Sleeping Dogs: A true story of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping

By Michael Foldes

On the night of March 1, 1932, the infant son of famed aviator Charles A. Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow, the daughter of a diplomat, was kidnapped from the family's hilltop estate in Hopewell, NJ. The ensuing investigation involved not only crime fighters at the highest levels, but also members of organized crime, small-time crooks and swindlers, politicians and hangers-on who surfaced from every quarter seeking their own measures of fame and fortune in the mournful glow of the flyer and his wife. A $50,000 ransom was paid, but the boy was not returned. Then, on May 12, 1932, the decomposed corpse of a child was found and identified as Charles Lindbergh, Jr. The search for the kidnapper or kidnappers continued until September 19, 1934, when Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German ex-convict living in the Bronx with his wife and son, was arrested after passing a gold note traced to the ransom. What was known as the Crime of the Century was followed by the Trial of the Century. Hauptmann was convicted and after several appeals, died in New Jersey's electric chair as the sole perpetrator of the crime.
Nearly 50 years later, the deathbed confession of an old woman living in the Hudson Valley, and the subsequent discovery of a gun buried in the concrete floor of the chicken coop behind her house, lead to a plausible explanation not of who actually committed the crime -- but of who didn't. And that's what "Sleeping Dogs" is about.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Foldes
• Release date: Feb 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465998361

Michael Foldes

Michael Foldes is a sales engineer specializing in medical displays and other electronic products. A graduate of The Ohio State University in anthropology, he has edited and published magazines, poetry anthologies, chapbooks, alternate newspapers, technical publications, and was an editor and columnist with Gannett newspapers in Binghamton, NY. He is the founder and managing editor of the online Arts magazine Ragazine.CC. He and his wife have three adult children. They live in Upstate New York.

Book preview

Sleeping Dogs

A true story of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping

and the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann

By Michael Foldes

Sleeping Dogs

A true story of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping

and the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann

By Michael Foldes

Smashwords 2nd Edition

Copyright 2012 by Michael Foldes

All rights reserved.

Cover Photo: Chuck Haupt

Cover Design: Chuck Haupt

Permission to reprint or quote from the work found in this book, unless available in the public domain, must be obtained from the author, who owns the copyright.

ISBN: 978-1-4659-9836-1

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When I was a boy, my father, who was ten when Charles A. Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, gave me a plastic kit model of the Spirit of St. Louis, which we assembled together. While we worked, he told me the story about the flight and why this model, in particular, was important. It took me years to realize the extent of the impact of Lindbergh’s achievement, not only upon my father, but also upon the world. I don’t recall that he ever mentioned the aviator’s son was the victim of a kidnap-slaying; I think I found that out from my mother, who explained the Lindbergh case gave cause for kidnapping to become a federal offense.

– Michael Foldes

For Jack Goehring & Bill Wade …

With whom the story began.

It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon.

Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1: The Bait

Chapter 2: The Evidence Room

Chapter 3: Bandwidth: Getting Over the Lindbergh-Hauptmann Barrier

Chapter 4: Archives

Chapter 5: The Crime

Chapter 6: The Body

Chapter 7: The Gun

Chapter 8: The Goehrings

Chapter 9: The Smolds

Chapter 10: Hugo Firsching

Chapter 11: Isidor Fisch & The Fur Trade

Chapter 12: Anna Hauptmann’s Lawsuit

Chronology of Major Events

Hauptmann’s Trial Testimony

Drs. Swayze & Mitchell Testimony

Anecdotes

Web Sites for Whackers

Acknowledgments

Sleeping Dogs

A true story of the kidnapping of Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr.,

and the wrongful execution of Bruno Richard Hauptmann

Charles A. Lindbergh Jr.’s First Birthday

Prologue

The Lindbergh Case: The ‘Crime of the Century’

Lambertville, N.J., March 1, 1982 – Until recently this riverside New Jersey town’s claim to fame was the annual Shad Festival at the end of April or beginning of May, when thousands gather from miles around to net the spawning fish as they toil up the Delaware River from the Atlantic Ocean. One never knows for sure just when the shad will spawn. But the good people of this once thriving artists’ colony across the river from New Hope, Pa., hadn’t been disappointed by a no-show yet.

This particular March 1, however, was different. It was the 50th anniversary of what had come to be known as The Crime of the Century, the kidnap-slaying of the first-born son of famed aviator Charles Augustus Lindbergh, and his socialite wife and partner in adventure, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Reporters and news teams gathered from around the world for the event, and many of them found lodging at the 170-year-old Lambertville House. Locals dubbed the inn alternate Lindbergh headquarters, a way station for whackers – jargon for people gone off the deep end searching a half-century later for new angles on the unsettling case.

Hopewell, where the abduction took place, had no quaint hotel like the 33-room Lambertville House to shelter the whackers. So for that particular week, numerous tales echoed from the roadhouse’s stone walls as journalists from London rubbed shoulders with reporters from upstate New York, Paris and elsewhere: All within 15 minutes of State Police headquarters in West Trenton, where the trove of Lindbergh evidence was – and still is – spirited away.

In 1982, I traveled to West Trenton to visit the newly opened files to do a story for The Sun-Bulletin newspaper in Binghamton, New York. The story was to be based on new evidence, both material and hearsay: the deathbed confession of an old woman, and a .32 cal. pistol later found buried in the cement floor of the chicken coop behind her house. If some link could be established between the accused, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, and the families or locations in her tale, it might help exonerate him of the crime. If not, it would merely add another chapter to hundreds of others alleging what really happened in Hopewell the night of March 1, 1932.

* * *

A Little Background

Charles Augustus Lindbergh gained worldwide fame and celebrity as the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. On May 20, 1927, he took off from Roosevelt Field, Garden City, Long Island, New York, in his small, custom-built, single-seat monoplane, The Spirit of St. Louis, named after the city where Lindbergh found the financial backing for his flight. A prolonged intensive search for the right aircraft to carry him across the sea ended with an offer from Ryan Aircraft of San Diego to build a plane based on Lindbergh’s single-engine design for the sum of $6,000.00. Two months after the deal with Ryan was made, Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis cross-country to New York, arriving on May 12. Eight days later he was on his way into history.

After fighting demons of hunger and sleeplessness, the former airmail pilot and stunt flyer landed 33 hours and 30 minutes later on May 21 at le Bourget Aerodrome in Paris, France. The trip won for him and his crew the widely sought $25,000 Orteig prize, offered as a challenge and incentive to accomplish what to then had been an all-but-impossible task. Lindbergh’s world, and the world around him, would never be the same.

In December 1927, at the invitation of the United States’ Ambassador to Mexico Dwight Morrow, Lindbergh, now a huge celebrity, flew into Mexico City where a crowd of 150,000 was on hand to greet him. According to an account in The American Experience, Nearly lost within that crowd was the one person who caught Lindbergh's eye, the ambassador's 21-year-old daughter, Anne Morrow. As their courtship progressed, Lindbergh taught Anne how to fly. The two were married in a brief, simple ceremony at the Morrow's estate in Englewood, New Jersey on May 27, 1929. Anne was 23 years old.

Little more than a year later, Anne gave birth to Charles Jr., the first of their six children.

The Lindbergh’s storybook romance closed to the public when they moved to Hopewell, New Jersey. The couple had selected the sequestered location in large part to escape the public eye. It was to be a sanctum where they could find respite from command appearances and oft-tiresome social functions that interfered with the young couple’s other interests, including raising a family. The estate was close enough to Englewood, in northern New Jersey, to facilitate Anne’s frequent visits to her mother’s home, and near enough Princeton and New York for Charles to commute to either place for business.

* * *

The kidnapping on March 1, 1932, put the Lindberghs back in the news, unhappily this time as parents of the victim in what came to be known as The Crime of the Century. The ensuing investigation involved not only crime fighters at the highest levels, but also members of organized crime, small-time crooks and swindlers, politicians and hangers-on who surfaced from every quarter seeking their own measures of fame and fortune in the mournful shadow of the flyer and his wife.

One of the main characters in the media circus was Dr. John Condon, a self-proclaimed emissary of the Lindberghs in the search for their son. Condon surfaced early in the game, publishing cryptic notices in the classified section of a Bronx newspaper ostensibly to connect with the kidnappers. Oddly enough, perhaps, he received equally cryptic notes back with indications the guilty parties were ready to negotiate return of the boy in exchange for a ransom. Repeated assurances from the kidnappers that Charlie was alive and well, conveyed through Condon, convinced the Lindberghs to authorize the doctor to deliver the ransom. Included in the $50,000.00 ranson were some $35,000.00 in gold notes with serial numbers recorded by authorities. Condon delivered the sum at a meeting in a cemetery in the Bronx to a man whom he said identified himself only as John, had a German accent, and promised the whereabouts of the baby would be revealed within hours. Lindbergh waited alone in a car parked nearby. The baby was not returned.

* * *

A little more than two months later, on May 12, 1932, about 3:15 in the afternoon, truck driver Orville Wilson stopped his vehicle so his helper, William Allen, could relieve himself in the woods at roadside. Wilson and Allen were driving on the Princeton-to-Hopewell highway to deliver a load of lumber to Hopewell. They were on a section known as Mount Rose Hill, four or five miles across the valley from the Lindbergh home. Allen was working his way through the brush when he saw what appeared to be a skull, which upon further investigation turned out to be the decomposing corpse of a partially clothed baby lying face down and somewhat covered by leaves in a shallow grave. The corpse, with a fractured skull, was identified from its garments as the Lindbergh child. Not all that far away, in the underbrush, writes Noel Behn in Lindbergh, the Crime, was the auxiliary telephone cable from Princeton that led to the police command post in the Lindbergh garage and had been laid during the opening days of the manhunt.

* * *

With the baby’s body found and the corpse identified both by the Lindbergh’s nurse, Betty Gow, and Lindbergh himself, the search for the culprits continued, driven as much by the authorities’ interest in solving the case as by the public’s interest in avenging their hero’s loss. Then, as the trail was growing cold, on September 19, 1934, a man used one of the marked gold notes to purchase fuel at a gas station in the Bronx. The station attendant wrote down his license plate number, leading police to arrest Hauptmann, a German ex-convict living in the Bronx with his wife and son.

Hauptmann was taken to police headquarters for questioning. Meanwhile, his home and garage, which was in an empty lot across Needham Ave., were ransacked in the search for further evidence. Police eventually found some $14,000 in ransom cash stashed in a cardboard shoebox hidden in the garage. Hauptmann said the money had been left