The Cases That Haunt Us (22 page)

VIOLET

That same day, detectives from the Newark Police Department set about the routine interviewing of all twenty-nine domestic servants in Mrs. Morrow’s employ at Next Day Hill. Betty Gow was an obvious potential suspect in Schwarzkopf ’s mind; she had both knowledge of the baby’s whereabouts and direct access to him. She had also worked in Detroit, where a mobster called Scotty Gow operated, sometimes dabbling in kidnapping for profit. But no connection could be established between him and Betty, and all of her responses to investigators seemed genuine and appropriate.

The New Jersey State Police also had the Hartford, Connecticut, department pick up Gow’s boyfriend Red Johnson for questioning. In addition to having knowledge of the child’s whereabouts on March 1, he also drove a green Chrysler coupe, and one local resident had reported a green automobile in the vicinity of the Lindbergh house. Close to four hundred green cars had already been checked out, but when detectives examined Johnson’s Chrysler, they found an empty milk bottle in the rumble seat. Johnson explained forthrightly that he drank a lot of milk and tossed the containers in the backseat while he was driving. Police held him for more than a week, but could never shake his story, and nothing in his background suggested he could be involved with the crime. Ultimately, the investigation of Johnson led nowhere, and two weeks after the kidnapping, Schwarzkopf made a public statement exonerating Johnson. Unfortunately for him, however, he turned out to be an illegal alien, and Schwarzkopf was ultimately able to dispense with him completely by turning him over to the immigration service.

As a group, the Morrow and Lindbergh servants were cooperative and matter-of-fact in their responses, with one surprise exception.

Violet Sharpe, twenty-eight years of age, was a maid who had left her rural village in Bradfield, England, in 1929 for Toronto, where she worked for nine months before moving to New York City to look for a better position. Shortly after registering with an employment agency, she was hired to work for the Morrows. Her sister Emily worked for Constance Chilton, who was the partner of Anne Lindbergh’s sister Elizabeth in a private school. Photographs show Violet to be plain but pleasant-looking, slightly on the heavy side with short dark hair and large brown eyes. From all accounts, she was friendly, a good worker, and liked by everyone on the staff. She was thought to be romantically involved with Septimus Banks, the butler and head of the Next Day Hill household staff. Banks had previously served as butler to British aristocracy and to industrialist Andrew Carnegie. The other servants believed that someday Violet and Septimus would get married. The only thing that might stand in their way was the butler’s alcoholism, a problem that had gotten him fired several times, but each time Mrs. Morrow had relented and welcomed him back. Violet got him to promise to stay off the bottle for a year.

On the day of the kidnapping, Violet had been the one who had received Anne’s telephone call to Next Day Hill asking for Betty Gow. Before Betty left, she told Violet the baby was sick, so instead of the Lindberghs coming back here, she’d be going there.

When they spoke to Violet, the detectives were expecting another routine interview, but it didn’t go exactly that way. She seemed nervous and agitated, and in accounting for her whereabouts on March 1, she told a convoluted story that didn’t seem to go anywhere. At around 8 P.M., she had gotten a call from a man she’d met the previous Sunday while she was walking with her sister Emily in Englewood. A man drove by and waved; she assumed she knew him so she waved back. He stopped and offered them a ride home. She didn’t know him, as it turned out, but he seemed friendly and said he would call her to take her out—this despite the fact that she had an understanding with Septimus Banks.

Violet and this man went out together with another couple on the evening of March 1. The four of them went to a movie. After the movie, he drove her back to Next Day Hill, walked her to the servants’ entrance, and they said good-night. She agreed to see him again on March 6, but then broke the date.

So who was this man? What was his name? Violet didn’t remember. What about the other couple? She couldn’t recall their names, either.

What movie did they see? She didn’t remember. Well, then, what was it about? Nothing came to her. What was the name of the theater? It was in Englewood, but she didn’t know the name.

The detectives told her they knew this was trying and that she must be nervous. She snapped back that she wasn’t nervous, but they had no business prying into her private life. They asked her to tell them
anything
else about her actions or whereabouts on the first of March, but she had nothing else to say.

While she was being interviewed, other officers went through Violet’s room. While no clues or direct evidence of anything was found, a deposit book from a New York City bank indicated a balance of around $1,600. Considering that this was in the midst of the Depression, that Violet’s salary was $100 a month, that she had been working for the Morrows less than two years, and that she was regularly sending money home to her family in England, this sum called attention to itself. As she had no room or board expenses, it was technically possible for her to have saved so much if she was extremely frugal. But together with the hostility and evasiveness of the interview, it made police look at her far more closely than they would have if she’d reacted to their inquiries as the other servants had.

“
CEMETERY
JOHN”

The ad signed “Jafsie” appeared in the
New York American
on March 11. That same afternoon, Mrs. Condon answered the telephone to a voice she later described as having a “thick, deep, guttural accent.” The caller asked for her husband. She said he was at Fordham University, but would be back by 6 P.M. The caller said he would call again at 7:00 and suggested that Dr. Condon stay home and wait.

By the time the mysterious man called again, Condon and Breckinridge had both returned home.

“Did you gottit my letter with the singnature?” he asked. Condon immediately picked up on the Germanic verb form and the pronunciation of
signature
as it had been spelled in the letter.

“Where are you calling from?” Condon asked.

“Westchester,” the man said, before asking Condon a few more qualifying questions. Condon distinctly heard him speaking to someone in the background.

Then Condon heard a background voice saying,
“Statti citto!”
Condon took that to be Italian, roughly for “Shut up!”

“You will hear from us,” the caller promised, then hung up.

Colonel Schwarzkopf had wanted to set up a trace on Condon’s telephone, but Lindbergh had overruled him. The fact that Lindbergh could overrule the chief of the lead law enforcement agency on the case spoke directly to the aviator’s enormous and unique power. Lindbergh had gotten where he was by exerting total control, both in his professional and personal lives. He believed that the best chance of getting his son back alive lay in “playing straight” with the kidnappers. And so the police had no way of using this call to Condon to help locate the offenders.

Some of the people Lindbergh had chosen to work with, though, were difficult to control. On March 12, Morris Rosner, Lindbergh’s newly appointed “personal secretary” and liaison to organized crime, announced to the press that he knew that the baby was alive and well and would soon be returned to his parents. That same day, New York City police commissioner Edward Mulrooney announced that Rosner had just been indicted for land fraud. He was later acquitted; some say it was because of the Lindbergh connection.

On Saturday, March 12, Condon went to a cabinetmaker in the Bronx to have a wooden box constructed to the kidnappers’ specifications. He had the design based on an old ballot box he had received years ago as a gift so that it could easily be identified if it turned up in anyone’s possession. He paid the cabinetmaker $3.

By 6:00 that evening, Condon was back at his house with his friend Al Reich and Henry Breckinridge when the doorbell rang. This had to be the communication they were waiting for. But it was just Milton Gaglio and Max Rosenhain. Breckinridge was worried that their visit might have scared off the kidnappers. Then around 8:30 the doorbell rang again. It was a taxi driver named Joseph Perrone, who explained that he had been given the envelope he was carrying by a man wearing a brown overcoat and brown felt hat who had hailed him on Gun Hill Road and Knox Place and asked him to deliver it to Dr. Condon. Upon further questioning from Breckinridge and Gaglio, Perrone said that the man spoke with a thick German accent and wrote down the license plate number of Perrone’s cab before leaving.

Condon opened the envelope and they all read:

Mr. Condon

We trust you, but we will note come in your haus it is to danger. even you can note know if Police or secret servise is watching you

follow this instruction.

Take a car and drive to the last supway station from jerome Ave here. 100 feet from this last station on the left seide is a empty frankfurther stand with a big open Porch around, you will find a notise in senter of the porch underneath a stone.

this notise will tell

you were to find us.

act accordingly.

After 3/4 of a houer be on the place. bring the mony with you.

The now familiar signature circles were at the bottom of the note.

The box wasn’t ready and neither was the cash, but Condon felt it was important to follow the instructions to the letter. When he arrived at his destination, he would explain to whoever met him. Al Reich would drive him to the location in his Ford coupe.

At the closed hot dog stand Condon got out of the car. On the porch he found an envelope under a rock. He went back to the car and opened it.

Cross the street and follow the fence from the cemetery direction to 233
^rd
Street. I will meet you.

The cemetery in question was Woodlawn, a four-hundred-acre burial ground separated from Van Cortlandt Park by a wrought-iron fence. Condon waited at the front gate. Someone walked by and stared at Condon but kept on walking. Later, Reich stated he felt strongly that this individual was there as a lookout. Condon continued waiting about fifteen or twenty more minutes, until he saw someone inside the fence waving a white handkerchief at him. Condon looked closely; he was wearing a brown coat and fedora, just like the man Perrone had described. As he held the handkerchief in front of his face, he asked in a thick accent, “Did you gotted my note? Have you gotted the money with you?”

It was the same voice Condon had heard on the telephone.

“No,” Condon responded. “I can’t bring the money until I see the baby.”

They heard footsteps. The shadowy man accused Condon of bringing in the police. Condon insisted he wouldn’t do that. The man hoisted himself up on the cemetery gate and jumped over, landing near Condon. “It’s too dangerous,” he said, then took off north on Jerome Avenue. Condon noted that the footsteps they had heard belonged to a cemetery guard. After assuring the guard that everything was all right, Condon took off after the man, not an easy task for a seventy-two-year-old, even one who paid as much attention to his physical condition as Condon did.

He finally caught up with the man about a half mile later at the southern tip of the lake in Van Cortlandt Park, when he stopped running. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” Condon chided him in his pompous professorial tone. “No one will hurt you.”

“It was too much risk,” the man countered, still doing his best to pull his hat down and his collar up to protect his identity. “It would mean thirty years.”

The two men walked to a shack near the tennis courts. Condon pointed to the nearby bench. He estimated the man to be in his midthirties, about five nine, 160 pounds, with a small mouth, high cheekbones, and deep-set, almond-shaped eyes. No longer assertive, the man now seemed preoccupied. He said again that he could get thirty years if he was caught. “And I am only go-between. I might even burn.”

“What was that you said about burning?” Condon asked.

“What if the baby is dead? Would I burn if the baby is dead?” It was unclear whether he meant burning in hell or the New Jersey electric chair. Either way, Condon was distressed by the reference.

No one had yet made any public reference to the possibility that the baby might already be dead, but though they hadn’t addressed it with the Lindberghs, Schwarzkopf and his officers must have been considering it. Almost two weeks had gone by. Kidnapping is one of the riskiest major crimes, because it involves extended and ongoing dealing with the victims, who will almost always be in contact with the police. In the case of a well-publicized crime, everyone will be looking for the kidnapped child as well. It is therefore incumbent on the offender to get in and out of the crime as quickly as possible. The longer the ordeal drags on, the less chance he’s kept the abductee alive.

Condon confronted the stranger, asking what he meant. He said there was no point in this negotiation if the baby was dead.

“The baby is not dead,” the man insisted. “The baby is better than it was. We give more to him to eat than we heard in the paper from Mrs. Lindbergh. Tell her not to worry. Tell the colonel not to worry. The baby is all right.”

Wanting to make certain the man with whom he was dealing was authentic, Condon asked several qualifying questions, then pulled out the safety pins he had taken from Charlie’s crib. The man correctly identified them. “What is your name?” Condon demanded.

“John.” Further questioning elicited that he was a Scandinavian sailor from Boston. The two men talked for more than an hour, during which time John said the baby was on a “boad” about six hours away by air and that he was being well cared for by two women. He said further that the kidnapping gang consisted of four men, the leader of whom he said was a high-level government employee, that neither Betty Gow nor Red Johnson were involved, and that the crime had been planned for a year, waiting until the baby was old enough that they could keep him alive away from home. He said that on Monday he would send proof that his gang was actually holding the baby.