At 10 o'clock one morning fortnight ago a man in a black Dodge sedan drove up to the Warner-Quinlan filling station on Manhattan's Lexington Avenue at 127th Street. Day Manager Walter Lyle filled his tank with five gallons of gasoline worth 98¢. The man gave him a $10 gold certificate.
"You don't see many of these anymore," said Lyle.
"Ah, yes, you do." said his customer. "I've got a hundred of them left at home." He took his change and drove off.
Following his company's instructions to be on the lookout for counterfeit gold bills or bills of large denominations, Manager Lyle wrote on the margin of the note he had just received the license number of the Dodge sedan: 4U-13-41. Next day he gave the bill to an employe named John Lyons, told him to take it to a nearby branch of the Corn Exchange Bank, see if it was genuine. Lyons was told it was. Three days later the bank turned the bill over to the New York office of the Department of Justice as one of the 4,750 gold and silver certificates passed through an opening in the hedge of a Bronx cemetery on the night of April 2, 1932 by John F. ("Jafsie") Condon as ransom for Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. More than $5,000 of the ransom money had turned up in 716 transactions during the past two years. But no one who had received any of it had ever been alert enough to connect it with the case. License number 4U-13-41, penciled on the bill, was the one hard factual link for which the police of New York and New Jersey and the Department of Justice had been tirelessly searching for 29 months.
Image. Detectives working on the Lindbergh case had carefully constructed a working model of the appearance, habits and character of the criminal they sought. From the ransom letters to "Jafsie" Condon and the note left in the empty nursery on Sourland Mountain, psychiatrists had deduced that the man was German, or at least Teutonic. His English was largely phonetic and he used "gute" for "good." He also appeared to be some sort of mechanic; one ransom note had a careful working drawing of the sort of box in which he wanted the money delivered. The ladder by which he climbed to the Lindbergh nursery was of careful, home-made construction, and a New York City toxicologist, examining ransom money as it came in, found emery dust and glycerine esters. Hence the man was likely to be a carpenter or machinist who ground his own tools. Judging from the ladder's broken rung, the man's weight was put at somewhere near 160 lb. From vague descriptions given by a taxi-driver who had taken the third ransom note to "Jafsie" Condon and from Condon's own recollections of the intermediary "Johns," a Washington cartoonist was able to make for the Department of Justice sketches of the criminal's face: sharp nose, flat cheeks, small mouth, pointed chin.