Charles Lindbergh's kidnapping nightmare
His remarkable flight and the wreckage that followed
“You know what you want,” Evangeline Lindbergh wrote in reply to a letter from her son Charles. She couldn’t help adding a mother’s doubt: “…is a plane a wise investment & has the occupation of pilot any future?”
The 6’ 2 1/2” Lindbergh, nicknamed Slim, was performing stunts on planes that barnstormed from town to town. Billing himself as the “aerial daredevil Lindbergh,” he eked out a living, skydiving and walking on wings. He even toyed with the idea of hanging from a plane by his teeth. His dream, he told his mother, was to buy his own flying machine.
Yes, the occupation of pilot had a future — and thanks to Lindbergh, that future would be brighter than anyone realized.
The improbable arc of Lindbergh’s 33-and-a-half-hour solo flight from Long Island to Paris in 1927 instantly made the 25-year-old Minnesota farmboy the world’s hero. It set off a media frenzy to know everything about Lindbergh — and triggered his response: a decades-long pursuit of privacy.
The lowest point came 94 years ago this month. On March 1, 1932, an intruder climbed a ladder into the second-floor nursery of Lindbergh’s home in Hopewell, New Jersey and kidnapped his 20-month-old son, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., from his crib. A crudely-written ransom note on the window sill instructed Lindbergh to get ready to pay $50,000 for his child’s return.
“For the second time in less than five years, the world revolved around Charles Lindbergh,” A. Scott Berg wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Lindbergh: A Life.
“Radio programs everywhere were interrupted and front pages of newspapers were remade, shunting the Sino-Japanese War and Congressional attempts to repeal prohibition aside.”
It has been more than a month since Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of Today show anchor Savannah Guthrie, disappeared from her Tucson home. Security cameras revealed the presence of a man in a ski mask and gloves, wearing a backpack, at the door of Nancy Guthrie’s home, on February 1, the day she disappeared. Ransom notes were sent to media outlets, but it’s unclear if they were genuinely from someone who abducted Guthrie. The family is offering a million-dollar reward for information leading to Guthrie’s return.
As Axios reported on Feb. 23, “a swarm of national news crews, local reporters, bloggers and social media influencers have spent the past three weeks camped outside Nancy Guthrie’s Catalina Foothills home, where she was last seen Jan. 31.” This week, Savannah Guthrie visited the Today studio and talked of returning to the show at some point.
The world is left to hope that fame will not again bring tragedy, as it did in the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. The life of the pioneering aviator offers still-relevant insight into the nature of celebrity and the role of the media.
Flunking out
Raised mostly by his mother, Lindbergh was a lonely child who became fascinated by nature and science but struggled with most academic subjects. Evangeline moved to Madison, Wisconsin to be with her son, where he attended the University of Wisconsin. But it didn’t help — and he flunked out.
Lindbergh’s parents, a badly mismatched couple, had separated after his father, C.A., won election to Congress. The elder Lindbergh went on to lose several campaigns for Senate, including one in which he and Charles barnstormed Minnesota on an Army surplus plane they bought after the end of World War I. The Curtiss JN4-D “Jenny” could fly as fast as 70 miles an hour. Evangeline Lindbergh “thoroughly enjoyed” being in the cockpit of that plane after C.A. lost the election.
C.A. Lindbergh was an early isolationist and populist politician, deeply skeptical of bankers and foreign wars. His political stance influenced the world view of his son.
As a child, Lindbergh collected everything from arrowheads to coins and stamps; he was fascinated by nature and mechanical devices, but “painfully shy,” as his half-sister said. While flying brought young Charles Lindbergh out of his shell, there remained something remote and very private about him.
The prize
In 1919, hotelier Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 prize to the first aviator to fly nonstop from Paris to New York or the other way round. Many of the entrants competed as a crew, rather than relying on one person to attempt the 3,600-mile flight.
One prominent competitor, René Fonck and his crew of three, took off on September 21, 1926 from Roosevelt Field on Long Island, nine months before Lindbergh. The French aviator’s plane was equipped, Berg wrote, with “a bed, red-leather upholstery, long-wave and short-wave radio sets, flotation bags in case of an emergency landing, a hot ‘celebration’ dinner to be eaten upon arrival... even a last-minute batch of croissants to send them on their way.”
As spectators looked on, the plane lumbered down the runway, unable to gain altitude. It crashed into a gully and exploded. Fonck escaped, along with another crew member; the other two were killed.
When Lindbergh took off from the same airfield in 1927, the runway was water-logged. The “Spirit of St. Louis” bounced twice before just clearing a tractor by 10 feet and telephone wires by 20 feet. There were no croissants — he brought along five sandwiches to sustain him on the flight. He sat on a wicker porch chair, rather than red leather.
His mother Evangeline had told him, “The happiest day for me will be the day you return.” She did confide to him in a letter, “for the first time in my life I realize that Columbus also had a mother.”
Lindbergh had hardly any sleep the night before he took off. He had extensive experience as an air mail pilot in the Midwest, but had never traveled such a long distance — and over enormous stretches of ocean. “Where Lindbergh had steered his course in the past according to visible landmarks below,” Berg noted, “he would have to navigate this trip by looking above, charting a course based on time traveled and the position of the stars.”
Heading over Newfoundland and above the open Atlantic, Lindbergh fought fog and an ice buildup on his plane. He kept himself awake partly by writing in his log. “My back is stiff; my shoulders ache; my face burns; my eyes smart,” he noted. “It seems impossible to go on longer. All I want in life is to throw myself down flat, stretch out—and sleep.”
Flying about 50 feet over some fishing boats, Lindbergh shouted, “Which way is Ireland?” He didn’t get a response, but soon soared over Ireland and began to realize that he actually could make it to Paris.
At 10:24 P.M. on May 21, 1927, 150,000 people greeted the sleep-deprived 25-year-old as the Spirit of St. Louis touched down at Le Bourget Airfield.
Evading the press
Lindbergh realized even then that he would pay a huge price for his achievement.
Watching people running toward him on the airfield, Lindbergh pondered his future. “At first he feared for his physical safety; over the next few months he worried about his soul,” Berg wrote. “He instinctively knew that submitting himself to the idolatry of the public could strip him of his very identity; and the only preventive he could see was to maintain his privacy.“
“The unwanted fame all but guaranteed an isolated adulthood. And, indeed, Lindbergh spent the rest of his life in flight, searching for islands of tranquility.”
After Lindbergh’s historic landing in Paris, as many as a million people lined the Champs Elysees and other Parisian avenues as the aviator rode in an open car. Visiting England, he met King George V and patted the cheek of his granddaughter, the future Queen Elizabeth II.
The cultural world took notice, Berg observed:
Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht would soon collaborate on a cantata —”Der Lindberghflug” — fifteen scenes for soloists, chorus, and orchestra in which a tenor portraying Lindbergh sings of his preparations for the flight, and later faces such antagonists as the Fog, the Snowstorm, and Sleep.
TIME magazine proclaimed him its first “Man of the Year.” When Lindbergh returned to the U.S. the next month on a U.S. Navy cruiser, “A convoy of four destroyers, two Army blimps, and forty airplanes accompanied the Memphis up Chesapeake Bay,” Berg noted.
“It is a great and wonderful sight,” Lindbergh told an admiral, “and I wonder if I really deserve all this.”
His flight to Paris marked the beginning of a lifelong battle with reporters, as Lindbergh tried and often failed to shield his activities from view.
When he married Anne Morrow, the couple switched cars in an alley to evade reporters and drove from New Jersey to Long Island. “With their two-hour jump on the press, Charles and Anne reached their destination on the Sound at ten o’clock, undetected,” Berg wrote. “According to plan, they found a dinghy tied to a tree, which they hauled by flashlight to the water. As a cold wind blew, Charles rowed his bride out to their cruiser, the Mouette, which waited there with lights shining, beckoning them to begin their voyage together.” They headed up the coast to Maine.
The New York Times admitted that it and the other newspapers had been outfoxed. It reported on May 29, 1929, “Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh and his bride, the former Anne Spencer Morrow, vanished utterly from the public view yesterday, spending the first day of their honeymoon in complete privacy that left their whereabouts a mystery.” Eventually reporters found out where they were.
Kidnapping
When their child was taken, the Lindberghs reacted in different ways: Anne grieved. Her husband approached the ordeal non-emotionally, as an engineering problem he could solve if only he remained calm. Of course, he could not.
The clues were scarce. As an FBI account noted, “During the search at the kidnapping scene, traces of mud were found on the floor of the nursery. Footprints, impossible to measure, were found under the nursery window. Two sections of the ladder had been used in reaching the window, one of the two sections was split or broken where it joined the other, indicating that the ladder had broken during the ascent or descent. There were no blood stains in or about the nursery, nor were there any fingerprints.”
A retired school principal in The Bronx publicly offered to act as a go-between in delivering the ransom, which had been increased to $70,000. John F. Condon went by the nickname “Jafsie” in the discussions that followed. He eventually met “John” at Woodlawn Cemetery and later gave him $50,000 in return for a note indicating that the child was on a boat supposedly named “Nellie” near Martha’s Vineyard. The search for the boat proved fruitless. Meanwhile, con men sought to make a quick buck at the expense of the Lindberghs by pretending to know the truth about the kidnapping.
The child’s real fate became known on May 12. His body was found in the woods near a highway, about 4.5 miles away from the Lindbergh home. “The Coroner’s examination showed that the child had been dead for about two months and that death was caused by a blow on the head,” the FBI noted.
Parts of the ransom were paid in distinctive gold certificates, dollar bills backed by the gold standard. A service station attendant in The Bronx reported that a man paid for five gallons of gas with gold certificates. He was eventually identified as Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a 35-year-old carpenter born in Saxony, Germany. He had served time in prison for robbery and had entered the U.S. 11 years earlier. Hauptmann reportedly met the description of “John.” Lindbergh, who accompanied Condon on one of his encounters with John, identified Hauptmann’s voice.
The trial of Bruno Hauptmann was a media sensation on a par with the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995. America’s most eminent columnists and authors converged on Flemington, New Jersey — everyone from Damon Runyon to Walter Winchell to Dorothy Killgallen to H.L. Mencken. Hauptmann insisted he had nothing to with the kidnapping, but the evidence of his involvement in the kidnapping was overwhelming — although his precise role and the possibility of accomplices will probably never be known.
Not only did Hauptmann have ample amounts of the ransom money, but an expert came up with devastating evidence of his connection to the ladder that was used to enter the Lindbergh home.
As Berg wrote,
As a result of his study, [wood expert Arthur] Koehler swore that one of the uprights in the ladder had originally been part of a plank in the flooring of Hauptmann’s attic, fitting right down to the nail-holes. The rest of the lumber in the attic, he maintained, also came from the very yard at which his search had ended. Furthermore, a study of the tools found in Hauptmann’s garage revealed that the plank from the attic had been planed down by one of his tools.
Hammering a final nail into Hauptmann’s coffin, Koehler said that a three-quarter-inch chisel was used in making the recesses for the rungs of the ladder, and that upon inspecting the Hauptmann toolchest he found no such tool, one that would be standard equipment in an ordinary carpenter’s kit. That was the exact tool found at the Lindbergh house. [After that testimony] Hauptmann returned to his cell with his head bowed and eyes cast down.
Was the ladder the key to explaining how the child had been injured, and perhaps how he died? Berg noted, “Part of the ladder had broken. One of the side rails of the center section had split along the grain, suggesting that while the kidnapper had been successfully able to climb into the nursery, the added weight of his victim was enough to crack the wood. The location of the break indicated that the kidnapper and the baby might have fallen as much as five feet to the ground.”
The tension mounted when the jury left the courtroom to deliberate.
Close to seven thousand people gathered around the Hunterdon County Courthouse, completely blocking Flemington’s Main Street. At 10:27, an assistant to the Sheriff was sent up the courthouse stairs to the belfry, where he tolled the bell. The crowd shouted for several minutes in anticipation of the verdict—chanting “Kill Hauptmann! Kill Hauptmann!”
Controversy still rages about the fairness of the trial and the evidence of Hauptmann’s guilt. Observers blasted the judge and the press for their behavior. The Boston Herald compared the atmosphere surrounding the trial to “the ballyhooed sideshow of a circus.”
There were other consequences. “The Lindbergh kidnapping affected every child and parent in America,” Berg wrote. “If ‘Baby Lindy’ — protected by servants within estate walls — could be abducted, then every child in America was vulnerable. Parents encouraged their children to come inside and play, and many were forbidden thereafter from walking even a block from home by themselves.”
On April 3, 1936, Hauptmann, still proclaiming his innocence, was strapped into the electric chair in Trenton state prison and executed.
By then, the Lindberghs were long gone from the U.S. After the birth of their son Jon, Charles Lindbergh felt he could no longer protect his family and their privacy in his own country. They fled to England at the end of 1935. “The man who eight years ago was hailed as an international hero and a good-will ambassador between the peoples of the world,” reported The New York Times, “is taking his wife and son to establish, if he can, a secure haven for them in a foreign land.”
Impressed by Nazi Germany
They did find refuge in a 14th century house in Kent, owned by the writers Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. But Lindbergh had no inkling that he was heading into another media storm that would shadow the rest of his life.
Major Truman Smith, the U.S. military attaché in Berlin, was anxious to learn more about Germany’s rearmament under the Nazi regime. He asked Lindbergh to visit and obtained approval from the second-ranking man in the regime, Air Minister Hermann Goering.
Inspecting factories, Lindbergh was impressed. Germany, he noted, was “now able to produce military aircraft faster than any European country.” Charles and Anne were feted at a state dinner by Goering, who had to change his pants after his pet lion urinated on him.
Then Lindbergh attended the opening ceremony of the Berlin Olympics, seeing Adolf Hitler but not speaking with the German dictator.
Germany, Lindbergh wrote, was “the most interesting nation in the world today, and … she is attempting to find a solution for some of our most fundamental problems.” While he privately frowned on the Nazis’ persecution of Jewish citizens, he did not see that as a reason to mute his enthusiasm for the regime. Anne Lindbergh also praised Hitler as “a very great man” in a letter to her mother.
On a return visit to Germany in 1938, Lindbergh attended a stag dinner at the American Embassy. Goering surprised him by bestowing on Lindbergh a medal — the Service Cross of the German Eagle — which he said was being awarded at Hitler’s behest. It was, Berg wrote, “a golden cross with four small swastikas, finished in white enamel, strung on a red ribbon with white and black borders. Accompanying the medal was a proclamation on parchment signed by Hitler.”
This history would dog Lindbergh for years. He returned to America and spoke out against any involvement in the war Hitler launched by attacking Poland in 1939. While the aviator’s isolationist writing and speeches initially drew support in the United States, his cause cratered after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and Germany’s declaration of war against the U.S.
Lindbergh knew then that the U.S. had no alternative but to go to war, and he aided the war effort in many ways. But his reputation never recovered from his glowing view of 1930s Germany. He condemned the Nazis’ slaughter of millions of Jews and others, but engaged in what would now be called a false equivalency by putting it on a par with U.S. war crimes. Anne Morrow Lindbergh admitted their error in cheering on Germany; her husband never did.
In the postwar years, Lindbergh became a committed and effective conservationist, helping to save endangered species and protect indigenous societies. As Berg noted, though, “Some, particularly Jews, found Lindbergh’s newfound passion disconcerting, especially when he flung around such phrases as, ‘I don’t want history to record my generation as being responsible for the extermination of any form of life.’ Longtime editorial writer Max Lerner, for one, wondered, ‘Where the hell was he when Hitler was trying to exterminate an entire race of human beings?’”
‘Fractured by secrecy’
In 1952, Lindbergh declined to participate in 25th anniversary events commemorating his flight to Paris, though he did write a book about it, The Spirit of St. Louis, that became a bestseller the following year.
Explaining why he wouldn’t give an interview, he told an Associated Press editor, “I doubt that it is possible for anyone who has not lived through long periods of intense personal publicity to realize fully the problems it creates and the difficulties involved. I believe that over the years I have come to value the freedoms of privacy as highly as you value the freedoms of the press.”
In one respect, Lindbergh succeeded in achieving privacy.
Beginning in the 1950s, he led a double life — fathering children in Germany with three women — with even his family remaining in the dark. Lindbergh would visit them periodically, identifying himself to the children with an assumed name. According to the Minnesota Historical Society, “Ten days before his death in 1974, Lindbergh wrote letters to his three mistresses, asking them to continue ‘utmost secrecy.’”
Those facts didn’t surface in Berg’s biography — even though the author was granted full access to the records of Charles and Anne Lindbergh — but only became public in 2003, 29 years after his death. A book published by three siblings in 2005 said that he had also been the father of four more out-of-wedlock children.
“I don’t know why he lived this way, and I don’t think I ever will know,” wrote Reeve Lindbergh, the youngest child of Charles and Anne, “but what it means to me is that every intimate human connection my father had during his later years was fractured by secrecy.”