by Bill James
11) One rail of the ladder was a piece of wood obviously previously used, and taken from some other source. This wood perfectly matched a board taken from Hauptmann’s attic, and had, in fact, been sawed off of that board.
These eleven facts, taken as a whole, form an extremely solid foundation for the prosecution of Hauptmann. The “Hauptmann Is Innocent” writers of the last thirty to forty years have used three techniques to try to confound the public about this issue. First, they exaggerate the real and substantial failings of the Hauptmann trial. Second, they try to take your eye off the ball by warbling on for hundreds of pages about issues entirely irrelevant to the case. And third, they allege—with absolutely nothing to support them—that everybody who participated in the prosecution lied about everything.
There are really two books that are central to the belief that Hauptmann was innocent. Those books are Scapegoat, by Anthony Scaduto (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976), and The Airman and the Carpenter, by Ludovic Kennedy (Collins, 1985). I’ll deal with The Airman and the Carpenter first because we can deal with that more quickly: This is the most dishonest book that I have ever read, bar none. Virtually every word of the book is a lie, a con, or a deception of some sort. You can pick up the book, flip open to any page, point at some sentence at random, and it will, at a very minimum, shade the truth. The title is a lie; it should have been called The Airman and the Petty Criminal. The only books I can think of that come close to it in terms of persistent dishonesty are Caryl Chessman’s death row fictionalizations, but Chessman, after all, was trying to con his way out of the gas chamber; Kennedy just seems to enjoy pulling the wool over the readers’ eyes.
Scaduto’s book is different; Scaduto’s work I certainly respect, while I entirely disagree with him. I respect Scaduto because he has done very well something that I could never do: investigative journalism. Scapegoat was written in the aftermath of Watergate, when investigative journalism was getting a little carried away with itself. Sixty Minutes was barging into boardrooms, ambushing people with television cameras and no fair opportunity to prepare for the interview.
These books started to come out in the 1970s, in large part, because they couldn’t come out until the people who remembered the case had died and been replaced by a public that was unfamiliar with the time and the facts of the case, thus could be told tall tales without spotting the obvious fallacies. A couple of simple examples: Hauptmann quit his job the day the ransom money was handed over. Hauptmann tried to explain this by claiming that he quit the job in a dispute or disagreement over how much he was to be paid. Well, it was 1932. People were standing in breadlines. Carpenters didn’t quit jobs because of little disputes and live off of their investments. People in 1935, at the time of the trial, understood that, and they reacted to Hauptmann’s claim with deep skepticism. People in the 1970s didn’t quite catch it. He didn’t like what he was being paid; he quit the job, so what?
Of course, even if we assume that he did have a dispute over the money, it’s still quite a coincidence, but it plays different if you understand the context. He quit his job, and incidentally never worked again. Another thing is the “Rail 16,” the one rail of the ladder that was a different piece of wood, which had nail holes showing that it had obviously been used before for some other purpose. The “wood expert,” Arthur Koehler, demonstrated very convincingly that this piece of wood was sawed off of a board in Hauptmann’s attic.
Scaduto and Kennedy pooh-pooh this whole theory, Scaduto arguing—falsely—that many pieces of wood have similar grain patterns and markings. But the thing is, if you look at two pieces of wood that have been sawed apart, you can tell whether they fit together. Anybody can. Take an old piece of wood that’s been used somewhere, saw off a piece of it, put them together and ask the jury “Did these used to be part of the same piece of wood, or not?” If they weren’t, it will be obvious for 25 reasons—the age and color of the wood, the finish, the shape, usage patterns, dimensions, type of wood, the width and pattern of the grain, etc. You couldn’t fake a match like that, any more than you could switch somebody’s dog with another dog or their shoes with somebody else’s shoes. It would be obvious.
Men of the 1930s, who almost universally had worked with wood as a part of the common experience of growing up early in the twentieth century, would have known that. Having the wood in front of them would re-enforce the concept. But to people reading about it in a book forty years later, when working with wood was no longer part of the common experience of life, Scaduto’s argument seems as if it might be plausible.
Scaduto claims that Condon’s phone number was written on a board inside a closet in Hauptmann’s house by a reporter to manufacture a news story, and this claim has entered the apocrypha of the case, now assumed by many who write about the case to be true. But
1) Hauptmann acknowledged to police that he had written the number, and attempted to explain why,
2) There isn’t any background documentation for Scaduto’s claim, which emerges from a cesspool of rumor forty years after the fact, and
3) The discovery of the phone number was reported simultaneously by multiple newspapermen, none of whom was the man Scaduto alleged to have written the number there in order to manufacture an exclusive news story.
The Freedom of Information Act was passed into law in 1966. It was originally assumed to apply only to a fairly narrow range of documents. Over the next few years, lawsuits successfully expanded the range of documents which could be accessed by journalists under the Freedom of Information Act. Scaduto was the first man to realize that the Freedom of Information Act could now be used to pry open the files of the Lindbergh investigation, and he did so.
If Scaduto’s reading of the old documents “proved” that Hauptmann was framed, he had a book. If the papers merely proved that Hauptmann was guilty, he had nothing. Still, I don’t doubt that, when he began his investigation, Scaduto sincerely believed in Hauptmann’s innocence. But he lost all judgment and perspective, and would use any information, no matter how clearly it pointed to Hauptmann, to try to prove that Hauptmann was framed.
Joseph Perrone (the taxi driver) provided the first eyewitness description of Hauptmann. According to Scaduto, one of the things that he most wanted to find, in his investigation of the investigation, was Perrone’s first description of the suspect, long before Hauptmann’s name surfaced.
And he finds it. You’ve got to respect that, right? That’s good investigative journalism.
The only thing is, it turns out to be an uncannily perfect description of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. “German or Scandinavian, about thirty-five, one hundred seventy to one hundred eighty pounds, blue eyes, brown felt hat, brown double-breasted overcoat.” Let’s see … he’s a white male, so that’s 45% of the population. Let’s assume “German or Scandinavian” (meaning German or Scandinavian accent) is one-tenth of all the white males—in reality it is probably more like 1%, but let’s say—that gives us 5%. About thirty-five years old is maybe 10% of those people, so that’s one-half of one percent. He nailed Hauptmann’s weight precisely; let’s say that a fourth of the German or Scandinavian men of about 35 years of age are somewhere close to that in weight, that gives us a little more than one-tenth of one percent. Blue eyes cuts that down a little more; we’re under one-tenth of one percent. It’s a Level Three description of Richard Hauptmann!
But Scaduto, rather than admitting that Perrone has nailed Hauptmann to a T, lifts out of context one line from a different description of the man, given by Perrone at a different time and in a different place, and uses that to argue that Perrone must be describing somebody else. At that moment the astute reader may conclude (I did anyway) that Scaduto knows perfectly well that Hauptmann is guilty, but has committed himself to the “scapegoat” theory and is going to run with it no matter what. On some level this sophistry seems preferable to Ludovic Kennedy’s self-delusional ranting.
Condon said that the kidnapper/contact had “wide almond-shaped eyes,”
so Scaduto predictably argues that Hauptmann’s eyes were not almond-shaped. But anyone looking at photos of Hauptmann can see that he does, in fact, have wide-set, almond-shaped eyes. Scaduto depends on his readers being so uncritical that they won’t make the minimal effort to look at a photograph and draw their own conclusions about this.
Scaduto’s book is not a failure; it’s a success. He succeeded in putting together a readable and entertaining book. He succeeded in making some money off the book, God bless him, and he succeeded in convincing a generation of gullible readers that Hauptmann was framed. This has devolved into popular culture, and now some halfwit is running around arguing that the Lindbergh baby was murdered by Anne Morrow’s sister.
The only thing is, the whole premise is nonsense. On a scale on which 100 points are necessary to convince a skeptic that Hauptmann was guilty beyond any reasonable doubt, I would score the evidence against him at about 213 points:
40 points for the fact that the money was found in his possession,
35 points for the fact that his handwriting matched perfectly the handwriting of the ransom notes,
35 points for the fact that one rail of the ladder was made from a board taken from his house,
30 points for Condon’s definite identification of him as the man he had met with in the cemetery,
15 points for Hauptmann’s previous criminal convictions,
15 points for the fact that Hauptmann was a perfect match for the Level 5 description which had been built up of him before he was arrested,
13 points for the fact that he quit his job on or about the day the ransom money was handed over,
10 points for the fact that Hauptmann had been a regular customer of the lumberyard to which Koehler had already traced the wood used to build the ladder,
8 points for Joseph Perrone’s positive identification of him,
5 points for the fact that Hauptmann never had a job or attempted to get a job after receiving the money, but continued to live comfortably,
4 points for the fact that Condon’s phone number was found written on a board inside his house, and Hauptmann acknowledged writing it there,
2 points for Lindbergh’s identification of Hauptmann, based on a quick viewing and on hearing Hauptmann shout the words “Hey Doctor” to Condon, and
1 point for the fact that Hauptmann was a regular reader of the Bronx Home News, the small newspaper that had played a key role in the transfer of the money.
After the Lindbergh case (and the Massie case in Hawaii, which was a contemporary case that we will get to a little later) … after those cases there would not be another case as big for many years. Well, there wouldn’t be another case as big as Lindbergh until the O. J. Simpson case in the 1990s, but there wouldn’t be another case as big as Massie or the Hall-Mills case or the Snyder-Gray case or the Loeb and Leopold case; there wouldn’t be another pure crime megastory like that until Sam Sheppard in 1954. There was the Black Dahlia case in the 1940s, which was big then and is huge now, but there was no contemporary media circus surrounding that that was in any way comparable to these other big cases.
For fifteen years the coverage of crimes had spun in an ever-widening orbit, ratcheting up to a new level and a new level and a new level. The Lindbergh case, said H. L. Mencken, was the biggest news story since the Resurrection. After Lindbergh there was no new level for a long time. I’ve thought a lot about why that happened, and I’m not sure that I understand it, but I’ll give you the best explanation I can. There were five factors:
1) The criminal justice system stopped playing along. The bull-in-a-china-shop intrusion of the media into the process of justice was curtailed by judicial reforms after the Hauptmann trial. The Hauptmann trial was frequently interrupted by newsmen taking photographs, which in that time meant flashbulbs. Reporters interviewed witnesses before and after they took the stand, and sometimes asked them to repeat their testimony for the newsreels. This was entirely improper. The media was elbowing the system of justice out of the way so that they could get their story. After the Lindbergh case the courts said, “We can’t let this happen. This is our system; we can’t let the news media take it over and run it.” Many reforms were adopted in direct response to the Lindbergh trial circus, including the banning of cameras from the courtrooms.
2) World War II, of course, changed everything—but America didn’t enter World War II until almost seven years after Hauptmann’s trial.
3) Burnout. Do you remember how tired a lot of people were of the O.J. case by the time it was over? The wall-to-wall O.J. coverage, even though the country was really into the case, eventually started to turn people’s stomachs.
I think that something similar happened here, perhaps a little more so. By the end of the Lindbergh case, the American people were sick of it, and they didn’t want another case like it.
4) Newspaper consolidation. New York City about 1850 had … nobody knows, maybe 140 daily newspapers. The rapid consolidation of newspapers from the mid-1930s into the mid-1950s reduced the competitive pressures on newsmen, and reduced somewhat the tendency of newspapers to try to increase circulation by splashing sensational stories—often crime stories—across the front page.
5) Journalistic ethics. The newsmen of 1880 were not “journalists”; they were just newsmen. They didn’t go to college and study journalism. They didn’t go to college at all, overwhelmingly, and colleges didn’t teach “journalism.” The first school of journalism was founded in 1908 at the University of Missouri.
As educated and professional journalists gradually took over the field, many of them looked askance at the tawdry spectacles of crime reporting. It wasn’t eliminated from newspapers, but it was gradually controlled.
In the teens and twenties there were in most larger cities “scandal sheets,” which were in truth little more than fronts for blackmail operations. A scandal sheet might have two reporters on staff, one of whom would hang around the police station and pay a cop to tip them off about a local politician arrested naked in the back seat of a Packard with a sixteen-year-old girl, for example, or a leading clergyman whose wife made a habit of falling down the stairs. These rags had an audience—there is always an audience for that sort of thing—but they really made their money from the stories they agreed not to print. “Councilman Johnson, we have this story. You buy some advertising from us, we don’t print the story.” They would also agree to print stories for money. When Councilman Johnson was being opposed for re-election, he might come up with $200, in return for which a story would run accusing his opponent of cohabiting with a woman with a drug habit, or being a silent partner in a gin room, or what have you. By the late 1920s the scandal sheets were being driven out of existence by better ethical practices of policemen and prosecutors, with whom they were in bed, as well as by the opposition of reputable journalists.
XIV
Euclid Beach is toward the eastern side of Cleveland, on the south shore of Lake Erie. On September 5, 1934—fourteen days before Hauptmann was arrested—a young man strolling along Euclid Beach came across the partial remains of a dismembered young woman. The pathologist said she had been in the water for several months.
The woman was never identified, and the crime was never solved.
Less than three weeks later, two headless corpses were found in Kingsbury Run, their bodies complete except for the heads and genitalia. A serial murderer was at work in Cleveland.
He would never be caught.
Kingsbury Run is the bottom land on the east side of the Cuyahoga River, where trains slip into and out of the city. There is a rough, undeveloped area there, the railroad yards and the cliffs beside them, which had become a squatter’s camp during the Depression. The delta, where the river makes ready to meet the lake, was Cleveland’s red-light district, the Roaring Third.
Between September, 1934, and August, 1938, an unknown person murdered and dismembered thirteen or more victims. As a rule, he abducted hoboes from the squatters’ camps or prostit
utes from the Roaring Third district, and dumped their bodies in Kingsbury Run. This is a generalization; not all of the victims were tramps or prostitutes, and not all of them were dumped near the tracks. In fact, since only two of the thirteen victims were ever positively identified (an astonishing fact in itself), any statements about who the victims were are largely conjecture.
After the sixth murder, the crime spree became the biggest ongoing story in the Cleveland papers, and began to consume more and more of the time and energy of Cleveland’s director of public safety, Eliot Ness. This story is told in Torso: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, by Steven Nickel (Avon Books, 1989). It’s a good book, careful and intelligent, though at times Nickel lacks historical perspective.
The last bodies of the series were discovered on August 16, 1938. Criticized for his inability to find the culprit, Ness ordered two extraordinary measures to bring the Butcher’s run to an end. First, police conducted a series of raids on the shantytowns of Kingsbury Run, trampling and burning the pitiful possessions of the men who lived there. When this brought even harsher criticism raining down upon him, Ness ordered a house-to-house search of the Roaring Third, using the pretext of fire safety investigations to avoid the necessity for search warrants.
Nickel suggests (and I am inclined to agree) that the investigators may have missed the monster’s “lair” because they were expecting something obvious. They were looking for blood-spattered walls, blood-drenched mattresses, bloody axes and blood-soaked clothing. Eliot Ness had once expressed the opinion that the murderer’s “laboratory” must be very elaborate. Subsequent experience with murderers from William Heirens to Jeffrey Dahmer has demonstrated that the murderer could very well have committed the crimes in an ordinary apartment, and left no obvious evidence after the fact.