by Noel Behn
Bruno said that he heard and that he was not going to lie—and that he could explain the money. “You can explain the money?” Yes, he could. “Well, let’s hear.”2
Bruno now told them that it had to do with his partner in the fur deals, Isador Fisch. The previous Christmas, Fisch had taken a trip back to his native city of Leipzig, Germany, to visit his parents. Just before sailing, he stored a trunk, several suitcases, and a cardboard shoe box with the Hauptmanns. The shoe box, which was tied with string, was put on a high shelf in the kitchen broom closet and forgotten. Fisch was tubercular and in poor health and died in Leipzig on March 29, 1934. During a heavy rainstorm just three weeks ago, the roof of the broom closet developed a leak. While taking drenched articles down from the shelf, Bruno rediscovered the shoe box, which he had never opened. Now that it was wet, he opened it. Bruno didn’t deny his surprise on viewing the contents: approximately fourteen thousand dollars in gold certificates. Without telling Anna of his find, he brought the damp currency to the garage, divided it into several piles, each of which he wrapped in newspapers, and created hiding places for them. Since Fisch had owed him seven thousand dollars, Bruno saw no reason not to even their financial account and appropriate half the money for himself. He intended to spend no more than the rightful seven thousand dollars, which he began to do sometime in August.
At the time no one believed the Fisch story, as it became known, but several of the most cynical officers grudgingly marveled at Bruno’s ability to come up with such a yarn after undergoing nonstop interrogation without sleep and food.
Word swiftly spread that fourteen thousand dollars in ransom money had been seized in the Bronx and that the police had taken a suspect into custody. This was what America and the world had waited so long to hear, and the media bore down with a fury. By 4:00 P.M. the name Bruno Hauptmann was being flashed over the airwaves. Extra police were rushed to his home in the Bronx to contain reporters and neck craners. The scene at the Greenwich Village station house was approaching riot proportions. Crowds jammed the narrow streets, and many of the curious had walked out along the nearby elevated tracks to catch a better view of the action. As 5:00 P.M. approached, the corridors inside the precinct were packed with frantic news personnel boisterously intent on getting a peek at the greatest confrontation of the decade: Jafsie Condon was on his way over to identify Hauptmann as Cemetery John. By now the handwriting expert, who had learned that fourteen thousand dollars in ransom money had been recovered from the garage, revised his previous opinion and said that Bruno had used a clever device to mask his penmanship. Osborn and his equally expert father weren’t fooled. Hauptmann, they asserted, was the true author of the ransom messages.
J. Edgar Hoover, H. Norman Schwarzkopf, and General John F. O’Ryan, commissioner of the New York Police Department, were on hand as Richard Hauptmann, his wrists handcuffed in front of him, was led into the office of the second deputy police commissioner at the Greenwich Street station house and made to stand between NYPD detectives Martin Monahan and Benjamin Rosenberg in a fourteen-man police lineup. Like Rosenberg and Monahan, the other eleven suspects were members of the New York PD and wore civilian clothes. The time was 5:30 P.M., and the man who seemed to be watching most intently, and being intently watched by many others in the room, was John F. Condon. The lineup was for him, Jafsie, the indomitable showman and the surest news copy of the entire case, the only intermediary so far not to end up in jail or publicly disgraced, a man most investigators still didn’t trust.
Inspector Lyons, who was in charge of the event, explained the ground rules. “Dr. Condon, start at the head of the line, look at all these men, and if you can identify the man to whom you passed the money to on the night of April 2, 1932, you just go over and put your hand on his shoulder.”
“May I ask for a favor?” Condon said. Of course he could, and what was that favor? “To speak to each man for one minute on something nobody else has heard but me?”
Lyons agreed. Condon walked back and forth along the line three times. On the last pass he stopped in front of suspect 3a, Richard Hauptmann, studied him for a moment, moved on down to suspect 13, and asked, “May I eliminate several men from the line now and have them come forward?” The request was granted, and he had 2, 3a, 11, and 12 step forward: a detective, Hauptmann, and two patrolmen. “Can I speak to them?” Condon asked. “You don’t mind do you?” Nobody minded, and he stood in front of Hauptmann and addressed the four suspects who had come forward. “When I saw you I gave you my word I would do all I possibly could for you if you gave me the baby. The only way in the world I think you can save yourself at all is to tell the truth. I gave you a promise heard that day. Follow that promise.”
At Jafsie’s request Inspector Lyons ordered the four suspects to hold out their hands, palms up. Condon examined all eight supinated palms, then asked suspect 2 his name. “James J. Kissane,” the detective answered. The same question was posed to 3a. “Richard Hauptmann,” Condon was told. On being asked, 12 and 11 answered respectively, “Herman Schwartzberg” and “Francis Mershon.” Condon walked back to Hauptmann, handed him a slip of paper, and told him to read it aloud. Hauptmann in his thick German accent, read, “I stayed already too long. The leader would smack me out. Your work is perfect.” Condon said that he could not quite hear the last two lines. Hauptmann read them again, “The leader would smack me out. Your work is perfect.”
Condon asked if Hauptmann had ever seen him before. “Never,” Bruno told him. You never saw me before? “Never.” What is your name? “Richard Hauptmann.” What is it, again? “Richard Hauptmann.” Condon handed him another slip of paper and told him to say what was written on it. “John,” Hauptmann read. And you didn’t see me before? “No, I never saw you before.” Bruno was ordered to hold out his hands again and did. Again Condon looked them over; then once more he asked each of the four suspects their names. The four complied with the request.
Jafsie had all the men but Hauptmann step back. “I gave the money. I promised to help out in case the baby was restored to me,” he told the German. “Do you remember that?” Bruno did not “And I said I would help out?” No, Bruno had never talked to him. “I never broke my word in my life. What is your name?” Richard Hauptmann, Bruno said. “Where were you born?” Germany “What place?” Saxony. “You don’t remember me—speaking to me?” Bruno couldn’t say that he could.
Condon talked to Hauptmann in German for a bit, then switched back to English saying, “That’s what I meant—you didn’t understand me. Listen. You never saw me before?” No. “Didn’t speak to me?” No. “You live in the Bronx?” Yes. “Do you know 233rd Street?” 233rd Street? Yes, Bruno knew it because he lived at 222nd in the Bronx. “You have nothing to say to me at all?” asked Condon, who now was studying the carpenter’s profile. No. “Why?” Because Bruno didn’t know what to say. Jafsie had him put on his hat, put it on to one side. “You didn’t speak to me about the baby?” No. “Never said a word?” Never said a word. “You didn’t speak to me about the baby at all?” No. “You are positive of that?” Positive.
Inspector Lyons broke in and asked Condon, “Would you say that he was the man?”
Condon replied, “I would not say he was the man.”
“You are not positive?”
“I am not positive,” Jafsie confirmed.
“Do you recognize the voice?” asked the inspector.
“The voice was husky. I’d like him to say this quick. When it’s a man’s life, gentlemen, I want to be careful. May I write something?” Bruno read what Jafsie wrote on the paper: What would your mother say? She would not like it. She would cry. “Louder, I am not able to hear,” Jafsie declared. Bruno read it again, louder. “Still a little louder.” Hauptmann obeyed. “Whom were you afraid of up there besides your mother? Do you remember Number Two?—that you could not wait any longer because they would smack you out?—the leader?” Bruno didn’t know what he meant. “All right, say, ‘Number Two.’” Number Two.
“Your name is what?” Richard Hauptmann. “How long do you live in the Bronx?” Nine years. “Nine years up there. You don’t know me?” No. “Never saw me?” No.
The most consistent statistic in Condon’s various descriptions of John was his weight, approximately 160 pounds. Now he asked Hauptmann, “How much do you weigh?” Around 180 to 182. “Have you gotten a little stouter lately than you were? Did you increase in weight lately?” No, he was practically the same. “In two years?” Yes. “How much did you weigh then, about? A little lighter?” No, he guessed that he was the same. A slight difference in summertime or wintertime, that’s all. “Did you ever run in races?” No. “Did you ever take exercises in German turning school?” Not here, over there. “In the old country?” Yes. “You can climb pretty well with your hands?” He used to do it in school as a child. “In a gymnasium?” Yes, gymnastic school.
Inspector Lyons wanted to know, “Is that the man?”
“He is the one who would come nearer to answering the description than anybody I saw,” Condon replied. “You gave me no hint and I picked him out. He is a little heavier. Can I go over and talk to him? I couldn’t say that he is not the man.”
“It looks like him?” asked Lyons.
“Yes.”
“But you cannot identify him?”
“No. I have to be very careful. The man’s life is in jeopardy.”3
Despite the fact that few investigators trusted Jafsie, many of them were still stunned by his failure to make the identification. Some were angry. Others openly speculated as to whether he was in cahoots with Hauptmann. The quirky pedant left the station house besieged by reporters and photographers. His comment to Inspector Lyons, “You gave me no hint and I picked him out,” would lead generations of case scholars to believe that the police had given him every hint as to which of the fourteen suspects they were certain was John.
Other witnesses were brought into the lineup room, and this is most likely when Perrone, the taxi driver, picked out Hauptmann. Cecile M. Barr, the Greenwich Village movie-house cashier who described the customer who gave her the folded ransom bill the night of November 26, 1933, as being American, identified him as being that man. Levatino, the greengrocer clerk, and Lyle, the filling station man, also identified him as the passer of ransom money.
The rudiments of an extortion charge were in place, but this was not good enough for H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who was playing for the highest stakes of any law-enforcement official connected with the crime. Only by establishing a link between the suspect and the kidnapping-murder could he regain control of the investigation—by having Hauptmann extradited to New Jersey to stand trial for the death of the child. If H. Norman was unable to make such a connection, New York could try the suspect for extortion. Later that afternoon the NYPD officially accused Hauptmann of just that.
A near riot occurred when a crowd tried to break through the police lines and get at Hauptmann as he arrived at the Bronx Supreme Court. Prompted by Schwarzkopf and the state’s attorney general, Governor Moore of New Jersey called Governor Lehman of New York and asked that the prisoner be extradited. The extortion trial was set aside, but Hauptmann’s Brooklyn-based attorney, James M. Fawcett, blocked extradition with a writ of habeas corpus.
Fawcett was confident he could keep his client from being sent to New Jersey. What didn’t help his cause was that Hauptmann had lied about not having a previous criminal record. The authorities now knew—and undoubtedly would try to use the information in court—that Hauptmann had been convicted of grand larceny, petty theft, receiving stolen property, and armed robbery and had served over three years at the Bentzin Prison in Seconsen, Germany. The grand larceny convictions had come as the result of several burglaries, which included his breaking into the home of a country mayor—using a ladder and entering through a second-floor window. The armed-robbery conviction resulted from Hauptmann and an accomplice stealing groceries from two women at gunpoint—two women who were wheeling a baby carriage. Three months after his release from prison, he was picked up and charged with another series of burglaries. To avoid prison, he fled to America. The record indicated that Bruno was an inept and amateurish crook at best. He fared better as an escape artist. Bruno was credited with a jailbreak as well as jumping out of a police van.
Fawcett remained certain he could block his client from standing trial for murder in New Jersey. He planned to show that since arriving in America, Hauptmann had been an honest and hard-working family man, even if he hadn’t bothered to take out citizenship. Of far more relevance to the case was that Fawcett had the testimony of alibi witnesses as to where his client was the night of the crime and on the night the ransom was paid. He also had physical proof—employment records from the Majestic Apartments—that Hauptmann was at work in New York City on the afternoon of the March 1 kidnapping.
New York’s Bronx County grand jury convened on Monday, September 24, 1934, and heard thirty-two witnesses before indicting Bruno Richard Hauptmann for having extorted fifty thousand dollars from the Lindberghs. Hauptmann himself testified to what he had already told lawmen: He was not John, and he hadn’t been given the ransom in St. Raymond’s Cemetery. The German carpenter insisted that he was at home with his wife and their friend Hans Kloppenburg at the time the money was paid and continued to maintain that he hadn’t discovered the shoe box belonging to Isador Fisch that contained $14,600 until August.4 Testimony was given by the Osborns that Bruno was the writer of the ransom letters. Also of importance were the statements by the pair of service station employees who received the bill which Hauptmann was traced, Walter Lyle and John Lyons, as well as the taxi driver Perrone and Cecile Barr, the movie-house cashier.
By now investigators had found John Condon’s telephone number written on a wooden beam in Hauptmann’s closet. A somewhat muddled Bruno didn’t deny to the grand jury having put it there and explained that like everyone else he was interested in the case. He would later refute the confession and rue having made it.
The Condon number was a harbinger of the manipulations and tampering to come in regard to physical evidence and witnesses. In a 1989 television documentary on the case, author Anthony Scaduto would ask, “Why would a man write on the inside of a dark closet the phone number of the intermediary with whom he is dealing in a kidnapping case, if he doesn’t have a telephone in his house?”5 According to Ludovic Kennedy, the journalist Tom Cassidy of the New York Daily News wrote Condon’s address and telephone number in pencil on the closet beam, ostensibly as a joke. Kennedy maintains that three people confirmed Cassidy was the writer.6 Former newsman Frank Fitzpatrick was to tell Scaduto in 1976, “Tom Cassidy himself told me he wrote it there. Hell, he bragged about it all over town. He even showed us how he wrote it.” Russell Hopstatter, another veteran scribe, said to Scaduto, “Sure, Cassidy wrote that phone number—he admitted that to me and Ellis Parker, he told everybody about it.” Russell M. Stoddard, a one time Camden Courier-Post reporter, is the last source cited by Kennedy: “[Cassidy] told a bunch of us he did it to get a new lead for the story the next day.”7
Whether as a joke or new story approach, the number and address in the closet was to have an indelible and grievous effect on the fate of Bruno Hauptmann.
As had happened at the trials of Gaston B. Means and John Hughes Curtis, Charles Lindbergh was on hand to testify at a legal proceeding, and it was he as much as any one person who would seal the fate of Bruno Hauptmann. Following a brief appearance before the Bronx grand jury, Lindy was asked if he would recognize the voice he had heard say, “Hey, Doctor, over here,” at St. Raymond’s Cemetery back on April 2 of 1932. The Lone Eagle, already on record as having said he could not, now modified his position and said that perhaps he might. The next day Lindbergh, wearing a disguise, was placed among a group of observers who were seated in the prosecutor’s office. Hauptmann was brought in and compelled to walk back and forth and call out in a variety of fashions, “Hey Doctor, over here.” The Lone Eagle departed without mak
ing an official comment.
What exactly made Charles Lindbergh reverse himself remains speculative. But he did. In no uncertain terms he told the Bronx County district attorney, Samuel J. Foley, that Hauptmann’s was the voice of Cemetery John—an identification the DI and J. Edgar Hoover would forever deem untrustworthy because of the manner in which it was elicited and because they didn’t believe that Lindbergh, or anyone for that matter, could remember after nearly two and half years, a voice he had heard utter a handful of words from a distance of two hundred feet.8 What Hoover or anyone else thought was of no consequence. Charles Lindbergh had spoken. The noose was drawn.
In a rare reversal of legal procedure, the Bronx grand jury indicted Hauptmann before he was arraigned. The arraignment came on Thursday, September 27, before Judge Lester J. Patterson. Hauptmann pleaded not guilty to extortion. The judge set a trial date of October 11 and denied the motion by defense attorney James M. Fawcett to reduce the hundred-thousand-dollar bail to five thousand dollars. The prisoner was returned to the Bronx County jail, where he had been kept on a twenty-four-hour-a-day watch since being brought uptown from the Greenwich Street police station. That afternoon, under the guise of routine interviews by an assistant Bronx County DA, investigators went to work on friends and acquaintances of Hauptmann who might have been able to corroborate where he was on critical dates. Nearly everyone but his wife would eventually change what he or she had to say or would refuse to testify in his behalf. Later many of them would claim they had been intimidated, openly threatened, and continually harassed by the interrogators. Officers such as Jimmy Finn and Buster Keaten would avow they had done nothing but be polite and ask routine questions in their often-prolonged follow-up for the truth.