Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (41 page)

Once the New York police identified Hauptmann as the suspect, they informed Schwarzkopf and Hoover. Immediately, city, state, and federal agents streamed into the Needham Avenue vicinity to watch the area and the house. Still fighting for jurisdiction, like children grabbing for the prize, each demanded the right to have an equal number of agents present on the scene. The men caused a ruckus in the streets, blaming one another for creating suspicion that might tip off the suspect. They were warned by neighbors, bitten by a dog, and admonished by the local police. After several days of negotiations, they developed a plan, agreeable to all agencies, for arresting Hauptmann with the least resistance.
¹¹

Cautioned by the forensic psychiatrist Dudley Schoenfeld, the officers agreed that it would be better not to take him from his home. By studying the ransom notes and the kidnapper’s bargaining behavior, Schoenfeld had deduced that he was a schizophrenic who viewed himself at once as helpless and powerful. Schoenfeld believed that he would have homosexual tendencies and would be quiet and restrained. Furthermore, he predicted that the man would carry a ransom note with him at all times as an emblem of his victory.
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As Hauptmann drove at a fast clip down White Plains Avenue toward Manhattan, the black police sedans followed, but with enough
space to avoid detection. Hauptmann nonetheless saw them through his rearview mirror and sped through the streets at forty miles per hour. When traffic was blocked by a city sprinkler truck a half-block north of East Tremont Avenue, the lead police car pushed Hauptmann’s Dodge to the side of the road and brought it to a stop. One detective rushed into the passenger seat beside the driver; the other police stopped behind and scrambled toward him. At gunpoint, they pulled Hauptmann out of the car, frisked him, and handcuffed him.

In deference to Schwarzkopf and the New Jersey State Police, Arthur (Buster) Keaton had been called to the scene to make the arrest. He pulled Hauptmann’s wallet out of his pocket, and had what must have been the inestimable pleasure of removing from it a $20 gold ransom note.

To Anne and Charles, visiting with Elisabeth and Aubrey at Will Rogers’s ranch in Santa Monica, Schwarzkopf’s call came with little warning.
¹³
While the hunt for the kidnapper had been unrelenting, so too had been their efforts to put Charlie’s murder behind them. Now they were forced to confront it again. Anne and Charles flew east, retracing the route they had flown at leisure just a few weeks earlier, and Jon was rushed by train from North Haven back to Englewood.
¹⁴
There, the family gathered once more to decide what to do.

Things were happening fast, and evidence was quickly mounting.
¹⁵
In spite of Hauptmann’s cool denial of complicity in the crime, within hours of his arrest the police found two stashes of Lindbergh gold notes, totaling $14,600, hidden between the joists of his garage. Along with the notes, they found fieldglasses, several maps of New Jersey, drawings of a homemade ladder and two windows, lumber and nails that matched those used to build the ladder, a small, empty green bottle marked “ether,”
¹⁶
a loaded pistol, paper that matched that of the ransom notes, and Condon’s phone number scribbled on his closet wall.
¹⁷
The next morning, the FBI called Schwarzkopf to congratulate him. Hauptmann’s handwriting samples, spelling, and grammar matched those of the ransom notes.
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Within a week, on the same day that Anne wrote to Evangeline, Charles, disguised in a hat and horn-rimmed glasses, had come face to face with Hauptmann in a line-up. Unknown
to Hauptmann, Lindbergh had unequivocally identified his voice as that of Cemetery John.
¹⁹
Another half-century of archival investigation would turn scholars into detectives and facts into allegations, but within a week of his arrest, a worldwide network of police, reporters, and criminologists were convinced that Hauptmann was the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby.
MYSTERY SOLVED,
declared the
New York Times
.
²⁰

While Schwarzkopf commandeered Hauptmann’s extradition to New Jersey, Hauptmann’s lawyers gathered evidence to support a plea of insanity. State examiners, however, deemed Hauptmann sane and morally cognizant.
²¹
He exuded not “evil” but humanity insensate; intelligence unmediated by common emotion. He spoke in a low, barely audible voice and displayed no excitement, perspective, or imagination, consonant with a man of above normal intelligence. Born with a speech defect and a form of disgraphia, which caused him to affix an
e
to the ends of words, he suffered spells of imbalance and dizziness resulting from his wartime head injury.
²²

Day after day, Hauptmann sat in a wooden chair answering the questions of police and psychiatrists. He spoke matter-of-factly in his high-pitched voice, showing no signs of doubt or fear. With his physical endurance and his steadfast denial of guilt, he wore out everyone; he never asked for his wife or his lawyer. Yet he could not account for his actions on the day of the crime and had no alibi.
²³
He had sought employment at the Majestic Apartments in Manhattan on the morning of March 1, but he had been turned away, had driven home, put his car in the garage, and, as far as anyone knew, had disappeared. Lacking proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Hauptmann was not in New Jersey on the day of the kidnapping, the New York City police had no choice but to release him to the custody of Colonel Schwarzkopf.
²⁴
His trial was set for January 2 at the State Courthouse in Flemington, New Jersey.

A
nne testifying in the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, January 3, 1935
.

(AP/Wide World Photos)

I
t was the week before Christmas 1934, but no one in the Morrow home felt like celebrating. To the friends who had gathered for Sunday dinner, Next Day Hill reeked of death.
²
The silver was laid, the china was set, the Christmas holly was about to be hung, but the
stately blue dining room, once bustling with warmth and vitality, seemed cold and bare.

Elisabeth had died three weeks earlier of pneumonia in the wake of abdominal surgery. The doctors had believed her appendix was diseased, but surgery revealed a thick adhesion that had strangled her bowel.
³
Three days later, Elisabeth contracted pneumonia and, within a week, was dead.

When Anne received the phone call from her mother in the early morning hours of December 3, she instinctively knew it signaled “the end.” For Anne, Elisabeth had died too soon—they had so much left to see and share with each other. There were roads without ends, sentences half-finished, and sketches of the future only half-drawn, and now there would be no completion. Life had a “pasteboard” reality—ephemeral, illusory, suspended in time.

Again, birth and death commingled, turning Anne’s thoughts to Charlie, imbuing her daily life with sorrow. As she paced the gravel paths in the Morrow estate, the trees and sky were disconnected from her “former life.” Her desire to preserve the memory of Elisabeth was reflected in her poem.
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But with the turn of the year, Anne’s former life returned, its laws the same as they had been. On January 2, the madness took hold again—the crowds, the reporters, the frenzied energy of the human hunt. Everyone, from the ordinary spectator to the celebrated personality, craved the touch and feel of the Lindbergh kidnapping. It was as though the violation of an icon permitted them access to forbidden places within themselves. Energy rushed into the quiet town of Flemington, New Jersey, like air into a giant vacuum.

No one standing on Main Street on that bright winter morning, as the limousines and vans filled with celebrities and journalists moved like juggernauts through enemy territory, would have known that the nation was still in the grip of the Depression. The trial breathed new life into the town’s faltering economy. The population doubled nearly overnight. The Union Hotel, across the road from the courthouse, hired sixteen new hands and filled all of its fifty rooms. Vendors filled the streets, selling trinkets and phony memorabilia: replicas of the three-piece ladder, bookends shaped like the courthouse, photographs of Lindbergh with false signatures, and snippets of baby hair sold by a young man with suspiciously fine curly blond locks.

In a perverse way, it was American capitalism at its best. Products flooded the market, and the market grew bigger every day. A hundred and fifty prospective jurors, a hundred reporters, fifty cameramen, twenty-five communications technicians, prosecution and defense lawyers, dozens of investigators, thirty court officials, and three hundred spectators, red-faced and cold, pushed up against the large courthouse windows, waiting for a glimpse of a celebrity.
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The century-old courthouse, with its pillared façade, stood as a symbol of calm above the fray.

But inside, the unimposing nature of the courtroom, with few architectural details, blurred the edges of rank and function. It looked more like an Elizabethan playhouse than a court of law, and, in many ways, it had the intensity of theatre.

Hired by the
New York Times
because of her novelist’s eye, Edna Ferber analyzed the voyeurism of the hovering crowds and the allegorical
quality of the unfolding drama. Disgusted by the behavior of the publicity-seeking socialites who attended the trial for “trend rather than tragedy,” she wrote in her piece, “Vultures at the Trial,” “we are like the sans-culottes, like the knitting women watching the heads fall at the foot of the guillotine.”
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