THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING SUSPECT NO. 1. Lise Pearlman

man, he stuttered, was subject to major mood swings and claimed to hear voices. He would collapse in a nervous breakdown in early 1928.

      It seems obvious that Lindbergh decided to marry Anne despite her family’s many health problems. He was a man of action with no real interest in courtship. Having been handed a golden opportunity to marry into a highly influential family, his primary concern was a spouse healthy enough to bear him the twelve offspring he envisioned, and so besotted and enthralled with him and with flying, that she would dutifully follow his every command.

      Dwight Morrow asked Anne what she really knew about his background. He and his wife had courted for ten years before they married. At the time Anne was deaf to their concerns and overwhelmed by “merciless exposure” to the media. She later realized the unreality of it all made it extremely difficult for her to acquaint herself with “this stranger well enough to be sure I wanted to marry him.” Yet when explaining to her younger sister Connie why she resolved all doubts in favor of marrying Charles, she confided, “Can’t look in his eyes and do anything else.” Anne’s diaries from Christmas 1927 until their wedding in May 1929 revealed she was “besotted with physical desire” — a “powerful sexual attraction” for America’s hero she could not resist had she wanted to. From the first time Anne shared the cockpit alone with the fearless pilot, the danger and excitement of flight acted like “an aphrodisiac.”

      That spring of 1929 Lindbergh took Anne on one of several flights to picnic in private in the Mexican countryside and lost a wheel in the rough terrain. He flew around for several hours to ensure that too little fuel remained to cause the plane to explode on impact when it landed back in Mexico City. The plane did roll over but did not catch fire. Lindbergh told their rescuers it was only a slight “mishap.” Anne did not answer how she felt about it, but let her fiancé speak for her. He had already warned her against speaking honestly to interviewers, or even sharing her misgivings with those in their inner circle. He insisted that she also refrain from writing anything down that she would not want to go public.

      Though Anne felt smothered, she ceased writing a diary for the next three years and self-censored her letters to friends and family. One biographer noted, “From now on Charles would be her voice.” Lindbergh got Anne to fly with him again three days after their crash landing in Mexico City. He wanted to prove how safe they felt in the air. She honored his ban on expressing any contrary view, but she later wrote about similar harrowing experiences that each time left her vowing never to do it again.

      In late April, as newspapers covered closely Anne’s return by train from Mexico, the Morrows were preoccupied with her sister Connie’s welfare — an incident that would become of interest again when Little Charlie disappeared. Connie went down to Mexico on her spring break and then returned to her boarding school in Milton, Massachusetts. On her return, she received a letter from an extortionist that warned she could wind up dead unless her father paid $50,000. The anonymous letter included reference to a Smith student who had recently gone missing (someone Anne knew). It also mentioned Anne and her mother’s return from Mexico, which led police to suspect someone quite familiar with the family. The letter included a demand the police not be notified. Connie told her father, who summoned Connie home while he turned the letter over to the Milton police for investigation.

      A follow-up letter in mid-May gave specific instructions where to leave the money in a crevice of a wall bordering an estate near the Milton boarding school. By then, all three of Connie’s siblings had been apprised of the threat, as well as Anne’s fiancé. Lindbergh gallantly offered to whisk his future sister-in-law in his plane to the family vacation home in Maine as a safe hideaway. Meanwhile, a young actress attended the school in Connie’s stead. A box filled with paper instead of money was delivered to the designated drop-off spot. The Milton police kept the site under surveillance, but no one ever claimed the fake extortion payment. The police requested writing samples from the Morrows’ circle of friends for purposes of comparison, but never found out who threatened Constance.

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      Despite repeated inquiries, the family kept the wedding date secret. At the groom’s insistence, there would only be twenty guests. Given the Morrows’ social standing they had likely wanted to invite hundreds. (When Connie had a coming out party in 1932, there were a thousand guests.) During the couple’s short engagement, Lindbergh battled his prospective mother-in-law over the size and other details of the wedding, including his opposition to having a minister officiate. Anne surprised her parents by agreeing with her fiancé. Mrs. Morrow wrote in her diary: “He has her. And we have lost her.”

      Source: wikimedia.com

       Lindbergh’s lawyer and close advisor Henry Breckinridge

      Source: Library of Congress

       Henry’s second wife, Aida de Acosta Breckinridge

      Source: Library of Congress

      Charles and Anne Lindbergh America’s Royal Couple. Photo taken in the summer of 1929 shortly after their marriage.

      6.

      America’s Royal Couple

      ON MAY 27, 1929, the family gathered with friends at the Morrow estate in New Jersey, ostensibly for Mrs. Morrow’s fifty-fourth birthday and to celebrate the return of Evangeline Lindbergh from an overseas teaching job. Except for the immediate family, the attendees at the Morrows’ New Jersey home on May 27, 1929, had no idea they would be present at Charles and Anne’s wedding. Even so, the press had gathered outside the gate of the Morrows’ new estate just in case. The engaged couple distracted them with several trips back and forth in street clothes. Likely at Dwight Morrow’s instigation, that morning Charles handwrote a will witnessed by his prospective father-in-law’s secretary and Anne’s sister, Elisabeth Morrow.

      The first clue for guests of what they were about to witness occurred when Anne entered the room on her father’s arm wearing a white chiffon wedding dress, lace cap and short veil. She carried a small bouquet from the garden. Lindbergh wore a blue suit. The minister then stepped forward. After a brief ceremony with no music, guests toasted the newlyweds. Lindbergh was asked to slice the wedding fruitcake. Unfamiliar with royal icing, he started hacking at the cake. At first, he made no headway through the sugary casing that created an almost impenetrable seal around the fruitcake. He must have felt someone had pulled a practical joke on him and was far from amused.

      Neither Mrs. Morrow nor Anne had thought to look at the directions the specially ordered cake came with. The person cutting the cake needed to use a knife dipped repeatedly in piping hot water. Mrs. Morrow assumed the knife was too dull and offered to get her son-in-law a better knife. She then got the shock of her life. “He grabbed her by the wrist and growled ‘No! No!’ in a tone she had never heard before and would never forget.” Lindbergh stubbornly kept sawing at the icing and managed to finish the task.

      The entire ceremony and reception were over in less than half an hour. Anne slipped away from the guests to change into a suit to head off with her groom. She hid on the car’s floor as Lindbergh drove by the throng of reporters at the estate’s entrance. For the time being, they managed to keep the press entirely unaware of what had just taken place or where the two were headed for their honeymoon. Lindbergh had his plane readied for take-off, which fooled the press into heading to the airfield. The subterfuge continued with an exchange of vehicles arranged by Henry Breckinridge. The newlyweds then headed to the Long Island shore where Breckinridge had made sure there was a rowboat available for the couple to reach a thirty-eight-foot motorboat moored nearby.

      Anne and Charles managed a few days of quiet motoring as they headed up toward Maine. He let his beard grow and donned grubby pants, a cap and sunglasses to disguise his appearance when he stopped