Stolen Away

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.