THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING SUSPECT NO. 1. Lise Pearlman

of superior stock. As a child, Lindbergh relished the gruesome details of the Sioux Uprising of 1862 that included a massacre of white settlers at New Ulm, Minnesota. Pioneers of his grandfather August Lindbergh’s generation vilified the Sioux to justify their own aggressive takeover of Native American lands. When C.A. Lindbergh was growing up, the frontier had moved West. The Chippewa were peaceful weavers and the Sioux no longer posed a threat. Still, C.A. told his young son, that when no adults were around, he and his friends “would hide in bushes and whoop like savages to frighten [their] sisters and their friends.”

      The future pilot’s own earliest memories were from the year he turned three. The summer of 1905, two searing incidents occurred that stuck with the boy for life, and likely fueled his penchant as an adult for destroying the peace of mind of friends and family. His father often swam across the swift currents of the Mississippi River with young Charles on his back, both always stripped naked. One day, the small boy fell off into the rushing river. C.A. continued to shore and watched to see if his son would sink or swim. Luckily, after going under and starting to drown, the little boy managed to thrash himself to safety, shocked to see his father standing on the bank, never having made any effort to come to his son’s aid.

      Late on Sunday afternoon, August 6, 1905, came the second emotionally scarring event of Lindbergh’s early childhood. After dinner, the little boy was playing in the parlor. Suddenly, his mother and their servants began screaming. A maid swooped him into her arms and brought him to the barn. The boy was by now greatly upset. He saw plumes of black smoke and tufts of flame coming from a third-floor window. Fire hoses could not reach that level of the house, but neighbors had time to bring out his mother’s cherished piano and most furniture before the house burned to the ground.

      To the little boy, the conflagration marked the end of an era. He lost all his toys in the attic. By year’s end, his father suffered severe cash flow problems compounded by taxes assessed on his real estate holdings. The fire helped precipitate the final rift in a deteriorating marriage. His parents’ separation when he was a small child was another well-guarded family secret.

      Widower C.A. Lindbergh and Evangeline Lodge Land were mismatched to begin with: a middle-aged, small-town lawyer raised among immigrant farmers in rural Minnesota; and a refined schoolteacher 17 years his junior, whose father was a prominent dentist and inventor in Detroit. C.A. had been quick to propose to 24-year-old Evangeline in the fall of 1900 when they both lived in a rooming house in Little Falls. Evangeline had just arrived to teach high school chemistry. C.A. had a thriving law practice in town with his brother. When he met her, C.A. had just quit living in his townhouse with his judgmental widowed mother and put his two young daughters in boarding school.

      C.A. knew the girls were desperate to come back to live with him. Marrying Evangeline would make that possible. C.A. also viewed her as an elegant asset to further his political ambitions. He had rarely met a woman college graduate, let alone one with a prestigious Bachelor of Science and Master’s degree. The attractive brunette came from British, French and Irish stock. She had a beautiful figure, played the piano proficiently and had excellent social skills.

      Evangeline’s parents tried to dissuade her, but her father’s recent bankruptcy made her especially concerned about financial security. The sophisticated Land family only met their stubborn Swedish son-in-law at the wedding at their home in March 1901. They found him “hard to approach and eccentric.” Evangeline was at least as difficult in her own way — with a strong temper she likely inherited from her volatile grandmother. The strain on the newlyweds’ relationship began shortly after their only child was conceived on their ten-week honeymoon out West.

      Evangeline returned to Detroit for the birth of her son. She was still suffering from postpartum depression when she returned with her baby to Little Falls a month later. Her unhappiness was compounded by her prickly relationship with C.A.’s two daughters, who were closer in age to Evangeline than she was to her husband. Evangeline lashed out at C.A. in front of his family and acquaintances, alienating her Swedish mother-in-law and extended family with her superior airs and uncontrollable mood swings. Her stepdaughters called her “crazy” and claimed that she mistreated the baby. In later years, her daughter-in-law Anne Morrow Lindbergh watched Evangeline behave erratically as well, prompting Anne to conclude that her husband’s mother suffered from a chemical imbalance.

      Lindbergh grew up witnessing his mother’s long memory for insults. She never forgave C.A. for guffawing at her when she fell off a galloping horse while riding side saddle because she found that more ladylike, or, on another occasion, when she slipped on winter ice in the town center and every passerby could see her underwear. Her son would exhibit both his father’s juvenile sense of humor and his mother’s thin skin and desire to inflict punishment for insults — real or imagined.

      Well before the Lindberghs’ house burned down, C.A. had begun cheating on his wife with a woman who worked in his office. The couple separated for good in 1906. C.A. relocated his principal office to Minneapolis and continued to see his mistress. Evangeline and her young son moved to a hotel in Little Falls and then shared a sparsely furnished room in a boarding house. The four-year-old boy spent a lot of unhappy time “looking out of windows.” Once, he took the landlady’s cat and dropped it out a third-story window “to see if it was true that it would land on its feet.” The experiment worked.

      Going forward, Charles alternated spending time alone with each parent as they battled for their son’s loyalty with conflicting demands. Evangeline raised her son to value science. C.A. battled to raise his son to relish his tough, Swedish roots and prepare himself to endure any physical hardship. The couple’s only child would always view himself as one half grounded in nature, the other in science.

      The small boy clung to his father when visiting others. One close friend of C.A.’s later commented that his son was so exceedingly shy that it “made contact with other youngsters of his age next to impossible.” His resentful mother reinforced the boy’s isolation. He seldom had other children to play with. She disdained all their neighbors and did her best to avoid interacting with her husband’s extended family.

      In 1906, C.A. won a seat in Congress, where he would serve for five terms. Most winters Evangeline and Charles traveled to the nation’s capital where they lived separately from C. A., who had brought his mistress with him to Washington. Yet he and Evangeline kept up appearances by attending official functions together. Their annual charade had to be confusing to their son.

      Because of his parents’ frequent moves, the boy wound up attending a dozen different public and private grade schools — none for very long. His mother would have preferred to avoid having her son keep being the awkward new kid in class, but C.A. would not commit to paying for private school over the long term. He felt it built character to attend public schools, getting his son ready for the challenges of life.

      With all the disruption in his schooling, Lindbergh fell so far below his grade level he found school painfully humiliating. It made a strong impression on him that his Congressman father had originally found studying as tedious as he did. As a youngster, C.A. had often gone AWOL from school, much preferring “the freedom of the surrounding woods and water.”

      Charles spent most of his time in Washington with his mother. She found bitter satisfaction in bad-mouthing her husband for how little money he provided for their support. In front of their son, her husband called her a “blood sucker” and, at least one time, was so enraged he hit her. Evangeline, in turn, ended one shouting match about her husband’s mistress by putting a gun to C.A.’s head. By the summer of 1909, Evangeline sought a divorce. C.A. told his sister he resisted for his son’s sake. He also knew voters would never support a divorced man. Evangeline became persuaded that remaining the wife of a Congressman had some advantages.

      Summers in Little Falls were far more to the boy’s liking. C.A. shared with his son a love of solitude. They both enjoyed walking in the primeval forests. Charles and his mother stayed in an uninsulated cabin built on the same site as their former home. The little boy created an “Indian lookout” by nailing cleats into a linden tree and later into a giant red oak tree the height of a six-story building overlooking the Mississippi River. He feared heights but found them irresistible.

      Lindbergh’s