Slowly, the terror in Buppie’s heart faded. The man wanted money; that must be the reason he’d taken him. Nothing else made sense.
The man hadn’t hurt him, and he wasn’t mean. The man fixed him scrambled eggs and took the blanket off long enough for Buppie to eat. The eggs weren’t very good, nothing like what he would have had for dinner at his grandfather’s!
With the blanket off him for a little while, Buppie saw that it was daylight. Then the blanket went over him again, and he was in the dark. Time passed; he couldn’t tell how much. He didn’t hear people noises anymore. He dozed off now and then. When he was awake, the man brought him an orange. It tasted better than the eggs. He slept again…
Footsteps! Not a dream!
The blanket was lifted from his head. “You’re going home,” a woman said as she untied him. “You know the nursing home on Bacon Avenue? Run there. Stop in front of it and wait. Go on now!”*
As the car approached the boy standing in front of the nursing home, Troll recognized him, though his face was almost black with dirt. “Percy, there’s your son!”
Orthwein didn’t wait for the car to come to a full stop. He leaped out and ran to Buppie.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Buppie said.
A joyous reunion followed at Grant’s Farm. Household servants joined social elites in offering tearful prayers of thanks. Buppie was given a bath and good food and was sent to bed.
“Not a cent” had changed hands to secure Buppie Orthwein’s freedom, Troll told a pack of reporters.13
Percy and Clara Orthwein were charitable as well as rich. They had not just promised a reward for the safe return of their son. They had even offered to help find a job for the abductor if he was impoverished. Charles Abernathy certainly was.
But the police were having none of it. Kidnapping was a crime, after all. For a short period, Pearl Abernathy was held as an accessory. And the police made it clear that they wanted Buppie’s parents to cooperate in the prosecution of Charles Abernathy. But first the police had to find him. Having failed at kidnapping as well as real estate, the hapless Charles had vanished.
Enter ace reporter Harry T. Brundidge of the St. Louis Star, one of several newspapers that thrived in the city back then. By the time the thirties began, he had exposed trafficking in fraudulent medical credentials in the Midwest. He had worked as a deckhand on a ship sailing between Havana and New Orleans to expose liquor smuggling. He had interviewed Al Capone.
Brundidge had sources on both sides of the law, and he quickly learned that Charles Abernathy was hiding in Kansas City, Missouri. Brundidge tracked him down a few days after the kidnapping, interviewed him, and obtained his confession. His newspaper ran the scoop on page 1. Soon afterward, Charles pleaded guilty to kidnapping and robbery and was sentenced to fifteen years in state prison.
(There would also be heartbreak in the extended Busch family. On New Year’s Eve 1930, August Busch Sr. was sixty-five years old, having celebrated his birthday just two days before. But he was not a young sixty-five. The long days over the years had taken their toll, and he was suffering from heart disease and gout. On February 13, 1934, he would scribble a note saying, “Goodbye precious mommie and adorable children” before killing himself with a revolver he kept by his bedside.)
Charles and Anne Lindbergh followed the Orthwein case from afar. They had spent the Christmas and New Year holidays at the Englewood, New Jersey, estate of Anne’s parents, Dwight and Elizabeth Morrow. A one-time partner at J. P. Morgan and one of the richest men in New Jersey, Morrow was a former ambassador to Mexico (appointed by his Amherst College classmate President Calvin Coolidge) and had just been elected to the U.S. Senate. Soon, he would be talked about as a possible Republican candidate for president.
Then as now a leafy community, Englewood would be much busier later that year and forever after with the opening of the George Washington Bridge, spanning the nearby Hudson River and linking northern New Jersey with New York City.
Lindbergh and his wife were building a house of their own on a 390-acre tract near Hopewell, New Jersey, about sixty miles south of Englewood. The home was expected to be finished in the autumn of 1931. In Hopewell, Lindbergh hoped, he and his wife would find the privacy they so craved. Lindbergh had come to despise reporters and photographers, who seemed to follow his every move.
To be sure, the newspaper people could be annoying. But there was another factor at play, one the adoring public didn’t understand. Lindbergh had a cool and distant personality. It was so appropriate, really, that he was an aviator, for he was comfortable being aloof. He was at ease around airplanes and engines, not around people.
Nor was Anne Lindbergh at home in the spotlight. Though from a prominent family and acquainted with some famous people, she was basically a shy person. No wonder the Lindberghs wanted privacy for themselves and their new son, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., who by delightful coincidence had been born on his mother’s twenty-fourth birthday, June 22, 1930.
Surely, the new homestead near Hopewell would offer seclusion…and safety.
*The author has inserted dialogue for dramatic effect as it was reported in several newspapers at the time of the kidnapping, and as it was rendered in a December 28, 2013, reprise of the case by Tim O’Neil in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
CHAPTER THREE
THE DOCTOR
St. Louis
Monday, April 20, 1931
Lightning flared, and thunder rolled across the sky like barrels. Wind-driven rain mixed with hail lashed the windows of the three-story brick mansion on exclusive Portland Place, the home of Dr. Isaac Kelley. Forty-five years old, he was already recognized as the leading ear, nose, and throat specialist in St. Louis.
It
