THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING SUSPECT NO. 1. Lise Pearlman

Elsie bounded up the other set of stairs by the kitchen to see what happened and found Anne in the nursery, still in her dressing gown, looking dazed. Elsie accompanied Anne back to her bedroom to change. Anne then opened a bedroom window and stuck her head out. She thought she heard a baby’s cry, but decided it was probably the howling wind.

      Elsie and Anne then joined Betty in the nursery with its light on to check under furniture and in every cabinet, closet and drawer where the toddler could possibly hide — to no avail. Nothing seemed amiss. As Anne knew, on Sunday afternoon the little boy had been left for a time to play by himself in the nursery. When he seemed too quiet, family friend Aida Breckinridge had gone upstairs to check on him and found Charlie had gotten out of the nursery into the bathroom at the end of the hall. She caught him in the act of pulling toilet paper from its roll and tossing it into the bowl. He squealed and raced back to his room.

      Betty Gow said it was about quarter after ten when the two men rejoined the women and reported back no sign of the child: “We all searched all around the house, the closets and drawers in the cellar and attic and everywhere. … When we couldn’t find the baby in the house the Colonel told Whateley to call the police.” The alarm went out on the wire immediately:

      COLONEL LINDBERGH’S BABY WAS KIDNAPPED FROM LINDBERGH’S HOME IN HOPEWELL, NJ SOMETIME BETWEEN 7:30 PM AND 10:00 PM THIS DATE. BABY IS 19 MONTHS OLD AND A BOY. IS DRESSED IN SLEEPING SUIT REQUEST THAT ALL CARS BE INVESTIGATED BY POLICE PATROL. AUTHORITY STATE POLICE TRENTON NJ.

      Courtesy of the New Jersey State Police Museum

      Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf responded immediately to news of the kidnapping with an all-points bulletin. He had been the head of the New Jersey State Police from its inception in 1921.

      2.

      A Secretive Loner in the Spotlight

      ON MAY 20,1927, when Charles Lindbergh took off on his unprecedented 33-and-a-half-hour solo flight to Paris from New York, he had little idea that this one journey would make him the object of the greatest media obsession in American history. The timing of his flight, and his ethnic background, made his super-stardom inevitable. “In an age of hedonistic materialism. he had shown courage and self-denial of a high order; in an age of corporations and committees he had acted alone.” To insatiable reporters, Lindbergh’s biography appeared perfect. The pioneering pilot was born on February 4, 1902, just over two years into the twentieth century. He was raised in part on a Minnesota farm at a time when most Americans remained farmers. He represented both the past and the future.

      Fans thrived on any news about their hero that they could get their hands on. They learned that the blond, blue-eyed pilot was named for his Scandinavian father, Charles August (“C.A.”) Lindbergh, except C.A.’s wife, Evangeline, spelled her son’s middle name like that of the Roman emperor. Science had transformed the world since C.A.’s boyhood. Lindbergh’s father had labored on a farm without any machinery before becoming a lawyer and Congressman championing farmers and laborers. His only son provided a comforting link between the past agrarian society and an unknown future shaped by new technology. What his worldwide admirers did not know was that Lindbergh “was shy and aloof, and wary, in his dealings with other human beings; he might be more spontaneous and wholehearted in his response to physical objects for the very reason that these did not demand that he respond and were, indeed, utterly indifferent to him.”

      Time magazine instituted the category of “Man of the Year” in 1927 and awarded it to the pioneering aviator, dwarfing Yankee Babe Ruth’s mammoth sixty-home-run season. Scores of poems and songs honored “Lucky Lindy.” Jubilant partygoers of all racial and ethnic backgrounds started doing the “Lindy Hop.” Lindbergh was deeply offended. As biographers would later note, throughout his life Lindbergh would regard “most reporters and photographers with intense suspicion and resentment. He … insisted that they twisted his words or quoted them out of context, they took pictures of him and his family at unflattering angles, and their jostling and intrusive flashlights upset him.”

      Fans had no idea that the real Charles Lindbergh was far from the heroic figure reporters portrayed. They had no clue about the paralyzing fears Lindbergh had overcome, nor his nasty, antisocial habits or family scandals. Just three years earlier, he had shown up at Brooks Field in San Antonio, Texas, an unknown quantity in a beat-up commercial biplane. The Army Air Service staff greeting new recruits on March 15, 1924, had to be shocked when out popped a cocky college dropout just in time for flight school. Charles “Slim” Lindbergh’s first assignment was to remove that junk heap from the premises.

      Pilot training in the 1920s demanded great concentration and skill. Less than a third of the 104 recruits who showed up to boot camp that spring would complete the course. Lindbergh’s brash attitude changed abruptly when he almost flunked out. For the first time in his life he hit his textbooks with a vengeance. By the following spring, Lindbergh became one of just 19 young men who earned their wings. He would be remembered as much for his pranks on the ground as for his superior flying ability.

      When given time off, most recruits headed for speakeasies and the local whorehouse. Lindbergh never went along. If he was not holed up with reading assignments, the aloof Midwesterner preferred to spend his free hours on mischief. Historian Kenneth Davis characterized the stunts Lindbergh pulled as “more malicious than humorous.” Learning that a cadet was deathly afraid of snakes, he hid a small, poisonous one in the fellow’s bunk, taking care only that its venom would not be fatal. Another trainee who feared scorpions “might anxiously check his sheets almost every night for a nasty surprise.” One well-endowed recruit who slept naked woke up with a start to find his penis painted green and a string tied to it, which Lindbergh had just convinced another recruit to yank. Those sleeping open-mouthed risked Lindbergh squirting their tongues with “shaving cream or hair grease.”

      When the troops gathered outside, Lindbergh created a trick with a sawed-off shotgun shell he placed under a chair and lit with a slow-burning, string fuse. When someone sat down, “the powder whoofed and the smoke shot upward.” Decades later, the world-famous pilot recalled the victims’ shocked reactions at boot camp as “delightful” to watch. At least one fellow pilot somehow found it amusing to recall that Lindbergh also attached a parachute to a dog and threw the poor animal off a hangar roof.

      After interviewing men who trained with Lindbergh, Davis concluded: “[Lindbergh’s] taste and talent for this kind of ‘fun’ [would] grow apace … passing beyond the bounds of sport into what, in the eyes of most observers, will appear a realm of crude, cruel aggression.” As biographer Leonard Mosley similarly noted: “Life in the Army stirred Lindbergh’s appetite for practical jokes, and they got rougher as he grew older.”

      When reporters quizzed Lindbergh about his personal life, he abruptly cut them off. Historian Kenneth Davis noted that Lindbergh strongly recoiled from “the absurd myth named ‘Lindy’ … his whole existence a melodrama shaped [by other people’s] fantasies. His fame became, in this respect, his mortal enemy … No man had a greater passion for privacy than he.”

      One pair of family secrets the aviator was hell-bent on keeping was that his father was illegitimate, and that Lindbergh was not even his family’s original surname. C.A.’s parents had not married until 1885, after they had seven children, C.A. being the first. C.A.’s father, Ola Mansson, had taken the name August Lindbergh when he fled Sweden in 1859 with his 20-year-old mistress Lovisa Jansdotter Carlen, and their baby son.

      Mansson had served for more than a decade as secretary for Crown Prince Charles of Sweden before getting caught in a major embezzlement scandal. He fled Stockholm to avoid prosecution. When he assumed a new identity in America, Mansson left behind a wife and seven children, the youngest of whom was just four at the time. Lindbergh never met his grandfather August Lindbergh, but likely learned about the scandals from two of C.A.’s older half-brothers who emigrated to Minnesota from Sweden in the 1860s and spent the rest of their lives