by David Stout
There were no rust marks around the nail holes, indicating that the board must have been used indoors originally, with no exposure to rain and snow. The lumber was of a low grade, not suitable for finishing but suitable for rough construction, as in a barn, garage, or attic.
The nails had been hammered in at different angles and depths, and the distances between the nails varied. Somewhere, Koehler knew, there must be another board or joist to which the rail board had been nailed. If that other board with corresponding nail holes were found, it could be invaluable evidence against the kidnapper, especially if it were found in his house or garage.
On March 8, 1933, Koehler stated his conclusions in a report to the New Jersey State Police. Then he asked if he could search the Lindbergh property and surrounding area for wood that matched the ladder. Schwarzkopf assigned two detectives to work with Koehler. For three months, they searched buildings, garages, outhouses, and shacks, not only around the Lindbergh tract but on properties of people with connections to the case, however slight. Nothing.
In early June, Koehler went back to Wisconsin to study the ladder pieces under a microscope and magnifying glass. In so doing, he discovered clues that would have eluded almost anyone else on the planet.
Koehler detected small grooves in the wide surfaces of the boards used to make the bottom two side rails. He recognized that the grooves, virtually invisible to the naked eye, had been made by an eight-bladed machine planer in a lumber mill. Moreover, Koehler was able to determine that one blade was slightly out of kilter with the others. He also found marks on the edges of the pieces of wood, marks that told him the side cutter was a six-bladed machine. Koehler thought the “eight-blade, six-blade” arrangement was unusual. Finally, he detected a defect in one blade of the side cutter.
Thus, Koehler could eliminate those mills that did not have certain types of planers. Last and most important, Koehler was able to determine from the intervals between the tiny marks on the wood and his familiarity with the speed of wood planers that the wood had been fed through the machines at a rate of 230 feet a minute. Koehler knew this speed was consistent with industrial wood planers used in the South.
So Koehler studied the Southern Lumberman’s Directory, which told him that there were 1,598 machine-planing lumber mills between New York State and Alabama.
Visiting all the mills was not feasible—even if he managed to visit two mills a day working seven days a week, it would take him more than two years—so Koehler mailed requests to the mills for wood samples without mentioning that his query was in connection with the Lindbergh kidnapping.
Koehler learned that there were just two manufacturers of machine planers in the Eastern United States. He visited both, conferring with men who were intimately familiar with the devices. They told him that markings on the particular piece of wood from the ladder indicated that the machine that planed it had been fitted with a drive pulley of an unusual size. This was an invaluable fact.
Koehler learned that only twenty-five lumber mills using the kind of machinery that had cut the ladder pieces were operating in the region where Carolina pine grew. With his knowledge that the machine he was looking for left telltale marks from a blade that was defective and another that was out of kilter and that one of the machines had been fitted with an unusual drive pulley, Koehler was zeroing in on his target. He was also able to rule out those mills that did not produce one-by-four-inch boards like those used to build the ladder.
Eventually, Koehler received a wood sample that seemed promising. It was from the Dorn Company in McCormick, South Carolina. The sample had been processed in a machine with the eight-blade, six-blade setup. But the Dorn sample had no sign of the blade defects that had so intrigued Koehler. Still, he was not discouraged, reasoning that the blades had been sharpened or replaced.
Koehler contacted the company again, this time requesting samples of wood more than two years old. The company sent the wood Koehler had asked for, but the markings on the wood were not what Koehler had expected. He knew he’d have to journey some nine hundred miles from Madison, Wisconsin, to McCormick, South Carolina.
There, in that tiny, sleepy town on the edge of the Georgia border, he interviewed J. J. Dorn, the owner of the mill. Dorn recalled that a few years earlier, a factory-installed pulley had caused the wood to be fed into the planer too fast, so in September 1929, he’d bought a replacement pulley of a different size at a hardware store. The hardware store pulley was used off and on, depending on the particular job.
Koehler asked the mill owner to process a sample of wood with the hardware store pulley. Voilà! The wood came out with markings exactly like those on the ladder used in the kidnapping. “The Sherlock Holmes of the Forest Service,” as he would one day be called, knew he had found the right lumber mill.
“I sniffed with gratitude the odor of pine sawdust, machine grease, and sweaty overalls,” Koehler recalled.
But where had the mill sent the one-by-four-inch boards used in the ladder? Koehler knew he could rule out lumber processed before September 1929, when the hardware store pulley was installed, and he needn’t bother with lumber sent out after March 1, 1932, the day of the kidnapping. Still, the Dorn mill had shipped a fair amount of lumber in the two and a half years that Koehler needed to focus on.
Koehler and Lewis Bornmann, the New Jersey State Police detective who had assisted him in the search around the Lindbergh property, set about tracking lumber shipped from the Dorn mill to yards in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. More than forty carloads of wood had been sent to twenty-five different lumberyards in those states from September 1929 to March 1932.
Eighteen carloads had been shipped to places within twenty-five miles of Hopewell, New Jersey—but all had been unloaded at fenced-in factory sites where there were no retail sales. Thus, those sites could be ruled out.
One by one, Koehler and Bornmann visited the other yards. Weeks went by, then months. Finally, on Wednesday, November 29, 1933, they arrived at the National Millwork and Lumber Company on White Plains Road in the Bronx. There, the foreman confirmed that a shipment of pine from the Dorn mill had been received on December 1, 1931, three months to the day before the kidnapping.
But the entire shipment had been sold, the foreman said. There was no wood left for Koehler to examine. And the company did business on a cash-only basis, so it was virtually impossible to find the buyers.
Koehler was crestfallen.
Then the foreman recalled that a portion of the December 1, 1931, shipment had been used to build a storage shed right on the National Millwork and Lumber Company property. At Koehler’s request, a section of a one-by-four-inch board was cut from the shed. With a magnifying glass, Koehler saw that the markings on the board matched those on the wood from the ladder.
We can only imagine the emotions Arthur Koehler felt that Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving.** His science had triumphed; he had triumphed. He had studied wood from the ladder and traced it to the region where the tree had been felled, then on to the mill where the bark had been stripped and the wood cut into boards, and finally to the Bronx lumberyard that had received the boards—and sold them for cash, without paperwork. Dead end. Or maybe not. Now, investigators were looking for a man of German descent, probably an immigrant, likely a carpenter, who had bought wood at the Bronx lumberyard and whose handwriting matched that in the ransom notes. And since the man had communicated with John Condon through a small newspaper in the Bronx, there was a good chance that he lived in that borough. The universe of possible suspects had been narrowed dramatically. And Koehler thought the ladder wood might yield still more clues.
*This quote and others by Arthur Koehler are from his article “Who Made That Ladder?” in the Saturday Evening Post of April 20, 1935.
**The holiday was still celebrated then on the last Thursday in November, not the fourth Thursday.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
STRICTLY BUSINESS
St. Paul, Min
nesota
Thursday, June 30, 1932
If he had time to look at the morning paper, young Haskell Bohn saw an abundance of news about politics.
Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York had a plane standing by in Albany to fly him to Chicago, assuming he was nominated for president at the Democratic National Convention, as seemed likely. Roosevelt’s aides said that, with stopovers, the flight would take some seven hours. If Roosevelt alighted looking cheerful and energetic, there ought to be no more whispers that he suffered from physical infirmities that would make it difficult for him to fulfill the duties of the presidency. One thing was already clear at the convention: there was overwhelming support among the delegates for repeal of Prohibition and, pending that, for legalizing the manufacture and sale of beer. Surely, that would boost sales of refrigerators, which was definitely good news for Haskell Bohn and the family-owned Bohn Refrigerator Company.
Haskell’s grandfather, Gebhard Bohn, had come to America from Germany in the nineteenth century, lacking money, fluency in English, and social polish. But he was blessed with enormous drive, business and mechanical skills, and perhaps a touch of genius. He worked hard at menial jobs, tinkering to great effect in his spare time, and settled in St. Paul.
He and two brothers started a company that sold window parts, furniture, and other household goods. But Gebhard saw the future coming, and it was called refrigeration. Before his death in 1924, he had invented a refrigerator far more efficient than most others at the time, one that was eventually used in nearly all railroad dining cars in the country.
His son, Gebhard C. Bohn, was also a visionary, unlike some sons of business pioneers. The younger Gebhard decided that the company founded by his father should concentrate entirely on refrigeration. He saw that the old-fashioned kitchen ice box belonged to the past. Every family would want an electric refrigerator. Nor would the appliance be a luxury; after all, dining out was unaffordable for many families. It was essential that store-bought food last as long as possible.
Restaurants, country clubs, flower shops—all needed refrigeration. There was a huge and growing market, and the Bohn enterprise captured much of it. Having caught the wave of the future, having helped to create the wave, the Bohn family was very wealthy during the Great Depression.
There was another recent development that had been covered rather modestly in the newspapers, considering its importance. Eight days earlier, President Herbert Hoover had signed the federal anti-kidnapping law—the Lindbergh Law, as it came to be known. Its chief sponsors, Senator Roscoe Conkling Patterson, a Missouri Republican, and Representative John Joseph Cochran, a Democrat from St. Louis, were understandably tired of the kidnappings in their state. The young Adolphus Busch Orthwein, the noted eye doctor Isaac Kelley, the daring dressmaker Nell Donnelly—those were only the most noteworthy victims in Missouri in recent months. There had been others not quite famous enough to get national attention.
And of course, the Lindbergh tragedy had made it impossible for Congress not to do something before fleeing the sweltering heat of the Washington summer.
There had been differences between the House and Senate versions of the law, with the House version providing for the death penalty for someone convicted of transporting a victim across state borders unless the jury recommended mercy.
Under the Senate version, the maximum punishment was life in prison. Supporters of the Senate version argued that subjecting a kidnapper to a death sentence could encourage him to kill his victim so the victim couldn’t testify against him.
In the end, the Senate version won the day, with life in prison the maximum sentence for transporting a victim across state lines.* On June 17, the House unanimously approved the Senate version, which had been approved on June 8. (There was nothing in the final bill to prevent a kidnapper from being sentenced to death under state law if a victim was killed in a state that had the death penalty.)
Importantly, the law provided for a seven-day waiting period before federal investigators could enter a case; in other words, if a victim was not found within that time, he or she was presumed to have been taken across state borders.
Just before 9:00 a.m. on June 30, twenty-year-old Haskell Bohn emerged from his house to be driven to work at the refrigerator plant. It was a warm day; the temperature would climb into the upper eighties by late afternoon.
As he and the family chauffeur approached the garage behind the family home, Bohn’s world turned upside down. Two men with pistols approached quickly, removed Bohn’s glasses, wrapped tape over his eyes, and led him away after giving the chauffeur a note.
Bohn was steered into a nearby alley and shoved into a car where he lay on the floor, his eyes still taped. The whole operation had taken only moments. Bohn had had no time to react. The kidnappers had carried out their operation without a flaw.
And away they want, the kidnappers and their captive. Bohn had no way of knowing that the note left with the chauffeur demanded $35,000 ransom. He also did not know—and surely would not have cared—that he had just become the first ransom-kidnapping victim since the Lindbergh Law took effect with President Hoover’s signature.
His captors drove for about an hour, then stopped in a building that smelled like a garage. For another three hours, Bohn sat in the car, wondering what his fate would be. Were the men holding him waiting for confederates to arrive? Making plans on the fly? Finally, a man yanked him from the car and steered him, still blindfolded, for what he estimated to be two hundred feet. Then it was into a building—a house, Bohn sensed—and down some steps. Bohn assumed he was in a basement.
He was guided a few feet, then told he could sit. He did, on a bed. He heard the voices of several men, then the voice of a woman. A man said he would get plenty of food and cigarettes and wouldn’t be mistreated if his father cooperated.
Almost immediately after Haskell was seized, the Bohn family began to get letters from the kidnappers. In demanding full cooperation, they alluded darkly to the murder of Charles Lindbergh’s baby. But Gebhard Bohn did not panic. He had the emotional support of his brother, William, who rushed from his home in Los Angeles to St. Paul to aid in negotiations.
The St. Paul police announced that they would not interfere. The stance of the police was not surprising in view of how government and law enforcement functioned—or didn’t—in St. Paul.
Meanwhile, Haskell Bohn was in a twilight world. For much of the daytime in the basement, his eyes were taped shut. But when the tape was being changed, he caught glimpses of the men and the woman who were holding him. He thought he’d be able to identify them if he got the chance.
His jailers kept their promise. He was treated humanely. A woman cooked his meals; the food wasn’t bad. But he wanted to go back to his real life. He wanted to eat food cooked in his own home, wanted to shower and change clothes.
At night, the tape was taken off, so he could stare into the dark before falling asleep. He welcomed the sleep; it brought freedom from the fear and monotony he had endured for…how many days?
On the evening of Wednesday, July 6, his eyes were bandaged and taped shut anew. He was told to stand up. He dared to hope.
Then up the steps, out the door into the night, and he was lying on the floor of a car again. The engine turned over, and the car moved. Bohn welcomed the sensation.
He guessed that an hour went by before the car stopped. He was pulled out of the car, not too roughly, and the tape and bandages were removed. The car sped off, and he was alone.
It was a clear, blue-black night, pleasantly warm. The sky was full of stars. He thought he smelled water, like a lake. But where was he? On a dirt road out in the country. No lights.
He walked. Very soon, his legs were sore from lack of exercise, but he didn’t mind. He was free. After about a half hour, he saw the lights of a farmhouse. He knocked on the door. The farmer, Roy Bell, was surprised to see a well-dressed but disheveled young man who had obviously had a rough time. Happily, Roy Bell’s
house had a telephone.
Before police officers came to take him home, Bohn learned that he had been freed near Medicine Lake, several miles west of Minneapolis. Later, he learned that the negotiations over his release had gone smoothly. The kidnappers had settled on a much smaller ransom. Some reports put the amount at $12,000, while others put it as low as $5,000. Perhaps the kidnappers were rank amateurs. Or maybe they were cold professionals, happy to cash in quickly, risking little and moving on to the next opportunity.
In fact, Haskell Bohn and his family had just been victimized by a man who was trying to bring a businesslike approach to kidnapping, a man who would soon be suspected of taking part in the Lindbergh crime. His name was Verne Sankey.
*As will be seen, the issue of the death penalty in the federal law would be argued and reargued over the years.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CRIMINAL AND FAMILY MAN
Verne Sankey lacked the swaggering corpulence and menace of Al Capone or the dashing good looks of the notorious bandit John Dillinger. Indeed, he was a short, bald, rather owlish-looking man. As far as we know, Sankey never killed anyone, although he was not allergic to gun smoke.
He was a family man, a loving husband and father. He was mild-mannered by gangster standards. While not an altogether honest man, he had a personal code of honor. His name may not be widely known in the twenty-first century, yet no history of crime in the 1930s is complete without his story.
Sankey was born in rural Iowa in 1891. When he was a boy, his family moved to Wilmot, South Dakota, where his father took up farming. As was the custom then, the father conscripted his three sons to work on the spread. For a time, Sankey’s two older brothers were content with their fate or at least resigned to it.
But dawn-to-dusk toil in the fields and barn with cows and chickens for company held no appeal for Sankey. He yearned for big money and places to spend it. So he bade farewell to family and farm when he was nineteen and found work on a railroad. He worked hard, becoming an engineer after stints as a watchman and fireman. While life on the rails had its sweat and tedium, Sankey got to see much of the Upper Midwest and stretches of western Canada. He earned a respectable salary.