by Noel Behn
Inside the thirty-by-forty-five-foot courtroom, a hundred reporters, fifty cameramen, and twenty-five communications technicians had somehow managed to operate in a fraction of the space they usually required. Among them were star journalists and special writers whom the more affluent publications had hired on, such as Walter Winchell, Arthur Brisbane, Edna Ferber, Fannie Hurst, Damon Runyon, Alexander Woollcott, Kathleen Norris, Heywood Broun, and Dorothy Kilgallan. The ace reporter for Hearst’s New York Journal was Adela Rogers St. John, whose father was one of America’s most prestigious lawyers. Adela had a direct line not only to the prosecuting attorney, David Wilentz, whom she often advised, but also to the defense attorney, Edward J. Reilly. William Randolph Hearst and his twenty-four papers had been openly declaring that the accused man was guilty, but this did not deter the Hearst organization from paying Reilly seventy-five hundred dollars in advance to represent the defendant in return for the exclusive rights to the story told by the defendant’s wife. During the proceedings it was not unusual to see Adela St. John conferring with Reilly or Wilentz or to observe Winchell passing Wilentz a note.
Walter Winchell, who, like Hearst, had already pronounced Hauptmann guilty, was one of the most popular and powerful columnists of his day. Not only did he write about the trial, but he tersely reported his views on radio to a listening audience that was larger than that of any of his broadcasting competitors. And his competitors were also there and reporting: Gabriel Heatter for station WOR, Boake Carter on WABC, Hans von Kaltenborn for WCBS. Each evening WHN had the respected lawyer Samuel S. Leibowitz provide a summation of the day’s testimony. On another wave length actors dramatized the proceedings. Whether the court knew that newsreel cameras were being brought into the trial room and quietly condoned it is moot, but cameras were there, poorly disguised and with the microphone for one of them concealed at the end of the jury box.
Radio was coming of age with the trial. An estimated forty million Americans were listening to on-the-scene broadcast reports from Flemington hours before the first headlines could hit the street. In addition to regularly scheduled newscasts, New York City alone had nine special reports on eight different stations in just the afternoons of each trial day. Even in the area of “special features,” radio held its own with print. The papers had contracted a series of experts, including psychiatrists and legal scholars, to write about the trial. Their commentaries had proved to be very popular with the readership, and very influential. Radio was putting on its own specialists with equal success, particularly in the case of Samuel S. Leibowitz.
Radio interviews with the key participants in the trial created yet another order of stars and credibility. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, whose rigid posturing and personality ruffled many a newspaper reporter and who didn’t come across all that well in motion picture newsreels, had a perfect voice for radio. In a fledgling medium where if you sounded good, you were good, he spoke with a staccato authority that convinced a large segment of the listening audience that if H. Norman said so, it had to be so. For the first time in the protracted and turbulent investigation, he and his state troopers gained a popularity all their own.
In 1932, the New Jersey State Police and H. Norman Schwarzkopf had been instrumental in restricting the media’s access to the news of the kidnapping. Over the ensuing two years and ten months the superintendent and his men had suffered journalism’s continued barbs about their having been inept in their initial investigation of the crime and ineffectual throughout the manhunt that ensued. Much of the media had argued that it had been the New York Police Department and federal agents who apprehended the suspect, even though the troopers had participated. The trial at Flemington offered Schwarzkopf the opportunity to vindicate himself and his organization. The state police were providing the majority of the evidence and witnesses on which the prosecution was basing its case. The small, ramrod-erect trooper boss still seized every opportunity to be photographed, particularly beside lanky Slim Lindbergh, but the old animosities between him and the print media seemed to have been laid aside. So was the long-held view that the crime had required more than one person in its perpetration. Walter Winchell’s manifesto that the defendant had acted alone in the kidnapping and murder of the infant was the prevalent view. The betting odds were overwhelming that the jury of twelve tried-and-true local citizens, who had only the highest regard for their famous former neighbors, Charles and Anne Lindbergh, would find the defendant guilty.
The state police had an additional and thankless task at Flemington: trying to maintain law and order inside and outside the courthouse. Keeping the massive flow of traffic moving was next to impossible. By the second week of the trial, it was estimated that fifty thousand visitors were coming to town each day. Regulating the crowds that consistently congregated on Main Street in front of the courthouse was equally trying. The multitude had a propensity for knocking aside barricades and restraining ropes. Troopers often had to form flying wedges to get key personnel in and out of the building.
As required by New Jersey law in a capital case, the jury had been sequestered, but this did not prevent the jurors from hearing news, rumors, and opinions about the trial. Four times a day they had to run the gauntlet through a mob that usually spread from the Union Hotel, where the jurors were billeted, to the courthouse, directly across the street. As they passed, the crush of spectators often shouted helpful hints at them: “Burn the Dutchman!” “Send him to the chair!” “Give the murderer what he deserves.” Wherever there was a crowd, ubiquitous newsboys were usually nearby, yelling out the latest extra-extra-read-all-about-it headlines.
The jurors, eight men and four women, occupied six rooms on the top floor of the Union Hotel. They took their meals in a sectioned-off area of the hotel’s dining room, where the conversations of nearby reporters, who were forever discussing the case and exchanging information, could be clearly overhead. The media folk often shouted at one another to make sure the eating jurors knew what they thought of the day’s testimony. The jurors were allowed no radios in their rooms, but an emergency broadcasting station had been installed on the floor below their rooms, and they could not help but hear the newscaster’s on-air reports and comments about the proceedings.5
The trial, once under way, exceeded all expectations. This was due in part to the compelling array of new personalities involved with the proceedings. No Hollywood casting agent could have found a better type to play the presiding judge than the man who was trying the case, seventy-one-year-old Justice Thomas W. Trenchard. Childless after forty years of marriage and beginning his sixth seven-year-term on the bench, the white-haired, quiet, conservative, ultradignified Trenchard had the reputation of being scrupulously fair.
The media’s new white knight was black-haired David T. Wilentz, who had an uncanny knack of playing to the hidden newsreel cameras no one was supposed to know were in the courtroom. Wilentz was consistently besting that patriarch of pomp, defense attorney Edward J. Reilly, also known as the Bull of Brooklyn, who was the self-professed veteran of fifteen hundred homicide cases and the loser of but six. He was also nicknamed Death House. Reilly insisted that was because he took on so many hopeless cases and saved so many clients from the gallows. His detractors claimed it was the other way around: that he sent them to their death. Reilly had replaced James M. Fawcett on November 2. Among the team of lawyers assisting the Bull was C. Lloyd Fisher, the local attorney who had represented John Hughes Curtis in the same courthouse back in 1932.
Embossed in red on Ed Reilly’s stationery and business cards was a ladder along with the announcement that he was chief counsel of “The Lindbergh-Hauptmann Trial.” His courtroom note-pads bore only the red ladder. A tall, imposing figure with thinning hair and prominent jowls, whose once-brilliant career had given way to booze, busty blondes, meaningless courtroom dramatics, and quirky lapses due to an advanced case of tertiary syphilis, Death House not only admired Charles Lindbergh but also kept a photograph of him on his desk. He was on reco
rd, off-the-cuff, as saying that his client was the killer and deserved the chair.6 The fifty-one-year-old, four-times-married, honey-voiced orator had wasted no time in trying to make friends beyond the courtroom. On his arrival in Flemington, Reilly announced to the local citizenry that he would like to live there among them. He addressed the Rotary Club and the American Legion, and as an homage to the town’s down-home simplicity, he occasionally wore a plain blue serge suit and vest in court rather than his traditional cutaway jacket and carnation, striped trousers, and spats. He had been paid his entire legal fee in advance and often seemed to be more interested in promoting himself than in defending his client. Death House, like David Wilentz, was forever giving interviews to reporters and posing for the cameras. Despite a strenuous effort to grab the spotlight whenever possible, Reilly was able to command only a fraction of the attention being showered on Wilentz, Lindbergh, or his client. Instead of preparing his case the night before the trial began, he was still passed out from the New Year’s party of the day before.
Once the proceedings were under way, Reilly did frequent radiocast analysis of the day’s testimony. In the courtroom he had the same unerring ability to play to the concealed newsreel cameras that Wilentz had. His bid for judicial sympathy included placing the defendant’s wife and their easy-to-cry three-year-old son, Manfried, in view of the jurors. He managed to keep spectators on the edge of their seats with intimations that not only would he have the defendant testify in his own defense but that he might very well call Al Capone to the stand, among a great host of others.
21
Trial of the Century
Few events in modern courtroom history have evoked the passion and controversy of Bruno Richard Hauptmann’s aptly named trial of the century. In this author’s mind it was a legal mockery and media sideshow of the highest order. The jury and judge appeared blatantly biased. Many of the witnesses and much of the evidence, under the stewardship of the New Jersey State Police, strike this author as flat-out fraudulent. But how can standards of propriety be applied to a farce? Legalistically, ethically, and morally, that’s what the trial of Hauptmann approached, a farce—as black a comedy as American jurisprudence could muster.
Hauptmann’s trial got under way on Tuesday, January 3, 1935, with the prosecutor, Attorney General David Wilentz, in unassailable form and a well-rehearsed cast backing up the three superstars who were slated to testify for the state: Charles and Anne Lindbergh and Jafsie Condon. Since no one had seen the child kidnapped or murdered, Wilentz’s case was to be based on circumstantial evidence. His strategy had already been previewed at the Hauptmann extradition trial at this same courthouse. First he would try to establish that the child had been kidnapped from his nursery and that ransom money was paid for his return—a ransom of which some fourteen thousand dollars ended up in the possession of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. The additional witnesses scheduled to testify in this phase included the gas station attendant who took down Hauptmann’s name and the movie-house cashier who claimed he gave her a tightly folded ransom bill. The cashier was of particular importance because the prosecution expected Hauptmann to say the ransom bills belonged to Isador Fisch and he didn’t discover he had them in his possession until after a rainstorm flooded his closet, forcing him to clear the shelves. The movie-house cashier had received a ten-dollar ransom note well before the rainstorm. Drawing the extortion noose even tighter was a battery of handwriting experts, led by the Osborns, who would claim that Hauptmann was the sole author of the thirteen ransom notes. The most damning testimony was expected to be Lindbergh saying he heard Hauptmann’s voice at the passing of the ransom money.
The second phase of the attorney general’s case would attempt to establish Hauptmann’s physical presence near the Lindberghs’ estate at the time of the kidnapping. At the extradition proceedings, testimony to this effect had been heard from two men, both of whom were expected to take the stand again. Reporters felt this portion of Attorney General Wilentz’s case was particularly vulnerable, since the witnesses might easily crumble under the withering cross-examination anticipated from defense attorney Death House Reilly.
His buffoonery to the side, Reilly had admirers who expected him to “crack” a few other key prosecution witnesses. One thing was certain: Death House was a grandstand player who loved to put on a good show.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh was among the first prosecution witnesses called by Wilentz. She quietly established that her child had been stolen, then brought many in the hushed room to tears as she identified, item by item, garments taken from the baby in the woods as being those her son was wearing when last she saw him on the night of March 1. Attorney Reilly told the court, “The defense feels that the grief of Mrs. Lindbergh needs no cross-examination.”1
Charles Lindbergh was the next to be called. He seated himself easily, crossed his legs, and leaned attentively forward, with his elbows resting on the arms of the wooden chair and his hands folded on a knee.2 Reporters’ eyes “popped wide with amazement” to see he was wearing a revolver in a shoulder holster under his rumpled, loose-fitting coat jacket.3 Had they been looking at Hauptmann, they would have seen the defendant lean forward as well, peer hard at Lindbergh, then sit back.4 Lindbergh related what had taken place the night of the kidnapping and identified the ransom note found in the nursery.
Charles Lindbergh, during the course of negotiations with the kidnappers, usually let others read the incoming ransom messages aloud to him. In the Flemington courthouse this January day, he left the reading to Dave Wilentz. While recounting the discovery of the ladder and a man’s footprint as well as ladder holes in the soft ground beneath the nursery window, Lindy managed to get a dig in at the media’s bad deportment. The session ended with his identification of the second ransom message, which had been mailed to the estate, and with Wilentz again reading the text aloud.
The next day on the stand, Lindbergh linked the prosecution’s case to physical evidence, such as the chisel and dowel pin, identified ransom messages sent to Henry Breckinridge and John F. Condon, told of driving Condon to St. Raymond’s Cemetery on the night of April 2, 1932, and related that after Condon had walked up to the corner along St. Raymond’s and started back across Whittemore Avenue, “I heard very clearly a voice coming from the cemetery, to the best of my belief calling Doctor Condon.” Wilentz asked what the words were. Lindbergh responded, “In a foreign accent, ‘Hey, Doctor.’” And has the witness heard this same accented voice again? Wilentz asked somewhat later. “Yes I have,” Lindbergh answered under oath. Wilentz wanted to know whose voice it was that called out “Hey, Doctor” that night in the cemetery. Lindbergh said, “That was Hauptmann’s voice.”5 Then, for the first time, the Lone Eagle looked at the prisoner.
The world had its first superheadline of the trial.
A moment of expected confrontation arrived with Death House Reilly’s cross-examination of Charles Lindbergh. Rumors had been spreading lickety-split that Lindy was wearing a gun in the courtroom because he had initially intended to shoot Death House should the defense attorney’s cross-examination of Anne prove too harsh. With Lindbergh himself on the stand, one of the first questions Reilly asked was, “Are you armed, Colonel?” Wilentz objected. The judge didn’t know to what, since he hadn’t heard the question.6 Lindbergh, having been warned that Reilly might inquire as to the weapon, gratuitously announced he wasn’t armed and opened his jacket to demonstrate the point. The first great confrontation had fizzled. Worse was to come.
During a radio broadcast the night before, Reilly had proclaimed that he would reveal the identities of the actual kidnapper-murderers. Rather than starting off the next day’s cross-examination by challenging Lindbergh’s damning but vulnerable “Hey, Doctor” testimony, Death House befuddled even his own colleagues by obliquely proposing a theory as to the true perpetrators of the crime: hostile neighbors who had conspired with a disloyal member, or perhaps members, of the Lindbergh’s household staff. He suggested that the homicid
al neighbors, angered by Lindbergh’s closing of a long-used lumber road on his property, had not only been informed the baby would be there on a Tuesday night by the treacherous employee or employees but had also been told how to leave the nursery with the stolen infant, which was not by the ladder but down a staircase in the Lindbergh home. Reilly implied that because household staff members were involved with the kidnapping, the family dog did not bark when the nursery was entered and the child brought down the stairs. Reilly had the witness describe the staircase locations in the house. While Lindbergh allowed that it might have been physically possible for him and his wife to have been eating in their dining room without seeing or hearing someone descending the main stairway, he deemed it very unlikely. There was another way down from the nursery, a servant’s staircase going to the kitchen, which opened onto a gravel parking area at the rear of the house. Reilly got an admission from Lindbergh that no one had bothered checking this possible route of exit the night of the crime.
Death House alluded to the New Jersey State Police as having bungled the investigation, which would be a continuing theme, but he concentrated on the hiring procedures that had led to the employment of Betty Gow and the husband-and-wife team of Aloysius (known as Oliver) and Elsie Mary Whateley as well as their activities the night of the crime. Ollie Whateley had died back in 1933, and Reilly targeted him as the prime inside betrayer without specifically saying so. Death House also brought up Violet Sharpe and Mrs. Morrow’s chauffeur Henry Ellerson, who had driven Betty Gow to the estate that fateful Tuesday. Lindbergh dismissed the defense supposition and avowed his complete trust in all the staffers. Reilly elicited a review of the child’s death and touched on Lindbergh’s connections with John F. Condon and the two other go-betweens, Mickey Rosner and John Hughes Curtis. Lindbergh saw nothing suspicious about Condon’s having offered his services as a go-between in a paid advertisement or in the fact that Jafsie always seemed to be alone when critical events occurred.