A Child is Missing
Kidnap. By George Waller. (Hamish Hamilton, 30s.) THE kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh, jr., on March 1, 1932, seems to have provided a number of people with a 'high-point in their lives. Even the author, the blurb says, 'has devoted more than a quarter of a century of research to his subject.' The facts behind it are simple enough. In 1926, a French hotel owner in New York, by the name of Orteig, offered a prize of $25,000 to anyone who flew the Atlantic from France to New York or the other way round. Charles A. Lindbergh, twenty-five, did it in 1927, solo. The press played it up for all it was worth. And Lindbergh's appearance and the mystery still surrounding flying helped it along. In 1929, he married Anne Morrow, whose father was US Ambassador in Mexico as well as being a multi-millionaire. They had a son, named after the father. They moved to a new house in New Jersey. From there the child was kidnapped and a ransom note left demanding $50,000.
The news of this, coming so close on the public hero-image of Lindbergh, was highly sensational. Offers of • help to mediate with the kidnappers came from a variety of sources. Even Al Capone, from gaol, issued a statement offer- ing a ten-thousand-dollar reward for capturing the kidnappers; while behind the scenes he tried to make a deal for his own freedom, if he got the child back. At one time there were some half-dozen people—some shady, some 'pillars of society'—all claiming that they were in touch with the real kidnappers. In the end, Lindbergh handed over the fifty thousand through one of them, `Jafsie.' But no baby. He was following
another such person's claim—another wild-goose chase—when a Negro truck-driver found the partly decomposed body of the child not far from the Lindbergh house. He had died from a blow not long after he was kidnapped. Two years later Bruno Richard Hauptman was arrested.
Hauptman, at seventeen, had been gassed and wounded as a machine-gunner on the Western Front. Back in Germany after the war he be- came a thief, and it was as a fugitive from justice that he entered the States in 1923 illegally. He had a few odd jobs as a carpenter, but wanted to return to Germany. A month after his arrest he was found guilty and sentenced to death. Over the next fourteen months, while he was in the death cell, there followed a series of reprieves and a series of false confessions by others. He was electrocuted on April 3, 1935, with no one in authority really believing that he was the only person behind the kidnapping.
I wish Mr. Waller was a better writer. If he were he would not need anything like 594 pages to cover the case. Nor would he have introduced so many corny bits of melodrama. In many ways this book reminds me of an academic thesis, where the important thing is method, a certain conscientiousness. His own attitude to- wards the case or the people involved is never quite clear. But the sheer piling-up of facts— the clever use of dropping a thread and picking it up later—keeps the thing moving.
It could also have been a better book if Mr. Waller had set the case more firmly in the Thirties and the Depression. His only attempt at analysis is with the witnesses for the prosecu- tion. The most theatrical and interesting was `Jafsie' (Dr. Condon), who wrote in offering to act as mediator between kidnapper and Lind- bergh. His only reason for doing this, he claims, was to see the child put his arms around his mother's neck (he had never known the Lind- berghs). And he regarded the case as 'this greatest and most disastrous case of all time, excepting the Crucifixion of the divine Son of Man.' He obviously hero-worshipped Lindbergh and when the trial was over went on a lecture tour of the case `to church and civic groups,' then on a vaudeville tour, referring to himself in Variety as 'the most enigmatic, colourful and widely publicised personality in America.' Asked why he did this, he replied that he hadn't made a penny out of the case.
But a great many others did. From the truck- driver who, by chance, came across the body (he was appearing in a Coney Island sideshow `gaudily decked out with a troupe of wax figures that re-created the discovery and the Lindbergh shock and grief') to the newspapers and the businessmen who introduced 'cute little kidnap ladders' for ladies to wear on their suits and dresses. No one comes out of the case with any kind of dignity. It drove the Lindberghs out of the States to England. Those who had hero- worshipped him now called him 'un-American,' `quitter.' Jafsie' reassured them. 'Colonel Lind- bergh told me that he would remain a citizen of the United States. He will return in triumph to us and the US.'
Lindbergh did return in the spring of 1939. In Europe he praised the new Germany, and received a medal from Goering. Back in the States he became an isolationist and made pro- Nazi speeches. But that is another story.
NORMAN LEVINE
Previous page
