Monday, May 26, 2008
A Roanoke footnote to Lindbergh baby case
Tom Angleberger
The New River Valley-based reporter answers your questions Mondays in his column, What's on Your Mind?
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Q: I found a note in an old Newsweek from Feb. 17, 1933, that said two Roanokers had been charged with trying to extort $50,000 for threatening to kidnap Charles Lindbergh's second son. What happened?
-- Claire English, Roanoke
A: As unbelievable as it sounds, someone really had sent letters to Charles Lindbergh threatening another kidnapping. And, yes, two Roanokers were charged with the crime. But, as articles from the Roanoke Times' archives show, the plots of both the criminals and the police were foiled. (My thanks to Roanoke Times archivist Belinda Harris for unearthing the reports.) At that time, the kidnapping and murder of Lindbergh's son, Charles Lindbergh Jr., was less than a year old and still unsolved.
To threaten the couple's other child, John, was not only dastardly, but it was also extremely brazen because the attentions of state and federal law enforcement officers were already focused on the family. Additionally, new federal kidnapping and extortion laws had just been passed. Yet, there were at least two such attempts, one of them appearing to have come from Roanoke.
The Roanoke letters were embarrassingly simple-minded. "we [sic] want the money and it will be cheaper to pay us the $50,000 your child is worth that to you, we will leave the country and you can have your child allways [sic] and no more to worry about."
They asked that $50,000 -- the same amount demanded for the first Lindbergh child -- be put in a stump near Rosewood Avenue.
Norman Schwarzkopf, father of the decades-later famous general, was superintendent of the New Jersey State Police at the time. He sent the letter to the Roanoke Police Department and received this reply:
"Our investigation officer is planning to trap the writer of these letters."
That investigator, Robert Johnson, did set a trap, but it didn't quite work.
Johnson posed as Lindbergh's secretary and, after some back and forth, baited his trap by leaving a check for $17,000 in the stump.
Joe Bryant, a 19-year-old, tried to cash the check using a phony name.
"Make it in big bills," he told the cashier at the State and City Bank. The cashier called the police before handing over the money.
Bryant and a 26-year-old named Norman Harvey were then caught after a chase through the streets of downtown Roanoke. Harvey's wife, Elsie, was also arrested.
Bryant's story was that he found the check whilst looking in the stump for liquor.
The arrests were made in February, but in early July the case was dismissed.
"We did not feel we had sufficient evidence even to go before the grand jury," the assistant district attorney said at the time.
For one thing, handwriting experts couldn't pin the letters to any of the three suspects.
Norman Harvey, however, did not go free.
In the meantime, he had been convicted of murder in a separate case.
And so the mystery remains, but, more importantly, the real crime never took place: John Lindbergh was not kidnapped.
Q: I have some questions about an old movie, "Trail of the Lonesome Pine," starring Fred MacMurray. Who played the girl? Who sang in the movie? Also, I believe it may have been the first Technicolor movie.
-- Lois Dezelich, Bedford
A: As Time magazine put it in 1936, "Sylvia Sidney is the pert mountain lass who turns hellcat."
The film gets a footnote in the history books because it was, according to Time, "the first Technicolor feature made outdoors."
However, it's of greater interest to us because it was based on a novel by Big Stone Gap writer John Fox Jr.
"It's basically a love story between a mountain girl who belongs to a family in a feud with another family and has no use for 'furriners' and an engineer who has come to the coalfields to pave the way for the extraction of coal," recalled Paul Dellinger, a movie buff and former Roanoke Times reporter.
Dellinger told me that Fox based the characters on Big Stone Gap locals. The folks down there were so proud of it they turned it into an outdoor drama in the 1960s and they're still putting the show on. The 2008 season begins June 26.
"As I remember, the 1936 movie takes some liberties with the novel," wrote Dellinger.
One of those changes may have been setting it in Kentucky instead of Virginia. And, in typical Hollywood fashion, it was filmed in neither state, but rather in California.
The movie co-starred Henry Fonda, Spanky of "Little Rascals" fame and Fuzzy Knight. Knight, who played a character named Tater, sang in the movie and went on to sing in many more.
"He had a kind of whisky voice, I guess you'd call it," remembered Dellinger. "He was from Fairmount, W.Va., [and] apparently started in vaudeville, singing and dancing."
If you've got questions, send them in to woym@roanoke.com or leave them on my voice mail at 777-6476 (please be sure to speak clearly and spell your name). I'll need your name, location and phone number or e-mail address.
Look for Tom Angleberger's column on Mondays.
