THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING SUSPECT NO. 1. Lise Pearlman

three-wheel wooden scooter among the toys in his nursery. He enjoyed turning the crank on his music box all by himself. He also made Anne laugh when he bent over and viewed her through his legs. Charlie attended the Little School on and off through late February 1932, missing more than half of the sessions. The bullying apparently ended, and he began to enjoy the experience. Connie Chilton had noted in Little Charlie’s January 1932 evaluation that he still preferred not to interact with other children. Instead he would carefully observe what they were doing and wait until they were out of the room to repeat their activities. His report card showed “good muscular coordination,” but his “periods of concentration” were “very short,” as one would expect at a year and a half.

      Writing to her mother-in-law, Anne could not help going on at length about the delight she took in everything her son said and did. He enjoyed having “Tee” and Mum Mum read and sing to him, but Tee had just left on a trip to Mexico. “Tee — all gone.” Charmed by her baby’s determination and sense of humor, and eager to share her joy in his games and laughter, she rambled on for pages until her husband intervened. This was not the first time. Lindbergh did his best to discourage his wife from writing long letters to anyone, but especially resented her recent preference for Charlie’s company to his own.

      Anne had other recent occasions to sense her husband becoming quite tense. When he drove the family south for a weekend at their farmhouse outside Hopewell with the Breckinridges at the end of January 1932, their car got rear-ended by another vehicle. Lindbergh got out and banged his door shut. As he and the other driver exchanged irate accusations, Anne followed her own instincts and grabbed their toddler. Charlie noticed his father had left the car and said, “Hi — all gone.”

      Movie star and newspaper columnist Will Rogers reported on his own observations. An avid flyer himself, Rogers had befriended the Lindberghs in California. He and his wife visited the family at Englewood on Sunday, February 14, 1932 — just over two weeks before the boy disappeared. In a newspaper column in early March, Rogers noted the “affection of the mother and the father and the whole Morrow family for the cute little fellow … [with] almost golden [hair] . . all in little curls.”

      The Rogerses had watched Anne play with blocks on the floor with her son for an hour. Then Lindbergh repeatedly tossed a sofa pillow at his toddler while the little boy walked unsteadily in front of the adults. Each time Little Charlie got up and took a couple of steps, Lindbergh knocked his son to the floor — as if he were a carnival target. Rogers could not help but comment: “I asked Lindy if he was rehearsing him for forced landings. After about the fourth time of being knocked over he did the cutest thing. He dropped of his own accord when he saw it coming.”

      Rogers might not have found the game so amusing if he knew that Charlie suffered from rickets — a Vitamin D deficiency indicative of weak muscles, easily fractured bones and skeletal deformity. The Lindberghs’ pediatrician would confirm that diagnosis later that same week. Maybe Lindbergh had kept knocking his son down so the Rogers would not notice anything odd about the boy’s gait. At the visit on February 18, Dr. Van Ingen had difficulty standing Charlie up straight for measurement at 33 inches. He also noticed that “… both little toes were slightly turned in and overlapped the next toe.” More significantly, Dr. Van Ingen noted that Charlie had an enlarged “square head.” The soft spot in the boy’s forehead would normally have closed months earlier, but Charlie’s fontanel still measured about ¾ inch in diameter. Though Charlie was tall and big-chested for his age, most other developments were far slower than Dr. Van Ingen routinely observed of twenty-month-olds. Dr. Van Ingen also noted that the boy’s skin was “unusually dry all over his body.”

      Lindbergh had already begun issuing harsh commands for altering his son’s behavior. When Charlie sucked his thumb, Lindbergh ordered special thumb guards put on him at night. The thimble-shaped wire caps were attached to a string tied around each wrist. This would be part of the nightly ritual from then on. (It might have been prompted by fear that thumb-sucking was the reason a couple of canine teeth were coming in at an angle.) Because of the rickets diagnosis, Dr. Van Ingen likely warned Anne and Charles that their child was quite fragile. He likely had already prescribed strong doses of Vitamin D, a sun lamp and plenty of exposure to sunlight. Those recommendations would remain.

      To prevent Little Charlie from being teased as a “sissy” or have his hair pulled again, Anne arranged to get him his first real haircut a few days after his checkup. A local hairdresser was invited to the Morrow mansion to shear off his mop of curls. The rite of passage took place in his grandmother Tee’s bedroom. Mrs. Morrow took clippings and saved them in an envelope. Very likely she also took before and after pictures despite her son-in-law’s aversion to photos of Little Charlie. The next day, Anne and her mother came to the Little School to observe Little Charlie in his rhythm class. He was obviously having a great time attempting the various moves. Mrs. Morrow left on a trip out of state on Friday, February 26, not having any idea she would never see her treasured grandson again.

      That Saturday, Aida Breckinridge’s eighteen-year-old daughter Alva Root took the ferry from New York and joined Anne for lunch at the Morrows’ Englewood estate. Alva had babysat for Little Charlie before and was invited to do so this weekend as well. Her parents and brother would join them at the Lindberghs’ farmhouse. After lunch, a chauffeur from the Morrow estate drove Anne, Charlie and Alva to the new estate. Skean had somehow gone missing so they left without him. They arrived around 5:30 p.m. Anne was glad to give Betty Gow weekends off. (Betty was, too.) Alva had watched Charlie on other occasions. She and Anne set about getting him fed and put to bed at his usual 7 p.m. bedtime. The area was drenched with heavy rain driven by a chill wind.

      Lindbergh spent the morning at the lab in Manhattan. Directly after lunch, he drove to Henry Breckinridge’s apartment. The timing of their friend’s arrival surprised Aida. She had understood that their plans were to leave in the late afternoon. But Lindbergh wanted to spend a couple of hours with Henry beforehand. They left New York around 4 p.m. Aida’s son Oren would make his own way to the farmhouse from Princeton where he was a student.

      When Lindbergh drove the Breckinridges to the new farmhouse, Olly Whateley and Wahgoosh came out to greet them in the garage. They found Anne in the living room by a roaring fire. Aida later recalled how much Lindbergh said he enjoyed having a home in the rural countryside as opposed to the city. The couple shared some tea while Alva went upstairs to the nursery, keeping Charlie company on the floor playing with his Noah’s ark and alphabet blocks.

      Anne and Aida soon came up to join Alva playing with Little Charlie in the nursery. He knew Aida as “Mimi.” It pleased her that he seemed to remember her from her visit two weeks before. Soon, Elsie Whateley arrived with his dinner, and Charlie greeted her by name as well. He delighted in his “toast” and “applesauce” and sat down to eat and drink his milk without help. Aida was impressed at how rapidly the toddler’s vocabulary was expanding. Anne then took him to wash up in his bathroom and dressed him for his evening nap in the crib with a stuffed rabbit to cuddle with. She opened a window slightly for ventilation and the two women and Alva came down to join the men for dinner.

      The conversation focused on national politics. Their host seemed to be in particularly good spirits. Anne was distracted somewhat, thinking about her son’s cold. Her husband had already established a household rule that Anne was not to check on her son after he was put to bed. After dinner she looked in on him once anyway and found him sneezing a lot. She, Alva and Aida went back up at 10 p.m. Charlie remained asleep when Anne lifted him from the crib to undress him and put him on his potty seat. Aida recalled that “he woke up crying quite hard in a rather high pitch.”

      After Elsie Whateley gave him some prune juice, Anne rocked him gently and sang him a favorite song as he bobbed his head to the tune. Anne then put her hefty toddler back in his crib for the night. The men came up to bed at 10:30 p.m. Alva would sleep in the nanny’s room next to the nursery, and her mother and stepfather occupied a guest room at the end of the hall. Around 11 p.m. Lindbergh joined Anne in the nursery to give Charlie some nose drops. After all the lights were out, Aida and Henry were startled out of bed by what they thought were flashes of lightning. They ran from their room as the whole house experienced intermittent bursts of light. It turned out to be a practical joke. Lindbergh had a master switch set up that