The Cases That Haunt Us (30 page)

So I have to conclude that Bruno Richard Hauptmann was involved in the Lindbergh kidnapping, though he did not work alone and was not necessarily the leader. His background showed him to be a risk-taker, both in terms of criminal record and in his means of getting to America. Moreover, that record suggested that when he did become involved with crime, it would be with others rather than alone.

I suspect that he was approached by one or more others in the German immigrant community because of his background and his skills as a carpenter. The unrecovered money would have gone to them, some of which may have been laundered in the J. J. Faulkner bank deposit. Since kidnapping was rampant, this would have been perceived as a get-rich-quick scheme. And who better to try than the most famous man in the world? Hauptmann may or may not have actually been at the crime scene. He might have driven the car and taken the handoff. At this late date, absent physical evidence or the possibility of interviewing him, there is no way to know.

If Hauptmann was Cemetery John, then he was probably not in the baby’s room, because in the first meeting with Condon, John referred to the ransom note with “singnature” as being left in the crib—perhaps the original plan—when, in fact, it was left on the windowsill.

Could a shady group of German immigrants have had sufficient knowledge of the inside of the house to pull off the crime? Yes. For one thing, plans had been published. This is no substitute for firsthand experience in so “delicate” a crime as kidnapping. But even this we can account for.

Mark Falzini came across an astounding document in the case archives that he called to our attention. It is from
FBI
New York Field Office File 62-3057, a 1932 summary of the case. Under a section headed “
ALOYSIUS
WHATELY
, commonly referred to as
OLLY
WHATELY
,” it reads in part:

Whately entered the employ of Colonel and Mrs. Charles A. Lindbergh October 15, 1930, and with his wife acted as caretaker of the Lindbergh estate at Hopewell, N.J. and resided there continuously after the house was completed.
Frequently in the absence of the Lindberghs
,
he acted as guide to tourists and other curious visitors showing them through thehouse and about the adjoining grounds.
[Italics added]

There you have it! Anyone could have conducted a reconnaissance run beforehand. This would have been impossible at Next Day Hill, the baby’s normal place of residence, which was actually much closer and more convenient to the Bronx, practically just across the Hudson. But Hopewell was the more vulnerable location, so that was where the crime had to take place. And that required specific information.

Whately died in May 1933 at fifty years of age after several months of illness, so this aspect was never followed up.

Was the kidnap ringleader the mysterious Isidor Fisch? Quite possibly, though little is known about him other than that he was a hustler who had bilked friends and other investors out of thousands of dollars in dubious schemes, including a pie-baking company. He was said by his family to be broke, and he departed the States owing a lot of money, yet Hauptmann said he left all this cash with him. One thing that is known is that Fisch applied for his visa on May 12, 1932—the day the baby’s corpse was found.

Fisch did not match the physical description of Cemetery John, which meant John either had to be Hauptmann or still another man was involved.

I’ve come out many times publicly in support of the death penalty. I’ve stated that I’d be more than willing personally to pull the switch on some of the monsters I’ve hunted in my career with the
FBI
. But Bruno Hauptmann just doesn’t fit into this category—the evidence just wasn’t, and isn’t, there to have confidently sent him to the electric chair. To impose the one sentence for which there is no retroactive correction requires a far higher standard of proof than was seen here. Blaming him for the entire crime was, to my mind, an expedient and simpleminded solution to a private horror that had become a national obsession.

I am troubled, for instance, that even after he was convicted and sentenced to death and appeals were denied, when Hauptmann was thrown a lifeline that would have spared him, he refused to grasp it. A number of people in authority came to his cell, including the governor of New Jersey, saying that the death sentence would be set aside if only he would confess—to something. All he had to do to save his life and spare his wife and son all that anguish was to say who else had been involved in the crime and what their roles had been.

And yet he refused, saying simply that he was innocent and therefore had no knowledge of who might have done it.

Not having had the opportunity to interview him myself, it is difficult to say for sure what his motive was. Based on my knowledge of other sociopathic offenders, I suspect this was probably stubbornness, arrogance, the “honor among thieves” of not ratting out a fellow comrade, and an unwillingness to disgrace his family and his name. Perhaps he was afraid for his family’s safety if he spilled. As we’ve seen, there is enough evidence of high-risk behavior in Hauptmann’s background to make this likely.

But not certain. I have to say that this refusal to trade his life for any verbal concession inevitably complicates the assessment. It is also a matter of record that Hauptmann asked repeatedly for a lie detector test and that one be administered to Dr. Condon. My colleagues and associates know I have never set much store in the polygraph and am always wary of the results, but it is unreasonable to think that Hauptmann had such a knowledgeable or jaundiced view. If he asked for such a test, unless this was a clever ploy he knew would never be followed up, he must have believed he could pass.

We can say that throughout her long life (she died on October 10, 1994, the sixty-ninth anniversary of her marriage, at age ninety-five), Anna Hauptmann believed fervently in her husband’s innocence and did everything in her power to convince others and have the case reopened.

Was a better and more satisfying solution to this infamous case possible? Yes, but not once certain key bridges were crossed.

The greatest single mistake, though it was made for understandable reasons, was allowing Colonel Lindbergh to dictate limitations on the police. In any kidnapping, the major risk for the offender is picking up the package. Had police been allowed to cover the money drop, the chances are great they would have picked up Cemetery John. It wouldn’t have saved the baby, but the case would have been cracked.

You cannot lose control of a case. If you do, it’s going to be difficult to get it back.

After the first meeting with Cemetery John, we would have wanted to debrief Condon and would have gleaned valuable information from him. For example, the passing reference to burning if the baby were dead could have been used during the second encounter, playing on his fears and sense of guilt to get to the others.

Likewise, Schwarzkopf could have been more proactive in his assumptions regarding an inside job. If we were working this case today, we would have assessed each household servant, then tried to show each one how we didn’t think he or she had purposely aided the kidnappers, but that someone had been tricked or duped and we had to have that information. I would have done everything in my power to get the Lindberghs themselves involved with this tactic so the staff would regard it seriously.

During the first encounter with Cemetery John, the offender went to some lengths to convince Dr. Condon that both Betty Gow and her boyfriend Red Johnson were innocent. Why even bother bringing up information about the servants and their friends if this wasn’t an avenue they wanted the investigators to avoid?

This was just one area that could have been better explored to get vital information when it would still have been useful. And there are so many other strategies that could have been tried but were not.

Instead, what we are left with is a classic American tragedy.

O
ne thing that motivates many serial offenders is the desire to create and sustain their own mythology. The press is often a willing collaborator, giving them such names as the Freeway Phantom, the Hillside Strangler, the Green River Killer. When the media is not so cooperative, they often insist upon their own designations, such as the Son of Sam or the
BTK
(for bind, torture, and kill) Strangler.

The reasons they feel a need to do this are obvious to those of us in criminal investigative analysis. These are insignificant nobodies whose only “accomplishment” in life, the only time when they feel in control and fulfilled, is when they are causing suffering or fear in others.

Among the most successful in establishing and preserving his mythology was the
UNSUB
known as the Zodiac. The Zodiac crimes remain unsolved, the offender never identified or caught. And of all the cases about which I am frequently asked, this one comes up as much as any. Particularly on the West Coast, this is one that continues to haunt.

THE
FIRST
SHALL
BE
LAST

It was the day before Halloween—Sunday, October 30, 1966—in Riverside, California, about sixty miles southeast of Los Angeles. Joseph Bates and his eighteen-year-old daughter, Cheri Jo, began their day together, going to mass at St. Catherine’s Church, then having breakfast at Sandy’s Restaurant. After that, they split up, with Joseph heading for the beach and Cheri Jo planning to do some schoolwork. A cheerleader at Riverside City College and at Ramona High before that, Cheri Jo was the all-American, California dream girl: blond hair, blue eyes, attractive tan, five feet three, and 110 pounds. A freshman at
RCC
, she was an honor student who held down a job at a local bank and aspired to a career as a flight attendant. Since her mother’s departure a year earlier, and with her brother serving in the navy across the country in Florida, Cheri Jo lived alone with her father, who worked at Corona Naval Ordnance Laboratory as a machinist.

Around midafternoon, Cheri Jo decided to go to the college library. She called a friend to see if she wanted to go along, but her friend was busy so Cheri Jo went on her own. She was gone by the time Joseph returned home, but had left her father a note. When he went back out, he left a note for his daughter in return.

Joseph Bates wasn’t worried when he came back around midnight and saw that the note he had left his daughter hadn’t been touched. After all, she was old enough to socialize that late and take care of herself. Thinking she was probably with a few of her girlfriends, he went to sleep.

But by the next morning she still hadn’t returned. He called a friend to see if Cheri Jo was at her house and, when she wasn’t, reported his daughter missing to the police.

Within the hour, Cheri Jo Bates was no longer a missing person. Her body was found by a college groundskeeper, lying facedown on the gravel path to the library parking lot. She had been stabbed in the chest and left shoulder and slashed in the face and neck, her jugular vein and larynx both severed. The assault was so violent that she was nearly decapitated.

Riverside police tried to reconstruct Cheri Jo’s final hours. A coworker at the Riverside National Bank had received a call from her around 5:30 P.M., asking if she’d seen the bibliography for a term paper Cheri Jo was writing. That was the last time anyone reported talking to her. A little after 6 P.M., one of her friends said she saw Cheri Jo driving toward the library in her light green Volkswagen. Someone else reported seeing a blond woman in a car like Cheri Jo’s and also noticed a bronze-colored Oldsmobile that followed closely behind.

This detail became important in the context of Cheri Jo’s assault. When investigators examined her VW, still parked at the library with newly checked-out books on the front seat, they found it had been tampered with, a wire to the distributor disconnected among other actions. Police, who conducted an impressive, exhaustive investigation, theorized that her assailant followed her to the library, disabled her car, then waited for his prey. He likely watched as she tried to start the car several times unsuccessfully, then offered her help or a ride. Whether he was a stranger or known to her, she trusted him enough that she went with him down the dark path, where he attacked.

Cheri Jo was small but athletic, and she put up a hell of a fight. One report compared the area where she died to “a freshly plowed field.” She had human hair and skin under her fingernails. A wristwatch, thought to belong to the
UNSUB
, was found ten feet from her body. The band had been completely torn away from the face on one side, ripped off in Cheri Jo’s desperate struggle.

The timing of the murder, however, was confusing. Two people in the area that night reported hearing screams between 10:15 and 10:45 P.M., but the library closed at 9 P.M. on Sunday nights. Did Cheri Jo and her murderer talk for more than an hour before he killed her?

Even more important, there was no apparent motive. The victim’s purse was found next to her body, with her identification intact and less than a dollar in change. The MO—disabling her car and lying in wait—was too complicated for a robbery, and a young college student off for an afternoon or evening of studying hardly made a worthy target for that. There was no sign of sexual assault, and nothing in the young woman’s background suggested she was a high-risk victim. At Cheri Jo’s funeral five days later, investigators scanned the crowd as her bereaved father collapsed in his grief. Like Joseph Bates, they were no closer to understanding why she had died.

An answer of sorts arrived by mail the next month in a letter to the Riverside police. The author was clever, typing the document in all-caps through perhaps a dozen or so pages of carbon paper, then mailing one taken from the bottom of the stack, rendering it so full of smudges that while its message was legible, it would be next to impossible to trace it to a specific typewriter. Of course, there were no fingerprints. And the writer was not only cunning in avoiding identification, he knew to include enough details of Cheri Jo’s murder to gain credibility as her killer.