THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING SUSPECT NO. 1. Lise Pearlman

spent hours slogging through the dense, wet foliage on foot without anything to show for their efforts. Meanwhile, one of the first responders summoned a local trapper named Oscar Bush who had worked before as a deputy sheriff. Oscar was half descended from a Native American tribe and knew the backwoods better than anyone else. He arrived at the farmhouse around 4 a.m. on March 2 and made an important find: footprints under the nursery window and leading to the spot where the ladder was found.

      Beneath the nursery window, Oscar spied a footprint from a woman’s shoe. Anne Lindbergh then told the police she had stopped there on her afternoon walk on March 1 to toss pebbles at the nursery window to attract Betty Gow’s attention so Betty would lift her toddler and Anne could wave to him. Outside, below the nursery, Oscar Bush found several large footprints and suggested they had been made by ribbed golf socks worn over men’s shoes. Police took a photograph of one footprint that was estimated to be about twelve inches long and four and a quarter inches wide.

      Corporal Wolf issued an immediate order for troops to protect foot prints from any damage. Oscar traced additional footprints that he was inclined to believe were from two different persons. They went from the ladder through the field on the east side of the house to an abandoned dirt road called Featherbed Lane. There, the tracks ended. Featherbed Lane ran parallel to the cinder driveway to the Lindbergh estate about a hundred yards east of the house. Both the lane and the driveway could be accessed only from the road north that led to Wertsville, New Jersey. Oscar told investigators that whoever crossed the Lindberghs’ grounds in the dark had to know the property very well. “That ain’t easy.” Close by the footprints ending in Featherbed Lane were what appeared to be automobile tire tracks. Oscar told officers he thought two automobiles had been used in the kidnapping. Oscar assumed that the kidnappers would have known, as he did, that the only way to avoid the police was via the “isolated, muddy, almost impassable roads north to Neshanic.”

      The Lindberghs’ nearest neighbors on the south side were the Conovers. The family reported seeing a suspicious car heading out of Featherbed Lane onto the Hopewell-Amwell Road around 6:30 or 6:45 p.m. on March 1. The driver turned off his lights as soon as the well-lit Conover house came into view, as if to avoid being seen. The incident struck the family as especially odd because the lane’s entrance was posted with a sign: “Road impassable — drive at your own risk.”

      Oscar shared with police and reporters his conclusion of where the car on Featherbed Lane had headed on the night of the kidnapping:

      “From the spot where those footprints headed at the Featherbed Lane, if you turn South you’re headed toward Hopewell and pretty soon, if you’ve got anything to be afraid about or to hide, you’ll be running straight into the arms of the police coming straight up from Princeton and Trenton.

      If you turn north on the lane, you’ll be coming into the Wertsville Road … a dead end for getting anywhere. But you can turn off it into the Neshanic Road at Zion. And there’s no police up that way. For Neshanic is away back up in the hills, far from the police, but with good roads leading out … to Pennsylvania, to Summerville, New Jersey, or to Jersey City.

      Or for that matter, you can drive on down again, through Skillman, with no one suspecting you, because you’d be headed the wrong way….”

      Oscar’s sister Rebecca was also interviewed. She told a reporter: “Why don’t they ask us people up here to help them find the baby? We know every inch of the ground. We know the places the police will never find. But none of us is going to butt into other folks’ business until we’re asked. Even if we found the baby, we’d be a-scared to say so for fear we’d be suspected of stealing him and maybe thrown into jail for the rest of our lives.”

      When Lindbergh returned to his estate in the early morning of March 2 after trekking through the woods to no avail, he saw reporters beginning to trample his yard. Unlike the rude attitude he often exhibited on prior occasions, he acted quite welcoming. He thanked reporters for their interest and had Elsie Whateley make sure there were ample sandwiches and coffee provided for them and the scores of state and local officers. The police had staked or boxed in the footprints and tire tracks, but efforts to maintain the integrity of the footprint evidence in the yard would quickly prove useless.

      By then, Wahgoosh was barking almost nonstop. Lindbergh sent Olly Whateley to Hopewell several times to get more food. Lindbergh himself exhibited his usual huge appetite. He also readily joined in all discussions of what might have happened to the child, while his wife retreated from the invasion of her home. Three months pregnant with her second child, Anne felt disconnected from the trauma they were experiencing. It likely reminded her of a tragedy she endured at Smith when a good friend disappeared and was presumed dead: “A nightmare of reporters, papers, reports, clues, detectives, questioning.” Now, her own house was invaded night and day. Anne was “only occasionally seen wandering like a distracted ghost between the rooms.”

      Yet while the details remained fresh in her mind, Anne wrote to her mother-in-law a chronology of what happened. She noted that Charles was downstairs in his study at 10 p.m. when Betty Gow announced Little Charlie was missing from his crib. Betty accused Lindbergh of perpetrating another of his pranks. “I did, until I saw his face.” Anne concluded that her son could not have been kidnapped between 9:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. because her husband was already in his study and would have seen or heard something. Any footsteps in the uncarpeted nursery directly above would have been clearly audible. Anne accepted her husband’s view that the crime had the look of professionals. Yet she knew that her own presence there on a Tuesday was by chance. She would not have stayed Monday and Tuesday night if her son did not have a cold. She assumed that the kidnappers must have closely followed their activities. It relieved Anne somewhat to consider the kidnapping well-planned. That gave her hope they were only after the money and would leave her son unharmed. Her first thought had been more dire — that it might be some “lunatic.”

      When the Lindberghs were staying at their rental home a few miles south the prior spring a peeping Tom had peeked in their window. He might have been an escapee from the nearby Skillman State Village for Epileptics. A substantial percentage of the state’s diagnosed epileptics were segregated there on the mistaken belief they had incurable mental disorders. By the early 1930s, the village housed over 1200 inmates. Several of them had escaped over the past year, and not all had been caught.

      Courtesy of the New Jersey State Police Museum.

      The table with the medicine tray is between the two doors.

      The same table and chair in the center of the room looking toward the east wall and the window to the left of the fireplace.

      Courtesy of the New Jersey State Police Museum

       The three-wheel “Kiddie Kar” parked in Little Charlie’s nursery

      To the right of the fireplace behind the chair is the three-wheel Kiddie Kar State Trooper Joe Wolf described seeing on the night of March 1, 1932. To its right is the dresser, suitcase and roof of Noah’s ark against the east wall beneath the sill where the ransom envelope was left.

       https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Antique-KIDDIE-KAR-Trike-Scooter-Toy-By-H-C-White-Company-U-S-A-Patent-1918-/22347500324

      Both images courtesy of the New Jersey State Police Museum

      Close up of the window to the right of the fireplace with a small dresser and suitcase under it and the roof of Noah’s ark on the suitcase. Sitting