Guest post written by author Mariah Fredericks
Mariah Fredericks was born, raised, and still lives in New York City. She graduated from Vassar College with a degree in history. She is the author of the Jane Prescott mystery series, which has twice been nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award, as well as several YA novels. The Lindbergh Nanny is out now.
My first thought when approaching the Lindbergh kidnapping exhibit at the New Jersey State Police Museum is that enormous baby blocks spelling out LINDBERGH are not entirely tasteful. But many people would say nothing about an exhibit about kidnapping and murder is tasteful.
I am not one of those people. Or if I am, curiosity has always outweighed scruple. When it comes to history, I have always felt an enormous drive to see. I have dragged friends to Middleham Castle in Yorkshire, my family to Gettysburg and Antietam, a John Brown Wax Museum in Harper’s Ferry, to The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home in Lenox, MA, and to Alcatraz—twice.
I am one of those people.
The Lindbergh Nanny tells the story of America’s most famous kidnapping from the point of view of one of its prime suspects, a young Scottish woman by the name of Betty Gow, who was Charlie’s nurse for the last year of his life. I live in New York, within driving distance of the crime scene in Hopewell, NJ. But the house itself is not open to visitors. I have explored the two cemeteries where key events of the crime took place, but Betty was not present at either meeting. Other points of fascination, such as a trial re-enactment at Flemington, NJ, have been paused due to Covid.
Covid was also the reason I could not visit the NJSP Museum while writing the book, although I was extremely fortunate to have digital copies of the police documents and the patience of Mark Falzini, the museum’s archivist. In some ways, it didn’t matter. To write the book, I didn’t need to see the actual ransom notes or the electric chair that is either the one that ended Bruno Richard Hauptmann’s life or one just like it (the note card is charmingly evasive on that point). Probably, I reasoned, there wasn’t much in the exhibit directly connected to Betty anyway.
And yet when the museum finally re opened, I went. Here were the physical artefacts of the novel—the ladder, the notes, the little booklet with the numbers of the ransom bills. The clothes Charlie was wearing that night were once part of the display; as I understand it, the family recently asked that they be removed. The sleep suit in the case is marked REPLICA. The size of it surprises me. The images I have seen of Charlie are mostly from when he was a year old. He was nearly two. You forget the leap between one and two years old. The length and bulkiness of the Dr. Dentons suggests more boy than baby.
There are two objects in the case touched by Betty. One is a flannel undershirt with the bottom half cut off; this is labeled a “fabric sample from the clothing used to make the baby’s t-shirt.” It was cold on March 1st. Charlie was getting over a cold. That night, Betty cut up an old shirt and made him an extra layer so he would be warm. It’s a key moment in the novel and I stare at the shirt for a long time. But strangely, it doesn’t speak to me like the replica sleep suit. Maybe it’s the awkward phrasing of the label.
But there is a second item, one I never expected to see: Charlie’s thumb guard. Charlie sucked his thumb. To stop him from doing so, his parents put a wretched wire device over his thumbs when he slept. In the novel, Betty hates the thumb guards, but dutifully puts them on. In real life, she later found one of them—this one, apparently—on the ground outside the house, weeks after Charlie was taken, but before he was found. At the time, discovering it seemed like a hopeful omen.
And here it is. The braided metal is much heavier than imagined—I thought it would be closer to a paper clip or the wire around a champagne cork. But it’s all smooth, no sharp points. Attached are two white ribbons which were tied to the baby’s clothes.
The thumb guard is an unhappy object in the book. It’s cold, ugly, controlling—not at all something you’d want in a crib with a sleeping child. There’s something about the contrast between the yellowing ribbons and the harsh twisted metal that just hurts. There are other harsh items in the case, but they are official documents or things that never touched Charlie physically. For me, the thumbguard is the most painful object in the display.
But why engage with that pain in this way? Why do we put items on display that might cause anguish to loved ones? Why do people like me drive two hours to lay eyes on them? Maybe because despite all the documents—the police reports, the death certificate, the trial transcripts, the many, many books—it is still hard to believe that such a cruel thing could happen. Looking at these objects provides a stark, stern reminder that this crime was inflicted on a real child and the people who loved him. It is a humbling experience.
