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

that he would like to carry them as little trophies from his great triumph.

After the meeting, Finn contacted Schwarzkopf, who agreed to let the psychiatrist see photostatic copies of the ransom notes. But Schwarzkopf, in another mind-boggling display of bureaucratic territoriality, said that Finn could not see them, that the New Jersey State Police did not need the assistance of the New York police, thank you very much.

By this time, Dudley Shoenfeld wasn’t surprised at the turf battles between police forces. But at least Detective James Finn had listened to him. Maybe something good would come out of their session one day.

Many months would pass before Shoenfeld’s theories about the kidnapper could be compared to the actual human being. Then the police would see that the psychiatrist had been remarkably perceptive.

*The direct quotes in this chapter and my paraphrasing of Shoenfeld’s views are from his 1936 book The Crime and the Criminal: A Psychiatric Study of the Lindbergh Case, as well as a memo he wrote after meeting with Finn. And I am indebted to Dr. Peter D. Byeff, whose late mother, Ruth Eile, was Shoenfeld’s personal secretary for many years. Dr. Byeff was kind enough to share his own recollections of Shoenfeld.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

TWO VICTIMS

Englewood, New Jersey

May and June 1932

The household help at the Lindberghs’ home near Hopewell had been questioned and cleared, their whereabouts on March 1, the day of the kidnapping, accounted for. Then there was Violet Sharpe, a twenty-eight-year old maid at the Englewood estate of Anne Lindbergh’s mother. Sharpe had left her native England two years before in search of a better life in the United States.

Questioned by the New Jersey State Police nine days after the baby was taken, she gave answers that were vague, even contradictory. She seemed defensive and surly.

Asked where she had been on March 1, she claimed at first that she had gone on a double date to a movie that night. But she said she couldn’t recall the name of the man who had accompanied her, nor the names of the other couple, nor the title of the movie, nor even the location of the theater.

So, she was asked, how did you meet this guy who took you on a date and whose name you don’t even remember?

Sharpe said she and her sister, Emily, were strolling on Lydecker Street in Englewood, not far from the Morrow estate, on Sunday, February 28, when a man waved from a car. For a moment, Sharpe said, she thought she knew him, so she waved back. As he stopped the car, she realized she didn’t know him after all. But the man had a friendly way, and he asked her out, Sharpe politely declined, but the man was persistent. He got her phone number and said he would call. He did, early on the evening of March 1, saying he’d pick her up at the Morrow estate around eight o’clock.

Sharpe’s story raised suspicions from the onset, yet the police did not question her again until April 13. This time, the police expressed their skepticism, and Sharpe admitted that she’d lied. She said the foursome had not gone to the movies; rather, they had gone to a roadhouse in Orangeburg, New York, just across the New Jersey border and a half hour drive from Englewood. Sharpe said she drank coffee while the other three drank beer. And this time, she remembered her date’s first name: Ernie.

After some dancing to the radio, Sharpe said, the group left, and she was dropped off back in Englewood around eleven o’clock.

Sharpe’s new account did not dispel the suspicions. For a young single woman to go to a roadhouse during Prohibition with a man she’d just met called her character into question, at least in the eyes of some people, even if she had drunk nothing stronger than coffee. Besides, she still couldn’t remember her date’s last name.

Investigators saw other reasons to focus on Sharpe. They discovered that she had $1,600 in her bank account. That was a lot of money, especially for a maid who was paid $100 a month. And her sister, Emily, had sailed for England just a few days after the ransom money was handed to Cemetery John.

Or should Sharpe have been given the benefit of the doubt about her bank account? After all, her job included board and lodging, and her expenses were not high. It would have been reasonable to conclude that she was simply a thrifty young woman.

But the stars seemed to be aligning against Sharpe. She had lost weight and was feeling ill. On May 11, she was admitted to a hospital in Englewood with a severe infection of her tonsils and adenoids. Her tonsils were removed, leaving her with a terrible sore throat.

The afternoon of Thursday, May 12, was cool and drizzly as a truck driver pulled off a road in a wooded area not quite five miles from the Lindbergh estate in Hopewell. He walked forty feet or so into the woods to relieve himself. A horrid stench was in the air. He spotted what looked like a baby’s foot, then a skull, beneath leaves and brush. A closer look revealed the corpse of an infant, badly decomposed and half torn apart by animals. The search for the Lindbergh baby was over.

The search had extended over a wide region of the country and out to sea, yet it had ended not far from home and only seventy-five feet or so from the emergency phone lines set up by the police. Colonel Schwarzkopf quickly came under criticism from people who lived near the Lindbergh estate and had complained that the police hadn’t searched the area closely enough.

An autopsy confirmed that the infant son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh had died of a skull fracture, almost certainly the night he was taken. The Lindberghs, fearing that a grave would attract ghoulish souvenir hunters, had their baby’s remains cremated and scattered at sea.

Schwarzkopf said a group suspected of being