by Noel Behn
The media were having their day. This was the event they had promoted from the moment the baby was reported missing. For nearly three years newspapermen and radio broadcasters had relentlessly beat the drum and built the suspense in their demand that the perpetrators be found. Now the fiend was in custody and about to be tried. Anxiety was worldwide. So was a passion to mete out capital justice. Justice was not always uppermost in the mind of individual reporters, but a hot story was.
The press weighed heavily on a potential witness’s decision as to whether to testify for Hauptmann. Every turn of events, even that occurring behind the closed doors of supposedly secret grand juries, had a way of making the newspapers and radiocasts. The media was not friendly toward Bruno. A witness who considered speaking up for him faced public ridicule as well as intense police scrutiny, which may have been the reason that several handwriting experts who had agreed to appear in court and say that Hauptmann had not written the ransom notes resigned from the case before testifying. The state police would contend the experts dropped out because they realized the accused man was indeed the author of the messages.
Another pattern took shape: the emergence of physical evidence helpful to the prosecution and the disappearance of evidence helpful to Hauptmann. Two examples of the former were the finding of Condon’s telephone number written in pencil on a beam inside a closet of the Hauptmann home and the September 26 discovery by NJSP Lieutenant Lewis J. Bornmann of a missing section of wood flooring in Hauptmann’s attic, wood that investigators would contend had been used in the construction of the ladder. As we have seen Tom Cassidy of the New York Daily News was subsequently credited with writing Condon’s phone number in the closet,9 but Bornmann continued to defend his discovery and further stated that he was the first investigator to examine the attic, even though a review of the records reveals that nine searches of the attic by some thirty-seven law officers had occurred before his September 26 exploration.10 Additional doubt was shed on Bornmann’s claim when it was learned that he had written three drafts of his report for that day and hadn’t bothered to mention the critical discovery of missing wood until the second draft. At the opposite end of the evidence spectrum was the mysterious disappearance of the employment records for the building where Hauptmann claimed he was working the day of the kidnapping.
If, as H. Norman Schwarzkopf had told the media the day of Hauptmann’s arrest, he intended to extradite the prisoner to New Jersey and try him for the kidnapping and murder of the child, proof would have to be presented that implicated the German carpenter in the deadly event. It arrived at the Bronx County Courthouse in the person of Millard Whited, a thirty-five-year-old illiterate, dirt-poor hillbilly who lived with his family in a shanty just up the road from Sorrel Hill. Whited had been wakened the night of the kidnapping by a search party that included Lindbergh and Buster Keaten. He told them he had seen nothing and no one suspicious. In a formal statement taken seven weeks later, he reaffirmed that he had seen nobody suspicious in the area of the Lindbergh estate.
According to those who knew him, Millard was thoroughly dishonest and a congenital liar.11 His sudden recollection of having noticed a stranger in the neighborhood on February 18, 25, and 27 seems to have occurred subsequent to his being informed that useful information might result in him receiving part of the twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward posted by the state of New Jersey. He would later assert that he had been promised three hundred dollars if he would say everything investigators told him and that after he complied, he received only thirty dollars.12 The state police contended that Whited had first identified Hauptmann from two photographs shown him by Captain Lamb and Corporal Wolf. The troopers also provided an explanation as to why Whited wasn’t brought to the Greenwich Village police station in New York City when Hauptmann was first picked up back on September 19: the almost perpetually unemployed laborer was on a logging trip to Pennsylvania.13
Millard Whited was the glue with which H. Norman Schwarzkopf intended to bind his extradition case against Bruno Richard Hauptmann: an eyewitness who would place the accused man near the scene of the crime on or about the time of its commission. Captain Lamb of the NJSP escorted Whited to the Bronx County Courthouse on Saturday morning, October 6. Hauptmann was placed in a lineup without his lawyer’s knowledge. Whited picked him out as the man he had seen near the estate in the days before the kidnapping. When brought to the Bronx County DA’s office and told of the identification, Hauptmann yelled, “I was never at the Lindbergh house, never! I will not confess. I am innocent of any crime!”14
That afternoon Schwarzkopf convened a press conference at which he violated the confidentiality of the New Jersey grand jury system by publicly stating when and where he would present the twenty-three witnesses whose testimony he was certain would lead to a murder indictment against Bruno Richard Hauptmann.
On Monday, October 8, alerted by H. Norman’s pronouncement of two days before, the media were waiting in force as a cheering crowd of locals greeted the grand jurors who arrived at Flemington’s Hunterdon County Courthouse for their supposedly secret hearings. It was the second official inquiry into Hauptmann’s relationship to the crime and ordinarily would have been headed by Anthony M. Hauck, the balding thirty-five-year-old county DA who had successfully prosecuted John Hughes Curtis for the Lindbergh scam over two years before. Hauck was downgraded to main assistant to the man who named himself chief prosecutor, thirty-eight-year-old David Theodore Wilentz, the attorney general of New Jersey. Wilentz and Hauck were aided by four other prosecutors.
Shouts and applause from outside the ancient courthouse echoed the arrival of Charles Lindbergh. Once inside and duly sworn in, he told the secret conclave that the voice he had heard call out, “Hey, Doctor!” in St. Raymond’s Cemetery belonged to the man whom the Bronx County DA had forced to repeat the cry several weeks before: Bruno Richard Hauptmann. The day’s hearing was rounded out by testimony from Schwarzkopf, eight troopers, two DI agents, an IRS man, and three NYPD officers. At an evening press conference attended by Wilentz and Governor A. Harry Moore, Schwarzkopf told reporters that Lindbergh had positively identified Hauptmann as the man whose voice he’d heard in the cemetery. News of Lindy’s ID was instant and worldwide. The trapdoor of the gallows had all but snapped open on the accused but untried German.
Grand jury proceedings for October 9 focused on legitimizing the jurisdictional right of Hunterdon County to prosecute the murder case. Since under New Jersey law the maximum punishment for kidnapping was a prison term of thirty years, David Wilentz had decided to try Hauptmann on a statute that stipulated that if during the commission of a felony a victim is accidentally killed, the perpetrator can be convicted of first-degree murder. Wilentz intended to invoke this felony-murder law by claiming that Hauptmann had entered the Lindbergh nursery to steal the Dr. Denton worn by the child and that in the commission of this burglary he had killed the infant, who still happened to be inside the night garment.
On that October 9 Tuesday, to establish Hunterdon County’s right to the trial, Wilentz had Dr. Mitchell, the presiding physician of Mercer County, testify before the Hunterdon County grand jury that the baby had been killed by a blow to the head inflicted either during the theft of the Dr. Denton or shortly after, thereby implying that the tiny victim was dead before leaving the territorial boundaries of Hunterdon County, something neither Mitchell nor anyone else knew for a fact. This exercise in truth bending was added to by an out-and-out prevarication when Mitchell described an autopsy that he credited himself with having done but in fact never performed.
Assisted by physical evidence, such as ransom notes and handwriting specimens, the father-and-son team of Osborns assured the jurors that Hauptmann was the author of the messages. A Madison, Wisconsin, wood expert by the name of Arthur Koehler, who claimed to have traced wood from the ladder to the Bronx, testified that the missing board in Hauptmann’s attic floor was a section of the kidnapper’s ladder known as rail 16. Millard Whited agai
n swore he had seen Hauptmann near the Lindbergh estate a week before the kidnapping. Reinforcing Whited’s testimony was a student by the name of Benjamin Lupica, who said he saw Hauptmann’s car in the area of Sorrel Hill around the time of the child’s disappearance. Subpoenas had been issued to two more men who allegedly saw Hauptmann near the estate prior to the kidnapping, but neither one was called to testify. Movie-theater cashier Cecile Barr was on hand to repeat her accusation that Hauptmann had given her a five-dollar ransom bill on the night of his birthday, some nine months before he supposedly discovered the money left in a shoe box by Isador Fisch.
It took thirty minutes for the Hunterdon County grand jury to indict Hauptmann for the murder of the baby. Before Tuesday was out, Governor Moore had an extradition warrant sent to New York’s governor, Herbert Lehman, who agreed that it would be honored.
H. Norman Schwarzkopf had prevailed. He was already the official spokesman for the case and would soon be in total control of the pretrial arrangements. J. Edgar Hoover wasted no time in letting it be known that since his special agents had successfully completed the majority of work in the Lindbergh investigation and because he estimated that the New Jersey State Police were probably competent enough to handle the remaining details on their own, the DI was officially withdrawing from the case.
The effort by Hauptmann’s attorney, James M. Fawcett, to quash the extortion indictment was dealt a setback when he was denied a usually routine courtesy: access to the notes-of the Bronx County grand jury. The defense lawyer and his client fared better in petitioning for a writ of habeas corpus with which to block Hauptmann’s removal to New Jersey. On Thursday, October 11, a day when the scheduled extortion trial was postponed to accommodate the extradition proceedings, Hauptmann was back before a Bronx court for the fourth time since his arrest and learned that his transfer to New Jersey had been stayed, pending a formal review at the beginning of the week.
On Monday, October 15, with crowds surging outside the spanking-new seven-million-dollar Bronx County Courthouse building and with security at a maximum, some four hundred members of the press and public who were admitted to the ninth-floor hearing chamber got the first public view of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. A pair of motion picture news cameras that was allowed to film the proceeding helped provide the world with a vivid preview of what was to come after the first of the year in New Jersey. Not only was the defendant present at the extradition hearing—seated at his counsel’s table, guarded by fifteen detectives and deputy sheriffs—but he took the stand and in direct examination testified that on Tuesday, March 1, 1932, he had spent the time from 7:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. in New York City, either working as a carpenter at the Majestic Apartments on Central Park West or looking for a job at an employment agency on Sixth Avenue. Between 5:00 P.M. and 6:00 P.M. he returned home. Since his wife, Anna, worked as a waitress at Fredericksen’s bakery-lunchroom in the Bronx every Tuesday and Friday, he changed clothes and did what he normally did on Tuesday and Friday nights: had dinner with her at Fredericksen’s after she got off work, usually between 9:00 P.M. and 9:30 P.M. After dinner they went home.
In an accusatory and confrontational cross-examination New Jersey’s attorney general, David Wilentz, hammered away at why Hauptmann had previously claimed only that he was working at the Majestic Apartments on March 1, and now admitted he might have been at an employment agency instead. Hauptmann contended that when initially questioned, he hadn’t been given the time to think out clearly where he was on that date. As a result, he had repeated the first thing that came to mind. Now that he had time, his best remembrance was that he had been at one or the other place.
Wilentz, in an ongoing jab of questions, made the most of Hauptmann’s having first lied about being in possession of additional ransom money and then having switched to the alibi that Isador Fisch left it with him. Subsequent to the discovery of the initial $13,760 in listed bills, investigators searching for even more currency dismantled Hauptmann’s garage and at the edge of one board discovered six drilled holes. Five of the holes contained a total of $840 in rolled-up ten-dollar gold certificates from the ransom payment. The sixth and largest hole produced a miniature German-made pistol, which Wilentz homed in on. Hauptmann asserted that he had purchased the weapon on Eighty-second Street in New York City and hid it in the garage because he didn’t have a gun permit. The last time he fired the weapon was on a trip to California in the summer of 1931.
Displeased that Wilentz turned to his police record in Germany, Hauptmann somberly conceded that he had been convicted of grand larceny in Europe on June 3, 1919, and that fifteen days later, on June 18, he was convicted of robbery with a gun as a result of having held up two women. He also acknowledged that when he had been discovered stowed away on a German liner and was dropped off at Ellis Island, he gave authorities a false name: Pellmeier. Caught stowed away a second time, he went by his own name, Richard Hauptmann. On the third try he succeeded in illegally entering the United States and never took out citizenship papers. Wilentz was unsuccessful in trying to make Hauptmann say he could climb better than most people. The prisoner admitted to having visited New Jersey in 1931 and to having been in Flemington just a few months before his arrest. Hauptmann maintained that he had only been circulating the ransom money for three or four weeks but conceded that he was afraid to deposit any of the bills in the Federal Reserve Bank because they could link him to the crime. Wilentz finished his cross-examination having highlighted a great many contradictions in Hauptmann’s statements but without having got the prisoner to alter his alibi one iota.
Hauptmann’s testimony neared an end with his lawyer, James M. Fawcett, asking him, “Were you in the state of New Jersey on March 1?”
The prisoner, who for two hours and fifteen minutes on the stand had maintained his equanimity, answered no in a polite and respectful manner.
“Did you murder the child Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr.—”
“No,” Hauptmann interrupted, as composed as ever.
“On March 1, 1932, or any other time?” Fawcett continued.
David Wilentz leapt to his feet and in one breath shouted, “Didn’t you build a ladder and put it up against the Lindbergh house, and didn’t you go up that ladder into the house and murder the child?”
“No,” Hauptmann shouted, rising halfway out of his chair.15
Away from the courtroom Wilentz was not reluctant to express his personal feelings about Hauptmann. “He’s guilty as hell,” the attorney general was quoted as saying in the following day’s edition of the New York Post. “I’ve never prosecuted anyone before,” he told the reporter. “I hate to prosecute. I’ve always tried to have a tolerant attitude. I’ve defended hundreds of criminals charged with all sorts of crimes. But this case of the Lindbergh child cries aloud for justice. The murder of a helpless little baby is such a revolting crime.”16
On the second day of the hearing, Fawcett had Hauptmann’s wife, Anna, testify that in the early evening of Tuesday, March 1, 1932, her husband had come to Fredericksen’s bakery-lunchroom in the Bronx, where she was working. They had dinner there and then went home. Fawcett brought Christian Fredericksen and his wife, Katie, to the stand to confirm that Anna waitressed at their bakery-lunchroom every Tuesday and Friday and to offer corroboration, to the best of their memory, that Hauptmann had dinner with her there the evening of March 1, 1932. Wilentz, in questioning Anna and the Fredericksens, astutely established that they remembered the event not because it occurred on March 1, 1932, a day that none of them specifically recalled, but because it happened on Tuesday, a day Mrs. Hauptmann always worked as a waitress and when Hauptmann usually came by for dinner before driving her home.
Wilentz called on Albert S. Osborn, who testified that he was reasonably certain Hauptmann had written the ransom messages.17 When during cross-examination Fawcett caused the expert in false documents to contradict himself, the hearing took on the aspects of the David-and-Goliath battle that pitted an obscure Brooklyn lawy
er and his handful of private detectives against a high-visibility attorney general and the combined forces of the New York and New Jersey law-enforcement establishments. Unhappily for the defense attorney, no one was rooting for David. On entering the fray, Fawcett had no doubt he would win. His most important witness, the secret weapon with which he intended to demolish the extradition action and save his client from being tried for murder, would present evidence from the Reliant Property Management Company—evidence Fawcett had seen—verifying that Hauptmann had worked at the Majestic Apartments on March 1, 1932, and therefore couldn’t have been in New Jersey at the time of the baby’s disappearance.
The witness was Reliant’s timekeeper, Edward F. Morton. Fawcett had subpoenaed him to appear as the defense’s first witness and bring along the company time sheets. When the court attendant called Morton’s name, the timekeeper failed to respond.18 Fawcett began with a different witness, then had the court again call for Morton. Morton never appeared. Compounding Fawcett’s dilemma was Wilentz’s unexpected witness: Howard Knapp, the assistant treasurer of the same Reliant Property Management Company for which Morton worked. Knapp brought a time sheet with him, all right, but not for the first half of March 1932. The record was for the second half of the month and established what was to become a cornerstone in Wilentz’s case against Hauptmann: that the German carpenter hadn’t begun to work at the Majestic Apartments until March 21, 1932. And what of the time sheet for the first half of the month, including March 1? “Our records do no indicate that any such record exists at this date,” Knapp stated on being cross-examined by Fawcett.19 Under more pressure he held out the possibility that Joseph P. Furcht, a former superintendent at the building, might have additional information.