The Cases That Haunt Us (25 page)

Norman Schwarzkopf himself came to inspect the site. Not only did the flannel material and thread match up, the label on the T-shirt the baby was wearing was the same as the nine others in the package Anne had bought. Schwarzkopf then broke the news to Betty Gow, then to Elizabeth Morrow. Together they told Anne, Elizabeth saying simply to her daughter, “The baby is with Daddy.” Anne then called her mother-in-law in Detroit.

The corpse was removed to the Swayze & Margerum Funeral Home at 415 Greenwood Avenue in Trenton. In addition to being a mortician, Walter Swayze served as the Mercer County coroner. Betty Gow went to officially identify the remains and did so from clothing, hair, facial features, teeth, and Charlie’s characteristic overlapping toes.

A postmortem exam was conducted, officially by Dr. Charles H. Mitchell, but the actual dissection and physical examination was handled by Walter Swayze since Mitchell was elderly and had severe arthritis. That Swayze did the actual hands-on work of the autopsy was not revealed until 1977. The baby’s pediatrician, Dr. Philip Van Ingen, was there to compare measurements from his own examination records. There was no evidence of strangulation or gunshot. The cause of death appeared to be a massive skull fracture as evidenced by a decomposing blood clot. It had occurred the night of the kidnapping, probably when the ladder had broken and a burlap bag, found along the road and containing blond hairs consistent with Charlie’s, had been dropped. The extra weight of the baby could have caused the ladder failure, and he probably hit the concrete footer of the house in the fall.

The finding of Charlie’s remains should have quieted once and for all the persistent and ugly rumor that Lindbergh himself had killed the child because of some defect. Of course, it did not. Some people, fueled by the least responsible members of the media, seem to revel in these ideas. But in my unit, we’ve seen over and over that the method of disposal of a child’s body tells us a lot about the personality and motive of the murderer. It is a sad fact that parents do kill children, but as we will see in chapter 6, there are ways they do and ways they do not.

By the same token, there are ways they treat the body after death. Of course, in some instances, such as the Susan Smith case in South Carolina in which a desperate and distraught single mother got rid of her two young sons by plunging her automobile into a lake and letting them drown, there is no body disposal at all. But wherever we see postmortem handling of a child by a parent, we almost always see some attempt at careful or “protective” treatment. The body will be wrapped, buried with dignity or tenderness.

In the Lindbergh case, we have a body casually dumped by the side of the road when it is of no further use to the offender. A rudimentary attempt is made to bury it, but only to avoid detection. Nor is there a conscious attempt to degrade the body or symbolically pose it. This is the work of someone who just doesn’t care about anything beyond himself.

One more small point: In case you think I’m giving away trade secrets here—letting parents know how they can murder their children and avoid suspicion by treating the body in a certain manner—let me assure you in the plainest terms that any individual who thinks he or she can outsmart the law that way will make so many behavioral errors, leave so many other inadvertent behavioral clues in the commission of the crime and its aftermath, it will be easier rather than more difficult for us to crack the case.

As soon as they learned of the discovery of the Lindbergh baby’s body, state police officers drove to Cape May, where they found Charles on board the
Cachalot
, waiting for the next act of that drama. He rushed home to comfort his wife, saying that the examination showed Charlie hadn’t suffered long, and that since he was dead from the beginning, nothing they had done, no decision they had made, would have changed the outcome. Charles went to Swayze’s and identified the body for a second time. For him, the search was finally over.

THE
POLICE
TAKE
CHARGE

Even in death, the media would not leave the Lindberghs alone. A photographer had snuck into the funeral home and taken photos of Charlie’s remains. The photos were going on the street for $5 each. Fearing that a grave site would turn into a similar circus, Lindbergh had Charlie’s remains cremated, then he took them up in his plane and scattered them among the clouds where he felt most comfortable and secure.

Now, his need for control of the case was over. The police could do whatever they needed so as to find the monster or monsters who had changed his and Anne’s life so horribly and profoundly.

Anne and Charles moved back to Next Day Hill, abandoning the nearly completed Hopewell house forever. They never spent another night there. Their ultimate desire, once Anne gave birth, was to get as far away as they could—from the press, from the police, from the memories.

President Herbert Hoover announced that the federal law enforcement establishment would be thrown behind the case to aid Schwarzkopf ’s department, saying, “We will move heaven and earth to find out who is this criminal that had the audacity to commit a crime like this.”

In spite of the effective involvement of the
IRS
and the Treasury Department, especially Elmer Irey, the president named
FBI
director J. Edgar Hoover to lead the federal investigative effort. As became his rather notorious custom over the decades of his reign, Hoover threw the other U.S. government agencies off the case. But that still left the various New Jersey and New York police departments, as well as district attorneys’ offices. Altogether, plenty of people were working the case with plenty of opportunity for toes to get stepped on. The crime was now months old, the trails cold, and Schwarzkopf the target of widespread criticism that would never really go away.

To test the theory of how the baby was abducted and then killed, Schwarzkopf had a duplicate ladder constructed and, in Lindbergh’s presence, reenacted the abduction himself at the scene. On his way back down the ladder, the 165-pound chief carried a sandbag weighing the same as the child. When he stepped down on the highest rung of the base section of the ladder, the side rail split, just where it had on the real ladder. When that happened, Schwarzkopf dropped the bag and it struck the cement windowsill of the library.

He also sent the written communications out to independent handwriting experts, most notably seventy-four-year-old Albert Sherman Osborn, considered by many at the time to be the dean of American forensic graphologists. As others had before him, Osborn concluded that one person had written all of the notes, and that certain misspellings, letter transpositions, and handwriting anomalies were consistent throughout. And he said that the writer was German. Even the convoluted sentences made syntactical sense when translated into German. Osborn composed a sample paragraph including many key words from the notes that investigators could get suspects to write without connecting it to the Lindbergh communications.

At the same time that Osborn and his associates were evaluating the notes, Schwarzkopf had pieces of the ladder analyzed by other experts. The critical man here was Arthur Koehler, a wood technologist with the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service Lab in Madison, Wisconsin. According to author and professor Jim Fisher, Koehler was able to identify at least four types of wood in the construction: North Carolina pine, ponderosa pine, western Douglas fir, and birch.

But despite the impressive work of the experts Schwarzkopf had arrayed, despite the NYPD’s relentless trotting of John Condon from one police station, prison, or mug book to the next, despite the supposed connections of John Curtis, Gaston Means, and Morris Rosner to the kidnapper or kidnappers, all trace of Cemetery John had evaporated. All that was left of him was Condon’s account of his meetings and a few words Lindbergh had heard more than a hundred feet away.

VIOLET
REVISITED

On the investigative side, Inspector Harry Walsh believed the kidnapping must have been an inside job. Whoever took the child not only knew the precise location of the nursery, he also knew that the Lindberghs had not returned to Englewood after the weekend. The first piece of knowledge might be explained by publicity about the house, but the Lindberghs themselves didn’t know they were staying on in Hopewell until essentially the last minute.

The most suspicious of those with established knowledge, Walsh felt, was Violet Sharpe, and Schwarzkopf was anxious to follow up with her. But on Monday, May 9, she had come down with acute tonsillitis and needed to be hospitalized. While she was in the hospital recovering from surgery, Charlie’s remains were found. The day after Lindbergh identified his son and had the body cremated, Violet checked herself out of the hospital against doctor’s advice. Schwarzkopf waited a week, then sent the state police surgeon, Dr. Leo Haggerty, to Next Day Hill to examine her and determine if she was up to renewed questioning. Haggerty and a local physician, Dr. Harry D. Williams, found her still weak and advised against proceeding. Nonetheless, Walsh came to interview her on the evening of Monday, May 23. He was accompanied by Schwarzkopf and Lieutenant Arthur Keaton. Lindbergh was there, too.

With her employer present, Sharpe was more docile and cooperative than she had been in previous encounters with the police, but her story was still full of holes and contradictions. For example, she couldn’t explain why she had first mentioned a movie and then changed her story to a restaurant. She couldn’t even explain why she’d agreed to go out with Ernie since she never went out with people she hardly knew. And it now came out that her mysterious date Ernie had called about an hour and a half
after
Violet learned that Betty Gow was going to Hopewell instead of Charlie and his parents returning to Next Day Hill.

Walsh returned for another round with Sharpe on Thursday, June 9. He had a theory that a cheap crook and former taxi company operator named Ernest Brinkert from White Plains, New York, may have been the Ernie whose last name she couldn’t recall. When they’d searched her room back in March, they’d found six of Brinkert’s business cards. Violet looked even weaker and more sickly than when she’d gotten out of the hospital.

Walsh showed her a mug shot of Brinkert and asked if he had been her date on March 1.

“That’s the man,” she confirmed.

Then how come she didn’t know his last name since she’d had his cards in her room? She knew nothing about the cards.

She was growing hysterical. A doctor was called in. Walsh agreed to suspend the interview, but said he wanted to resume the following day at his office. Laura Hughes, Mrs. Morrow’s secretary, was present to record the interview. When Violet left the room, she flashed Hughes what has been described as a sly smile, then gave her a wink. Walsh and the doctor were unaware of this.

That night, Sharpe again became hysterical, this time in the presence of Betty Gow and other servants, swearing the police would not take her away and that she would answer no more questions. The next morning, Walsh phoned the estate to let Violet know a state police car would be by to bring her in for another interview.

Before the car arrived, Violet Sharpe was dead. She had mixed cyanide chloride, a powdered silver polish, with water, drunk it, come downstairs, and collapsed in the pantry.

Later than night, Ernest Brinkert surfaced, getting in touch with the White Plains police. He told them he didn’t know Violet Sharpe, had nothing to do with the Lindberghs or the kidnapping, and had no idea why his name had been connected with the case in any way or how his cards had ended up in Sharpe’s room. On the night of March 1, he was visiting a friend in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Dr. Condon was brought in to see if Brinkert could be Cemetery John, and as soon as he saw him, Condon said he was not.

The New York police handed him over to New Jersey, where the questioning continued, and he gave handwriting samples according to Osborn’s sample paragraph. Brinkert’s wife could also alibi him for the night in question.

Then on Saturday, June 11, a twenty-three-year-old bus driver named Ernest Miller told detectives of the Closter, New Jersey, police department that
he
was the Ernie who was out with Violet Sharpe on March 1. The police were left scratching their heads. He named the other couple, and his story matched up with the revised one Violet had given.

But why didn’t Violet identify him? Miller had no idea. He’d certainly given her his name. And why did she identify the photo of Ernest Brinkert, who looked nothing like Miller? Again, Miller was in the dark. Police rounded up the other couple. Their stories squared with Miller’s. Now there were more questions and fewer answers.

Since Violet Sharpe’s suicide, Lindbergh case scholars and aficionados have wrangled over what significance, if any, it had beyond her personal tragedy. Some have accused Schwarzkopf and Walsh of harassing her to death. Violet’s sister Emily essentially said as much after Scotland Yard investigated and cleared her back in England. Others have suggested Violet was afraid the police interest in her and her small improprieties might have lost Septimus Banks’s affection and caused Elizabeth Morrow to sack her and leave her jobless. It was suggested that she had been married years ago in England and the close police scrutiny would reveal this “scandal.” But further investigation proved this claim to be without foundation.

To me, Sharpe’s suicide calls to mind the case of Leonard Lake, thirty-eight years of age, who was picked up by South San Francisco police in June of 1985 for stealing a $75 vise from a lumberyard. Police found the vise and a silencer-equipped .22-caliber pistol in his trunk, took him to the station house, and booked him on theft and weapons charges. He was carrying a driver’s license that identified him as Robin Stapley, but the photograph looked nothing like him. After a couple of hours in the station, he asked for a drink of water, and before the cops knew what was happening, he’d swallowed a cyanide capsule from a secret compartment in his belt buckle. He went comatose and died after several days on life support.