Lindbergh

by Noel Behn

  The jury was not convinced by the defense witnesses, many of whom were blatantly questionable. Death House Reilly, who would spend a grand total of only twenty-six minutes conferring with his client during the entire trial, had not only gone public and announced over the radio and in the papers that he was searching for witnesses who could aid the defendant, but he had actually put several of these volunteers on the stand—to the delight of the prosecution.12 Even reliable witness seemed to be sorely unprepared, and minor debacles could not be averted.

  Among those swearing under oath that they had seen Hauptmann in or near Frederiksen’s bakery-lunchroom on the evening of March 1, 1932, were Elvert Carlstrom, Louis Kiss, and August Van Henke. The prosecution easily established that Carlstrom had never left his job in New Jersey the evening of March 1 and that Kiss—a self-professed silk-painter artist and part-time brew-it-yourself rumshiner who allegedly got lost in the Bronx while delivering two pints of his product—had been at Frederiksen’s on a different night. The credibility of Van Henke—he attested to having seen Hauptmann walking a police dog near the restaurant—was put in doubt when it was revealed he had two aliases and had operated a speakeasy.

  Lou Harding testified for the defense that on March 1 he had directed two men in a dark-blue suburban automobile with a ladder inside it to the Lindbergh estate but that neither of the men was Hauptmann. When Wilentz suggested that the witness had once been convicted of assaulting a woman, Harding set the record straight by insisting the charge was “carnal abuse.”

  Defensewise, things didn’t go all that swimmingly for April 2, when the ransom was passed in St. Raymond’s. Benjamin Heier took the stand and told of having seen Isador Fisch jump over the cemetery wall that night, but it turned out that Heier had been in an automobile accident eight miles away at the precise time he said he had seen Fisch. Heier was later indicted for perjury.

  Lawyer Reilly didn’t give up on his attempt to link the crime to a member of the Lindbergh-Morrow household staffs. Peter H. Sommer told the jury that on the night of March 1 he was on the Weehawken ferry from New Jersey to Manhattan and saw two men, one of whom resembled the photograph he was shown of Isador Fisch. After the ferry reached New York City’s Forty-second Street pier, Sommer saw the two men help a woman with a baby in her arms onto a trolley car. The witness identified a photograph of Violet Sharpe as being that woman. On cross-examination Sommer became so addled and contradictory that the courtroom was thrown into chaos, particularly when he was reluctant to either reidentify the photographs he had previously said were Fisch and Sharpe or refute his earlier testimony. Resuming his cross-examination the next day, Wilentz established that Sommer was a professional witness who had testified in such cases as the Halls-Mills murders and had once threatened to change his testimony unless he was paid the fifteen dollars he insisted was due him.

  Reilly’s most grievous miscalculation was putting Bruno Richard Hauptmann on the stand. As Death House had hoped, it added to the drama of the trial—and to the cliff-hanging question of whether the stoic German would “crack” or “thaw” under Wilentz’s cross-examination, whether he would not only confess but possibly name his accomplices, if they existed. Hauptmann did not possess the sort of personality that engendered either trust or compassion. A lean, dour illegal alien, he spoke with a pronounced guttural accent and betrayed a pomposity and an arrogance that reporters referred to as typically Germanic in an age when isolationist America watched with mounting distaste and trepidation the bloody antics of Adolf Hitler. Hauptmann, like Hitler, had been a corporal in the German army during World War I, a machine gunner in an army that had fought and killed United States doughboys. Though not an unbright man, the defendant displayed a glaring contempt for the intelligence of others. He relished being the center of attention and often seemed to gloat over what he considered to be his own mental superiority. He appeared particularly proud of the fact that Wilentz had not been able to make him crack as he was caught in this exchange during his cross-examination:

  “You think you are a big shot, don’t you?” Wilentz asked.

  “No, should I cry?” Hauptmann answered.

  “You think you are bigger than anybody, don’t you?”

  “No, but I know I am innocent.”

  “You are a man that has the will power, that is what you know isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “You wouldn’t tell if they murdered you, would you?”

  “No.”

  “Will power is everything with you, isn’t it?”

  “No, it is—I feel innocent and I am innocent and that gives me the power to stand-up.”

  “Lying when you swear to God that you will tell the truth. Telling lies doesn’t mean anything!”

  “Stop that!”

  “Didn’t you swear to untruths in the Bronx courthouse?”

  “Stop that!”13

  Hauptmann had taken the stand at 3:09 P.M. the same day the defense attorneys began to present their case. Sitting no farther away than fifteen feet, his eyes firmly set on the accused, was Charles Lindbergh. Reilly led Hauptmann through an account of his whereabouts on March 1 and April 2. Hauptmann repeated his dealings with Isador Fisch, who he still maintained had left the ransom money with him. One by one he was shown the ransom messages. He studied each of them, one by one, before denying he was the author. The day’s testimony ended with Hauptmann swearing he had not built or owned the ladder nor had he given a folded five-dollar bill to a Greenwich Village movie cashier on the night of his birthday.

  Though a severe snowstorm hit Flemington that Thursday night, the largest and most unruly crowd to date was jammed into the courtroom the next morning—seven hundred people filling a chamber that could barely accommodate the usual gathering of two hundred.14 Every aisle and nook and cranny was filled with sitting and standing men and women, a great many of whom chatted away or aggressively tried to better their location. Despite repeated warnings from the bench, the gallery giggled and guffawed at the slightest opportunity. Bailiff’s shouts of “quiet” added to the din. One outburst of raucous laughter finally provoked Justice Trenchard to lose his temper and proclaim that any future laughers would be brought to the bench for sentencing. The reason for the overflow turnout was twofold: Hauptmann was to give his second day of testimony, and there was a possibility that Wilentz’s cross-examination might begin. But the session started off with Death House Reilly questioning his client.

  Shown the sleeping suit worn by the dead baby in the woods, Bruno denied ever having seen it before. Then, with Reilly’s help, he went into a discursive explanation of his financial dealings. Following the noon recess, he was back on the stand to relate his arrest and mistreatment while at the NYPD’s Greenwich Village station house. In response to Reilly’s query, Bruno related how he had been forced to write exact copies of the ransom message, inclusive of the misspelled words. Reilly ended his direct examination late in the afternoon of Friday, January 25. Hauptmann had acquitted himself quite well while denying any complicity in the kidnapping-murder, had been self-assured and even relaxed in responding to the questions, often smiled—occasionally joked. With only a half hour left before the day’s session ended, David Wilentz began his cross-examination.

  As Hauptmann had a habit of smirking, so did Wilentz. Both were aliens: The accused had entered the country illegally as an adult; the prosecutor had been brought here legally at the age of one from Lithuania. What heightened the confrontation for many observers in the overcrowded courtroom was the fact that Hauptmann was German and Wilentz was Jewish. In general, the confrontation was an expanded replay of their prior meeting in the extradition hearing at the Bronx federal courtroom the previous September, which it now appeared had benefited Wilentz more than Haputmann.

  The attorney general began casually enough, listening to Hauptmann’s gratuitous clarification of testimony he had just given on his financial dealings. After posing a routine series of questions regarding the defendant’s crimin
al record in Germany, Wilentz walked up to the witness chair and shoved a dark-red memorandum book in front of Hauptmann. The book had been taken from the defendant’s apartment the day of his arrest. “Take a look at this word particularly,” the prosecutor demanded. “Tell me if that is your handwriting, that one word there.”

  Hauptmann squirmed in his chair but gave no answer. Alluding to the German’s earlier assertions that he was being framed and that a policeman may have put Condon’s telephone number in his closet, Wilentz asked, “Or did some policeman write it?”

  Hauptmann said he could not remember every word he had written in the book. “Just the one word, that’s all,” Wilentz pressed. “There are only a few words on the whole page. That one word, tell me if that is in your handwriting?”

  Hauptmann conceded that the word looked like his handwriting, but he did not remember putting it in the book. The German sighed; his pale face was flushed. No longer did he sit defiantly erect in his chair, sweeping the overcrowded courtroom with his eyes. His gaze was fixed on the floor. He tried to laugh off the attack.

  “Well now, this isn’t a joke!” shouted Wilentz. “You know either it is your handwriting, or it isn’t! Is it your handwriting?” The German mumbled that it looked like his handwriting. “Now, tell me, how you spell ‘boat’?” Hauptmann brightened and spelled it b-o-a-t. “Yes,” Wilentz agreed. “Why did you spell it b-o-a-d?”

  Hauptmann reached for the book, saying, “You wouldn’t mind to tell me how old this book is?”

  “I don’t know how old it is. You know; I don’t know.”

  “Let me see it.” The book was given to him.

  “Why did you spell ‘boat’ b-o-a-d?” insisted Wilentz.

  “This book is probably eight years old,” Hauptmann objected.

  “All right, why did you spell b-o-a-d?”

  “Well, after your make improvements in your writing—”

  “All right,” the prosecutor interrupted, “so that at one time you used to spell ‘boat’ b-o-a-d.”

  “Probably eight or ten years ago, and I’m not quite sure if I put it in.”

  “At one time you used to spell ‘boat’ b-o-a-d, didn’t you? Isn’t that right?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Eight years ago, six years ago, ten years ago, whenever it was, you used to spell ‘boat’ b-o-a-d; isn’t that right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You spelled it in there, didn’t you?”

  “I—”

  “You tell the truth now! Didn’t you spell it in there?”

  “Now listen. I can’t remember I put it in there.”

  Wilentz continued to pound away at the word boad. Hauptmann desperately maintained he couldn’t recall writing it in the book.

  “The reason you don’t say yes or no,” Wilentz finally concluded, “is because you wrote ‘boad’ when you got the fifty thousand dollars from Condon, isn’t that right?”

  To a New York Herald Tribune reporter Hauptmann looked obviously frightened while replying, “No sir.”

  Wilentz handed Hauptmann the final ransom message Condon had received. “Do you see the word ‘Boad Nelly’?”

  “I see it.”

  “B-o-a-d?”

  “I see it.”15

  Pressed sharply by Wilentz, Hauptmann refused to agree that the word boad in his book and the word boad in the ransom note were formed alike. By now the defendant had taken out a handkerchief and was wiping away his perspiration. The prosecutor linked the boad spelling to Hauptmann’s native Saxony, then shifted and hammered away at the defendant’s business records and partnership with Isador Fisch. “The only man who knows about any monies between you and Fisch, so far as the stocks are concerned, is that man that is dead, Fisch; isn’t that right?” Wilentz asked. A moment later he asked, referring to Fisch, “Did he help you kidnap this Lindbergh child and murder it?”

  “I never saw—” Hauptmann started to say.

  “You never saw?”

  “Mr. Lindbergh’s child!”

  “But Fisch didn’t help you, did he?”

  One of Hauptmann’s attorneys, C. Lloyd Fisher, entered a shouting match with Wilentz and was chided by the judge for shouting. Wilentz homed in on the two-by-four wooden board found in Hauptmann’s garage. The board contained drilled holes in which a small gun and rolls of ransom money had been found. Wilentz suggested that the round holes had some connection with the circles that formed the symbol on the ransom notes. Hauptmann admitted that if you drill a hole, it’s usually round. The prosecutor shifted to the defendant’s illegal-entry attempt into the United States and the fact that on one occasion he used the alias Perlmeier. Was Perlmeier’s first name John? Bruno didn’t remember.

  “Are you the Cemetery John who was up at Woodlawn Cemetery?” Wilentz demanded.

  “Positively not!”

  “Are you the Cemetery John who was in the other cemetery?”

  “No, I never was in the cemetery.”16

  The day’s session was over. Hauptmann, visibly shaken by the ordeal, told reporters that he felt fine. Was he worried? “Why should I be worried?”17 Then he was led back to his cell. After three more days of equally searing cross-examination, Hauptmann was slightly less enthusiastic. But he hadn’t “broken” or “thawed” under Wilentz’s onslaught, and he was very proud of that.

  On February 2, when the trial was in the fifth week, David Wilentz was “shocked” to learn that newsreel cameras had been smuggled into the courtroom and were illegally filming the proceedings. Attorney Reilly and Justice Trenchard were equally surprised.18 None of them, it would seem, had noticed the additional glare and heat created by the high-powered bulbs with which someone had replaced the courtroom’s ordinary socket lights. The cameras were ordered removed, but somehow the proceedings went on being secretly filmed under the high-powered photo lights.

  After twenty-nine days of hearing testimony, the jury retired to consider a verdict. The prosecution’s case had been circumstantial. No one had seen Hauptmann at the Lindbergh estate, and the witnesses who placed him near the area in the approximate time frame of the crime were highly questionable. No fingerprints had been found, and the one footprint the police had sketched wasn’t introduced. No concrete evidence was offered as to where or exactly how the baby had died, but the state had maintained that the blow that inflicted death was intentional and that it was obvious the kidnapper never meant to take care of the child while negotiating for the ransom. There was no question that Hauptmann was in possession of ransom money. Jafsie Condon’s testimony that Hauptmann was Cemetery John, the man to whom he paid the ransom, did not establish that Hauptmann either kidnapped or killed the baby. Albert D. Osborn, the handwriting expert who originally said Hauptmann had not written the ransom messages, was insistent that Hauptmann was the author of all the communications. A “wood expert” traced a piece of wood in the ladder to a board in the attic of Hauptmann’s home. That essentially was the state’s case.

  There was a good deal of prosecution testimony that Reilly could have challenged, but he chose not to. On the occasion when he seemed to be on the verge of discrediting a state’s witness, as in the case of Jafsie Condon, he suddenly had no more questions. His defense, all in all, was disorganized, and it often flagged. Instead of calling many credible witnesses who might have helped establish that his client was not in New Jersey the night of the kidnapping or at the cemetery when the money was passed, he put out a call for new witnesses who could help save Hauptmann. He brought to the stand at least one tried-and-true professional witness he had used in the past. His biggest mistake may have been in allowing Hauptmann to testify. Bruno didn’t fully comprehend the legal process but pretended he did. The defendant apparently believed that if he could show that his expenditures for the previous years had come from money he had earned, not from the ransom loot, he would be vindicated and the charges dropped. Wilentz conducted a whithering cross-examination, pointed, and shouted accusatio
ns of “You killed the baby!” Death House Reilly’s objections were few and usually tepid. To some in the gallery, he seemed indifferent to the bashing being suffered by his client.

  An estimated seventy-five thousand to one hundred thousand people were visiting Flemington each day by the time the jury retired to consider a verdict.19 Justice Trenchard ordered that everyone without an accredited seat be removed from the courthouse and that the doors be locked. The crowds outside began to chant for Hauptmann’s death. The judge retired to his chambers, by all accounts to read. Activities in other parts of the building were less sedate. A noisy crap game got under way in the law library adjoining the courtroom. Media people, court stenographers, lawyers, law students using the library, and Broadway characters took their turn at the dice for stakes that ran as high as eight hundred dollars a roll. In the courtroom games of checkers and tic-tac-toe were being played. People wandered about with paper bags in their hands, munching sandwiches or cakes, drinking coffee, milk, beer, or applejack. The floor was littered with papers, cigarette stubs, and remnants of discarded food. Dave Wilentz sat in the jury box and quipped to reporters, “This is where I should have been in the first place.”20

  Death House Reilly luxuriated in the witness chair, reading a paper and smoking his cigar. At one point he good-humoredly burlesqued the testimony of state’s witnesses for a group of reporters by shooting questions at himself, then cupping a hand to his ear and pretending he was too deaf to hear them. “What was that? What? Repeat the question?”21 Overcome by melodic impulse, Reilly and a lady reporter stood before the judge’s banc and sang “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” An alert was flashed that Justice Trenchard was on his way to the library. The crap game instantaneously broke up, and many of the gambling attorneys and law students began reading law books or briefs. Trenchard entered, recovered the volume he was after, and left with a quizzical smile on his face. The game resumed.