One Summer: America, 1927

closing arguments and the twelve men of the jury – it was all male because women were not allowed to hear murder cases in New York State in 1927 – were sent to deliberate. One hour and forty minutes later the jurors shuffled back in with their verdicts: both defendants were guilty of murder in the first degree. Ruth Snyder wept bitterly in her seat. Judd Gray, face flushed, stared hard at the jury, but without animosity. Justice Scudder set sentencing for the following Monday, though that was really just a formality. The penalty for murder in the first degree was death by electrocution.
    Coincidentally and conveniently, just as the Snyder–Gray case wound to its inevitable conclusion, another even bigger story began to unfold. Three days after the trial ended and just a short distance away, a silvery plane called the Spirit of St Louis swooped down on Long Island from the west and landed at Curtiss Field, adjacent to Roosevelt Field. From it stepped a grinning young man from Minnesota about whom almost nothing was known.
    Charles Lindbergh was twenty-five years old but looked eighteen. He was six feet two inches tall and weighed 128 pounds. He was almost preposterously wholesome. He didn’t smoke or drink – not even coffee or Coca-Cola – and had never been on a date. He had a curiously stunted sense of humour, and loved practical jokes that veered dangerously close to cruelty. Once on a hot day he filled a friend’s water jug with kerosene and mirthfully stood by as thefriend took a mighty swig. The friend ended up in hospital. His principal claim to fame was that he had successfully parachuted out of more crashing planes than anyone else alive, as far as could be told. He had made four emergency parachute jumps – one from just 350 feet – and had crash-landed a fifth plane in a Minnesota bog, but clambered out unhurt. He had only just reached the fourth anniversary of his first solo flight. Among the flying community on Long Island his chances of successfully crossing the Atlantic were generally presumed to be about zero.
    With Snyder and Gray off the front pages, demand arose now for a new story, and this confident, rather mysterious young Midwesterner looked like he could be it. A single question swept through the reporting fraternity: Who is this kid?

C HAPTER 2
     

     
    THE FAMILY NAME was really Månsson. Charles Lindbergh’s grandfather, a dour Swede with a luxuriant beard and fire-and-brimstone countenance, changed it to Lindbergh when he came to America in 1859 in circumstances that were both abrupt and dubious.
    Until shortly before that time, Ola Månsson had been a respectable citizen and, by all appearances, a contentedly married man with a wife and eight children in a village near Ystad on the southernmost, Baltic edge of Sweden. In 1847, at the age of forty, he was elected to the Riksdag, the national parliament, and began to spend a good deal of time in Stockholm, 600 kilometres to the north. There his life grew uncharacteristically complicated. He took up with a waitress twenty years his junior, and with her produced a child out of wedlock: Charles Lindbergh’s father. At the same time Månsson was implicated in a financial scandal for improperly guaranteeing bank loans to some cronies. It is not clear how serious the charges were. The Lindberghs in America always maintained that they were trumped up by his political enemies. What is certain is that Ola Månsson in 1859 left Sweden in a hurry, failed to answer the accusations against him, abandoned his original family, settled in rural Minnesota with his mistress and new child, and changed his name to August Lindbergh – all matters that Charles Lindberghoverlooked or lightly glossed over in his various autobiographical writings.
    The Lindberghs (the name means ‘linden tree mountain’) settled near Sauk Centre, future home town of the novelist Sinclair Lewis but then on the very edge of civilization. It was in Sauk Centre, two years after their arrival, that the elder Lindbergh suffered a famously horrific injury. While working at a sawmill, he slipped and fell against the whirring blade, which tore through his upper body at the shoulder, creating a hole so large that his internal organs were exposed – one witness claimed he could see the poor man’s beating heart – and leaving his arm attached by just a few strands of glistening sinew. The millworkers bound the injuries as best they could and carried Lindbergh home, where