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

up a meeting between the psychiatrist and Detective Finn. So Shoenfeld and the detective sat down one day in April 1932, just after Condon’s mysterious night meetings with Cemetery John.

We can envision Finn, who was more open-minded than many cops about psychiatry, and Shoenfeld quietly discussing the most sensational crime of the era, with the psychiatrist smoking the “luxury cigarettes” he liked to buy from Nat Sherman’s fashionable tobacco shop in Manhattan.

Finn said he had heard rumors that members of some gangs were eager to cooperate with lawmen, eager to convince them they’d had nothing to do with the kidnapping. If they could do that, they could resume their activities without distractions. Finn thought the gangsters’ eagerness made it all the more likely that professional criminals had nothing to do with the crime.

Shoenfeld agreed. He told Finn that the behavior of Cemetery John in the meetings with Condon—talking to Condon at length, even negotiating at the last minute over the exact ransom amount and agreeing to accept less—was hardly the work of a slick intermediary working for professionals.

But could a lone amateur really have climbed a ladder to the Lindberghs’ second-floor nursery, opened a window, and spirited the baby away without inside help? Some police investigators had declared that feat virtually impossible.

Shoenfeld disagreed. He pointed to a 1920 case in a small town in Pennsylvania. A mother and father lived in a private house with three children, the youngest just eighteen months old. One night, the mother heard a sound and awoke her husband to investigate. When the father entered the second-floor nursery, he found the two older children asleep and the nearby baby’s crib empty. A ladder had been used to gain entry.

Ransom negotiations followed, the police set a trap, and a man was arrested as he picked up a package he thought held the ransom money. The man confessed and said he had accidentally smothered the infant while carrying it away. Then he’d weighted the body down and thrown it into a river. The body was never found. The man was sentenced to life in prison.

The Pennsylvania case showed that it was possible for a kidnapper to climb a ladder and remove a small child from a home and do it quietly enough to avoid detection, Shoenfeld said.

Implicitly, Shoenfeld was accusing investigators of a failure of imagination and of failing to do their homework. He was also engaging in—pioneering, really—a blend of science, art, common sense, and intuition that would one day be called criminal profiling.

The Lindbergh kidnapper was a German immigrant; that much seemed clear from the ransom messages. Shoenfeld told Finn he’d like to see them instead of just reading about them in the newspapers. Finn said he’d see what he could do.

Ominously, in Shoenfeld’s view, none of the ransom notes had contained threats to the baby. Rather, they had said that the child was well. But Shoenfeld thought a kidnapper would more likely threaten harm to a victim rather than offer reassurances to spur quick payment of ransom—if the victim were still alive, that was.

Then there was Cemetery John’s cryptic comment to Condon: “I’m only a go-between. Would I burn if the baby was dead?”

Shoenfeld told Finn the kidnapper had almost surely killed the baby just after taking him.

What kind of man would do such a thing? What was the key to catching him? In a sense, Shoenfeld theorized to Finn, the key might lie not in the kind of man the kidnapper was but in the kind of man Lindbergh was. Think of magnets, Shoenfeld said. Opposites attract; in a perverse sense, the kidnapper was drawn to Lindbergh.

After his 1927 flight, Lindbergh was—or appeared to be—virtually omnipotent. He soared above the world, this boyishly handsome man, seemingly indifferent to the adoration from below, which he attracted endlessly and effortlessly.

The kidnapper was the polar opposite, “inferior in the world of reality,” and had probably had earlier brushes with the law, Shoenfeld said. Perhaps he had been incarcerated. Surely, he had delusions of grandeur along with a tremendous unconscious drive to be powerful.

To the kidnapper, Lindbergh was an enemy, everything the kidnapper wanted to be but never could. Taking the child meant the kidnapper had triumphed over the father, wounding him, as he himself had been wounded by life. How gratifying it was to force “the great man, Colonel Lindbergh” to bow before him by paying a ransom! But the money itself was not as important to the kidnapper as the power he had displayed in acquiring it. He had brought the Lone Eagle down to earth, where he himself felt so inferior.

If and when the kidnapper was caught, Shoenfeld predicted, he would not display fear or apprehension; indeed, he would not even feel those sensations, since he lacked the normal emotional development to do so.

The suspect would seem mild-mannered and would tell obvious lies yet not be able to feel how ridiculous he was being, Shoenfeld told Finn. But paradoxically, given his deep-seated feelings of inferiority, “he thinks he is capable of getting away with anything, merely by trying.”

He would probably talk a lot but he would say essentially nothing, Shoenfeld went on. Physical violence wouldn’t result in a confession because “he would enjoy playing the stoic and thus demonstrating his superiority.”

But a questioner who feigned a sympathetic, simple-minded demeanor might—might—obtain a confession by leading the suspect on “from extravagance to extravagance” and thence to overconfidence and carelessness.

“None of your routine questioning methods, however, will serve to obtain that confession,” Shoenfeld said. “Of this, I am certain.”

One more thing, Shoenfeld said. If the police discovered who the kidnapper was, they should arrest him away from his home. If he was arrested in his home—well, who knows? Maybe he had hidden the ransom where the police would have a hard time finding it. But if they arrested him when he was away from home, he would have some of the ransom bills on his person. Even when he was not planning to spend them, Shoenfeld thought