Snatchers on Sourland Mt.

At Niles, Ohio last week, James Dejute Jr., 12, son of a well-to-do contractor, was kidnapped on his way to school by two men in a brown coupe. A minister's wife witnessed the abduction. Next day Contractor Dejute received a note demanding $10,000 unless he wanted his boy back ''in installments." Two days after that a posse of local police found the Dejute boy alive and well in a house not ten miles from his home. The kidnappers were found with him. He had been concealed behind a false wall, said he was well-fed but sleepy.

No notice of the Niles abduction wa taken by the world-at-large. It would scarcely have attracted the little national attention it did had not a fabulous melodrama unfolded the night before in central New Jersey.

The last person known to have seen 20-month-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. was his nurse, a dark-haired, light footed little Scotch girl of 26 named Betty Gow. Nurse Gow immigrated to the U. S in 1928, has been in the Lindberghs' employ over a year. At approximately 8:30 o'clock one evening last week she went to his nursery. It is on the second floor southeast corner, of the home which Col. & Mrs. Lindbergh completed last autum three miles north of Hopewell, ten miles north of Princeton, on a wild, lonely stretch of high ground called Sourland Mt. Nurse Gow tucked Charles Augustus who had been ailing with a cold, into hi crib and went down to the servants' quarters to have a chat with the Lindbergh's butler, Oliver Wheatley and his wife.

At 8:30 Col. Lindbergh returned from New York by motor. He had a speaking engagement in Manhattan that night but neglected it through an oversight. He ate dinner and afterward took a seat in his living room directly under one of the nursery's three windows, all of which were closed but none of which was locked.

At 10 o'clock Nurse Gow went to the nursery. The baby was not in his crib. She hurried downstairs and notified the parents. All three ran back upstairs. The first thing they did was to inspect the floor to see if the child had crawled somewhere. He had not. One more look around the room disclosed muddy footprints, an open windowscreen and a note on the sill below. Exact contents of the note have never been revealed, but if, like most notes of the same kind, it warned against police intervention, Col. Lindbergh brusquely disregarded the warning. He could have had no idea of the overwhelming glare of press and police activity which was shortly to ignite in his remote retreat, providing a possible barrier forever between him and his child, when he summoned officers from Hopewell.

The Hopewell police arrived not later than 10:30, for by 10:50 a teletyped message went humming through the length of the State with the news that the first-born of the nation's No. 1 hero had been kidnapped.

Posse. Instantly an impregnable wall of interrogation, prying eyes and blue steel was thrown around New Jersey's borders as city police and State troopers of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania began stopping cars at all bridgeheads, ferries, and at the mouth of the sub-Hudson Holland Tunnel. By morning a gigantic posse of police, troopers, U. S. Department of Justice operatives, Coast Guardsmen, American Legionaries, Quiet Birdmen, civilians was combing an area from Boston to Baltimore. There had never been such an intensive search party since Booth shot Lincoln.

Object of the search was the most famous child on earth, whose birth, and, up to last week, whose life were jealously guarded secrets. So successfully did his parents keep his name and face out of the Press that ignorant gossip whispered that he must be backward, deaf, perhaps defective. But four photographs of Charles Augustus had ever been made public, one of them snapped surreptitiously last summer in Maine when his parents were flying to China. Now there issued forth from Col. Lindbergh's private collection cinema films by the score. These went broadcast through the land by mail, wire, television while enormous headlines splashed the child's name across every U. S. front page day after day.

Prayers & Sympathy. In Pasadena, Calif. Albert Einstein said he thought kidnapping showed a lack of "social sanity." Law-abiding Londoners, aghast at a crime directed against "the American approximation of the Prince of Wales," could not understand why a Prince of Wales would leave his much-publicized infant unguarded. President Ortiz Rubio ordered the Mexican Army to watch the border for the kidnappers. The Changchow Merchants' Guild of Peiping sent sympathy. Episcopal Bishop Manning of New York ordered his flock to pray for the infant's safe return. School children and 500,000 Companions of the Forest of America also prayed, as did Philadelphia Lutherans, New Jersey Methodists. Crowds in Buenos Aires watched bulletins, took the whole affair for a hoax the first day. Herbert Hoover spurred Government sleuths from a Cabinet meeting. Mrs. Hoover, cruising in Florida, sent ashore for news. In Chicago Col. Robert Isham Randolph of the "Secret Six" warned the nation again about the rich, swift-growing racket of abduction for extortion, helped circulate a new gangland name for kidnappers: snatchers. Also in Chicago, more precisely in Cook County jail where he is waiting a last appeal against an eleven-year Federal sentence, "Scarface Al" Capone interested himself in the Lindbergh case. Offering a $10,000-reward for the baby's safe return, he indignantly remarked: "It's the most outrageous thing I ever heard of! I know how Mrs. Capone and I would feel. . . . If I were out of jail I could be of real assistance."

Clues. At the end of the first six days, heart-wrung Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who expects another child, and her harassed husband had no more evidence as to who had snatched their child than was established in the preliminary examination of their estate.

While crank letters poured into the Lindbergh home by the hundreds, all of which proved inconclusive, there were several tangible pieces of evidence connected with the crime:

Item. A well-made ladder of three seven-foot sections. Footprints indicated that it had been leaned up against the nursery window, then taken 60 feet away and abandoned.

Item. A chisel, probably intended for prying open the nursery window, if the criminals got in and out that way.

Item. A note, not made public.

Item. Footprints, large enough to be a man's but muffled by burlap or moccasins, traceable toward the main road which bounds the eastern edge of the 350-acre estate. Other footprints, small enough to be a woman's, joined them a short distance from the house.

Item. A farmer's testimony that he saw a parked car on the road which runs down the south side of the estate, Featherbed Road, at 7:30 on the evening of the abduction.

Item. The remarkably narrow time limit within which the kidnapping probably took place: 8:30 when Nurse Gow says she last saw the child and 9:15 when Col. Lindbergh sat down under the nursery window.

A small, rheumatic terrier was in the house but did not bark while the child was being taken. There was no watchman, since Col. & Mrs. Lindbergh had never remained more than a week-end in their white, Colonial, $50,000 house since it was built, spending most of their non-flying time at the Morrow home in Englewood. There was a floodlight system on the grounds but it was not in use. These facts led some guessers to imagine that the person or persons who took the child knew that the Lindberghs were going to stay longer than their usual weekend; knew the grounds, knew the house plan, knew the child's routine, possibly knew the child himself, since he made no outcry.

Nurse's Friend. After hundreds of people had been fruitlessly questioned by police throughout the U. S. concerning the kidnapping, search narrowed down to persons surrounding the person who last saw Charles Augustus, namely, Nurse Gow. It was discovered that on the day of the abduction she had twice communicated by telephone with one Henry ("Red") Johnson, a deckhand in the summertime aboard the yacht of Thomas William Lamont, Morgan partner and good friend of Charles Augustus' late grandfather, Dwight Whitney Morrow. Henry Johnson and Nurse Gow had been friends for three years. He was promptly apprehended in Hartford, Conn, at the home of a brother. Authorities attached importance to the fact that in his green Chrysler coupe was found an empty milk bottle. From Hartford Henry Johnson was taken to Newark, N. J., further questioned, further held by police on the grounds that there were flaws in his alibi for the night of the abduction.

Ransom. Meantime the frantic Lindberghs were making stronger and stronger efforts to get in touch with the kidnappers. Two days after the kidnapping, NBC broadcast: Col. & Mrs. Lindbergh not only wish but hope that whoever is in possession of the child will make every effort to communicate with them.

No effort having been made, 24 hours later they tried a stronger appeal over their own signatures through the Press: We promise that we will keep whatever arrangements that may be made . . . strictly confidential and we further pledge ourselves that we will not try to injure in any way those connected with the return of the child. The prosecutor of Mercer County, in which lies a part of the Lindbergh lands, agreed to give the criminals immunity. It was then found that the nursery, where the crime was committed, was in Hunterdon County, whose law officers issued no promises.

How completely the Lindberghs, their advisers and police had knuckled under to the kidnappers was evidenced in a still later bulletin by Columbia Broadcasting System which suggested that those in possession of Charles Augustus get in touch with some lawyer, who would be ethically bound not to betray them, or communicate with the Lindberghs over a dial telephone, from which no call can be traced. Only an ominous silence was forthcoming from the abductors.

In their next and most desperate move, Col. & Mrs. Lindbergh descended to the underworld. On the fourth night following their baby's disappearance they issued a signed statement, photostated copies of which were published in the nation's Press, as follows:

If the kidnappers of our child are unwilling to deal direct, we fully authorize "Salvy" Spitale and Irving Bitz to act as our go-betweens. We will also follow any other method suggested by the kidnappers that we can be sure will bring the return of our child.

"Salvy" Spitale was an obscure figure. The Press itself did not know much about him save that he made some of his money out of restaurants, was regarded as trustworthy by a number of gangsters and had Irving Bitz for a right-hand man. Go-Between Spitale thereupon disappeared from his usual haunts, and while everyone was wondering where he would bob up next, up he bobbed at a Madison Square Garden hockey game in Manhattan.

"I'm kinda sorry I got mixed up in this," said he. "Papers are printing pictures of my children and dragging my family into the story. My policy of avoiding publicity has been knocked for a row of milk bottles. Now I'm right up in the news bigger than the Shanghai war. From now on I'll be watched, not only by the newspapers but by the gangsters."

In Trenton, New Jersey's Governor Moore remarked to newshawks: "Personally, I think if you all laid off for a few weeks we might get somewhere."

Federal Law. There are many U. S. children whose parents could afford to pay rich ransom for their return were they kidnapped. But no kidnappee in the land could arouse so much public indignation against the kidnapping racket as Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr.

Since it became known that 282 abductions were recorded in police records in the last three years, bills by Senator Roscoe Conkling Patterson and Representative John Joseph Cochran of Missouri to make kidnapping across a State line a Federal offense punishable by death have been pushed in Congress. Last week House and Senate Judiciary Committees promised these measures speedy attention, and the House Post Office and Post Roads Committee reported favorably on a bill making the sender of an extortion letter liable to $5,000 fine, or 20 years in prison, or both.

"Lost Baby." New York citizens recalled afresh, last week, their city's most famed recent baby abduction, that of Billy Gaffney, snatched from his home in Brooklyn in 1927 and never returned. Having sent a message of condolence to Anne Morrow Lindbergh, scrawny, pathetic Mrs. Gaffney, wife of a chauffeur, mournfully predicted to reporters: ''She'll cry for him nights; she'll think about him days as she goes around the house, and she'll cry afresh when the new baby is laid in her arms, for he'll make her think again of the lost baby."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.