor.

They tried to take off from their glassy runway five times that day. During each attempt, Charles worked the controls in silent frustration, not even communicating to his wife. The stillness kept them from even an attempt the next day. Lindbergh spent the day after that, December fifth, jettisoning more of their load—food, tools, sleeping bags, practically all their clothes. He even went into the plane with metal shears to cut a gasoline tank out of the fuselage. Later that night, while out walking, Anne noticed her handkerchief fluttering in the wind. A few hours later, with the rising of the moon, they made what would have to be their last attempt before settling on another route home altogether. After an unusually long run in semidarkness, the plane splashed across the water, then spanked it many times, before the pontoons rose from the sea.

Sixteen hours later the Lindberghs spotted the Pan American barge at Natal, on the bulge of Brazil—1,875 miles from Bathurst. It was three o’clock in the afternoon local time, and steaming hot. Feeling punch-drunk as she got off the plane, Anne let herself think of Christmas at home with her son Jon.

Lindbergh promptly learned, however, that Juan Trippe wanted him to return to New York by way of Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and all the other major Pan American stations along the way. Mindful of his wife’s anxiety, Lindbergh told her he too wanted to go home directly and that they would stop only where necessary. At that, it would be almost another week just getting out of Brazil. Even though Anne was desperate for the travel to end, Charles announced that they would be going via Manáos, a thousand miles up the Amazon.

They might very well have lingered in the jungle were it not for an unpleasant encounter outside a rubber factory. An American approached the Lindberghs and thoughtlessly blurted, “You know, we were the first to hear of the kidnapping here!” It was an unpleasant smack of reality after nearly six months of living virtually unattached from the rest of the world.

The next day, the Lindberghs left Brazil for Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, despite a torrential rain. It was one of the few times even Charles conceded to Anne that it was “Bad stuff!”—the sort of weather through which he generally chose not to fly. Months later, he learned that their departure through cloud-covered mountains had given birth to a jungle myth: Just after the Tingmissartoq had passed over a band of Waiwai natives, a bolt of lightning had struck the chief’s house, running down one of the hut’s poles, singeing both his son’s head and daughter’s backside, melting the head of his hunting spear, and splintering a floorlog that they used as a ceremonial seat. Because, as one anthropologist explained, “There is no such thing in the jungle as coincidence,” the tribal explanation for this phenomenon was that the god Makanaima, upset with the Waiwais, had created a great mosquito to buzz over them, inflicting this fiery sting.

Despite Anne’s anxiety, Charles took another week getting them to Miami by way of Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo. They received a telegram from The White House within hours of their December sixteenth arrival on American soil. “WELCOME HOME AND CONGRATULATIONS UPON THE SUCCESSFUL COMPLETION OF THIS, ANOTHER FLIGHT MADE BY YOU IN THE INTEREST AND FOR THE PROMOTION OF AMERICAN AVIATION,” wired Franklin D. Roosevelt. “I HOPE THAT OUT OF THE SURVEY YOU HAVE MADE NEW AND VALUABLE PRACTICAL AIDS TO AIR TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATIONS WILL COME.” The Lindberghs thanked the President for his surprising interest in their trip.

The Tingmissartoq’s pontoons splashed down into Flushing Bay, Long Island, at 7:37 on the evening of December 19, 1933; and the media blitz on the Lindberghs’ lives resumed. A flotilla of speedboats carrying motion picture and still photographers, reporters, and radio interviewers closed in on them, one of the boats cutting so close that the plane rocked dangerously. Although they had been gone five months and ten days (to the minute)—during which time they had logged 29,781 miles and linked four continents—it was as if the Lindberghs had never left.

With the rapid advances in technology, the journey marked an end in a period of aviation, one which Lindbergh believed “was probably more interesting than any the future will bring.” The perfection of machinery, he observed just a few years later, “tends to insulate man from contact with the elements in which he lives. The ‘stratosphere’ planes of the future will cross the ocean without any sense of the water below.” Wind and heat and moonlight takeoffs would no longer concern the transatlantic passenger. Before the year had ended, Lindbergh called his friend F. Trubee Davison, president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, to offer the Tingmissartoq and all its accoutrements—down to the Lindberghs’ can of insect repellent. For years it hung in the museum’s Hall of Ocean Life, where it became one of the museum’s most popular attractions. After another few years at the Air Force Museum in Ohio, it found a permanent home as part of the Smithsonian Institute’s collection of aircraft.

Despite his aversion to New York City, Charles had taken of late to saying, “The only place where I’d feel content leaving a baby” was in an apartment. And so, in January 1934, the Lindberghs moved to 530 East Eighty-sixth Street. Their penthouse had two terraces, a river view, and a feeling of privacy and security. Jon, then sixteen months old, slept but a room away from his parents. Around the corner, Anne located a nursery school, to which she walked Jon and the dogs every morning. Jon was young, even for this playgroup; and yet Anne felt that she and Charles lived in a strange world “where we are ‘different,’” and the sooner Jon was sent “into it … and with the youngest possible children, the easier it will be for him.” She found the apartment conducive for finishing her book about their expedition to the Orient and for starting a National Geographic article about their trip to Greenland. Busy settling in, the Lindberghs refused an invitation to a large informal reception on the night of February first at the White House. Had Charles been more politically savvy, he might have attended the event, for the President evidently had aviation on his mind those days. One week after the event, he realized just how much.

On February 9, 1934—without any warning—President Roosevelt annulled all domestic airmail contracts between the government and more than thirty airlines. He claimed that there had been criminal conspiracy in awarding the contracts, and he ordered the Army to assume responsibility for carrying the mail. The root of the problem lay in the spoils system—specifically, the New Dealers suggested, the payoffs of their Republican predecessors.

In anticipation of Roosevelt’s taking office, the lame-duck Congress had established a special Senate committee under Senator Hugo Black, Democrat from Alabama, to investigate airmail and ocean-mail contracts. In his preliminary investigations, Black learned that former Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown had dispensed numerous contracts at a “clandestine conference,” capriciously and corruptly. While most people in aviation recognized Brown’s vision had done as much to galvanize the industry as any other force, his unilateral, dogmatic practices left much to criticize.

The Black Committee went into session in September 1933, requesting the financial records of every important player in aviation. Even before the Lindberghs had returned from their recent tour, he had been asked to submit itemized statements of all his cash and stock transactions with airlines since 1924. Audits of some companies’ books revealed that certain contracts had been awarded to the least desirable bidder—United Aircraft and American Airways among them. As a result, a United executive testified that his $253 investment in the company was now worth $35,000,000; a TWA executive testified that his company had paid a competitor over $1,000,000 not to bid on an airmail award. After hearing a few such gross examples, and assured that Army pilots were capable of flying the mail, Roosevelt revoked all the existing contracts.

The results were devastating. The aviation industry on the whole, many argued, had solidified during the Depression because of Brown’s work, though most of the companies were still struggling, paying down their initial debts. Transcontinental & Western Air, Inc., for one, was still posting losses after more than three years of operation—$1,270,973 since incorporation, and over $5,000,000 if its predecessor companies were counted. In all that time, nobody had received a bonus nor had any stockholders received dividends. Company salaries had never exceeded $20,000. What the Black Committee was overlooking, TWA President Richard Robbins wrote the new Postmaster General, James A. Farley, was that “there has been created in the United States of America the greatest air transport system in the world. In this development our company has played a leading part.” TWA, he said, was still committed to that development, prepared to spend another $3,500,000 purchasing the newest and finest flying equipment. All their financial planning was predicated on their government contracts. In the name of his employees and over twenty thousand stockholders, he asked the administration to reconsider its decision.

The company’s most famous employee and stockholder was incensed, convinced that the President had thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Lindbergh believed in the integrity of the people who ran TWA and knew how they had sacrificed to get the company off the ground. He had never taken part in any contract negotiations, but he felt he could not “remain silent in the face of action so unconsidered, drastic, and unfair.”

“Your action of yesterday affects fundamentally the industry to which I have devoted the last twelve years of my life,” Anne wrote, starting off a draft of a telegram Lindbergh would complete. In it, he insisted on a point greater than TWA’s or his own benefits—the right to a fair trial, where honest parties could assert their innocence. “THE CONDEMNATION OF COMMERCIAL AVIATION BY CANCELLATION OF ALL MAIL CONTRACTS AND THE USE OF THE ARMY ON COMMERCIAL AIR LINES,” Lindbergh concluded with certainty, “WILL UNNECESSARILY AND GREATLY DAMAGE ALL AMERICAN AVIATION.” Lindbergh sent his 275-word telegram to the President, simultaneously releasing a copy of the text to the press.

Stephen T. Early, secretary to the President, was dispatched to attack the messenger not the message. He told the press that the President first read Lindbergh’s telegram in that morning’s newspaper, before it had even reached his desk, and that Lindbergh had thus violated the usual courtesy of allowing the President to receive communications before the media. Because there was little the Roosevelt administration could dispute in Lindbergh’s argument, Early accused Lindbergh of sending the message strictly for “publicity purposes.”

Initially, most of Washington sided with the power of the presidency. Even a Farmer-Laborite congressman from Minnesota said Lindbergh was “like a small boy trying to aggravate the President with a beanshooter”; Senator George Norris, a Nebraska Republican, referred to the signing bonus Lindbergh had received when he first joined TWA, and declared, “At last Colonel Lindbergh is earning the $250,000 stock fee and other fees he received from the aviation industry for use of his name. The public long has wondered just what Colonel Lindbergh really did for the tremendous payment revealed as going to him by the airmail investigating committee. Now we know.” Despite these early efforts to dismiss Lindbergh’s attack as the work of a lobbyist, nobody challenged the truth of what he had to say.

The Lindbergh rebuke became the talk of the nation. As one “plain citizen” wired Stephen Early, “TO CHARGE LINDBERGH WITH SEEKING PUBLICITY WILL CERTAINLY TICKLE THE AMERICAN SENSE OF HUMOR.” Over the radio Will Rogers spoke highly of Lindbergh’s knowledge of aviation and urged him and the President—whom Rogers described as the two best-loved men in America—to come together to sort out the problem. But Roosevelt would not back away from his position.

On February 18, 1934, the president of TWA furloughed all its personnel and attempted to develop a minimal schedule for passengers that would keep the company alive. Other major airlines suffered similarly. The Army had even worse problems.

As Lindbergh had tried to explain, they were not prepared to handle the mail. Although the Army had close to one thousand planes available at the time, fewer than 150 of them were suitable mail carriers, and they could transport only a fraction of the load that the commercial planes could. But a bigger problem, Lindbergh knew, was that flying the mail required special skills.

Three days before the Army took over the airmail schedule, three of its pilots were killed on practice runs, two crashing in a snowstorm over Utah, another over Idaho. Another Army pilot barely escaped death crashing near Linden, New Jersey. By the end of the Army’s first week with its new assignment, another three pilots were killed, five more critically injured, and eight planes had washed out, accounting for property damage of $300,000. Lindbergh feared more disaster would follow “as the Army spirit is to push on in spite of everything and that is just what kills pilots in bad weather.”

The final weeks of that year’s winter turned unusually inclement, one of the most foggy, rainy, and snowy in the nation’s history. Each day brought another horror story. Superintendent of the Aerial Mail Service Benjamin Lipsner tried for days to speak to the President, and when he finally got through, on March eighth, he begged him to “stop those airmail deaths.” Roosevelt agreed to curtail the airmail service, but he would not hear of returning the mail to the commercial airlines. The next day four more Army mail pilots were killed. Roosevelt held his ground, calling a moratorium on airmail service. As the bodies of Army pilots mounted, so did pressure against the administration.

Secretary of War George H. Dern assembled a special committee to study and report upon Army aviation in relation to national defense, and he invited Lindbergh to serve on it. Lindbergh sensed this was an administration ploy to enlist his support. He replied to Dern that he stood ready to contribute whatever he could toward the maintenance of an adequate national defense, but he would not join this committee because he believed “that the use of the Army Air Corps to carry the air mail was unwarranted and contrary to American principle.”

The next day, March 16, 1934, both the Black Committee and the Department of Justice tried to induce Lindbergh’s support. For more than two hours, Lindbergh sat in the big red leather witness chair in the largest caucus room in the Senate Office Building. The room was packed with cameras and microphones and scores of people who wanted a glimpse of their hero. In answering even the toughest questions about commercial irregularities, he remained measured and articulate, insistent that “these contractors should have been given the right to trial before being convicted.” The New York Times reported, “Whenever his face flashed in the familiar, winsome smile, a murmur of approval ran through the hall. He seemed still to be one of the world’s most fascinating figures.”

The same day he testified, Carl L. Ristine, Special Assistant to the Attorney General, asked Lindbergh to confer privately with him “about some matters pertaining to air mail contracts and controversial subjects.” Lindbergh appeared in his office at the Post Office Department Building in Washington that evening. Upon his arrival, Lindbergh found not only Ristine, but also A. G. Patterson, chief investigator for the Black Committee, and a stenographer. Sensing that he was being set up, Lindbergh placed a call to Henry Breckinridge in New York.

Breckinridge advised his client to make no statement and to have no conversation before anyone representing the Black Committee without a subpoena, witnesses, and counsel present. He also told Lindbergh that if the inquiry were by an accredited representative of the Attorney General of the United States, it was his duty “to give freely any facts in his possession that had to do with any offense against the laws of the United States.” Lindbergh replied, “Check.” Breckinridge asked to speak to Ristine, who explained that Patterson had only stopped by and that the stenographer was, in fact, a personal secretary of the Attorney General. If Ristine would agree to furnish a transcript of the proceedings promptly, Breckinridge said he did not object to Lindbergh’s being questioned.

The interrogation quickly turned testy, full of hypothetical questions and hostile insinuations. Lindbergh felt that Ristine was not interested in an investigation of facts so much as a confirmation of his opinions that laws had been violated. But he also felt so confident about his position that he answered questions for close to three and one-half hours, thwarting Ristine at every turn. At times he seemed to enjoy toying with him, making him lose his temper by restraining his own. In the end, Ristine learned nothing that advanced his cause. Almost a month later, Lindbergh telegraphed Ristine reminding him that he still had not received the transcript of their conference.

By then it would have been imprudent for the Department of Justice not to comply. The Army was delivering the mail on a greatly reduced schedule, and a twelfth pilot had just crashed. Radio, newspapers, and newsreels all offered Lindbergh platforms from which to address the nation.

An editorial in the New York Times asserted that Lindbergh was “as fine a witness as one could find searching the whole world over.” Everyone from the man on the street to William Randolph Hearst concurred. Congressman Hamilton Fish, who represented the President’s home district, said his constituents’ mail had been running ninety-seven percent in favor of Lindbergh ever since the “discourteous treatment” shown by Stephen Early in replying to the Colonel’s initial telegram. Walter Lippmann, like many other Washington pundits, found it “shocking” the way in which “overzealous partisans of the Administration” set out to discredit Lindbergh—“to investigate his earnings, to make out that he was a vulgar profiteer who was disqualified and had no right to be heard.”

On April 20, 1934, Postmaster General Farley—the unwitting appointee who took the fall for the Administration’s political blunder—called a conference of commercial airlines for the purpose of accepting new bids for the old airmail routes. To save face, Farley said that no line would be granted a contract if it had been represented at the “Spoils Conference” of 1930, at which Walter Brown had parceled out the original contracts. The major airlines responded by reorganizing, mostly by changing their names: American Airways became American Airlines; Eastern Air Transport became Eastern Airlines; United Aircraft became United Airlines; and Transcontinental and Western Air became Trans World Airlines. Lindbergh found the solution “reminiscent of something to be found in Alice in Wonderland.”

Some of the leading personnel at each company had to be sacrificed in the “purge,” including Lindbergh’s friend Richard Robbins at TWA. Lindbergh himself wrote a letter of resignation, because he did not want to be part of a company “based on injustice and which necessitates the resignation of officers who have contributed so greatly to its development”; but management persuaded him to stay. On May 8, 1934, TWA was flying the mail again, and Charles Lindbergh had emerged as the one figure both the public and the industry believed they could turn to serve as their watchdog.

The “Air-Mail Fiasco,” as Lippmann referred to it, had deep repercussions for the President. For the first time since he had taken office, his authority had been effectively challenged, making him appear both fallible and impenitent. Neither Roosevelt nor Lindbergh would ever forget the other’s behavior during that skirmish, nor would either forgive.

By summer, Lindbergh was restless again. He let the New York apartment go and placed an order for a new plane, a single-engine, 125 h.p., two-place high-wing monoplane built by the Monocoupe Corporation in St. Louis. In August, the Lindberghs picked it up and proceeded to the West Coast to visit Anne’s invalid sister.

The Lindberghs joined the Morgans at Will Rogers’s 250-acre ranch in Pacific Palisades. Away on a trip, Rogers had made the spread available to Elisabeth, then desperately trying to recuperate. On Wednesday, September 19, 1934—after only three days together—the Lindberghs were abruptly summoned East again. Colonel Norman Schwarzkopf telephoned from New Jersey to tell Lindbergh that the kidnapping case had been cracked and a man he believed for certain had been involved in the crime had been apprehended—a German carpenter from the Bronx. “Oh God,” Anne said upon hearing the news, “it’s starting all over again.” “Yes,” Charles replied, “but they’ve got him at last.”

The Lindberghs moved back to Next Day Hill, still their safest refuge from the press. The media was so frenzied in its reporting on “the crime of the century” that each new revelation ignited a wildfire of rumor, in some cases forever clouding aspects of the story. But as the smoke cleared, certain tangible truths about this case revealed themselves:

Since the spring of 1932, the wood technologist Arthur Koehler had been analyzing the kidnap ladder. He began by completely disassembling it, numbering each rail and rung. Several types of wood—pine, birch, fir—went into the ladder’s construction, each with its own internal markings of rings and knots and its own external markings from the machinery that milled the raw timber into lumber and from the tools used to build the ladder. One piece of wood—identified as “rail number 16”—was especially interesting because it had four nail holes in it that had no connection with the making of the ladder, thus suggesting prior usage. Of low-grade sapwood, with no signs of weathering, it suggested that the rail had been previously nailed down indoors and used for rough construction, perhaps in the interior of a garage or attic.

There were dozens of other clues that kept Koehler on the investigative trail. The rungs of this homemade ladder, for example, were of soft Ponderosa pine but showed no signs of wear, indicating that the ladder had been built for this particular job. The marks on those rungs from the planer that dressed the wood revealed an unusual combination of cutter heads. Koehler mailed a form letter to 1,600 lumber mills on the East Coast, asking if their lumber planers shared the same characteristics. Positive replies came from twenty-five mills, which were asked to send sample boards. From them, Koehler was able to identify the Dorn Lumber Mill in McCormick, South Carolina, as the source of the boards that became the ladder’s siderails. Twenty-five lumberyards had received shipments of Dorn’s southern pine since the fall of 1929. Through scientific deduction, Koehler whittled the list down to the National Lumber and Millwork Company in the Bronx, which had bought its shipment in December 1931, three months before the kidnapping.

In November 1933, after eighteen months of investigation, Koehler needed only the sales records of the Bronx lumberyard to close in on the likely builder of the ladder. Unfortunately, National Lumber was largely a cash business and kept no such accounts. There, in the middle of the Bronx, Koehler’s investigation reached an apparent dead end.

Meantime, the FBI, New Jersey State Police, and New York City Police Department had continued to follow every lead. Gradually, a cluster of clues surfaced in the form of ransom bills, which began appearing within two weeks of their having been paid in St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx. Each was traced as far back as possible—usually from a New York bank to a shop to a customer, who was then investigated. On April 5, 1933, a Presidential Order increased the flow of Lindbergh ransom money: To combat the growing Depression practice of hoarding gold, Roosevelt directed that all gold coin and certificates valued at more than one hundred dollars be deposited or exchanged at a Federal Reserve Bank by May first. It would not become a crime to save or spend gold certificates, for the crime lay only in possessing more than one hundred dollars’ worth; but they suddenly became less common and thus easier to spot.

On May first the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at Liberty and Nassau received $2,980 from a man who signed his name as J. J. Faulkner. When the bank realized that it was Lindbergh ransom money, the police searched the address on his deposit slip. But Faulkner was never found. Another ten bills turned up during the year, most of them in Manhattan. On the occasions when the recipients of the bills could recall who had passed them, they repeated the same characteristics—a white male of average height, blue eyes, high cheekbones and pointed chin, a German accent.

On September 18, 1934, a teller at the Corn Exchange Bank in the Bronx checked a ten-dollar gold certificate against the list of Lindbergh ransom money and found a match. He notified the authorities, who noticed writing in the margin of the bill—“4U-13-14 N.Y.” The police investigators speculated that the bill came from a nearby gas station. One of the bank’s clients was the Warren-Quinlan service station on Lexington Avenue and 127th Street. The manager there, Walter Lyle, remembered the customer who had paid for ninety-eight cents’ worth of gasoline with the bill. When Lyle had looked askance at the gold certificate, the customer had said in a decidedly German accent that the money was good—that, in fact, he had about one hundred more just like it at home. The New York Motor Vehicle Bureau provided the police with the name of the owner of that car—Bruno Richard Hauptmann of 1279 East 222nd Street, the Bronx. In addition to information about his dark blue 1930 Dodge sedan, the registration card indicated that he was German-born and a carpenter.

The police staked out his house, which was within minutes of Woodlawn Cemetery, St. Raymond’s, Dr. Condon’s house, the National Lumber and Millwork Company, and the area in which most of the ransom money had been passed.

On the morning of September nineteenth, three black sedans carrying Special Agent Thomas Sisk from the FBI, “Buster” Keaten of the New Jersey State Police, and James Finn of the New York Police Department, among others, parked down his street. The officers watched Hauptmann through binoculars as he left his house and walked around the corner to his locked garage, from which he removed his car. They tailed him as he drove up Tremont Avenue; and, before losing him in traffic, one of the officers pulled him over. In an instant, the suspect was surrounded by police brandishing guns. They removed his wallet and found that this was Bruno Richard Hauptmann and that he was carrying a twenty-dollar gold certificate, the serial number of which they instantly found on the master list. When they asked where he got the gold note, he said from his house, where he had another three hundred of them. The police asked if he had not recently told a gas station attendant that he had one hundred such bills at home, and Hauptmann admitted that he had lied to the attendant.

In an apparent attempt to display his honesty, Hauptmann quickly revealed that he had entered the country illegally, on his third attempt as a stowaway. Since his arrival, he had worked at various jobs before marrying a German-born waitress, fathering their child, and finding regular work as a carpenter.

Although Hauptmann had suggested he was a crooked man gone straight, once the police got him back to his second-floor, five-room apartment, they developed a growing sense of his guilt. Most of the Hauptmanns’ furniture looked new and expensive, incongruous in its humble surroundings. The centerpiece of the room, for example, was a luxurious floor-model Stromberg-Carlson radio, worth hundreds of dollars. When Hauptmann’s wife, Anna, entered the apartment and saw her husband in handcuffs, he tried to calm her in German, saying that the police were there because of an incident involving his gambling. An officer who spoke German picked up on the fib. An inspection of their bedroom turned up hundreds of dollars worth of promissory notes, new ladies’ shoes, five twenty-dollar gold pieces, and an expensive pair of field glasses. The police asked Hauptmann point-blank where he had the rest of the Lindbergh ransom money. The suspect denied knowledge of the money or the case, other than what he had read in the newspaper. The police ripped open his mattress but found only stuffing inside.

Hauptmann explained that his fortunes had recently changed, that he had not been a carpenter for several years and that successful Wall Street investments had allowed him to purchase his few luxury items. In the living room, the police found ledger sheets of stock transactions—as well as road maps of New Jersey and other states along the Eastern seaboard. Hauptmann’s landlady was ushered upstairs with two ten-dollar gold notes that Hauptmann had given her toward his current rent. They were Lindbergh ransom bills. While the police turned his apartment inside-out, Hauptmann sat impassively—occasionally stealing a glance out the window.

Sisk of the FBI walked to the window. There was nothing of interest outside, just the small, crude garage fifty feet away. “Is that where you have the money?” he asked. Hauptmann said that he had no money. Sisk, Keaten, and Finn went to investigate the garage anyway.

Finn noticed that two of the floorboards there were loose, and when they pried them up they noticed fresh dirt. Grabbing a shovel, he dug until he hit a jar. Inside was nothing except water. Convinced that it had once contained ransom money, Finn confronted Hauptmann with his accusation again. Hauptmann reiterated that he had no ransom money, that he did not know what Finn was talking about. With that, they collected some of Hauptmann’s papers, with specimens of his handwriting, and carted him off to the 2nd Precinct police station on the lower West Side for questioning. A few hours later, they brought in Anna Hauptmann.

She was released within a few hours, appearing to know nothing of any criminal activity on her husband’s part. On her return home, she saw police still combing her apartment for clues. They had made two significant discoveries. In one of Hauptmann’s notebooks, they found a sketch of a ladder, of the same crude design as the one left on the Lindbergh property. They also found that Hauptmann’s toolchest was complete except for the standard three-quarter-inch chisel, which was one of the few pieces of evidence left at the scene.

The police subjected Hauptmann to twenty-four hours of punishing examination. He consistently denied any participation or knowledge of the Lindbergh kidnapping. He said he had worked on a construction crew at the Majestic Apartments on March 1, 1932—the day of the kidnapping—and remained on the job through the following month, at which time he quit carpentry. Later that night, Joseph Perrone, the cab driver in the Bronx who had delivered one of the ransom notes to Dr. Condon, was brought into the interrogation room at the 2nd Precinct. Pressed by the police, he identified Hauptmann as the man who had dispatched him to Dr. Condon’s house two years earlier.

Close to one o’clock in the morning—when Hauptmann was hungry and weary—they asked if he would provide samples of his handwriting. He agreed, offering specimens of both his printing and cursive. The writing varied in style, as though Hauptmann were trying to disguise it. Even so, dozens of idiosyncrasies in the spelling of words and the shapes of letters, which bore startling similarities to the Lindbergh ransom notes, kept appearing. After a solid day and night of relentless investigation, the suspect slumped over the writing table.

A fresh team of FBI agents and New York and New Jersey police arrived in the Bronx that morning to dismantle the Hauptmann garage. Behind a board nailed across two joists above the workbench, a detective found two newspaper-wrapped packets. One contained one hundred ten-dollar gold notes, the other eighty-three bills. All their serial numbers were on the ransom list. Removing more boards from the joists, the police found another hidden shelf, this one with a one-gallon shellac can. Inside, beneath some rags, were a dozen packages of gold notes, tens and twenties—another $11,930 of ransom money. Anna Hauptmann was shown the money and was dumbstruck. Downtown, the police were informed of the discovery and asked Hauptmann if he had any gold notes hidden away. Three times he denied having any, until they told him of their discovery.

Caught in another lie, Hauptmann proceeded to explain the presence of more than a quarter of the Lindbergh ransom in his garage. He said a tubercular friend of his from Germany named Isidor Fisch, with whom he had invested in the stock market and in a sideline business trading furs, had gone home to his parents in Leipzig the previous winter. Before leaving, he had stowed several containers of belongings for safekeeping, including a shoe box, which Hauptmann said he placed on the top shelf of a broom closet in his kitchen. During a recent rain, water leaked through the kitchen ceiling and into the closet. While inspecting it for damage, he discovered the forgotten shoe box, which he opened—only to discover $40,000 in gold certificates. Hauptmann said he hastily removed the money to his garage to dry it out. Because Fisch had owed him $7,000, he had no qualms spending that much. Unfortunately, Fisch could not confirm the story. He had died the preceding March. Fisch’s family later reported that not only had Isidor returned to them penniless, but over the next year they heard from several people from whom he had borrowed money.

After listening to the story, the police obtained several more incriminating details, which refuted other Hauptmann assertions. The suspect had claimed to have worked at the Majestic Apartments on Central Park West and Seventy-second Street for two or three months in 1932, starting on March first, the day of the Lindbergh kidnapping. The New York police investigation uncovered that Hauptmann did not begin his work at the Majestic until the twenty-first of March … and that he had quit the job on April second, only hours before the ransom money had been passed at St. Raymond’s. It was the last date on which Hauptmann worked as a carpenter before becoming a Wall Street investor.

Almost simultaneously, Albert S. Osborne, the eminent “questioned documents examiner,” who had been studying the handwriting of the ransom notes since May of 1932, confirmed what seemed obvious to many who casually compared the ransom notes to Hauptmann’s handwriting, samples written before and after his arrest. He said they were written by one and the same person. His colleague-son concurred.

Several secondary witnesses paraded through the 2nd Precinct, each picking Hauptmann out of a lineup, though the one on whom the police counted most did not pull through. John F. Condon spent hours at the police station, much of it in the immediate presence of Hauptmann. While he felt strongly that this was “Cemetery John,” Jafsie was reluctant to assert as much. Condon insisted that he had to be careful, that a “man’s life is in jeopardy.” He might have meant more than Hauptmann’s, as he revealed to Agent L. G. Turrou. Upon fingering a suspect, Condon said, he felt his own life “wasn’t worth five cents” because “They” would “kill him.”

Hauptmann’s character came further into question on Thursday afternoon, when the police received information from authorities abroad. Contrary to Hauptmann’s insistence that he had no criminal record prior to his arrival in America, German police reported that he had been convicted of grand larceny and armed robbery. In one instance, he had entered a house through a second-story window by way of a ladder. In another, he had held up two women at gunpoint, seizing groceries they were carting in baby carriages. He had served close to four years in a German prison. Shortly after his release, while still on probation, he was arrested for another series of burglaries. He had barely been reincarcerated when he escaped from prison grounds and attempted to stow away to America.

Still lacking a confession to the Lindbergh kidnapping, the police handcuffed a weakened Hauptmann in a chair, turned out the lights, and threatened to “knock [his] brains out.” They almost made good on the threat, kicking him and beating him, probably with a hammer, delivering blows to the shoulders, arms, abdomen, and head. More questioning followed; but he never confessed to any knowledge of or participation in the Lindbergh kidnapping.

While teams of police tore his story apart, others did the same to his house. Back at 222nd Street in the Bronx, more evidence piled up. On the doortrim inside a closet in the Hauptmann baby’s room, a detective discovered some writing in pencil: “2974 Decatur” and “Sedgwick 3–7154.” They were the address and former phone number of Jafsie. The board was pried loose and presented to Hauptmann, still in custody. More than once he admitted that the writing was his, and he provided an explanation for writing Condon’s address that was as peculiar as his admission had been unexpected. “I must have read it in the paper about the story,” he said. “I was a little bit interest, and keep a little bit record of it and maybe I was just in the closet and was reading the paper and put down the address.”

Then another discovery was made at the house. Although the lead detective from New Jersey had been in Hauptmann’s attic several times, he had not previously noticed one of the pine planks in its southwest corner was shorter than the other boards by a good eight feet. This detective suddenly recalled the wood expert, Arthur Koehler, commenting that rail 16 of the ladder had some prior use. Rail 16 was brought to the Bronx and laid across the crossbeams of the attic floor. Four holes in the rail lined up exactly with four nailholes in the floor joists.

Arthur Koehler was summoned. Although a little more than an inch of wood had been cut away between the rail and the original floor plank, the number, color, dimension, and pattern of the rings indicated to him that the one piece of the wood had been cut from the other. Koehler also examined a hand plane taken from Hauptmann’s garage, whose blade markings, he said, revealed that it had been used in making the ladder.

The police searched for some implement that might have been used to punch the holes in the strange design of interlocking circles on the ransom notes; but no such tool nor the symbol’s significance was ever discovered. They did find, however, yet another stash of money in the garage, this one in a two-by-four, which had been pounded between two wall joists and drilled with six holes. In five of them were rolls of ransom money. In the larger sixth hole they found a small, loaded pistol. Again authorities asked Hauptmann if he was concealing any more money before they confronted him with the goods.

Upon the Lindberghs’ return to New Jersey, Colonel Schwarzkopf informed them of the evidence being marshaled against Hauptmann. For two and one-half years, the police and the press had referred to the unknown perpetrators of the crime in the plural. With the apprehension of Hauptmann, all such references changed to the singular. Although Anna Hauptmann claimed not to have known that her husband’s first name was anything other than Richard, the press now spoke of him as Bruno.

On Wednesday, September 26, 1934, Lindbergh appeared before a grand jury in the Bronx County Courthouse. He had little to add to the evidence against Hauptmann, but his mere presence reminded the twenty-three jurors why it was so important that they serve justice. After fifteen minutes answering questions—mostly about the ransom money—a juror asked if Lindbergh would recognize the voice of “Cemetery John” if he heard it again. “It would be very difficult to sit here and say that I could pick a man by that voice,” Lindbergh said of the few syllables he had heard shouted from a distance of some two hundred feet over two and one-half years earlier. Upon completing his testimony, however, District Attorney James Foley asked if he wished to see the man they had arrested and hear his voice. Lindbergh said yes.

Hauptmann was indicted for extortion that afternoon. The next morning he was brought to the D.A.’s office in the Bronx, where a group of detectives were waiting. Hauptmann was ordered to stand in various parts of the room and say, “Hey, Doctor! Here, Doctor! Over here!” After Hauptmann was ordered back to his prison cell, the tall man wearing a cap and sunglasses huddled among the detectives went to Foley’s desk and averred, “That is the voice I heard that night.”

In October 1934, a grand jury sat in the Hunterdon County Courthouse in Flemington, New Jersey, to determine if there was enough evidence to indict Hauptmann on murder charges. New Jersey law stated that if a death occurred during the commission of a felony, the felon was responsible for the taking of that life even if it were accidental or taken by somebody else. The State had only to prove that Hauptmann had entered the house to commit a theft and that the baby had been killed as a result of that crime. Instead of five to thirty years for kidnapping, the state’s Attorney General, David Wilentz, could ask for the death penalty. Under Wilentz’s direction, most of the case’s leading players faced the grand jury, including a cameo appearance by Charles Lindbergh. He attested to his recognizing Bruno Richard Hauptmann’s voice.

Hauptmann was indicted for murder in the first degree, and the dozens who had gathered outside the courthouse in the small town cheered. A crowd of one thousand stood in silence beneath their lit torches the night of October nineteenth, when he was extradited to New Jersey and incarcerated in the new Flemington jail, just behind the courthouse. He pled not guilty at his arraignment, and his trial was set for January 2, 1935. Until that time, round-the-clock guards were forbidden to speak to him. The overhead light in his cell burned day and night so long as he was in custody.

Primarily for financial reasons, Hauptmann changed attorneys. His wife had retained a sympathetic but ineffectual noncriminal lawyer to represent him until a reporter from the New York Journal approached her with an intriguing offer. For the exclusive rights to Anna Hauptmann’s story, the Journal agreed to hire well-known criminal attorney Edward J. Reilly to defend her husband. The Hearst paper would also pick up such miscellaneous expenses as Anna Hauptmann’s lodging in New Jersey during the trial. The deal seemed irresistible, even though the former “Bull of Brooklyn,” as he had been called, was now referred to as “Death House Reilly,” for defending so many murder suspects. Unknown to the Hauptmanns, the fifty-two-year-old Reilly was a syphilitic alcoholic, loud of voice and dress. In other ways, he was even worse suited for the role of defending a man the press had already convicted. Reilly not only kept a photograph of his hero Charles Lindbergh on his desk but also believed, as he told an FBI agent, “that he knew Hauptmann was guilty, didn’t like him, and was anxious to see him get the chair.” On being named Hauptmann’s counsel, Reilly printed special stationery for the case, which featured a ladder embossed in red.

Reilly mounted his basic defense—gathering witnesses to support Hauptmann’s alibis: that he had been in New York picking up his wife at work on the night of the kidnapping; that he had been at a party with friends in the Bronx the night the ransom had been paid; and that the money in his garage had come from Isidor Fisch. Meanwhile, the Lindberghs tried to resume their lives at Next Day Hill. Fortunately for Anne and Charles, just as the case threatened to consume them all over again, a houseguest arrived.

Harold Nicolson—whom the Lindberghs had met the previous year—had been engaged as the official biographer of Dwight Morrow. He moved into Next Day Hill for ten weeks so that he could peruse his subject’s papers and interview his friends and relatives. Although trying to concentrate on Morrow, Nicolson was suddenly in a position to have greater access to Lindbergh than almost anybody outside his family had ever had. And while Nicolson was meant to be recording the past, it was impossible not to be drawn into the current controversy.

“This is the only household in the United States in which the L. baby is not discussed,” Nicolson wrote his wife, Vita Sackville-West. Although Nicolson had heard that Lindbergh was silent and aloof, he was surprised to find him affable and even garrulous. His somewhat nervous “chatter, chatter, chatter” at breakfast allowed him to keep his mind off the one forbidden topic. “I daresay I shall get the whole tragic story one day in a flood of confidence,” Nicolson reported to his wife. “But one has the feeling that the wound is still terribly raw and cannot be touched. He is interesting about America, which he knows very well. I find him, apart from his actual physical charm, a really delightful companion.” Nicolson was one of the few to detect his host’s humor from the start, as when Lindbergh warned him about his dog, telling Nicolson that if he tried to pass him, Thor might grab hold of him. “By the throat?” Nicolson asked. “Not necessarily,” Lindbergh replied. “And if he does that, you must just stay still and holler all you can.”

Nicolson surprised himself, succumbing to Lindbergh’s personality as he did. Anne’s former mentor from Smith, Mina Curtiss, for one, initially found him “really no more than a mechanic, and that had it not been for the lone eagle flight, he would now be in charge of a gasoline station on the outskirts at St. Louis.” Nicolson, on the other hand, discovered “a sensible man, without unthoughtful prejudices and with a direct approach to things.” His admiration only deepened as he observed Lindbergh’s uncommon decency. He was repeatedly impressed with the hero’s sense of proportion, how he “never shows off and never talks big.” He found Lindbergh’s reputation for sulkiness and bad manners entirely the result of the public’s desire to pick at his public image. “What I loathe most,” Lindbergh told Nicolson one day, “are the silly women who bring their kids up to shake hands with me at railway stations. It is embarrassing for me, and embarrassing for the kids. It makes me fair sick.” After ten days in his company, the rather particular houseguest was finding Lindbergh “as simple and refreshing as a stream in the woods.” Another month, and he decided that Lindbergh was nothing less than American royalty, that he “really is a hero in this continent and he never cheapens himself.”

He admired Anne as well. Nicolson read her article “Flying Around the North Atlantic” in the latest National Geographic and pronounced it “excellent.” He turned to Charles and said, “You should take another trip so that she can write another story, for the writing instinct, once it is started, is much stronger than the flying one!” Anne was flattered, further encouraged a few weeks later when Nicolson reported that his wife also liked the article.

Before daybreak on the morning of December 3, 1934, the night watchman at Next Day Hill knocked on the Lindberghs’ bedroom door. “Colonel, Pasadena calling,” he said. Mrs. Morrow was in California, where Elisabeth had recently been operated on for appendicitis, so this predawn call did not bode well. Lindbergh took the phone and said, “I’m afraid that’s bad news.” Anne stood by his side, scribbling on a pad, “Tell her I’ll come out.” Charles had only to shake his head. They returned to their bed, where he tried to comfort her. After all Anne had been through in the past two years, it was difficult to accept yet another family tragedy. The pain only increased when Mrs. Morrow returned to Englewood and, in an utterly thoughtless moment, blurted to Anne, “Of all my children, why did it have to be Elisabeth?”

Her sister’s death increased Anne’s devotion to her husband. While he took charge of the burial arrangements, she realized “how I must be good to Charles and love him always, and the things I must cherish and the things I must crush.” Like him, Anne began to steel her emotions, realizing she could not “count on anything.” She vowed to rededicate her life to Charles, as she resolved “to finish the book for him, to give him a home and a sense of freedom and power and fulfillment.” But first of all, she resigned herself “not to disappoint C. at the Trial.”

The Lindberghs had little time to mourn, only a few weeks before they had to present themselves to the public again. Hundreds of reporters, photographers, columnists, radio announcers, and technicians were already converging upon the little courthouse in Flemington. The fifty rooms at the town’s Union Hotel had not had a vacancy in a month, forcing the majority of visitors to scramble for places to sleep. Half the houses in Flemington opened their doors to strangers, including one where Anna Hauptmann stayed. Country clubs, taverns, and poolhalls rented rooms and floorspace. By New Year’s Eve, thousands of tourists were angling for ringside seats. There was carousing in the streets.

Within earshot of the uproar, Bruno Richard Hauptmann tried to remain calm as he lay upon his cot, smoking cigarettes and reading. But he spent most of his time pacing the prison bull pen. “His reading has been confined to short periods, then the pacing would resume,” observed one of the guards. “He also has a worried expression.”