(2 of 2)
"Identification for letters are signatures. Answer three fold. (1-2-3-4). Two rings in blue ink, with center ring of red. A blue ink line of the blue circles on the outer edge of the red. A hole on the outer edge of each dark circle, and one in the center of the red.
"Don't publish this letter.
In New Jersey shocked indignation at the crime took the form of bitterness against the way Col. Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf and his State Police had handled the investigation. Emerson L. Richards, Republican majority leader ot the State Senate, promised an inquiry. The County Detectives Association demanded Col. Schwarzkopf's removal: "This action will be asked entirely because of his inefficiency in the Lindbergh case. The child was found dead in close proximity to the home while hundreds of thousands of dollars were wasted in searching elsewhere. While Col. Schwarzkopf's men were being sent all over this country and Europe, officials who were trained in investigating such cases were forced to stand on the deadlines. Col. Schwarzkopf did not appear to welcome the aid of city and county police . . . an outrage.
Hunt & Hoax. Meantime, while Congress prayed that the Lindberghs be further spared "the bread of affliction" and nations and cities all over the world poured sympathy on the bereaved young couple, the country's law agencies took a final hitch in their belts and started on a desperate, determined man hunt. Five days' hunting brought to light the second major hoax in the case.
Col. Schwarzkopf began examining he negotiators. John F. ("Jafsie") Condon told how the supposed kidnappers had sent him as an earnest to secure ransom, a sleeping garment which the Lindberghs identified as the one worn by their child the night of his abduction. The fact that the child's body was found without the sleeping garment led police to believe that the man to whom "Jafsie" Condon gave $50,000 of Col. Lindbergh's money, in a Bronx cemetery on April 2, represented the actual kidnappers and killers. Mr. Condon described this man, said he "could pick him out of a thousand." The district attorney of The Bronx prepared to call a grand jury and set out to find that man.
When John Hughes Curtis began to tell his tale of mysterious boat trips and constant failures to bring Col. Lindbergh into contact with the men he said were in possession of the child, Col. Schwarzkopf lent a polite, attentive ear. Mr. Curtis described and gave the approximate position of the fishing smack on which he had supposedly interviewed the child's captors. The Coast Guard sent 39 craft and three amphibian planes to find it, with no success. His identification of the criminals by nicknames proved similarly untrustworthy. At last, early on the fifth morning after the child's body was found, he broke down and confessed that "all the information he had given was the result of his imagination and deception, as well as his desire to make a good newspaper story that would bring lucrative returns. There was no fact or foundation on which the story was built." He was held at Trenton although no criminal charge was immediately brought against him.
President Hoover meanwhile had ordered 5,000 Federal operatives "to make the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby a live and never-to-be-forgotten case, never to be relaxed until those criminals are implacably brought to justice (see p. 9)." The first thing the Federal men did was to re-examine the Lindbergh servants.
Ashes, It was 3 o'clock on the morning after the discovery of his child's crumpled body that Col. Lindbergh drove up a Trenton alley and went into the frame morgue building. When he looked at the remains, one report said, he fainted. He asked for a lock of his child's hair. Next afternoon he returned to make an official identification of the remains. Then, as mute housewives watched over their back fences, he came out of the building following some men with a small oak box. He and Col. Henry Breckinridge, his companion and legal adviser through the past ten agonizing weeks, accompanied the box to Linden, N. J. In a square, grey building with a straight black smokestack cremation took place. The ashes were removed to Englewood where Mrs. Linbergh's widowed mother, Mrs. Dwight Whitney Morrow, lives.