Lindbergh kidnapping case still horrifies and fascinates 80 years later (Julie Mack column)

Julie Mack | By Julie Mack | The Kalamazoo Gazette
on May 19, 2012 at 9:00 AM, updated September 28, 2012 at 10:06 AM

HOPEWELL, N.J. -- "There," the man said, pointing to the southeast corner of the house.

I followed the man's finger to stare at the second-story bedroom window where Charles Lindbergh Jr. was taken by a kidnapper 80 years ago. As I stood near the ground where the 20-month-old likely died, the story seemed even more bizarre and improbable and achingly sad.

I'm not one to believe that the kidnapping was a hoax or the wrong person executed. But standing at the kidnapping gave me an inkling of why the case is still debated.

In the days before Google maps, a German immigrant from The Bronx actually was able to locate this house, at the end of a mile-long driveway on an obscure road in New Jersey's Sourland Mountains? A grown man holding a toddler was really able to fit through that small window? Nobody in this not-so-big house heard anything on the night of the kidnapping?

I had seen photographs of the site before. But in real life, it was surprisingly modest and austere. It's hard not to be struck by the remoteness of the location, the 27-inch thick walls -- and the fact the windows are small and relatively few.

It's more like a fortress than a house, and perhaps that's what Charles and Anne Lindbergh had in mind when the home was constructed during the winter of 1931-32. Five years after Lindy's historic flight, he was still dogged incessantly by the media and looking for a place to settle down with his young son and pregnant wife.

So the couple bought 600 acres near the town of Hopewell, N.J., about 50 miles northeast of Philadelphia, and built a two-story white house they called High Fields.

Around 10 p.m. March 1, 1932 -- a cold, windy, damp Tuesday night -- the baby's nurse discovered the toddler was gone from his bed. A ransom note was found on the windowsill, and a ladder made of scrap wood, with some slates broken, was abandoned by the side of the house.

Ransom was paid, but the baby wasn't returned.

On May 12, 72 days after the kidnapping, a truck driver stopped along the Hopewell-Princeton Turnpike and went into the woods to urinate. To his horror, he found the decomposed of the Lindbergh baby, half-covered by leaves.

An autopsy indicated the cause of death was a fractured skull. Investigators surmised the toddler died during the kidnapping when the ladder broke and the kidnapper accidentally dropped him.

It took more than two years to make an arrest. The case broke open when Richard Bruno Hauptmann paid for 98 cents of gas with a $10 gold certificate whose serial number matched a bill in the ransom money.

Hauptmann declared his innocence, but the evidence convinced the jury: $14,000 of the $50,000 in ransom money was found hidden in his garage. Wood in his attic matched the ladder, down to the wood grain and nail holes. His handwriting appeared identical to that in the ransom note. The  address and phone number of Lindbergh's go-between in paying the ransom was penciled on a door frame in Hauptmann's house. 

Hauptman was convicted and sentenced to death; the man who did the execution was the same man who performed the executions of Ferdinando Sacco and Bartololeo Vancetti.

It was the one of the most riveting stories of the 1930s: An American hero's baby, stolen in the dead of night, murdered in cold blood. The "crime of the century," the tabloids said.

Michigan newspapers played up the local angle: Lindbergh's mother, Evangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh was part of a prominent Detroit family; her uncle was John C. Lodge, for whom the Lodge Freeway is named. Although Charles Lindbergh was raised in Minnesota, he was born in Detroit and at the time of the kidnapping, Evangeline Lindbergh was a chemistry teacher at Detroit's Cass Tech High School.

(A decade after the kidnapping, during World War II, Charles and Anne Lindbergh and their children moved to Michigan for several years while Charles Lindbergh worked at Ford Motor Co.'s Willow Run plant in Ypsilanti to help perfect the B-24 bomber. The Lindberghs lived in a rented house in Bloomfield Hills.)

As for Hopewell, N.J., Charles and Anne deeded High Fields  to the state of New Jersey after the kidnapping. It's now a state residential facility for delinquent boys. There are currently eight boys at the Albert Elias Residential Group Center.

The inside of the house has been gutted and renovated, but the exterior is largely the same -- a grim reminder that the kidnapping was not just a gripping true-life crime story, but also a deeply personal tragedy that shattered the Lindberghs. Old-timers says that once they moved, the Lindberghs never came back to Hopewell. The Lindberghs' youngest daughter has said her parents never spoke of the kidnapping or their first-born son, although Anne Lindbergh eventually published her diaries and letters from that time in "Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead."

“Tragedy is the common lot of man," Anne Lindbergh wrote in a 1932 diary entry.  "'So many people have lost children' I remind myself."

In another entry: "This tragedy is such an inextricable part of my story that it cannot be left out of an honest record. Suffering -- no matter how multiplied -- is always individual."

Yet Hopewell also offers the reminder that life goes on.

After visiting the house, I drove to the spot where the baby's body was found 80 years and four days before.

"Turn right at the light and go to the crest of the hill," the woman at the Hopewell Museum told me. "It's about where the guard rail ends."

Then, as now, the road is the main route from Hopewell to Princeton, which is about 10 miles away. Where the guard rail ends is a ranch house made of brick. A few miles down, the scattered homes give way to the manicured campuses of a pharmaceutical lab, the Technology Center of Princeton and a conference center for Educational Testing Services, a division of the College Board.

Eighty years ago, reporters wrote that the baby's shallow grave was in "full view" of the Lindbergh house, on an adjacent hill four miles away as the crows flies. That's when the woods on the Lindbergh property had been cleared to build a private plane runway and landing strip.

Today, the foliage is much too thick. You would never know there was a house on the nearby hill. You would never know this was the the spot where a toddler's body was tossed like unwanted trash. Just standing here, there's no hint of any of it. It's just a  winding, hilly country stretch of road, on the way to Princeton.
