The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindbergh: Chapters 12–19

Often, after a sumptuous dinner, he would join his new friends in their leather-lined smoking rooms or book-lined libraries.

After all, Charles was a man of capital, too. First, there were the lucrative contracts he’d negotiated after the trans-Atlantic flight with both Transcontinental Air Transport and Pan American Airways.

After all, Charles was a man of capital, too. First, there were the lucrative contracts he’d negotiated after the trans-Atlantic flight with both Transcontinental Air Transport and Pan American Airways.

Charles was now a full-fledged member of what his father had called the Money Trust.

Charles explained he wasn’t a churchgoer. Therefore, getting married in one would be hypocritical.

Didn’t Anne see how different they were? Hers was the cloistered world of books, writing, and introspection. His was action and adventure.

Didn’t Anne see how different they were? Hers was the cloistered world of books, writing, and introspection. His was action and adventure.

Meticulously, Charles worked out an elaborate charade to fool the press and keep the wedding a secret.

If Anne was disappointed in his lack of ardor, she didn’t have time to dwell on it.

Her new husband, she realized, had exacting expectations, strict rules, and specific checklists. And Anne was meant to learn and follow them all. Eager to please, she docilely went along with his demands.

The couple spent the night in open water tethered to a fishing bank. Fighting to stay in her bunk as the waves roiled and dishes crashed, Anne felt hunted.

The scientist who stood to meet Charles Lindbergh in the dining room of the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research in Manhattan was a foot shorter than the pilot. He was stocky and pink-cheeked, and his eyes—one blue, the other brown—peered up through his pince-nez.

Besides being a Nobel laureate and experimental surgeon, Dr. Alexis Carrel was a practitioner of physiognomy—that is, he believed the quality of a man’s soul could be read on his face, imprinted there, he claimed, by “brain waves controlling the facial muscles.”

His experiments, remarked one of Dr. Carrel’s colleagues, were a cross between “medieval alchemy and the weird experiments of [Dr.] Frankenstein.”

The fit eliminated the unfit. Or, put another way, the strong and intelligent procreated and the weak died without coddling. This was how superior civilizations developed, he claimed.

To Carrel’s amazement, the kidney had functioned normally for several hours. Sadly, other such attempts had not been so successful. Still, he held out hope, especially for skin grafting.

The scientist was highly impressed with his protégé, despite the failures. Charles, he claimed, was “original in his ideas, skilled with his hands, utterly dedicated to his work and persistent. Stubbornly persistent.”

In an hour’s lunchtime, he might bloviate about the “difficulty of teaching a camel to walk backwards,” discuss the “relative intelligence of dogs and monkeys,” or give a longwinded account of a “[French] peasant hypnotizing animals.”

And once, he provided what he believed was a reasonable and unsentimental approach to solving society’s ills. “Those who have murdered, robbed while armed...kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, or misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases....”

And once, he provided what he believed was a reasonable and unsentimental approach to solving society’s ills. “Those who have murdered, robbed while armed...kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, or misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases....”

Carrel often pointed to his mousery to underscore his opinions. While the deaths of the weak mice seemed cruel, they were necessary, he said.

Culling the weak moved the species—generation by generation—closer to genetic perfection.

Blustery wet weather, combined with the unpaved country roads leading to their new home, had made him late.

Charles appeared so confident and sure. Who could doubt his competence?

Meanwhile, Anne stayed out of the way. Sequestered in her bedroom, she wrestled to remain calm, focusing on the comforting fact that Charles was in charge.

In the three weeks after the kidnapping, the New York Daily Mirror, a tabloid, would provide its readers with 160 photographs, diagrams, and other illustrations; another tabloid, the Chicago Daily News, would publish more than 200. Even the venerable New York Times would run as many as eight articles a day on the crime.

Every facet of the crime, as well as the irresistible glimpse it provided into their hero’s private life, fascinated the public.

At a time when most people had to scrape together the two cents it cost to buy a copy of the New York Times, newspaper sales rose 20 percent, resulting in a huge windfall for publishers who’d been hard hit by the Depression.

The trooper patched him through to the house. Robert Thayer came on the line. But the caller still refused to reveal why he’d telephoned. He identified himself as Dr. John F. Condon, a seventy-two-year-old retired school principal, athletics coach, and Doctor of Pedagogy.

The strange signature from the original ransom note had never been divulged to the press.

Dr. Condon looked like a charlatan to the flier, with his walrus mustache and his old-fashioned suit.

But the next morning, Charles agreed to the agent’s plan. “I am just desperately anxious that [nothing] bungle this,” he explained, apologizing.

The kidnappers instructed Condon to walk across the street and into St. Raymond’s Cemetery. Another graveyard! Cemetery John’s nickname seemed especially apt.

Then, a tall, gray-haired man with a solemn face arrived at the Lindberghs’ house. John Hughes Curtis, a bankrupt shipbuilder from Norfolk, Virginia, had met Charles before. Weeks earlier, on March 22, he’d finagled his way into the Lindbergh study with an astonishing story.

Curtis went ashore, ostensibly to find out what had gone wrong, while Charles stayed aboard the rocking ship.

Investigators surmised animals had eaten them.

Completely absorbed, Charles worked with almost wordless concentration. Human death was more than an abstraction now. It was the enemy. And he intended to vanquish it.

“[I] had every reason to believe I was dealing with the kidnappers and the baby was alive and safe,” he said, and he would testify to that in court. Schwarzkopf was convinced he’d made up the entire underworld story to bilk the Lindberghs and bask in the national spotlight.

Once plump and rosy-cheeked, Violet was now pale and gaunt. She’d lost forty pounds in a few months’ time.

Charles and Anne couldn’t imagine returning to the Hopewell house. In fact, they hadn’t lived there since June. Though they told themselves it was because of the ghoulish sightseers who kept coming around, the truth was, the place to them felt blighted.