The Kidnap Years: Page 12

  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 behind the kidnapping was under surveillance. “Early arrests in the case were predicted,” the New York Times reported.47

  Soon after the discovery of the dead child, it was reported that Lindbergh had recently been on a boat off the New Jersey coast in a futile attempt to signal the kidnappers, who were supposedly on another boat.

  Within a week after the baby was found, there were reports that the New Jersey State Police were closing in on five men and a woman as their main suspects.

  John Condon viewed hundreds of photographs in police files in the hope that he would recognize “one of the men with whom he unsuccessfully negotiated,” the Times reported.

  Now, there was an assumption that more than one person must be involved in this, the new “crime of the century.”

  News that the baby had been found dead affected Violet Sharpe profoundly. Already physically ailing, she sank into a black mood. After a few days in the hospital, she returned to the Morrow home in Englewood to recuperate. Unsympathetic and under growing pressure, Colonel Schwarzkopf pressed her for yet another interview.

  Sharpe balked, contending that she was still too ill. A doctor supported her, telling the police that she had a fever and that it would be best for her if another session were not held immediately. But Schwarzkopf insisted, and another round of questioning was scheduled for the evening of Monday, May 23, in a study at the Morrow home. Present were Schwarzkopf, Inspector Harry Walsh of the Jersey City police, another New Jersey detective, and Charles Lindbergh.

  Yet again, Sharpe was asked about the chance meeting with Ernie on Lydecker Street (“Are you in the habit of picking up strange men?”) and her earlier lie about going to a movie. She was asked for further details about her trip to the Orangeburg roadhouse. Her answers seemed clipped and grudging.

  But she volunteered one thing she’d neglected to mention before. Ernie had called her around one in the afternoon of March 1 as well as that evening before picking her up.

  The timing was crucial. By the early afternoon of March 1, word had reached the Morrow estate that Charles and Anne Lindbergh and their baby would be staying overnight at Hopewell instead of coming to Englewood. Thus, the question: was this mysterious Ernie part of a kidnapping conspiracy, and had Sharpe given him information that would aid him? (But if so, why did she voluntarily mention the earlier phone call?)

  When the May 23 interrogation was over and a tired Sharpe had left the room, Lindbergh said she had been acting like a person who was ill and despondent over the death of a child she had adored; he didn’t think she was involved in the kidnapping. The police were not convinced. They intended to question her further.

  On June 7, Sharpe wrote to a friend in Britain, saying that she felt weak and weighed only one hundred pounds. She was homesick. “But I cannot leave the country, or they would think I knew something about the baby.”48 She confided that she felt that “life is getting so sad, I really don’t think there is much to live for anymore.”

  On June 9, Inspector Walsh appeared at the Morrow home again, along with a secretary. Again, the inspector tried to pick Sharpe’s story apart, only this time, he added something new. He showed her a photograph of Ernest Brinkert, who had owned a taxi company in White Plains, Westchester County, New York, and had a record for larceny and assault. Sharpe was apparently unaware that the police had surreptitiously searched her room and found a few business cards for the taxi company.

  “So,” Walsh demanded, “is this the Ernie you went on a date with?”

  “Yes,” Sharpe replied. “That’s him.”

  “So,” the inspector pressed, “why didn’t you tell us before?”

  Sharpe explained, again, that she hadn’t recalled her date’s first name early on, let alone his last name.

  Walsh goaded Sharpe, putting her into a state so agitated that the police secretary took pity and summoned a doctor. The doctor arrived quickly, examined Sharpe, and announced that questioning must cease for the day. Her heart was racing, and her blood pressure was high. She was near hysteria.

  The morning of the next day, Friday, June 10, Walsh called the Morrow estate and said he was sending an officer to bring Sharpe to his office for still more questioning, this time with a doctor looking on. When she learned that her ordeal was not over, Sharpe screamed and rushed upstairs. She grabbed a can of powdered silver polish, which contained cyanide. She mixed some of the powder with water, went to her room, and drank. Minutes later, she was dead.

  Schwarzkopf and his detectives were dismayed. They had hoped to pressure Sharpe into telling them who else was involved in the kidnapping and murder—besides Ernest Brinkert, that is. The police dearly wanted to find him. In the best of all worlds, John Condon might even identify him as Cemetery John.

  Finding Brinkert was surprisingly easy. Just hours after Sharpe’s death, a White Plains detective went to the home of a man who had fielded Brinkert’s calls for taxi service. Brinkert happened to call in on Friday night. He told the detective that he’d heard that he was wanted for questioning and would be happy to turn himself in.

  The detective didn’t want to wait. A trace had been put on the call, showing that it had come from New Rochelle, not far from White Plains. The detective rushed to the location and took Brinkert into custody late Friday night. By this time, Condon had been called to Westchester County and shown a photograph of Brinkert. The photo wasn’t that clear, and he couldn’t say for sure if Brinkert was the man from the cemetery. Then, when he saw him in person that night, Condon could say for sure: he had never seen Ernest Brinkert in his life. Standing a mere five feet four, Brinkert was several inches shorter than Cemetery John.

  Brinkert said he didn’t know Violet Sharpe, that he couldn’t account for the presence of the cards for his taxi service in her bedroom (there were probably a lot of his business cards floating around out there), and that he and his wife had been at the home of another couple in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the afternoon and evening of March 1, the date of the kidnapping.

  The couple in Bridgeport readily confirmed Brinkert’s account.

  So perhaps the case against
Sharpe was really not so strong. Perhaps there was no case at all. One has to wonder if Schwarzkopf and the New Jersey detectives went to bed that night with chills in their stomachs. But the real nightmare would come the following day, Saturday, June 11.

  The suicide of Violet Sharpe was the lead story in the New York Times that Saturday. It quoted Colonel Schwarzkopf as declaring that the death confirmed “the suspicion of the investigating authorities concerning her guilty knowledge of the crime against Charles A. Lindbergh Jr.”49

  The article went on in that vein as Schwarzkopf and Walsh recalled that she had lied about her whereabouts the night of the kidnapping and apparently lied about knowing Ernest Brinkert, who had very likely graduated from minor crime to kidnapping and murder, with Sharpe’s inside help. At least, that was the obvious implication.

  “Of all the 29 servants in the Lindbergh and Morrow homes that were questioned by us after the kidnapping, Miss Sharpe was the only one who could not tell a story that stood up,” Walsh said. As for the money in Sharpe’s savings account, he said, “I’d feel quite comfortable if I had as much.”

  Even as hundreds of thousands of people were reading the damning remarks of Schwarzkopf and Walsh in Saturday morning’s newspapers, the terrible truth was emerging.

  First, a butler at the Morrow estate remembered something. “The man you’re looking for is Ernie Miller, not Ernest Brinkert,” he told the police on Saturday. The butler had recalled that Sharpe was acquainted with a young man named Ernest Miller from Closter, another community in Bergen County, New Jersey, not far from Englewood. Sure enough, Ernest Miller was located on Saturday and said that he’d gone to the roadhouse with Sharpe the night of March 1.

  Later Saturday, a young woman from Palisades Park in Bergen County told the police that she and a young man, also from Closter, had been the other couple on the March 1 outing. And no, a man named Ernest Brinkert had not been with them.

  The recollections of Ernest Miller and the young woman from Palisades Park about the trip to the roadhouse coincided in every detail with the account that Sharpe had given.

  What must Colonel Schwarzkopf and the detectives have felt as they realized that Sharpe, who had admittedly lied at first, had told the truth in the end? In their earlier comments, Schwarzkopf and his men had virtually convicted her. Now there would have to be another announcement, a humiliating one.

  As Inspector Walsh put it in a Saturday evening news conference, “a chap named Ernie Miller” had indeed confirmed Sharpe’s story “and says he cannot understand why she kept it from us.”50

  “This is a peculiar turn of events,” Walsh said lamely. “It is no fault of ours… I cannot understand why this girl, if she had nothing to do with the kidnapping, preferred death to revealing Miller’s name. I cannot understand it at all.”

  But in her June 7 letter to a friend in Britain, Sharpe had told of her poor health, her homesickness, the pressure she was under. Elizabeth Morrow, Anne Lindbergh’s mother, was a woman with traditional attitudes, and Sharpe may have feared she would lose her job if Mrs. Morrow found out about the trip to the roadhouse. Perhaps that was why she lied about it.

  In short, Violet Sharpe may have been on the verge of a nervous breakdown. How else to explain her mistake in looking at a photo of Ernest Brinkert and identifying him as her companion the night of March 1?

  The New York Times reported in a front-page article on Sunday, June 12, that “a sudden twist” in the Lindbergh case tended to clear Sharpe. Her sister condemned the police. “Ever since the baby disappeared, Violet was badgered and questioned until she did not know what she was saying or doing,” Emily Sharpe said. “She was driven nearly mad.”

  Yet Schwarzkopf, who had declared Sharpe guilty of something, still would not exonerate her. “The fact still remains that conflicting statements were made,” he told reporters. He insisted that she had not been subjected to undue pressure. But how likely was it that New Jersey policemen of the 1930s, working on the biggest case of their careers, took pains to be kind and courteous to her? In fairness, they were under enormous stress. They were also unfettered by Supreme Court rulings that would be handed down three decades later, rulings that would offer some protection to unsophisticated people of modest means who panic under police scrutiny—people like Violet Sharpe.

  Is it conceivable that Sharpe took her own life because she thought she had inadvertently given the kidnapper or kidnappers information about the Lindbergh household? Yes, it is conceivable. But all these decades later, no evidence to support that idea has surfaced. All she seems to have been guilty of was foolishly lying.

  Violet Sharpe was buried in Brookside Cemetery in Englewood, which is also the resting place of Anne Lindbergh’s father, Dwight Morrow. Colonel Schwarzkopf and his men had to shake off whatever guilt and embarrassment they felt. With bills from the ransom coming into banks sporadically, they had a money trail to follow. Were there any other clues, any avenues of investigation free of emotion and guided by pure science?

  Yes.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE MAN WHO LOVED TREES

  Madison, Wisconsin

  Early 1933

  It was so fitting that Arthur Koehler had but one hobby: cabinetmaking.

  From his boyhood in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, where he was born on June 4, 1885, Koehler was fascinated by trees. He loved the smell of a forest, loved the bark on trees, the rings inside them, the sap.

  Indeed, he revered trees. “They carry in themselves the record of their history. They show with absolute fidelity the progress of the years, storms, droughts, floods, injuries, and any human touch. A tree never lies.” Perhaps, he mused, “the ancients who believed in trees as gods were not so wrong.”*

  His father was a carpenter and taught his son the skills of his trade. Koehler was good with tools when he was still in elementary school.

  Koehler earned a bachelor of science degree in forestry from the University of Michigan and a master’s in wood anatomy from the University of Wisconsin. By the early 1930s, he was head of the U.S. Forest Service’s laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. He was, arguably, the foremost authority on wood in the United States and perhaps in the world.

  Koehler and his wife, Ethelyn, had three children. Later, Koehler would recall shuddering as he looked at their baby son and imagined the anguish the Lindberghs were feeling. He was eager to help them. Soon after the kidnapping, he wrote to Lindbergh, telling him it might be possible to trace the origins of the wood in the kidnapper’s ladder.

  Koehler was not surprised when Lindbergh didn’t respond. The famous aviator was being inundated with advice, much of it well-meaning, some of it from cranks.

  Colonel Schwarzkopf heard of Koehler’s offer and sent small slivers from the ladder to Koehler’s lab. Soon, Koehler sent back a report with his findings: the slivers were of ponderosa pine, a tree native to the western United States and Canada. Tiny fibers of wool were attached to the slivers. Could they be from the clothing of the man who had climbed the ladder?

  No, it was soon determined. The fibers were from woolen blankets that New Jersey State Police officers had draped over the ladder at the crime scene for protection. Disappointed and probably a little embarrassed, Schwarzkopf shelved Koehler’s report.

  But in February 1933, Schwarzkopf decided to turn again to Koehler. After all, the investigation was nearly a year old and at a standstill. Nor had Schwarzkopf forgotten what Koehler had discerned just from studying slivers. What might the wood expert learn from studying the entire ladder? So Schwarzkopf invited Koehler to come to Hopewell, New Jersey, to see the ladder. The decision may have been the most important of Schwarzkopf’s career.

  Right away, Schwarzkopf was impressed with Koehler, a tall, imposing man who looked like an outdoorsman. But he was a scientist first, and while he knew his task was daunting, he approached it with confidence. “The ladder was homemade, which meant that it contained individual characteristics,” he wrote later.51 “It was not one out
of a thousand or ten thousand, all superficially alike; it was the only one like it and could be expected to reveal some of the peculiarities and associations of the man who made it.”

  Koehler determined that whoever built the ladder knew something about woodworking but was a “slovenly carpenter.” He saw that the hand plane used by the ladder builder was dull. The three-quarter-inch chisel used to carve the recesses for the rungs—presumably the chisel found at the crime scene that had also been used to pry open the nursery window—was quite sharp, although the recesses had been carved in a sloppy fashion.

  Later, the New England manufacturer of the chisel would determine it was about forty years old. It was perfectly ordinary, similar to tools found in countless basements, garages, and workshops. But as he reflected on what it had been used for and that it might have been wielded to smash a baby’s skull, Koehler realized, “I could not touch it without a sense of horror.”

  Koehler urged Schwarzkopf to let him take the ladder to his lab for further study. The colonel agreed.

  Back in Wisconsin, Koehler dismantled the ladder, which had eleven rungs and six boards that made up the side rails. Some of the side-rail boards were of North Carolina pine, which, despite the name, is grown in a number of Eastern states, especially along the Atlantic Coast. Other side rails were of Douglas fir, grown in the West. The dowel pins used to hold the ladder together were of birch, common in temperate regions. The rungs were from ponderosa pine, eight of the eleven from the same piece of wood.

  Perhaps most significantly, one side-rail board from North Carolina pine had four holes where nails had been. Koehler speculated that whoever built the ladder may have run out of fresh wood and used secondhand wood to finish. Koehler also observed that two of the holes were made by square eight-penny nails, which were somewhat old-fashioned.