During Lindbergh kidnap case, FBI disdained Jersey's efforts

Sept 16, 1999

By J. Scott Orr and Mary Jo Patterson
STAFF WRITER
COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- It was two days after the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh been found dead in the woods near Hopewell, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had just dispatched a top aide to New Jersey to help in the investigation.

In his first report back to his boss in Washington, Special Agent F.X. Fay expressed dismay at the investigative prowess of the New Jersey State Police. The investigation, he told Hoover, was a mess.

"I believe --in fact, I know -- that if we could step in right now and take over the entire investigation, we would save both time and money and accomplish much better results," Fay said.

The FBI agents weren't the only ones to criticize the State Police probe of the 1932 abduction and murder that has been called "the Crime of the Century." A New Jersey governor, Harold Hoffman, local investigators and countless citizens raised questions about the investigation that led to the conviction and execution of German immigrant Bruno Richard Hauptmann in 1936, according to thousands of FBI files on the case that were released at the National Archives yesterday.

Hauptmann was convicted of using a homemade ladder to break into the second-story nursery at the Lindbergh estate in Hopewell on March 1, 1932, abducting the baby, killing him and leaving the body in a shallow grave a few miles from the house. Hauptmann was arrested after spending some of the ransom money. He was tried in Flemington, found guilty and executed in Trenton State Prison.

Many of the 28,000 documents had been released by the FBI over the years, but yesterday was the first time the original, unedited papers were made public. For researchers, there were few surprises, but the files opened a window into the strained relations between Hoover and the New Jersey investigators.

In the boxed papers were hundreds of yellowed, tattered letters from citizens who volunteered their help, fingered associates or devised their own theories on the crime. Also offering their services: self-confessed rum runners, convicted gangsters and other shadowy underworld characters.

There are also dozens of aged black-and-white photos of Hauptmann, a carpenter, his modest home in the Bronx and the crime scene, along with newspaper clippings and copies of some of the $50,000 in gold certificates that paid the ransom.

Also among the mountains of papers was the FBI original draft of a news release announcing the arrest of Hauptmann on Sept. 19, 1934, saying that "after continued and vigorous questioning, Hauptmann admitted his participation in the kidnapping." That paragraph was crossed out in pencil, with a handwritten note "Please delete."

The files show that Hoover personally oversaw the FBI's involvement in the case and at times took steps to keep state investigators in the dark about what his G-men were up to.

Still, Hoover acknowledged that the case fell solely to the jurisdiction of the 11-year-old New Jersey State Police, headed by Col. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, and there was little he could do to influence it.

Agent Fay arrived at Trenton's Hotel Hildebrecht on May 17, 1932. The next day, he wrote to Hoover that the investigation, headquartered in the garage at the Lindbergh estate, was in disarray. He described Schwarzkopf as "childish" and a press hound who was more interested in headlines that solving the crime.

"Schwarzkopf seems to be very much interested in the publicity which he is receiving. . . . He does not seem to give much thought to the answers which he makes and the information given to the press," Fay wrote.

"Unless he is very fortunate and actually falls across the solution to this case, I feel that his press reports will eventually act as a boomerang to him," the letter continued.

"I have not seen a man who has impressed me as being a real investigator engaged on this case so far. They have their own staff, members of the Jersey City Police and a couple of Newark detectives. They appear to be of the hit or miss variety and seem to be using police methods (strong arm) entirely,'" Fay wrote.