Читать книгу THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING SUSPECT NO. 1 - Lise Pearlman - Страница 11

INTRODUCTION

One drizzly Thursday afternoon in mid-May 1932, a truck driver on his way along a back road in central New Jersey pulled over at a remote location so he could relieve himself in the woods. Moments later, as the middle-aged African American stood under a tree branch, he stepped on something and started to kick it away. When he looked down, it startled him to see the foot of a small child sticking out of some leaves. He noticed the head face down in a hollow under the tree. The back of its skull had only a small bit of decayed skin on it and tufts of dirty blond hair partly washed by the ongoing light rain.

The driver called to his white co-worker to get out of the truck and come see. The body was missing both hands, one forearm and a leg below the knee. Though its chest was covered in a T-shirt, its lower torso and limbs were largely skeletal. Its sex could not be determined. The driver speculated that the rest of the body had “either decomposed or had been eaten by animals.” This could well be the missing Lindbergh baby, the subject of an intense nationwide manhunt for nearly two-and-a-half months, found dead less than five miles from home. The two men then sped off to track down the local constable.

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I began researching the Lindbergh baby kidnap/murder case when I started writing my first legal history book after I retired as a judge. The case became one of the chapters in my 2012 book, The Sky’s the Limit: People v. Newton, the REAL Trial of the 20th Century? which compared the political and social significance of headline trials from 1900 to 1999 to that of a landmark 1968 death penalty trial. I also included the Lindbergh trial as a chapter in a follow-up book in 2017, With Justice for Some: Politically Charged Criminal Trials of the Early Twentieth Century That Helped Shape Today’s America, which put famous criminal trials from 1900 through the Depression years in a different perspective — as a cultural backdrop to the divisive xenophobic, racial and ethnic issues we face as a nation today.

The Lindbergh “crime of the century” was an easy choice to include in both books. Among more than a dozen famous cases from 1900 to the Depression that were on every expert’s list as a candidate for “the” trial of the century, the Lindbergh case mesmerized the widest audience. Record numbers of people followed its every twist and turn on radio, in newspapers and magazines and gatherings outside the hundred-year-old courthouse in the small town of Flemington, New Jersey. Its extraordinary saturation of news outlets rivaled the ubiquitous coverage of the O. J. Simpson trial in the 1990s.

Law Professor Gerald Uelmen was a member of Simpson’s Dream Team. In his book Lessons from the Trial: The People v. O. J. Simpson, Uelmen observed a key feature of all the spellbinding trials in our nation’s history: “The most remarkable aspect of every ‘trial of the century’ … has been the insight it provides into the tenor of the times in which it occurred. It is as though each of these trials was responding to some public appetite or civic need of the era in which it took place.” The Lindbergh kidnap/murder took place during the height of the Depression. The context included a sharp rise in xenophobia in a national political environment dominated by white supremacists and social Darwinists, who feared the degradation of their race by an influx of immigrants. All of these factors figured in how that case played out. But most importantly, the case involved the world’s first flying hero — a real-life Nordic demi-god — eleven years before Superman first appeared in the comics.

When police investigate various suspects, they generally consider motive, opportunity and means as well as later conduct demonstrating consciousness of guilt. Yet in the Lindbergh kidnapping case, the police only applied those criteria selectively and left many people questioning why they switched from blaming a professional gang with inside help to pinning the kidnap/murder on an accused lone actor. After German immigrant Bruno Richard Hauptmann was tried and executed, questions still lingered about Hauptmann’s guilt or innocence, and what other persons might have been involved. Investigators also noted Lind bergh’s odd behavior in the wake of the crime — conduct which either intentionally or negligently obstructed the police investigation.

Near the end of World War II, British military historian B. H. Liddell Hart invited his readers to open their minds to face facts that might be disquieting: “Nothing has aided the persistence of falsehood, and the evils that result from it, more than the unwillingness of good people to admit the truth when it was disturbing to their comfortable assurance.” One key suspect the police focused on the day after the abduction was originally labeled by the FBI “UNKNOWN PERSON NO. 1 (Man with Ladder Near Lindbergh Home).” For shorthand, let us call him “Suspect No. 1” — a tall, unidentified man in a long stylish coat and fedora who was seen at dusk with a ladder in his car at the entrance to the Lindberghs’ driveway. The police completely ignored one insider fitting that description who likely had both motive and opportunity. Instead, they bowed to prestige and political power and let control of the investigation be taken from them.

In this book, I take advantage of the distance in time to treat the boy’s father as a potential suspect in his kidnap and murder; like all the others on the list, a fallible human being, not a demi-god. What impact did it have on the investigation to have the Governor of New Jersey assure Charles Lindbergh that he had full authority to direct the state police investigating a crime committed in his home?

Today, we have both the benefit of insights provided by previous scholars and sleuths, as well as a treasure trove of evidentiary puzzle pieces whose significance has been unrecognized until now. I invite you to join me in focusing on a key question police never pursued back in the spring of 1932 — was international hero Charles Lindbergh himself Suspect No. 1, the man who got away? Judge for yourself.

Source: Library of Congress: New York World Telegram staff photographer — New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c09416

Charles Lindbergh testified as the star witness for the prosecution at the death penalty trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann before a packed courthouse in Flemington, New Jersey in January of 1935. The jury is seated to the right behind the railing.