The Capture of the Lindbergh Baby Kidnapper, 80 Years Ago

Shortly before 10 a.m. on September 15, 1934, a dark blue Dodge sedan pulled up to the gasoline pumps at a Warner-Quinlan service station on Lexington Avenue in upper Manhattan. Manager Walter Lyle walked over to the car and filled it with five gallons of ethyl as the man behind the wheel requested. “That’s 98 cents,” the attendant told the driver, who reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled a $10 bill from a white envelope.

Lyle grasped the bill with his greasy hands as his eyes noticed something unusual. “You don’t see many of these any more,” he told the driver. The motorist had given Lyle a gold certificate, which had been removed from circulation more than a year before when President Franklin D. Roosevelt took the country off the gold standard in response to the hoarding of the precious metal during the depths of the Great Depression. “No, I have only about one hundred left,” the driver told Lyle. The suspicious attendant recalled his company’s warning that counterfeiters might attempt to reproduce gold certificates, so as the 1930 Dodge pulled away from the station, Lyle scribbled the vehicle’s New York license plate number—4U13-41—on the bill’s margin.