The most extraordinary passenger on the Aquitania as that Cunard-White Star liner steamed out of Southampton for New York last week was a pretty Scottish nursemaid whose name was not printed in the passenger list. She was whisked incognito to her cabin, where a stalwart British stewardess was posted before the door to keep out undesirable visitors. Nurse Betty Gow, from whose care the world's most famed baby was snatched on the windy night of March 1, 1932, was returning to the U. S. Surrounded by all the melodrama of a penny-dreadful, Nurse Gow, it was whispered, was to be met in New York Harbor by a police launch, spirited away to a hotel. There she was to be kept incommunicado until time for her to testify at what promised to be one of the 20th Century's most spectacular trials. For the murder of Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., Bruno Richard Hauptmann was to be tried for his life at Flemington, N. J. next week.
Nurse Gow is of no real importance to defense or prosecution. But the thick conspiratorial atmosphere enveloping her voyage to the U. S. typified the whole course of the incredible crime and its fabulous aftermath.
Scene. Flemington is the seat of Hunterdon County, on New Jersey's western border. A meticulously neat, elm-shaded town of nearly 3,000, it serves as a trading centre for a rich old agricultural community. About ten miles to the southeast is Sourland Mountain, where the child was kidnapped.
Flemington has been on the newspaper map ever since the kidnapping occurred. It was a base of police operations and, after the baby's corpse was found, the place where pettifogging Boat-Builder John H. Curtis of Norfolk was tried for fraud after he led Col. Lindbergh on a wild goose chase for his son. But even the citizens of Flemington were not prepared for the sort of life & death contest which was about to be staged in their town. The 100-year-old courthouse seats only 250 people in all. More than 400 reporters and special correspondents have applied for seats at the trial. In the little room under the roof, Western Union set up 75 sending machines, Postal 50, a battery calculated to dispatch 1,000,000 words a day on the case. Sheriff John H. Curtiss (who added the second "s" to his name after the exposure of Boat-Builder John H. Curtis) good-naturedly turned over his private office to two news services.
The Union Hotel, only inn in town, was restricting its hospitality to the jurors and others officially connected with the case. Newshawks were advised to rent rooms elsewhere, and the town's housewives were preparing to reap a rich harvest from the influx of at least 1,000 guests. Already hearing the distant clink of coins, Flemington's town council deadlocked over the proposal to permit erection of street-side hot dog stands, a measure hotly challenged by the town's two restaurateurs.