Lindbergh
Page 27
Wilentz called Millard Whited to the stand and had him swear to having seen Hauptmann near the Lindbergh estate. Though Fawcett was visibly dejected over the time sheet matter, he got Whited to admit that Captain Lamb had shown him photographs of Hauptmann before he picked the suspect out on the lineup. When asked if he was getting part of the reward, Whited lied to Fawcett and said no. Fawcett produced a cousin of Whited’s and two neighbors, all of whom attested to Millard’s bad character and unreliability. Wilentz paraded out James Petrosino, Inspectors John Lyons and Henry D. Bruckman, Buster Keaten, and Captain Lamb. It was Wednesday, October 17, and by late afternoon the presiding judge, Earnest E. L. Hammer, had heard enough. He ordered that Hauptmann be extradited to New Jersey, then granted Fawcett a forty-eight-hour stay in which to appeal.
Tom Cassidy of the New York Daily News was closing in on Joseph Furcht. Cassidy was the reporter who had admitted to his fellow newsmen that he had written Jafsie Condon’s telephone number on the wooden beam in Hauptmann’s bedroom closet. Furcht had indeed been Hauptmann’s supervisor at the Majestic Apartments, only the German carpenter couldn’t for the life of him remember Furcht’s name. Cassidy had been present when Hauptmann was first being interrogated and recalled this lapse in his memory. After Furcht was mentioned at the extradition trial, Cassidy tracked him to the lunchroom of his current place of employment, the Department of Public Welfare on New York City’s Eighth Avenue.
Furcht remembered Hauptmann and told Cassidy that in late February of 1932 he needed to fill a pair of positions suddenly vacated by workmen who had originally come from the labor-contracting company for the Majestic, Reliant Property Management. He turned to another contractor, E.V.C. Pescia, proprietor of Pescia’s Reliable Employment Agency at 779 Sixth Avenue, who sent him Gus Kassens and Richard Hauptmann. Furcht had no records, but he took Cassidy to see Pescia. Pescia did have records, ones that showed that on Saturday, February 27, Hauptmann and Gus Kassens had gone to the Majestic Apartments, where they were hired for a job that was to begin on March 1, 1932. Cassidy had photostatic copies made and took the statements of both Furcht and Pescia. Fawcett was informed and got Furcht’s affidavit and a statement from Pescia.
That evening, October 18, Fawcett went to Judge Hammer and received permission to bring the new information before Justice Francis Martin of the appellate division of the state supreme court. Furcht accompanied Fawcett to Justice Martin’s office but was not called into his chambers. He did, however, talk to reporters who had gathered there to interview him and assured them that Hauptmann was at work until 5:00 P.M. the night of the kidnapping. Judge Martin agreed to let Fawcett appear and make a motion to introduce his new evidence at 2:00 P.M. the next day, when the appeals court was scheduled to consider Judge Hammer’s recommendation for the dismissal of the habeas corpus action and the extradition of Hauptmann to New Jersey. The Daily News beat the competition to press with its scoop, which thoroughly stunned David Wilentz and Bronx County DA Sam Foley. Foley said he had never heard of Furcht and Pescia. He later conceded that Hauptmann had worked at the Majestic Apartments on March 1 but tempered his admission with an unsubstantiated opinion that the German carpenter had left the job at 1:00 P.M., thereby allowing himself ample time to drive to Hopewell and perpetrate the crime.
Wilentz, for whom the Furcht-Pescia revelations were near catastrophic, masked his agitation with a bold face as he assured reporters that their information would have had no effect on Judge Hammer’s decision to extradite Hauptmann, even if it was introduced as evidence at the appellate level. The next day at the courthouse, waiting for the appeals session to begin, Wilentz confronted Furcht in a hallway and demanded, “What do you mean by this? We don’t want to condemn innocent men in New Jersey. If you had any evidence, why didn’t you come to me?” Bristling with indignation, Furcht shot back that because his wife was in the hospital seriously ill, he didn’t even know his name had appeared in the papers or that he had some connection to the case until a Daily News reporter approached him. “I was willing then and I am willing now to answer any and all questions,” he told Wilentz heatedly, “and I resent any reference that I have held something back!”20
The five-judge appeals court spent the afternoon and early evening of Friday, October 19, reviewing Furcht’s affidavit, listening to Pescia’s statement, and hearing Fawcett’s argument for introducing the new information as evidence. The justices unanimously refused the request on the grounds that the information was “merely accumulative and not contradictory” and that a clear-cut issue of fact should not be evaluated at an appeals hearing but at the trial of action, to wit, the impending murder trial.21 It was 7:05 P.M. when the justices handed down their decision and ordered that the temporary stay of extradition be lifted.
At approximately 10:20 P.M. that same night, October 19, a convoy of seven cars and escort motorcycles entered Flemington, New Jersey, and stopped at the jailhouse. Along with a host of reporters and cameramen, an estimated one thousand local citizens were waiting, many holding burning white flares by which to see. They watched silently as New Jersey detectives got out of six of the cars. From the seventh, manacled and impassive, came thin, sullen, five-foot-ten Bruno Richard Hauptmann. He was turned over to the five-foot-tall county sheriff, John H. Curtiss, and to the jail warden, Harry O. Macrea. After being frisked, Hauptmann asked for a cigarette. He was given an entire pack. Then he was led into the jailhouse. Twelve state troopers deployed and took up sentry outside.
Police investigators had extensive interviews with Pescia and Furcht and, later, with Gus Kassens, whom it took time to locate. Before long Pescia’s records vanished, never to be found. Even though photographs of them had appeared in the Daily News, Pescia become disinclined to verify that they had ever existed or to discuss the matter. Kassens signed an affidavit saying Hauptmann had not started work until several weeks after March 1. Joseph Furcht was persuaded to refute his first affidavit with a second one, in which he stated that he did not know if Hauptmann worked at the Majestic on March 1, and implied that the New York Daily News had distorted what he told them.22
The time sheets and payroll records of the Reliant Management Company, the prime labor contractor for the Majestic Apartments, would forever cast a shadow on the veracity of David Wilentz and the investigators who assisted him. Information surfaced that showed that just before the extradition hearing got under way, the supposedly nonexistent time sheet for the first half of March was hastily removed from the Reliant office. So were company payroll records that might have reflected that Hauptmann had worked on March 1. It soon came to light that the missing payroll records had been placed “under lock and key” in the office of a Bronx County assistant district attorney. At the end of October, with Hauptmann already in New Jersey waiting to be tried for murder, the assistant DA turned them over to Detective Cashman of the NYPD, who dutifully signed a receipt for them.23
Edward F. Morton, the Reliant timekeeper Fawcett had subpoenaed as his first witness, blamed his failure to appear at the hearing on the fact that the time sheet for the first half of March was not available to him. The man the company sent in his place, Howard Knapp, had testified not for Fawcett but for Wilentz. Knapp misled the court about the existence of a time sheet for the first half of the month and brought with him a time sheet for the second half, which ostensibly showed that Hauptmann hadn’t begun work until March 21. Later, when this time sheet was carefully examined, several curious aspects were evident. The names of thirteen handymen and carpenters who had worked at the Majestic Apartments during this period were listed in a column down the left side of the page, with Hauptmann’s name on the bottom. Beside each name, stretching horizontally to the opposite end of the sheet, were sixteen boxes designating the last sixteen days of the month. The day an employee worked was noted by a check mark. The box for a day he didn’t work was left blank. But not in Hauptmann’s case. The boxes for March 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20 on Hauptmann’s line were each filled with a roundish in
kblot large enough to mask any check mark that may have existed underneath, inkblots the court had been told meant that he hadn’t been employed on those days.
If Hauptmann had worked at the Majestic from the sixteenth through the twentieth, as the seemingly doctored record indicates, then Wilentz’s contention that Hauptmann hadn’t been hired on at the apartment house until March 21 would have been discredited. In the half century to come, a majority of scholars would suspect that tampering had occurred, and attendant perjury. It made little difference for the defendant.
For Ellis Parker, Sr., the arrest of Bruno Richard Hauptmann was a travesty. He told his old friend and former manhunt boss Harold Hoffman that the crime had been perpetrated by a local disbarred lawyer by the name of Paul Wendel. According to Parker, Wendel was on the verge of cracking, and it was only a matter of time before he confessed.24 Harold Hoffman had other things on his mind, but single-handedly he would add a new and terrifying dimension to the Lindbergh case.
On December 3, 1934, a month before Hauptmann’s trial got under way, Anne’s older sister Elisabeth—who had married Aubrey Morgan in December of 1932—expired in Pasadena, California.
20
Hullabaloo
In the view of the authors Alan Hynd and Anthony Scaduto, who would write about the event much later, three trials were actually occurring: the trail in the courtroom, the trail in the newspapers, and the trial on radio.1 Almost from the time of his arrest, newspapers and radio had been proclaiming that the defendant was guilty. Since every juror knew what the media had been saying, the only question left open seemed to be, How guilty was guilty? It really didn’t matter. The media had mesmerized the nation with technology and hoopla. This was just the beginning. Matters of law and justice would come at a later time and in different courtrooms.
Because Sheriff John H. Curtiss was only five feet tall, his legs didn’t quite touch the floor as he sprawled in his chair at his Hunterdon County Courthouse office in Flemington. The pudgy lawman toyed absently with a watch chain, stroked his fox terrier, Buddy, chewed on an unlighted cigar, and announced to the reporters who had come to interview him that, yes, he would happily take “donations” of five and ten dollars for choice seats to the upcoming Hauptmann murder trial. Curtiss, a Republican, was reported to have already collected twelve hundred dollars in donations to help offset “expenses.” When news of his scalping activities reached Trenton, he received a telephone call from the Democratic governor and soon-to-be U.S. senator, A. Harry Moore, who forcefully reminded Curtiss that the state of New Jersey, not Hunterdon County, was bearing the cost of the trial. In rebuttal Curtiss pointed to a $150 bill for lumber to build press seats. No one is quite sure what the governor said to this, but it seems to have been persuasive. “All right, all right,” the wee law officer grunted, “I’ll return every cent of it.”2
Sheriff Curtiss grievously underestimated the marketplace. Though the main trial room of the hundred-year-old Hunterdon County Courthouse was uncomfortably small, poorly ventilated, and exceedingly hot, by the beginning of 1935 it was host to the most publicized criminal proceedings in the history of the republic. Scalpers in New York City were asking from one hundred to three hundred dollars a ticket for reserved seats to a so-so session, on the rare occasions when one was available. When and if the popular Jafsie Condon took the stand, the price was expected to soar to five hundred dollars. A section of the gallery was available to the public on a no-charge first-come, first-served basis, and eager spectators formed long lines each morning, hoping for admittance. Just waiting in the perpetual throng outside the courthouse and observing who was entering or leaving were usually worth the trip that sightseers made to be there. Many of the faces they saw were world renowned. Charles Lindbergh attended every session. Mrs. Lindbergh was often with him, as was Colonel Henry Breckinridge. Other well-known personalities were usually in possession of scalped tickets or were admitted by the prosecution or defense under the guise of being witnesses: Douglas Fairbanks, Ginger Rogers, Jack Benny, Jack Dempsey, Moss Hart, Lowell Thomas, and social-register types galore. Often all a visitor had to do to find a famous man or woman was turn from the courthouse and look directly across Main Street to the four-story Union Hotel. A celebrity might be outside on one of the porches that ran along the building’s facade or in the hotel dining room, which had become the prime gathering place for out-of-towners.
The conversion of Hopewell—population nine hundred plus with a police force of two—into a rip-roaring Forty-second Street in the wake of the Lindbergh kidnapping on March 1, 1932, was tepid tea in comparison with the transformation that Flemington—population twenty-seven hundred with only one full-time policeman—underwent in January of 1935. The first weekend of the Hauptmann trial, an estimated twenty thousand automobiles and sixty thousand sightseers descended. The average speed on the roads into town was three miles per hour, and traffic was backed up an average of ten miles in all directions. Once in Flemington, the legions of visitors found it next to impossible to get out. On Sunday a restless mob of five thousand swarmed past the guards who were trying to keep them out of the county courthouse and went on a rampage: They cavorted in the jury box, shouting out their names; waited their turn to pose in the judge’s banc or in Lindbergh’s seat or in the prosecutor’s or on the defendant’s chair; searched every nook and cranny of the building for souvenirs, many of which they fought over; took as mementos almost anything that wasn’t nailed down and quite a few items that were, including spittoons, mops, bars of soap, toilet paper, pieces of chairs and tables; cut their initials into wooden surfaces; invaded the attic communication center and tried to tear out cables.
The population of Flemington doubled, and massive traffic jams became commonplace as the trial proceeded. For the depression-racked quiet little town, bumptious outsiders were part of an economic windfall. Retail prices soared, and any home owner with a spare bedroom or bed could rent it out at an handsome price. If board was offered as well, exorbitant charges could be extracted by the meal. The only hostelry in town, the Union Hotel, was completely booked, (nine hundred requests had been received for its fifty rooms when the trial was announced back in October) but management had hired on additional help so the dining room could be kept open until midnight. The hotel also converted a main-floor storage area into a tap room, which the media not only appropriated as their preferred watering hole but named after Nellie, the stray pooch that a New York reporter had adopted. Business at the nearby Blue Bowl Tearoom rose dramatically. The same was true for the Candy Kitchen, which featured a Lindbergh sundae, a Hauptmann pudding, and baked beans bearing the name of the prosecutor. To help meet the demand for meals, the Woman’s Council of the Methodist Episcopal Church prepared a lunch, of which many a lawyer and reporter availed himself or herself. One farsighted press organization had rented an entire country club in the area to house and feed its staff. Another paper had taken whatever apartments could be found. The balance of reporters were on their own. Hotel accommodations in Princeton, fifteen miles southeast of Flemington, were heavily booked, and quite a few newspeople stayed in Trenton, which was twenty-one miles to the south. Several scribes braved the awesome traffic and commuted the sixty plus miles from New York City each day.
The streets of Flemington became a gouger’s paradise as out-of-town hawkers vied with local shopkeepers in peddling every kind of souvenir imaginable, from “autographed” photos of Lindbergh to “certified” locks of the dead infant’s hair. Among the best-selling novelty items was a miniature replica of the kidnapping ladder that was being built and sold by a local lad and his brother.3
The trial seemed to mark a milestone in the long and strenuous relationship between Charles Lindbergh and the media. If Lindy had sent the press on a bogus chase, hoping the interest in the death of his son would abate, he had miscalculated. The media had persisted and triumphed. Lindbergh had accepted the reality that the timetable of his scenario had been upset—extended far longer than he desired.
He had done all he could not to get anyone implicated in the crime. These efforts failed. Lindy’s decision to identify the voice from the graveyard may have been a last resort to end the tragic ordeal his family had endured. Many legal experts believed that even if Hauptmann was convicted, he would be spared the death penalty.
Lindbergh resigned himself to becoming a supporting player in the Flemington spectacular. He maintained his dignity and cut a heroic figure. Many a Lindy watcher thought he or she detected signs of relief in the Lone Eagle. He was just as inaccessible to reporters as in the past and just as much the target of journalists’ gossip, but there appeared to be a certain mellowness about him.
The press on the whole behaved despicably, as David Brinkley would incisively document in his 1962 program on media deportment at the trial of the century, which was subtitled in part “‘It Was a Sickness.’”4 Four hundred fifty reporters and photographers were estimated to be in Flemington, a healthy percentage of whom seemed to be strident and rowdy, hard drinking, and insensitive to the town. Almost every major paper in the country, as well as a great number from around the world, was represented, and the Hearst syndicate alone had sent a staff of fifty. The attic rooms over the trial chamber had been converted into a communications center replete with forty telegraph and cable operators, who, according to the wireless companies, were capable of transmitting a million words a day. The mass of telephone and telegraph wires leading from the tall utility pole on the sidewalk through the upper windows of the courthouse included forty-five direct lines to such places as Paris, Berlin, London, Buenos Aires, and Sydney, Australia. Motorcycle messengers roared through the narrow streets, many of them heading for the improvised airfield at the edge of town, from which film of the day’s events was flown to New York and other cities and developed in time for late-night or early-morning editions.