by Noel Behn
Confronted by the press, Attorney General David Wilentz admitted he knew that Condon, a potentially crucial witness for the defense’s case for clemency, planned to leave the country the night before the court of pardons was to hear Hauptmann’s petition. “I saw no reason then,” Wilentz told a reporter, “why he shouldn’t go and I see no reason now.”25
By the morning of January 12, the media were reporting that during the court of pardons hearing, a confrontation had occurred between Hoffman and Wilentz over the apprehension of Jafsie Condon, as well as over the governor’s power to invoke a reprieve as he saw fit. The disagreement carried into the next day, and Hoffman, in a pique of anger, was said to have told Wilentz that if he had to, he would continue to reprieve Hauptmann until the end of his term as governor, some two years hence.26
The governor’s trip to New York City that evening was accomplished with an unusual degree of secrecy, considering that he was continually dogged by newsmen. He was a regular commuter to Manhattan, where his usual pied-à-terre was the New Yorker Hotel’s gubernatorial suite, number 2200, better known as the Huey Long Suite, since it had been favored by the Kingfish when he’d been in town. The ostensible reason for the trip was to attend a Circus, Saints and Sinners bash that night, a usually high-profile event that was well covered by the media.27 But it wasn’t until the next morning that reporters got wind he was in town. Arriving at suite 2200, they found the governor poring over his upcoming budget message to the New Jersey legislature. Not lost on the newsmen was the fact that Bruno Richard Hauptmann’s defense attorneys occupied suite 2600 in the same hotel, where they were trying to devise last-minute strategies for saving their client’s life.28 The governor denied having met with them during his current visit, refused to commit himself on the matter of granting a reprieve, said he still intended to have Condon arrested and brought back to America, and in response to questions about the criticism being heaped on his intervention in the Hauptmann case, he said,
Politically I’ve always had the ball on my own five-yard line. I’m in the position that had I done nothing, I would have been blamed for negligence in duty, and when I do try to do something, I’m charged with seeking publicity.
Hauptmann means nothing to me personally. I have had no object in this case but to see that justice is done. I think every one will admit that the death of Hauptmann will leave the case still not completely solved.
There are still many angles of this whole thing to which we do not know the answer. When the relatives or lawyers of any man condemned to death come to me with information which may aid the prisoner, I consider it my duty to investigate that information. I have done no more or less in this case.29
Exemplifying how the governor’s behavior had frustrated and outraged a great many Americans was Congressman Blanton of Texas. On Monday, January 13, Blanton rose on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and attacked the “yellow newspapers” he accused of creating sympathy for the condemned prisoner. He ridiculed the governor and told his Capitol Hill colleagues, “Hoffman has no more right to order the arrest of Dr. Condon than I have. If Hoffman authorized the statement in the headline he ought to be impeached.”30
In France, Paris Soir published a copyrighted interview with Charles Lindbergh, the first such story the Lone Eagle had granted since going into exile. “I want silence and peace,” he was quoted as saying. “I want to be forgotten. I should like people to forget even my name.”31
With the clock ticking for Bruno Hauptmann, the mounting suspense as to whether the governor would grant a reprieve was added to by political enemies in the New Jersey State Legislature who claimed that no such right existed and that they would block any attempt by the chief executive to try to delay the execution. Then, too, there was another legal technicality to exhaust, which if by itself couldn’t save the condemned carpenter’s life—and few expected this to happen—might provide the governor with one more pretext for issuing the reprieve: a writ of habeas corpus to be filed with the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds that Hauptmann’s constitutional rights had been violated during the kidnapping-murder trial in Flemington. Hauptmann’s chief counsel, Lloyd Fisher, brought in two constitutional-law experts to initiate the process of a federal appeal.
On the morning of January 14, the New York American reported on its front page HOFFMAN TO GIVE REPRIEVE IF ABLE. The paper attributed the information to an unnamed reliable source and also printed that should anti-reprieve forces, led by the Democrats, make good on their threat to legally challenge the current statute pertaining to the matter, the governor’s allies were ready to introduce a new bill for immediate passage by the legislature that would ensure his right to issue a reprieve. The American, like other papers, also wrote that the Democratic members of the state legislature were prepared to demand that the body launch an official investigation into the governor’s conduct vis-à-vis the Hauptmann case.
One particularly sticky wicket that the governor’s detractors hoped to make an issue of was expressed by Mercer County assemblyman Crawford Jamieson: “We are informed that Governor Hoffman was accompanied by one or two women when he made the secret visit to Hauptmann’s cell.” Jamieson also demanded to know on what evidence the governor based “his friendly attitude” toward Hauptmann. There was more: “We want to know why he had consulted the defense counsel so often and ignored the Attorney General, the legal adviser of the state government.”32 From Chicago, where the report of a special American Bar Association committee bitterly criticized the tactics used at Flemington, Lloyd Fisher and his fellow defense lawyers received unexpected support for their contention that Hauptmann hadn’t received a fair trial.
At 6:02 P.M. the evening of January 14, after a stormy ninety-minute hearing in a federal courtroom in Trenton’s new Post Office Building, Judge J. Warren Davis denied Hauptmann an application for a writ of habeas corpus. A moment later he denied a second motion for a federal stay of execution. Journalists, wanting to know the governor’s next move, were told by his press secretary that no steps would be taken to force Jafsie Condon to return from his cruise. This, to the media, sounded like final confirmation that a reprieve was imminent.
The next day the electric chair at the Trenton State Prison was tested and found to be in working order. The media were told that Hauptmann’s spiritual adviser, Rev. John Mathis, would accompany him to the execution room, along with the prison chaplain, Rev. John Goorly.
That evening Harold Hoffman was back in New York City, this time accompanied by his secretary and aide-decamp, William Lagay. Once more he checked into the New Yorker Hotel unnoticed by the press. He was, from all indications, exhausted and despondent. Despite the fact that much of the media and many antagonists pictured his investigation as a well-financed and pervasive undertaking abetted by the powers vested in the office of the chief executive, the opposite was more accurate. His staff was composed mainly of volunteers—and a ragtag lot at that. The inquiry had little or no available cash and in the governor’s own estimation was also “handicapped by merciless ridicule, blocked at every turn by the police agencies who should have been aiding in the search. Progress is feeble.”33
As much as anything, the night of January 15 in the New Yorker was meant to be a cathartic, and Hoffman would later write,
Harassed and tired after weeks of abuse, my office swamped with the daily receipt of thousand of letters and wires, almost worn out with efforts to dodge reporters, photographers, private detectives, and “cranks” who seemed to encounter me at every turn, the evening held promise, in spite of the few appointments I had made, of being fairly free for relaxation and thought. I needed it. In the following day I knew I would face the necessity of making an important decision.34
The governor was scheduled to meet at the hotel with Ellis Parker. Since the Old Chief wanted Murray Bleefeld’s brother-in-law, Martin Schlossman, to be sworn in as a deputy, Schlossman may have been invited to join them, something that never occurred, probably due to an unexpe
cted guest. While chatting with the governor, Vernon Taylor, the assistant manager of the New Yorker, mentioned that David Wilentz was downstairs in the hotel’s Terrace Room, having dinner with friends.
Harold Hoffman would later write that he wasn’t sure whether he asked Taylor to tell the attorney general that he was in the hotel or whether Wilentz learned on his own. One way or another, and “without prearrangement,” the governor stated,
we got together and talked about Hauptmann.
It was a long, earnest, important talk. The Attorney General and I have known each other for years. We managed the same basketball team at different times; we worked for the same newspaper; he became Democratic County Chairman of Middlesex County; I became Republican County Chairman of that county at the same time. Wilentz became Attorney General; I became Governor. There is little difference in our ages. I respect his ability, his successful fight against odds to make a place in the world. He has done many things that reflect friendship for me.
Dave Wilentz and I do not have to “pull our punches.” … We have disagreed in politics; we have certainly disagreed, without any personal feeling, on the Hauptmann case.… That night I expressed to the Attorney General the doubts I entertained about the case. I gave him frankly my appraisal of the value of the testimony of the state’s identification witnesses, the things that I considered evidence that should have been presented, the position I had been placed in by misrepresentation.
There were some things I could not tell him—35
Wilentz, for the sake of argument, assumed that the key defense witnesses were untruthful. He was still convinced by the physical evidence—Condon’s phone number on a closet beam (which a reporter had all but confessed to printing there), the spelling of boat as boad in the ransom note as well as in an old diary—that Hauptmann’s conviction was warranted.
“But that evidence,” the governor argued, “would support only the crime of extortion. Even if it were unanswerable, it would not put Hauptmann at the scene of the kidnap and murder.”
Wilentz replied, “Then why in hell doesn’t he tell the truth?”36
According to Harold Hoffman, the two old adversaries agreed that it was more important “to society” to get the complete story—how a man could conceive and execute such a ghastly plan single-handedly—than it was to take his life. They evolved a plan to secure a confession, if there was a confession to be had.
“Wilentz left, and I had another visit to make,” Hoffman wrote. “J. Edgar, I had learned, was in the hotel.”37 The director of the Division of Investigation was in suite 2716–17, and the governor visited him there.38 The two men talked until well after midnight. It was now January 16. The following evening Hauptmann was to die.
With less than three hours’ sleep Harold Hoffman left New York City on the 7:00 A.M. train to Trenton. It was January 16, and he went straightaway to his suite at the Hotel Hildebrecht and dispatched Colonel J. Fred Margerum, his military aide-de-camp, to arrange for an immediate, and discreet, meeting with the condemned man’s wife, Anna Hauptmann. The governor was soon en route to the Stacy-Trent Hotel, where Mrs. Hauptmann was staying. To avoid the lingering battery of photographers and newsreel men in the lobby, he entered through a rear door, took a freight elevator upstairs, and went to the hotel manager’s private suite, where he was left alone with the doomed man’s wife. “Mrs. Hauptmann,” Harold Hoffman said with an assumed air of finality, “tomorrow is the day when, under the law, your husband is to die. I wanted to help him, but he has not been telling me, or anyone else, the truth.”
“No! No! No!” screamed Anna Hauptmann. “Dot isn’t so! Richard did tell the truth! He is telling the truth!” With clenched fists she began beating against the governor’s chest. “Listen to me, Gofe’nor, listen to me!”
“Things look bad for your husband,” Hoffman continued. “Every one seems to believe that he is guilty. There is only one way in which he can save his life.”
The distraught wife wanted to know what that way was, and the governor explained the understanding he and David Wilentz had come to the night before: If Hauptmann agreed to tell the whole story, the governor and the attorney general or an aide of the attorney general’s, would go to the prison and listen; if they were convinced he was telling the truth, even if he had acted alone in perpetrating the crime, they would petition the court of pardons to set aside the death penalty and change his sentence to life imprisonment—and there was no doubt that the court would honor the request from both the governor and the attorney general.
“You must go to the prison this morning,” Hoffman told her. “You must see your husband. You must tell him he can save his life. You must tell him that you want him to tell the truth.”
Anna Hauptmann screamed that she could not, that he would turn his back on her. “He vould think dot the last von in the vorld to know that he is innozent should think, too, dot he haf commit this crime!”
More emotional give and take ensued, and finally the woman agreed to a compromise suggestion: that she would ask her husband if he would be willing to be seen by the governor and the attorney general and answer their questions. She stipulated, however, “I vill not say to him—his vife—dot at last he should tell the truth, van alvays I know dot he has told the truth dot he did not do dis terrible thing.”
An hour later, back in his rooms at the Hotel Hildebrecht, Harold Hoffman received a call from the keeper of the state prisons, Mark Kimberling, who put Mrs. Hauptmann on the phone. Richard, she told him, would see him and Wilentz. “But Gofe’nor, the story is just the same; he haf told eferything he knows—nothing more he can tell.”39
Hoffman called Wilentz and informed him of Hauptmann’s response.
“To hell with it, Harold,” Wilentz declared. “If that’s still his attitude, I’m damned if I’m going to do anything to help him.”40
Bruno Hauptmann was not interviewed.
At approximately 2:33 P.M. in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Supreme Court wasted only twenty-one words in refusing Hauptmann’s attorneys the right to petition for a writ of habeas corpus and a stay of execution. The condemned man’s final legal tactic had failed.
At 3:25 P.M. Governor Harold G. Hoffman, accompanied by the attorney general, David Wilentz, and the Hunterdon County prosecutor, Anthony Hauck, arrived at the executive chamber of the statehouse. The crush of waiting spectators, reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameras was invited into the governor’s conference room, where at 3:29 P.M. they were told by Hoffman, “The Attorney General and I just have been in a conference on this matter, and I have decided to issue a reprieve for thirty days.”
Newsmen rushed for telephones and temporary telegraph facilities, causing the governor to comment, “They apparently don’t care what the Attorney General says about this.” The governor went on:
“My intention is to grant just this one reprieve. There will be no further reprieves. I had held that with fourteen different reprieves given by six different governors since 1906, there existed ample executive precedent for the issuance of a reprieve by the governor even though the ninety day period had expired since the conviction at Flemington.
“On a strict interpretation of the law, the Attorney General feels that a reprieve cannot be granted. But he has agreed by reason of the fact there is ample precedent that the right of the Governor will not be challenged.”41
Questions followed.
With the none-too-cheery Wilentz and Hauck looking on, Harold Hoffman signed the order that extended Hauptmann’s life—and his own efforts to prove who had killed the Lindbergh baby—another thirty days.
26
Countdown
The race was on. Harold Hoffman had thirty days to save the life of Bruno Richard Hauptmann and salvage what he could of his crumbling political fortunes. Legal recourses were running out. A confession by Hauptmann that he had not acted alone would help the governor’s cause. A confession that he alone was guilty would also be welcomed. Governor Hoffman fervently bel
ieved that Hauptmann’s complicity in the crime was negligible, if not nonexistent, and proving it had become a passion—proving it any way he could, with any gambit possible. Enter Jacob Nosovitsky.
On January 17, 1936, as word of the previous day’s reprieve for Hauptmann made headlines, Nosovitsky also was front-page news, but only in the New York American and not under his own name. The American ran a two-column article, BREAK SEEN NEAR IN MYSTERY, that carried the by-line of Sanford E. Stanton, the reporter who accompanied Gus Lockwood and investigator Mary McGill to the December meeting at the Tombs with Wally Stroh and Dennis Doyle.1 Like Nosovitsky, Stroh and Doyle weren’t mentioned by name in the text, only as two New York prison inmates, but Stanton credited them with providing information that unearthed the latest prime suspect in the governor’s attempt to determine who actually perpetrated the Lindbergh crime: a Russian Pole—that is, Nosovitsky. The mysterious suspect was said to speak German fluently and bear a striking resemblance to Hauptmann. Back in 1932 he had a hacking cough, an affliction Jafsie Condon had attributed to John.
The Stanton article asserted that the mystery man, who was no minor criminal, had a record of burglary, forgery, and bigamy; that he had boasted of having fooled the Justice Department into employing him as a confidential investigator and that one of his dupes was J. Edgar Hoover; that he had tried, a short time before the Lindbergh kidnapping, to extort money in a scam where St. Raymond’s Cemetery was used as the drop off. Back in 1932, he had been working with a woman accomplice. Three days before the Eaglet disappeared, they dropped out of sight.
Stanton recounted that in the wake of the two inmates’ having fingered the Russian Pole, the governor’s experts worked all night and concluded that his handwriting bore a striking similarity to that in the ransom notes as well as to J. J. Faulkner’s signature. The governor was said to have been impressed by this and other information indicating that the mystery man, and possibly his woman accomplice, were the true culprits. An all-out search for the suspect had been initiated the week before. Hauptmann’s reprieve came on the heels of these discoveries and with the governor stating that the new lead “holds dramatic possibilities which may overshadow anything that has thus far occurred in the case.” Though the apprehension of the mystery suspect might establish that Hauptmann was innocent and save his life, an aide to the governor allowed that it could also, evidentially, tie Bruno closer to the crime than ever. If the Russian Pole was the perpetrator, Hauptmann might turn out to have been an accomplice.