The Kidnap Years: by David Stout (popular books of all time TXT) 📗

roll. Natty in a new black suit, he was led from his cell by a priest and the prison warden shortly before ten in the morning. Walking was hard, since his ankles were chained and his arms bound to his sides, but he had two big guards for support. And he only had to walk about forty feet to the gallows in a room nearby. On the way, he mumbled in response to the prayers offered by the priest.

Alas, the child killer had overestimated his newfound manliness. His legs buckled on the ninth step of the gallows, and he had to be dragged the final four steps to the top. As the black hood was placed over his head and the noose was adjusted, Hickman started to collapse again. Eager to get things over with, the hangman signaled for the trap door to be sprung. Because Hickman was slumping over, he bumped against the gallows instead of falling neatly through the opening. Without a clean drop that would have broken his neck and brought instant death, Hickman jerked and twitched as he strangled at the end of the rope.

A dozen or so officials and reporters watched. A few of the witnesses toppled off their wooden chairs in a faint. After fifteen minutes, a prison doctor climbed a stepladder, put a stethoscope to the chest of the condemned, and pronounced him dead. (Perry Parker did not watch the execution, though he could have. He had had enough of death.)

William Edward Hickman was gone from this world at the age of twenty, not much pitied for having endured a slow death and not greatly mourned.

CHAPTER NINE

A CASE LIKE NO OTHER

Hopewell, New Jersey

Early March 1932

Cars full of sightseers clogged the previously little-traveled road past the Lindbergh estate. Thousands of investigators from various police agencies joined the hunt for the child and his abductor. Motorists with small children in their cars were pulled over and checked.

Lindbergh let it be known he was ready to pay a ransom once he was given delivery instructions. Anne Lindbergh pleaded on the radio for her baby’s return. She gave details of his diet and feeding schedule in the hope that the kidnapper or kidnappers would hear and heed.

On Friday, March 4, the Lindberghs received a second note with the same circle symbols as the first. In the same fractured English, the note said that because the police had been called, the ransom was being raised to $70,000, and that it might be necessary for the baby to be kept for a longer time.

Various people, cranks and otherwise, offered to help find the infant. Al Capone, newly ensconced in federal prison for income tax evasion, said he was sure he knew the gang responsible for the abduction and that he could negotiate with the culprits and obtain the release of the child. Of course, Capone added, he would have to be let out of prison to offer his help. (His offer was declined.)

Without consulting the police, Lindbergh himself managed to contact some underworld figures. Talk to people in your line of work, he asked them. Find out what happened to my son.

Somehow, a Norfolk, Virginia, man convinced a prominent clergyman and a retired navy admiral that he knew the child’s abductors. Word of the Norfolk man’s claims reached Lindbergh, who asked the man to negotiate for the release of the child. The Norfolk man knew nothing; there were no negotiations.

Reporters swarmed around the Lindbergh property in Hopewell. Scores of newspapermen took over a garage on the estate, sometimes literally rubbing shoulders with investigators. Showing remarkable restraint, Lindbergh asked the horde of reporters if they could thin their ranks, at least temporarily, to relieve the strain on the telephone and telegraph lines in the region. For days, telephone operators in Hopewell screened calls to the property, putting them through only when they were satisfied that the callers were well-meaning and not deranged.

The police assigned to the case deferred to Lindbergh. He was allowed to take over some avenues of the probe—to interfere, really—in a way an ordinary man would not have been.

From the start, it was clear to Colonel Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf, the first superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, that he had a problem. Schwarzkopf was thirty-six at the time and hardly a pushover. He had graduated early from West Point in 1917 and had seen combat in the Great War, where he had endured a mustard gas attack that caused him to have respiratory problems for the rest of his life.

Due to his leadership ability and his fluency in German (he was the son of German immigrants), he rose quickly in the army. In 1921, having attained the rank of colonel, he accepted an offer from Governor Edward I. Edwards of New Jersey to head the newly formed state police force, which he divided into two troops. The northern troop would ride motorcycles and combat gambling, narcotics trafficking, whiskey running, and other mob-related activities, especially in the suburbs of New York City. The southern troop would be on horseback and go after the many moonshine rings that flourished in the woods and hills where the Garden State was still lightly developed.

Schwarzkopf personally trained the first contingent of twenty-five troopers, so at the time of the Lindbergh kidnapping, he was used to being in command. Yet even he found himself overwhelmed by Lindbergh’s controlling personality and even more by his fame.

Amid this circus atmosphere, investigators tried to be sensible and methodical. The workmen who had built the Lindberghs’ house were questioned and their backgrounds checked. All were cleared. For a time, a boyfriend of nursemaid Betty Gow was under suspicion. He, too, was cleared eventually.

There were early clues that seemed promising. A waitress in Pennington, New Jersey, called the state police to say that on the Friday before the kidnapping, she served three men who asked for directions to the Lindbergh estate. The three men were tracked down. They were newsreel photographers who had been at