The kidnap case that inspired Murder On The Orient Express
IT IS probably the most famous whodunit that has ever been set on a train. When Murder On The Orient Express was published in 1934 its author Agatha Christie was known as the Queen of Crime and copies raced off the shelves.
The book was turned into a film starring Albert Finney as her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot 40 years later and was immediately nominated for six Academy Awards. Indeed, it generated so much interest that a re-released version of the novel sold three million copies in that year alone.
Now a new film version with an all-star cast including Sir Kenneth Branagh, Dame Judi Dench and Johnny Depp is to hit our cinema screens next week.
But while many will remember the ingenious solution to the mystery, what is less well-known is that the story was based on a reallife case that made front-page news around the world and proved equally baffling to solve.
At the time Christie was putting pen to paper the newspapers were obsessively reporting every twist and turn in the fall-out from the kidnapping and murder of the 20-month-old baby son of recordbreaking aviator Charles Lindbergh, the most venerated American celebrity of his day.
In 1927 Lindbergh had become the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic in his plane the Spirit of St Louis. This historic feat propelled him to national hero status. He made a goodwill tour of the then 48 states of the union and 50 million Americans turned out to cheer him. The “Lindy Hop” – a dance craze named in his honour – filled ballrooms.
When Lindbergh married Anne Morrow, the daughter of a US senator, two years later and taught his new wife to fly the golden couple looked to have the world at their feet, literally and metaphorically.
But on the night of March 1, 1932, tragedy struck at their New Jersey home. At about 10pm the Lindberghs’ family nurse discovered that the couple’s baby boy Charlie was missing from his crib.
His father rushed upstairs and found a note in an envelope left on a radiator by the windowsill in the nursery. On going outside he found marks in the mud underneath the window and sections of a discarded wooden ladder. The implications were all too clear.
THE police were called and the hunt for baby Charlie began. And what a hunt it was. Aware that the eyes of the nation were upon him due to Lindberghs’ celebrity status, President Herbert Hoover put 5,000 FBI agents on the case.
Public revulsion over the babysnatch was so great that even the kings of the underworld offered the authorities their assistance. Gangster Al Capone, then facing a jail sentence for tax evasion, put up a $10,000 reward for information that would lead to the arrest of the kidnappers. “I know how Mrs Capone and I would feel if our son were kidnapped,” he declared.
The original ransom note demanded the payment of $50,000 – more than $900,000 in today’s money. Four days after the abduction a second ransom letter arrived – raising the money demanded to $70,000.
A retired teacher called Dr John Condon, who had written a letter to a Bronx newspaper offering a $1,000 reward if the kidnappers handed the child over to a Catholic priest, was appointed as intermediary. In early April a ransom of $50,000 was handed over by Condon to an unidentified man SLEUTH: Sir Kenneth Branagh as detective Hercule Poirot and, inset, the front page of New York’s Daily News called “John” in a New York cemetery but Lindbergh’s son was not returned.
One month later a truck driver, who had stopped to relieve himself about four miles away from the Lindberghs’ home, made a gruesome discovery in the bushes. It was the body of baby Charlie. He had been killed with a blow to the head.
The news stunned people in the US and across the world. Suspicion began to grow that the abduction had been an inside job. How would an outsider know, for instance, which room baby Charlie slept in? And why didn’t the Lindberghs’ dog bark?
Violet Sharp, a 28-year-old British maid at the home of Mrs Lindbergh’s mother, faced fierce questioning from the police. On June 10 she committed suicide by drinking poison. Was it an admission of guilt or had the ordeal of being a suspect been too much?
Agatha Christie wrote her book based on the Lindbergh case in 1933 before any arrests had been made. Already inspired by her own journey on the Orient Express in 1928, she now had the underlying plot for her thriller. She changed some of the details, for instance making the kidnapped child a girl, Daisy, and her father Colonel Armstrong half-British.
In Murder On The Orient Express Christie also changes the nationality of Violet Sharp and makes the perpetrator of the kidnap and murder a gangster boss called Cassetti, posing on the train as a Mr Samuel Ratchett.
But at the time Christie’s mystery appeared the hunt for the real-life killer was still going on. It was not until September 1934 that an arrest was made. Detectives had traced some of the numbered ransom notes to a small area in the Bronx. A motorist used some of the ransom money to pay for petrol and his registration number was recorded.
The car belonged to a German carpenter called Bruno Richard Hauptmann. His apartment was searched and a large amount of the ransom money was found in his garage. There then followed what newspapers billed “the trial of the century”.
Hauptmann’s fingerprints had not been found at the scene of the crime but a section of floorboard taken from his apartment matched the grain of wood used for the “16th rail” of the ladder found outside baby Charlie’s window. Hauptmann’s writing also appeared to match the writing on the ransom notes, while both Lindbergh and Condon testified that his voice was the same as they had heard when the money had been handed over.
Hauptmann protested his innocence but he was found guilty and sent to the electric chair. However, his execution didn’t end speculation about the case. Hauptmann’s wife Anna, who died aged 95 in 1994, campaigned tirelessly to have her husband exonerated. To her dying day she insisted that he was with her on the night of the kidnapping.
And she was not alone in defending Hauptmann. Some theories even accuse Lindbergh. He was a practical joker and according to some had once hidden his child in a closet. Was the kidnap a prank that went horribly wrong?
Just before he was executed Hauptmann declared: “They think when I die, the case will die. But the book – it will never close.”
Eighty-five years on the Lindbergh murder mystery still presents us with more questions than answers. Perhaps we need to enlist the services of a modern-day Hercule Poirot to help us solve it. Murder On The Orient Express opens on Friday, November 3.