I witnessed the rest of it long-distance, via the newspapers and an occasional on-the-qt call from Colonel Henry Breckinridge, who had come to agree with me that Slim’s no-cops-allowed approach was (as Breckinridge put it) “counterproductive.”
The only other difference, this time around, was that Colonel Schwarzkopf was kept abreast of the Norfolk ransom negotiations (though the Virginia authorities weren’t). Not that it mattered much: Schwarzkopf and his spiffy state police continued to obey the Lone Eagle’s hands-off orders and stayed well away from Curtis and the supposed kidnap gang he was dealing with.
For the rest of April and well into May, Lindbergh followed Commodore Curtis’s lead and boarded first a small rented vessel, then the yacht Marcan, belonging to a hotel-owner pal of Curtis’s, and finally the eighty-five-foot ketch, the Cachalot, belonging to another Curtis crony, for various attempted sea rendezvous with the kidnappers. Raging storms, rough sea and dense fog seemed to conspire with heavy boating traffic to keep any meeting from occurring. Between outings, Curtis-all by his lonesome-would rush ashore for phone calls and meetings with Hilda, Larsen and sundry others of the kidnap gang members, who seemed eager to return the little boy to his weary parents. Detailed descriptions of several boats the kidnappers were using were provided by Curtis, as were various specific rendezvous points.
On May fifth, while Lindy and Curtis and crew were searching for kidnappers off the coast of Virginia, Gaston Bullock Means was getting arrested by the FBI on an embezzlement charge-specifically, “larceny after trust.” Immediately after I suggested it, and Lindbergh himself okayed it, Evalyn had first fired Means, demanding the return of her money, and then-after Means gave a typically wild excuse for not being able to do so-she tipped the feds to him.
But the crime having been committed in the District of Columbia meant Means had to be arrested in D.C. And his home in Chevy Chase was just over the Maryland state line. The feds shadowed him till he drove those few blocks into federal territory, got pulled rudely over and found himself deposited in the office of old J. Edgar himself, who despised former-agent Means for the black eye he’d given the bureau.
And to Hoover, Gaston Bullock Means told a story which he had already tried (unsuccessfully) out on Evalyn and her lawyers.
It seemed when Mrs. McLean requested the return of her one hundred thousand dollars, Means had picked up the money in his brother’s home in Concord, North Carolina, and was on his way to Washington to hand it over when, just outside of Alexandria, a man waving a red lantern flagged him down. This fellow (who Means hadn’t seen all that well) had put a foot on Means’s running board and said, “Hello, Hogan-Eleven told me to take the package from you, here.”
And of course Means had turned the money over to this stranger, because, after all, the stranger knew Means’s code name and Evalyn’s code number.
Later, it came as a devastating shock to Means to discover that the stranger had not really been a representative of Mrs. McLean’s; that her money had never been returned to her.
Unfortunately, nobody questioned Means about this story with the aid of a Chicago lie detector.
And so, naturally, Means pleaded not guilty, and served six days in the red-brick D.C. jail before a bondsman put up the $100,000 bail-a fitting amount, I thought.
The afternoon of the day Means got out of jail-May 12-a colored driver hauling a load of timber pulled his truck alongside a narrow, muddy back road between Princeton and Hopewell and wandered into the underbrush, braving a steady rain, to take a leak. But before he could, he noticed something half-buried in dirt and leaves.
A small, decayed corpse.
Colonel Lindbergh was at the time on the Cachalot, just off the New Jersey coast, trying to make contact with another boat, called (Curtis said) the Mary B. Moss. Curtis was ashore trying to make contact with the kidnappers through “Hilda.” The yacht eased into Cape May Harbor that evening, after another day of miserable weather, though prospects for a better day were imminent. Lindbergh remained aboard ship, where he’d been sleeping nights of late; hopeful that tomorrow the rendezvous would finally be made.
But a naval officer and a Curtis associate boarded the ketch and discovered that the news that had already been on the radio and in headlines had not reached the storm-tossed ship. Gingerly, they told Lindbergh, but I’m told that Slim knew at once from their faces that his son was dead.
The next afternoon-Friday the thirteenth-Lindbergh spent three minutes in the morgue identifying the decomposed body as his son. Anne stayed home.
A few days later, Commodore Curtis-who’d failed to provide either Treasury Agent Frank Wilson or Schwarzkopf and Inspector Welch with any conclusive proof of the existence of Sam, John, Hilda, Larsen, et al.-confessed that it had all been a hoax. Investigators said Curtis’s business was in trouble, and that the year before he’d had a nervous breakdown; also, in the thick of his “negotiations” with the “kidnappers,” he’d signed with the New York Herald-Tribune to tell his story.
The yacht-club commodore was tried for obstructing justice and fined a grand and sentenced to a year in the pokey, though the latter was suspended.
Gaston Means got fifteen years. Nobody could find Evalyn’s hundred thousand (actually one hundred and four thousand, including Means’s “expense account”), though feds ransacked his Chevy Chase home and checked several safety deposit boxes.
The feds also checked the safety deposit boxes of the late Max Hassel and Max Greenberg, who Means in court fingered as the real kidnappers. Nearly a quarter of a mil in cash was found in Hassel’s safety deposit box, but the denominations were fifties and up, whereas both Evalyn and Lindbergh had paid out fives, tens and twenties.
Meanwhile, the “Fox” turned out to be a disbarred lawyer named Norman Whitaker who had indeed been Means’s cellmate; he claimed never to have laid eyes on the Lindbergh boy, that he had assumed the role of “mastermind kidnapper” to help out his old swindler pal. He was in fact in jail at the time of the actual kidnapping. And now he would be in jail again, for two years.
Evalyn wasted no time finding a new cause. In June of ’32, to the dismay of her socialite friends, she began championing and funding the “Bonus Army,” the depression-racked World War veterans who were seeking aid from the government; the government, of course, responded with tear gas and terrorism. But God bless Evalyn and her good heart for trying to help. And the Bonus Army was a hell of a lot better place for her to spend her money than Gaston Bullock Means.
As for the Means tip about Violet Sharpe, Inspector Welch followed up on it, all right. Welch had already been suspicious, as Violet’s stories had continued to shift-the movie theater she said she’d attended March first evolving into a roadhouse called the Peanut Grill, the boyfriend’s name finally coming back to her-Ernie-but leading to her falsely identifying a cabbie named Brinkert when the real “Ernie” was a beau of hers named Miller.
Not surprisingly, Welch questioned Violet repeatedly, particularly in the month following the discovery of the corpse of a child, and on June 10-the day after a particularly pointed interrogation-Violet reacted with panic and anger to the news that Welch was on his way back for another round. At Englewood, she apparently poisoned herself, rather than be questioned by the persistent Welch again. Cyanide.
I felt a little bad about that. I’d helped focus Welch-a thick-headed third-degree artist if ever I met one-on the girl. Not that I figured she was blameless; but so much information died with her.
Professor Condon was considered a suspect, grilled by the cops, humiliated by the public (one letter promised Condon a look at a picture of the child’s kidnapper, and the enclosure was a small mirror); but he held up far better than Violet Sharpe. And much of the press attention he seemed to thrive on, pontificating at the drop of a hint.
Betty Gow’s beau, Red Johnson, was deported; Betty herself, when the Hopewell household broke up, went back to Scotland. The Whatelys stayed on, maintaining the estate for the eventual return of the Lindberghs, who had moved “temporarily” to Next Day Hill, the Morrow estate at Englewood, shortly after the discovery of the little body less than two miles from their Hopewell house.
But butler Ollie took sick-he became increasingly nervous, and troubled by internal pains; he survived an emergency operation for a perforated ulcer, then died four days later. His widow stayed in the Lindberghs’ employ, though her employers forever abandoned the unlucky Hopewell house, donating it to be a welfare center for children.
In mid-August, Anne Lindbergh gave her husband a second son. Lindy beseeched the press and public to allow the boy to “grow up normally”; at the Englewood estate, the cranky fox terrier Wahgoosh was made second-in-command to a surly police dog named Thor, who was known to shred the clothing and flesh of intruders. Kidnap threats against the infant were an everyday occurrence, the notes now requesting money to prevent a kidnapping; in one case kidnap notes and a ransom drop led to the arrest of two suspects-both of whom had alibis in the previous kidnapping, however.
There was something else, which struck me as very strange: when the name of the boy was finally released to the press, it turned out Anne and Charles had christened him “Jon.”
Even without the “h” out, that seemed a hell of a choice.
I quit the force and went into business for myself in December 1932. The Lindbergh case had long since become something I followed in the papers, like everybody else. I began to wonder if they’d ever find the kidnappers. If Capone had really been behind it-he was in the Atlanta pen, now, as Eliot predicted-I didn’t figure they ever would.
On the other hand, that ransom money was out there, and in 1933, the country went off the gold standard, meaning anybody with gold certificates had to turn them in by May first or face the legal consequences. That, thanks to Frank Wilson and Elmer Irey’s insistence on paying out the ransom in gold notes, ought to flush out the kidnappers.
Or the extortionists.
I continued to think it might have been an interloping group with inside info that had contacted Jafsie; with that kid buried in so half-ass a fashion, so near the estate, in woods that had been searched time and again, the kidnappers themselves seemed unlikely to risk going after any dough. They had fucked up that night, accidentally killing the kid maybe when the ladder broke, or when they were fleeing the house, and faded into the night and history.
At least, that was my theory. And when the gold notes were tracked, I’d be proven right or wrong.
A New York City dick named James Finn, a lieutenant, had been keeping in his Manhattan precinct office a large city map charting the path of the surfacing gold notes for over a year, when the gold-standard situation started crowding his map with pins.
I had never met Finn, but apparently he was in touch with Schwarzkopf and even Lindbergh in the early days-just another cop being kept at arm’s length.
Anyway, it was Finn who made the bust. September 19, 1933.
They only got one guy: a German carpenter in the Bronx. Following it from Chicago, in the papers, I figured Finn and the feds would soon shake the rest of the gang out of this Hauptmann guy.
The papers claimed he was Jafsie’s “Cemetery John.”
I had thought about calling Slim with my condolences, when I first heard about the body of his little boy turning up in those woods; but I figured I was the last person he’d want to hear from. I’d got very drunk, sitting by the phone, making my mind up, and got a little weepy, which was the rum talking.
Lindbergh called me, but better than two years later. Not long after they caught the kraut, in fact. A long-distance call so crackly it might have been from another planet, not New Jersey. On the other hand, my experiences in New Jersey led me to believe it just might be another planet.
“Nate,” Slim said, “I’ve been negligent in thanking you.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I wish I could have done more.”
“You wanted to. Sometimes…I wonder how things might be different, if I’d listened to you.”
“Not much. Frankly…if you’ll forgive my bluntness, Colonel, it’s obvious your son died the night of the kidnapping. Nothing we could have done differently would change that.”
“Those evil bastards would be in jail now.”
“Maybe. But this clown Hauptmann will cough up his accomplices. Wait and see.”
I heard him sigh. Then he said: “That’s what we’re counting on. I understand you’re in private practice, now.”
“That’s right. A-l Detective Agency. I’m the president. Also the janitor.”
He laughed. “Same old Nate. If I ever need a detective, I know who to call.”
“Right,” I said. “Frank Wilson.”
He laughed again, wished me well, and I wished him and Anne and their new son the same. And that was that.
It felt strange, sitting on the sidelines, after having been in the midst of this famous affair, early on. Not that I minded. Sometimes I thought about Lindbergh; fairly frequently I thought about Evalyn. Bittersweet memories.
Nonetheless, it was reassuring knowing that this case was behind me-that it was, in fact, virtually solved.