THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING SUSPECT NO. 1. Lise Pearlman

head. The two women then put the flannel T-shirt on Charlie. Betty then got him back into his new, store-bought undershirt. He was already diapered and had on rubber pants. Over the underwear, they dressed him again in Dr. Denton pajamas and put him in the crib.

      The two women covered Charlie snugly with a sheet, two blankets and a quilt. It was already 7:30 p.m., half an hour later than the toddler usually went to bed. They knew Lindbergh wanted them to follow his instructions to a T. He usually arrived from work at about 7:45 p.m. He would expect his son to be asleep when he arrived. Betty thought the room might get too stuffy without ventilation, so she and Anne discussed opening one of the windows slightly. Anne said she normally opened the French window on the wall nearest the crib, but only after taking into account the direction of the wind. She headed downstairs as Betty unlatched the French window and opened it slightly for ventilation while the little boy slept. Betty secured its shutters again so they would not flap in the wind and turned out the light as she left.

      Anne went down to her desk in the living room. Betty washed Charlie’s clothes in the bathroom next to the nursery. The nanny checked in on Charlie again around ten minutes to eight, attached the thumb guards, and used two large safety pins to secure the blanket to the mattress. She turned out the light as she left and then turned out the light in her own bedroom across the hall. Betty went downstairs with the toddler’s wet clothes to hang them to dry in the basement. On her way, she passed Anne in the living room. The nanny reported that Charlie was breathing more normally and had “gone to sleep unusually quickly.” That was the last anyone would report seeing him alive.

      Source: UCLA Leon Hoage Collection

      The archivist of the Leon Hoage — Lindbergh Kidnapping Collection at UCLA identified the boy on the tricycle as being Charles Lindbergh Jr. shortly before the kidnapping. (https://www.library.ucla.edu/blog/special/2011/11/04/evidence-in-the-crime-of-the-century.) If so, this photo was likely taken in January or February 1932 at the Little School (presumably by his grandmother or Aunt Elisabeth) and may be the only full-length photo of Charlie at 19–20 months. The tricycle appears to be a Colson Fairy Model No. 1, which was a popular high-end model in the 1920s and early 1930s. The boy on the trike looks about twice the height of this model’s 16 inch front wheel: Charlie’s height was 33 inches when last measured on February 18, 1932. Although this model was advertised for 3- to 4-year-olds, Charlie was very large for his age, exhibited good coordination according to his teacher, and had his own smaller, three-wheeler in his nursery. Lindbergh himself was fascinated with bikes as a child and would likely have wanted to foster similar mechanical aptitude in his son.

      Colson Fairy Model No. 1, see “1920s Colson Fairy Catalogue”: https://oldbike.eu/1911-colson-fairy-ball-bearing-velocipede-model-no-1/Fairy; Children’s Vehicles Holiday Advertisement 1930, 4 https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p267401coll36/id/7002.

       Little Charlie at 20 months

      Pictures taken of Little Charlie presumably on Thursday, February 23, 1932, less than a week before he disappeared. These were printed in several newspapers the week after he was kidnapped. The source of these photos was not reported but was likely his grandmother, Elizabeth Morrow, who kept locks of his hair in an envelope as a souvenir of his first haircut. (The envelope with her handwritten notations and the clippings themselves are now at Yale University archives. Yale also maintains in its Anne Morrow Lindbergh collection a typed list of photos of Charles, Jr. on Charles Lindbergh’s stationery with a handwritten notation mentioning pictures taken at Englewood in February 1932).

      ACT TWO

      Courtesy of the New Jersey State Police Museum

      New Jersey State Police search the tall grass in the daylight on March 2, 1932, about 75 feet from the house, where Lindbergh told them he found the three ladder pieces, the chisel and a dowel the night before — in the dark without a flashlight. According to Betty Gow, Lindbergh and Olly Whateley ran outside for maybe ten minutes after 10:10 p.m. while the women were searching inside the house before Whateley called the police.

      1.

      The Police Arrive

      THE HOPEWELL police recorded that it was 10:22 p.m. when Olly Whateley first called to alert them that the Lindberghs’ son was missing. The state police received a similar call at 10:25 p.m. State troopers, county detectives and local police had overlapping jurisdiction. The Lindbergh’s large estate straddled both Mercer and Hunterdon Counties. Technically, the house itself was over the line in the township of Amwell in Hunterdon County; the town of Hopewell was situated in Mercer County.

      Rushing from Hopewell, Police Chief Harry Wolfe and Constable Charles Williamson intercepted Olly Whateley headed to town to buy a flashlight. Since the policemen had flashlights, Whateley turned around and came back with the officers around 10:35 p.m. Lindbergh called the state police at 10:40 p.m. to alert them that he had found an envelope in the nursery. This was new information since the first call; no one had apparently yet spotted it when the police were first notified of the child’s disappearance over fifteen minutes earlier.

      Once the two local policemen entered the house, the nursery was the first place Lindbergh took them. Betty Gow said the room had been dark when she found the child missing at 10 p.m. just as it was when she left the room just over two hours earlier. Now the light was on. Lindbergh warned the two Hopewell officers against touching any surface. He wanted to leave the room as it was for the New Jersey State Police, including an unopened envelope on a windowsill to the right of the fireplace on the east wall. Lindbergh told Chief Wolfe that was where the kidnapper must have entered and exited. It was the one window for which the women could not make the shutters close when they put his son to bed earlier that evening. Lindbergh said he was in the study directly below the nursery from 9:30 until 10 p.m. and heard nothing unusual.

      Looking around the room, it amazed the police chief that the nursery was full of undisturbed furnishings — quite a feat for a kidnapper to negotiate in the dark without knocking anything over. Chief Wolfe tried to figure out how that second-story window could have been the point of entry. The fellow would have had to stand on a ladder propped up against the house. Inside the room under the windowsill where the envelope lay sat a large chest, with a small suitcase on top and the roof of a wooden Noah’s ark on its surface. The police chief observed a smudge mark on the suitcase and on the floor nearby. But Wolfe was more “surprised at what he did not see.”

      Having investigated many other crime scenes, Harry Wolfe expected much more evidence to be apparent this soon afterward. He saw no blood on the crib or the sheets or any place else. No handprints either. The standing screen that stood between the French window and the crib showed no signs of even having been moved. The window where the sealed envelope sat on the sill did not look like it had been forced open. The police chief concluded that to get through the window, a would-be kidnapper would have to be quite an acrobat to launch himself over the stack of obstacles without disturbing any part of it. There was no indication that the chest below that window had moved at all. The kidnapper would also have had to land on his feet in the dark without making any loud noise or disturbing any other furnishings.

      Harry Wolfe considered the next step. He wondered how a kidnapper could possibly have carried a toddler out the same window without disturbing the chest that blocked his exit path. He later explained: “The culprit would have pushed it around in order to gain a secure foothold, he certainly would not have taken time to push the chest back into place, especially if he had a baby in his arms and was in the act of a desperate crime. But bear in mind — the chest had not been moved.”

      Lindbergh then took the policemen to the yard to view with the aid of