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

Maryland State Police searched isolated areas of both shores of the Chesapeake Bay after hearing that the baby might be on a boat in the region.

On April 14, Lindbergh declared that it was of “the utmost importance” that neither he nor his wife “nor our representatives” be followed by reporters for fear of ruining negotiations with whoever had the baby.46

Colonel Schwarzkopf tried to head off any questions about negotiations. It was clear from the Lindberghs’ language and Schwarzkopf’s reticence that the legendary aviator trusted himself more than the police to get his son back.

Lieutenant Detective James Finn of the New York City police watched the developments in New Jersey with frustration and, more and more, a sense of foreboding.

Finn, in charge of the New York City facet of the investigation, had never bought into the theory that the baby had been taken by professional criminals. Gang members wouldn’t be stupid enough to steal the child of a national hero, Finn thought. Such a crime would bring way too much heat. Besides, there were many targets with more money than Charles Lindbergh, notwithstanding the advantages the aviator’s fame had brought him.

Thus, Finn thought, Lindbergh’s early attempts to recruit organized crime figures in the search for his child were useless. Most likely, the kidnapper was an amateur with no ties whatsoever to gangsters.

Finn felt left out of the overall investigation. Colonel Schwarzkopf, perhaps eager to keep as much personal authority as possible over the investigation, even refused at first to let Finn see copies of the ransom notes—despite the fact that the notes had all been mailed from New York.

As for Finn’s growing sense of foreboding, it was triggered in part by a long conversation Finn had had with a psychiatrist.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE PROFILER

New York City

April 1932

Dr. Dudley D. Shoenfeld knew that, even in the twentieth century, there were people who viewed his field of psychiatry as no more scientific than astrology or voodoo. And sadly, there were people who might benefit from visiting him but were embarrassed at the thought of seeing a psychiatrist.

Which was a shame, really, because Shoenfeld was the least threatening of men and not just because he was only five feet four inches tall. He smiled easily, had many friends, and enjoyed parties. Now and then, he rested his formidable intellect by going to Yonkers Raceway, where he loved to bet on the trotters, sometimes after trading hot tips with the elevator operator in his Midtown Manhattan apartment building.

Shoenfeld had been drawn to the study of the mind while a navy physician during the Great War, after his graduation from New York University and its medical school. Besides maintaining a private practice, he worked at Mount Sinai Hospital and was a consultant at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. He was a charter member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society.

He was no worshipper of the Lone Eagle, for he had heard that Lindbergh was an anti-Semite, like many Americans at that time. But Shoenfeld could empathize with the ordeal of the Lindberghs, since he and his wife, Helen, had a young son, Richard.

Shoenfeld, who had turned thirty-nine on March 24, had been following the Lindbergh case with interest and, increasingly, with dismay. He couldn’t understand why some investigators theorized in public that the kidnapping must have been committed by an organized gang. Shoenfeld thought gang involvement was almost inconceivable, given the firestorm that a crime against the Lindbergh family would set off.

“No gang would have undertaken so hazardous an enterprise for the ridiculous sum of $50,000,” Shoenfeld would write later. And if a gang had been reckless enough to undertake the kidnapping, “the ransom demand would have been much higher.”*

But Lindbergh subscribed to the organized gang theory and wanted the New Jersey State Police to walk a tightrope. Above all, of course, he wanted them to recover his son unharmed. If they could do that and track down the kidnappers, fine.

Shoenfeld thought the police were deferring to Lindbergh too much, that Lindbergh’s interference had “placed the troopers in the roles of estate guards and messenger boys” whose main task “was the sorting of crank clues.”

Shoenfeld also knew, from his contacts in the realms of science and medicine, that the New Jersey State Police had bungled a test for fingerprints on the kidnapper’s ladder days after the baby was stolen.

Dr. Erastus Mead Hudson, a New York City physician who for years had been interested in fingerprinting, had volunteered his services just after the kidnapping. Of crucial importance, Hudson had been trying out a new method using silver nitrate in a chemical process that could lift prints that were otherwise indiscernible. Given a small section of the ladder, he was allowed to demonstrate his method to a group of troopers—who then tried to imitate the method themselves, hopelessly smudging whatever prints might have been discovered.

(Had someone had the good sense and exercised authority, the ladder might have been quarantined from the start until a fingerprint expert like Dr. Hudson was allowed to examine it. For that matter, the FBI might have been valuable early on in this aspect of the case. The bureau’s laboratory was being set up in 1932, and FBI technicians were gaining expertise in the art and science of fingerprint analysis.)

Dudley Shoenfeld’s specialty was not chemistry but psychiatry, and it was in that capacity that he became acquainted with Leigh Matteson, science editor of the International News Service. The journalist was seeking support for a theory that had been forming in his mind: that the Lindbergh crime was the work of one man, a man who might be considered insane but would function well enough to carry out the kidnapping.

Matteson had visited Dr. Lindsay R. Williams, secretary of the New York Academy of Medicine, who had referred him to Dr. Israel Strauss, chairman of the Committee on Medical Jurisprudence. Finally, Matteson was referred to Shoenfeld, who was secretary to the committee at the time.

Shoenfeld and Matteson traded opinions and hunches. Then Matteson set