The Kidnap Years:

by David Stout

  He explained that he could get the same kind of impression by putting a piece of paper on a board that had been planed, thus revealing the marks left by that particular tool.

  Then Koehler asked the judge if he could set up a vise on his bench to demonstrate. The judge gave permission, whereupon Koehler used Hauptmann’s plane to shave the side of a board, put a piece of paper on the planed surface, and rubbed it with a pencil—and obtained an impression that matched the hand plane marks on a section of the kidnapper’s ladder.

  The defense had tried early on to discredit Koehler’s testimony, questioning at the start whether there was even such a thing as “a wood expert,” as lawyer Frederick Pope put it. But clearly there was. His name was Arthur Koehler, and he proved to be unshakable on cross-examination. He had the science on his side. Not only that, but he was the son of a carpenter and was an accomplished carpenter himself.

  Shrewdly, Wilentz had managed to place sixty-year-old Liscom Case on the jury. Case could appreciate and understand Koehler’s testimony better than his fellow jurors, as he was a retired carpenter.

  Taking the stand in his own defense, Hauptmann said that on the night of the kidnapping, he and his wife were drinking coffee in the Bronx bakery where she worked and where he often picked her up to take her home. And the night the ransom was paid, he said, he and his wife were entertaining friends.

  But the defense was unable to produce witnesses who could testify with absolute certainty that Hauptmann was where he claimed to have been on those nights.

  On cross-examination, Wilentz ripped into the defendant, forcing him to acknowledge his record of burglary and robbery in Germany, his escape from jail in his native country, and his illegal entry into the United States. The prosecutor brought up a particularly ugly crime from the defendant’s past, when Hauptmann and another man robbed two women who were wheeling baby carriages.

  “Everybody wheels baby carriages!” Hauptmann replied, heatedly and illogically.168

  “‘Everybody wheels baby carriages,’” Wilentz repeated scathingly. “And you and this man held up these two women wheeling baby carriages, didn’t you?”

  The defense objected, and the judge ruled that the fact of the defendant’s conviction in Germany had been well established. But Hauptmann’s temper display and his odd response—“Everybody wheels baby carriages!”—had surely discredited him in the eyes of the jurors.

  As for the big stash of money found where Hauptmann lived (money that he had claimed must have been left there by his deceased friend and business associate Isidor Fisch), the defendant claimed it was his habit to squirrel away money rather than deposit it all in banks. But this explanation didn’t quite square with his claims, never substantiated, that he was sophisticated enough to have made money with good investments.

  Wilentz’s cross-examination went on for many hours. The prosecutor got the defendant to acknowledge contradictions, even outright lies, contained in his earlier testimony during a hearing to have him extradited from New York to New Jersey. And Wilentz induced the defendant to sputter and display hostility several times.

  But in the end, it may have been a few indisputable facts that doomed Bruno Hauptmann. Money from the Lindbergh ransom had been found on his premises and in his pockets. John Condon’s address and phone number were written on a closet door in his apartment. And the ladder used to build the wood had been traced to him, thanks to the solid science and endless persistence of Arthur Koehler, the man who loved trees.

  We can be fairly certain that Dr. Dudley Shoenfeld, a pioneer in what would come to be called criminal profiling, followed the trial. Surely, he took some satisfaction in reading that the defendant had behaved as he had predicted: arrogant and seemingly confident, at least at first, that he could talk his way out of anything, no matter how ludicrous he sounded, no matter how much the truth was against him.

  “The lowest and vilest type of man,” Wilentz branded Hauptmann during the prosecution’s closing statement on Wednesday, February 13, 1935. “An animal” and “a cold-blooded child murderer” who deserved to be put to death.169

  Wilentz added a late element to his case: the hypothesis that Hauptmann had struck the baby on the head with his chisel as he lay in the crib, thereby stunning him into silence as he was being spirited through the window. Perhaps the prosecutor was trying to extinguish any lingering doubt among the jurors that a kidnapper could have climbed into the nursery and taken the baby without causing him to cry out. Or was he trying to excise any sympathy the jurors might have felt if they thought Hauptmann had killed the child accidentally?

  Shortly before noon, the jury began deliberating.

  In a quaint small-town custom, a 125-year-old bell in the courthouse was rung to signal the community that a jury had reached a verdict. The bell tolled at 11:28 p.m. the night of February 13, 1935. The jurors found Hauptmann guilty of murder. They did not recommend mercy, so Hauptmann was immediately sentenced to death. Upon hearing the verdict and sentence, Hauptmann’s face went “ashen white” with terror, the Times observed.***170

  By the night of his execution, Friday, April 3, 1936, Bruno Richard Hauptmann seemed to have accepted his fate. “I am glad that my life in a world which has not understood me has ended,” he said in a statement composed shortly before the execution. “I protest my innocence of the crime for which I was convicted. However, I die with no malice or hatred in my heart. The love of Christ has filled my soul and I am happy in Him.”171

  He walked calmly into the death chamber at Trenton State Prison accompanied by two ministers, one of whom read from the Bible in German. His face was impassive as his arms and legs were strapped and the electrodes were fixed. The current rushed through his body, and he was pronounced dead a few minutes later.

  *If Wilentz could prove that Hauptmann committed the felony of burglary, then the defendant would be guilty of murder, since the baby died during the commission of that felony.

  **It is not clear from the trial testimony when Lindbergh might have heard the voice again by way of comparison. Perhaps it was during the hearing on Hauptmann’s extradition from New York City to New Jersey.

  **I am indebted to Richard T. Cahill Jr., whose fine book Hauptmann’s Ladder: A Step-by-Step Analysis of the Lindbergh Kidnapping added to my understanding of the legal proceedings. I am also indebted to the bygone reporters, editors, printers, and pressmen of the New York Times who produced the magnificent coverage of the Hauptmann trial. Their work showed the Times at its best.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  HEIR TO A TIMBER EMPIRE

  Tacoma, Washington

  Friday, May 24, 1935

  “You’re just like other kids.” That was the message that John Philip Weyerhaeuser Jr. tried daily to convey to his two daughters and two sons. He wanted them to be healthy, happy, normal children.

  But most children of that time were not chauffeured to and from their exclusive private schools. They did not live, as the Weyerhaeuser family did, in a mansion that was on a par with those owned by people whose surnames were Rockefeller or Carnegie or Vanderbilt. Indeed, the Weyerhaeusers were royalty in the Pacific Northwest, fabulously wealthy because of the family patriarch, Friedrich Weyerhaeuser, a German immigrant with the drive and vision characteristic of the men who became industrial titans in America’s Gilded Age.

  Friedrich came to the United States in 1852 at the age of seventeen. At first, he planned to make a living (and perhaps a fortune one day) brewing beer. But according to one story, perhaps apocryphal, he was afraid that a brewer might become his own best customer. So he worked on a railroad in Illinois and later at a sawmill where he soon rose to a managerial position.

  But he was at heart an entrepreneur, not an executive. He moved to the Northwest and saw the future—and it was wood. He jumped at the chance to invest his savings in timberland—some nine hundred thousand acres of it, which he bought from the Great Northern Railway at a bargain price.

  John Philip Weyerhaeuser
Jr. was the grandson of Friedrich. He had just returned from Illinois, where he had buried his father, John Sr., who had died on May 16.

  John Jr.’s son George Hunt Weyerhaeuser was destined to rule over what was becoming, and what is today, one of the greatest timber empires in the world. But in the spring of 1935, he was a nine-year-old schoolboy. On this Friday, May 24, he followed his usual routine: when the students at his private school were set free for lunch, he walked to the nearby girls’ school that his sister Ann, thirteen, attended. There, the family chauffeur generally drove both home for their midday meal. There were two other children, Philip, ten, and Elizabeth, who was just two.

  But on this day, George’s class had been let out earlier than normal, so he got to his sister’s school with time to spare. Rather than wait for her, he began to walk home. On the way, he took a shortcut through some tennis courts, where he encountered a man who said he needed directions.

  George was all set to be helpful, but the man didn’t really want directions. He wanted George. The man and several accomplices had been tracking the boy’s movements for weeks, waiting for their chance. When George took a shortcut alone, they had it.

  The man grabbed George and carried him to a car parked across the street. George saw another man sitting in the front seat. Then he was put into the back seat and covered with a blanket. For the next hour or so, the nine-year-old endured the emotional agony common to kidnapping victims, a fear to freeze the heart of an adult, let alone a child. George was terrified, not knowing what would happen to him, when he would get to go home. Had he done something wrong that this should be happening to him?

  The car stopped. The men removed the blanket, and George saw that they were by the side of a country road. He was given an envelope and a pencil. Write your name on the back, he was told. He did. Then he was pulled from the car, blindfolded, and picked up by one of the men. Soon, he heard the sound of rushing water close by, then the sound was louder and beneath him.

  He’s wading across the stream, George thought. “Are you going to drown me?” he asked.

  “No, kid, you’re worth more to us alive.”

  On dry land again, George was set down, then led by the hand. He felt bushes and trees bumping him. We’re in the woods, he thought. After a long hike, they stopped. George’s blindfold was taken off. The first thing he saw was a hole in the ground. His captors chained his right wrist and leg and put him inside, then covered the hole with a board.

  The men stayed nearby. George could hear them talking. Darkness came.

  When George didn’t come home for lunch, his parents were alarmed. When the people at George’s school said they didn’t know where the boy was, the distraught parents called the police. John Jr.’s wife, Helen, George’s mother, was reported to be in a state of near collapse.

  That night, a special delivery letter arrived at the Weyerhaeuser home. It demanded $200,000 in unmarked twenty-, ten-, and five-dollar bills for George’s safe return. And no gold certificates, the kidnappers decreed. They were apparently aware that Bruno Hauptmann, convicted only a few months earlier for the kidnapping and slaying of the Lindbergh baby, had been caught after spending a gold certificate from the ransom money.

  George’s signature was on the back of the envelope. The kidnappers also specified that an advertisement, signed “Percy Minnie,” be placed in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to signal that the family would comply with the demands.

  On Wednesday, May 29, John Weyerhaeuser got a letter from the kidnappers. Go to the Ambassador Hotel in Seattle, register as “James Paul Jones,” and wait, the letter ordered. And thank God Almighty, enclosed with the letter was a note from George, saying that he was safe.

  Weyerhaeuser checked in at the hotel. That night, a cab driver delivered another letter to him. It ordered him to drive out of the city to a certain point on a country road and look for two sticks driven into the ground with a piece of white cloth attached. Weyerhaeuser did as ordered and found the sticks and cloth, along with a message directing him to find another sticks-and-cloth site farther along the road.

  Weyerhaeuser did as commanded, but when he got to the second site, there were no further orders. He waited for two hours before going back to the hotel. Was he able to sleep at all that night? We don’t know.

  The next morning, Weyerhaeuser got a phone call.

  “You didn’t follow instructions last night,” the caller said.

  “I did,” Weyerhaeuser said. “There was no other note. I couldn’t—”

  Click.

  It was Memorial Day. Those millions of Americans whose lives were still normal were celebrating the start of summer. For Weyerhaeuser, it was a day full of fear and frustration. All he could do was wait. And wait.

  By this point, Weyerhaeuser was carrying $200,000 in cash. It had been marked, despite the kidnappers’ orders. Gathering the money had been an effort. Of course, the Weyerhaeuser family was worth many times that much. But it was no small feat to amass that much in cash.

  Shortly before ten that night, another phone call. The man on the line had a European accent, Weyerhaeuser thought. The man told him to go to an address where he would find a note in a tin can.

  But this time, it was decided that Weyerhaeuser would stay home and one of George’s uncles, F. Rodman Titcomb, would try to make the delivery.* Titcomb drove into the country, found the location and the tin can—only to be directed to another site, and still another. He understood the kidnappers’ tactics. They were not just toying with him; they were making it all but impossible for lawmen to pursue them without giving themselves away.

  But local and state police had already agreed to stand aside, at least for the time being. So had FBI agents, a small army of whom had gathered in the Seattle-Tacoma area.

  Finally on that wearying night, Titcomb was steered to a site on a dirt road off the main highway between Seattle and Tacoma. There, he found a flag and a note. Wait five minutes with the inside light of your car on, the note said. Then go to yet another place on the same road and find a note. He did.

  Leave your car engine on and leave the money, he was ordered. Walk back toward Seattle. If the money is all here, your son will soon be back with you.

  Titcomb had walked about the length of a football field when he heard sounds behind him. He turned in time to see a man get in the car and drive off with the money. Titcomb walked until he was able to hitch a ride back to Tacoma.

  Cowering in the hole in the ground that first night away from home, George Weyerhaeuser thought he heard the two men talking about how the police might fight him. For whatever reason, they pulled him out of the ground, carried him back to the car, and put him in the trunk. In that pitch-black place, he felt the car bump and jostle on the way to—where?

  After a while, George was yanked from the trunk and led through more dark woods. Finally, the men stopped and ordered him to wait by a tree. George did, hearing the sounds of shovels plunging into dirt. The men were digging another hole. Finally, he was put into the hole, along with a car seat and two blankets. He heard something being put across the hole (tar paper, it would be revealed later), and George was left alone in the inky darkness. He thought he heard things crawling in the ground.

  To the nine-year-old, it seemed forever ago that he had been walking home to lunch. In fact, it was “only” two days after he was taken that the two men (accompanied now by a woman) put him in the car trunk again and drove. George had no way of knowing that they had crossed the state line into Idaho.

  In the early morning, the boy was taken out of the trunk and handcuffed to a tree. He could see mountaintops over the trees. He was guarded until night came. He tried not to be afraid. He remembered what the man had said: “You’re worth more to us alive.”

  “This looks like a ‘big league’ job,” U.S. Marshal A. J. Chitty said in Seattle.172 “There was talk at first that it was done locally, but we’ve assumed now that outsiders, some big shot gangsters from the East maybe, are mixed up i
n it.” (Perhaps Chitty’s remarks reflected a lingering prejudice that the younger West had not yet “caught up” with the more sophisticated East. After all, it was not until 1928, with the election of the Iowa-born Herbert Hoover, that the country chose as its president a man born west of the Mississippi River.)

  There was also speculation that left-wing union members were behind the crime (the Weyerhaeuser company was having labor troubles at the time), but union leaders quickly dashed any such talk, expressing hopes for the child’s quick, safe recovery. “This is something in which differences of social position are erased,” Rowland Watson, Northwest representative of the American Federation of Labor, declared as he urged members to be on the lookout for the boy.173

  By any standards, the kidnapping was a bold one. The name Weyerhaeuser carried as much clout in the Northwest as the Bremer name did in the Midwest and the name Urschel did in Oklahoma. And Washington State had passed a law making kidnapping punishable by death under some circumstances. Simple conspiracy to kidnap was a felony.

  George listened to the voices; he thought he counted six, including that of a woman.

  His captors had taken him to a house and blindfolded him, but not before he saw that the structure had two gables. He heard some of the men call one another by name: Harry, Bill, Allen. Or was it Alvin, as in Alvin Karpis, the bandit whose sneering face and piercing eyes were familiar throughout the country from wanted posters?

  Sometimes, they took his blindfold off. When they did, they wore Halloween masks. George thought they looked funny, but he didn’t laugh.

  And while homesick, he wasn’t terrified. He recalled what one of the men had said early on: “You’re worth more to us alive.” He knew he was.