THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING SUSPECT NO. 1. Lise Pearlman

at 7:50 p.m. The envelope with the ransom note was left on this windowsill.

      Courtesy of the New Jersey State Police Museum

      The dime-store plain envelope and ransom note left on the windowsill March 1, 1932, first opened by the state police at midnight.

      2.

      The First 48 Hours

      BY NOON on March 2, the yard was swarming with over 400 newsmen and photographers as well as policemen. Scores of mattresses borrowed from Princeton University provided extra accommodations throughout the house. The most promising lead learned by the state police on March 2 was one the Bureau of Investigation later called “Unknown Person No. 1.” A next-door-neighbor’s son, Sebastian “Ben” Lupica, was brought to the estate to share a stunning breakthrough. He had just heard that morning about the kidnapping the night before. Lupica came at the suggestion of another neighbor and a reporter he met at the neighbor’s house to tell the police what he had observed.

      Lupica commuted to Princeton Academy from his parents’ home. In addition to classes, he played baseball and ran track. On the afternoon of Tuesday, March 1, he stayed late for sports practice and returned from campus around 6 p.m. As he approached his turnoff, Lupica stopped to pick up the mail from the family mailbox. No other cars were then going either way. He started driving home again very slowly, partly due to the poor condition of that section of the road from the bad weather and partly because he was distracted by trying to read a letter. He estimated his speed was 8 to 10 miles per hour. Visibility was limited and darkness was setting in.

      The Lindberghs’ driveway was just half a mile south of his parents’ farmhouse on the same side of the road. As Lupica neared his famous neighbor’s home, the high school senior suddenly saw a dark blue or black Dodge sedan coming around the bend from the opposite direction, heading south. It had local Mercer County license plates like the plates on his own car. From its distinctive emblem and decorative radiator grill, Lupica recognized the car as a 1929 model.

      The other driver was alone in the car and behaved strangely. When Lupica stopped and pulled to the right to give the driver ample room to pass, the driver instead braked to a stop on the left. Lupica saw that in the back of the Dodge sedan were at least two stacked ladders that extended partly over the front passenger seat. Though his view of the driver was obstructed, Lupica guessed that the man was about thirty-five to forty. The man wore a dark fedora and overcoat, which distinguished him as a city-dweller, not one of the locals. The man looked American, not foreign, and was clean shaven, with “a thin face and long features.” The man did not wear glasses, but the evening shadows made it difficult to see him clearly.

      Lupica told police that he did not get a good enough glimpse to believe he could ever identify this person. From the ladders, Lupica assumed the driver might be a window washer, though if so, he was clearly overdressed. In his rear-view mirror, Lupica saw the man wait for Lupica’s car to get by before moving on. Lupica’s remarkably detailed description included the type of spokes on the sedan’s wheels. A farm woman in the neighborhood, Mrs. Henry Wendling, had a short while earlier seen a car of similar general description.

      When Lupica volunteered his information, he did not know that a ladder of similar type had already been found abandoned in the Lindbergh’s yard. The three-piece ladder had already been moved, but Lupica was brought back around 7 p.m. to see the ladder the police had found. He said it resembled what he had seen collapsed inside the Dodge sedan the evening before.

      Despite sleep deprivation, Lindbergh had acted remarkably calm and collected almost the entire time since his son’s disappearance — with a few noticeable exceptions. To Anne, her husband looked like a “desperate man” the first 48 hours after their son disappeared. Anne wrote to her mother-in-law that she was afraid to speak to Charles. Betty Gow, likewise, “had never seen him so changed.” Yet to others the only time Lindbergh appeared anxious during the first couple of days was on the afternoon of March 2 when he was introduced to Ben Lupica.

      Police told Lindbergh that Lupica was the neighbor’s boy, who had seen a driver with ladders in his car near the estate the evening before. Though the Lupica farm was the next house past Lindbergh Lane headed north from Hopewell, the two had never met previously. In the 1990s, as an old man, Ben Lupica vividly recalled that meeting. He had been awestruck as a teenager with possibly vital information to share with the world-famous aviator in locating his missing child. But rather than praising the youth, “Lindbergh became agitated and distraught, and mumbled something about concern for his wife.” He left the teenager standing there dumbfounded.

      The night of March 2, the state police focused on finding Unknown Person No. 1, the driver of the car Lupica saw. They obtained from the Department of Motor Vehicles the official list of all owners of 1929 Dodge sedans in the county. Since Lupica felt he might recognize the sedan if he saw it again, officers took Lupica out all night until 4 a.m. the next day checking out likely vehicles. He then went home for a couple of hours’ sleep and to Princeton for morning classes. At 10:30 a.m., police showed up at the Princeton Academy to take Lupica to look at Dodge sedans in the Princeton area. By the time those were eliminated, they had gotten only part-way through the list. Yet the police suddenly discontinued the search. Lupica could never fathom why they stopped looking.

      Several other people who lived in the vicinity of the farmhouse reported to New Jersey police that they saw “strange automobiles near the estate at different periods of time just prior to the kidnapping.” One of the most mysterious vehicles locals had seen was a blue-green sedan with New York license plates that hovered around the Lindbergh estate over the course of eight days ending on March 1. A nineteen-year-old music student who lived near Featherbed Lane said three men were in the out-of-state car and asked directions to the Lindberghs’ home. A waitress in Pennington less than six miles south, also reported that three unfamiliar male patrons had shown up on both Friday, February 26, and Tuesday, March 1, 1932, asking directions to the Lindbergh estate.

      Alfred Hammond, the Reading Railroad watchman at the Skillman Village crossing, spotted a similar trio in a car of a similar description — a light blue 1926 sedan with New York plates — on five mornings between February 25 and March 1 (excluding February 28, which was Hammond’s day off). A telephone lineman saw a car like that, too, not far from the Lindberghs’ driveway. A woman from Zion said she saw a car of that description near the post office. It seemed to be on its way north. After March 1 no one saw it again.

      Police also had other good leads. Archie Adam, Office Manager of the nearby State Village for Epileptics at Skillman, had been driving south toward Hopewell after work on March 1. Adam was not far from the Lindberghs’ driveway at around 7:40 p.m. when he was forced to veer suddenly to keep from crashing into the second of two cars coming in the opposite direction. Adam did not see who was in the first car, but the second one had two men in it.

      On March 2, Lindbergh subcontractor David Watson called police with some useful information. Watson had read about the shutters that could not be bolted on one of the nursery windows. He wanted to let the investigators know he had personally hung all of them and they all worked properly when he was finished. The house had only been completed in December 1931 — just shy of three months earlier. Watson had made a number of trips to check on his work. As a skilled carpenter he did not consider it possible that any windows he hung would already be warped — he would have noticed and fixed them. No police followed up with Watson.

      Anne said she and her mother had noticed the problem with the bolt for that pair of shutters the first weekend of February. On the morning of February 29, 1932 — the day before his son disappeared — Lindbergh called a different subcontractor to fix the front door weather stripping. Yet he had never asked to have the nursery window fixed even though that window was routinely opened and shut twice a day.

      While parents were