Bearing Witness

by Michael A. Kahn

  “Why did he volunteer for those two homicides?” I asked.

  “Because of Hitler,” she replied, almost matter-of-fact. “He despised Hitler, he despised Nazism, and he especially despised the German Americans who supported Hitler. He viewed the German-American Bund as a personal affront. He denounced them at meetings and handed out leaflets against them on street corners.” She paused, smiling at a memory. “Once, the Bund held a rally at the Friedrich Jahn monument in Forest Park. My father helped organize the anti-rally. They hired a biplane and pilot for the afternoon. The pilot flew over the rally, and my father dumped several buckets of horse manure onto the demonstrators.”

  I laughed. “That’s wonderful.”

  Her smile faded. “A few nights later a gang of masked thugs dragged my father into an alley and beat him severely. He spent more than a month in the hospital.”

  I winced. “Oh, no.”

  She nodded. “But he was a hero in South St. Louis. Most German immigrants were loyal Americans.” She leaned back and crossed her arms over her chest. “My father viewed the Bund members as traitors to America and traitors to God. He loathed their anti-Semitism and their racism. That’s why he volunteered to work on those homicides.” She paused. “It started as a personal crusade. Unfortunately, it became an unhealthy obsession.”

  I could see how she might be an effective marriage counselor. Although she exuded no warmth, she was no doubt a meticulous diagnostician.

  I removed my portable dictation machine from my briefcase. It was about the size of a deck of cards. “Would you mind if I record this?” I asked. “I don’t always trust my notes.”

  She nodded. “That’s fine.”

  Over the next forty minutes, Ingrid Lindhoff described her father’s quest to solve the two murders—an obsession that consumed his waking hours, wrecked his marriage, and ultimately destroyed his life. Myron Bernstein had been the first homicide victim. When Harry Rosenthal was killed eighteen months later, Lindhoff volunteered for both cases. He knew enough about Nazi Germany and the Bund ideology to understand the significance of the two murder dates. Although other detectives were assigned to each case, Lindhoff pestered his superiors for months until they relented and put him in charge of both investigations. He was thirty-seven at the time. The assignment would become his life’s work.

  He spent full time on both cases for more than a year, but in the spring of 1945 his superiors informed him that all personnel assigned to the investigation were being reassigned to other, newer cases. Although he could remain nominally in charge of the investigation, they expected him to take on a full caseload of other homicides. After all, they explained, a fresh batch of unsolved murders had been added to their department’s inventory since Harry Rosenthal’s death, there were no solid leads in either of the so-called Nazi cases, and the word from City Hall was that Homicide better start arresting some murder suspects pronto. Ironically, he received the news on May 8, 1945, the day after Germany surrendered.

  Kurt Lindhoff was a good cop. He accepted the decision and his new caseload without complaint. But he remained far more than nominally in charge of the Bernstein and Rosenthal investigations. He continued to work both cases hard, squeezing in time at night and on weekends. Ingrid Lindhoff was in high school at the time, and she could remember going to bed most nights before her father got home from work. Not surprisingly, her parents’ marriage crumbled. Within weeks after Ingrid started her freshman year at the University of Missouri, her mother left her father and moved in with her spinster sister.

  “He changed,” she said, a touch of melancholy coloring her otherwise rigid features. “My father had been the classic Germanic type, obsessed with order and cleanliness. He used to spend an hour after church every Sunday morning scrubbing our porch and front steps.”

  But no longer. The house began to deteriorate physically. By the time she graduated college, one of the awnings was torn, the paint on the outside was peeling, the grass was uncut, and one of the shutters was hanging at an angle. She recalled her dismay over what she saw when she visited him. The whole house smelled of musty cigar smoke and stale beer. There were files on the two murders spread throughout the house. The kitchen was a disaster area, with piles of dirty dishes in the sink, dozens of empty cans of beans and chili on the counters and table, and swarms of fruit flies everywhere. Her father slept most nights on the couch in the living room. Dirty socks and underwear and shirts were strewn on the floor. Crackpot informers and other oddballs would drop in at all hours of the night with “hot tips” on the cases. And at the center of this swirling chaos was her father, once the spit-shine lawman, now a disheveled kook.

  “It was quite distressing for me,” she said.

  But her father remained focused and confident. “Just a matter of time, Ingrid,” he used to promise his daughter. “There’s no statute of limitations for murder. We’ll find the bastard.”

  And, surprisingly enough, he did.

  In the fall of 1955—nearly twelve years after Harry Rosenthal’s murder—the newspapers announced the arrest of a suspect in the murders of Harry Rosenthal and Myron Bernstein. Ingrid showed me a photocopy of the article from the Globe-Democrat. It included a picture of her father posed with the suspect on the steps of the police headquarters.

  I studied the photograph with fascination. Detective Kurt Lindhoff was a thick, bull-headed man with a flattened nose and squinting eyes. He was wearing a dark fedora and a wrinkled raincoat over what appeared to be a suit and tie. According to the picture caption, the skinny man in handcuffs standing next to him was Herman Warnholtz. I recognized the name from Harold Roth’s reports. It was difficult to make out Warnholtz’s features in the photograph because of the shadows. He had a narrow, almost gaunt face, with prominent cheekbones and deep-sunk eyes beneath projecting eyebrows. He was wearing a cap and a jacket over what appeared to be a laborer’s shirt and pants. According to the article, Warnholtz was a “local contractor alleged to have once been active in the now defunct German-American Bund.”

  Within a few days the grand jury indicted Warnholtz for both murders. Kurt Lindhoff was ecstatic. Warnholtz pleaded not guilty at his arraignment, and trial was set for early spring of 1956. But Lindhoff’s initial euphoria began changing to anxiety as the trial date approached and he realized that the culmination of his life’s work was now in the hands of the prosecutors.

  And then the playing field shifted ominously.

  “A new lawyer for Warnholtz appeared,” Ingrid explained.

  He was a fancy dan from Nashville named Rufus von Rep-pert, who wore cream-colored double-breasted suits and spats, spoke with an elegant Tennessee drawl, and arrived with an entourage of assistants, secretaries, investigators, and law clerks. Rufus booked an entire floor of the Chase Park Plaza and turned it into his trial headquarters. Every night at nine sharp he stepped off the elevator at the Tenderloin Room, usually in the company of his lovely personal assistant Luanne, and the maître d’ would escort the two of them to their corner booth for dinner.

  But appearances were deceiving, for Rufus was no effete dandy. He was a brilliant criminal defense attorney with an impressive number of acquittals and hung juries. On the day before Warnholtz’s trial was to begin, Rufus pulled off a dramatic coup by convincing the trial judge to dismiss the Harry Rosenthal murder charge for insufficient evidence.

  “My father was livid,” Ingrid said.

  But the jury convicted Herman Warnholtz of murder in the first degree for the death of Myron Bernstein. The trial judge sentenced him to die in the electric chair, and the court of appeals affirmed six months later.

  “Was he executed?” I asked.

  Ingrid shook her head. “The governor commuted his sentence to life in prison.”

  I frowned. “Why?”

  “No one knows. Governor Roy Thompson was a lame duck at the time and entered the order during his last week in
office. My father was convinced that someone bribed him or threatened to blackmail him. There were rumors that Thompson was a homosexual, which is apparently why he decided not run for reelection when his term ended.” She paused and shook her head. “I think the governor’s decision pushed my father over the edge.”

  “How so?”

  “Warnholtz was in the penitentiary outside Jefferson City. My father drove there once a month to visit him.”

  “Why?”

  She sighed. “My father vowed that he’d find the necessary evidence to convict him for the Rosenthal murder. He’d drive down to prison to taunt Warnholtz, to tell him that he’d watch him die in the electric chair.” She shook her head sadly. “It became a pathological fixation. In 1961, my father resigned from the police force to devote himself full time to the case. The last time I saw him was on his birthday, June 22, 1963.”

  She came to the house to wish him Happy Birthday. Her father looked terrible—haggard and unshaven—but he was also almost delirious with excitement. He claimed to be on the verge of a major breakthrough in the Rosenthal case. He told her, “I’m going to finally see that Nazi bastard fry.”

  “What was the breakthrough?” I asked.

  She shrugged and shook her head. “Probably nothing. My father died a week later, and I certainly couldn’t find any breakthroughs in the records he left behind.”

  “How did he die?” I asked.

  She seemed to contemplate the question before answering. “They found his car in the middle of the Chain-of-Rocks Bridge at three in the morning. It was empty. There were no witnesses. They recovered his body from the Mississippi River three weeks later. The medical examiner ruled it a suicide.” She paused.

  “You have doubts?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve read the literature on suicides. Denial is a common reaction among the surviving family members. Even where the fact of suicide is manifest, the survivors try to rationalize it away.” She crossed her arms and frowned. “I’ve tried to be professional about this. My father was mentally unstable near the end. But still, I do not believe that he was suicidal.” She gave me a rueful smile. “Then again, it’s difficult to be professional about personal matters.”

  Ingrid Lindhoff’s nine o’clock arrived on schedule. I thanked her for being so generous with her time.

  “It was my pleasure, Rachel.” She walked me to the side door. “My father died with unfinished business. I suppose that’s the way most of us will exit, but his death still troubles me.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “An unsolved murder must be every bit as distressing for the relatives of the victim. Please tell your client that my father went to his grave convinced that he had solved it correctly the first time. Perhaps that will help her.”

  ***

  I sat in my car in front of her office for a long time mulling over what Ingrid Lindhoff had told me and how it might fit with what I already knew. I seemed to be stumbling through a maze of mirrors inside a haunted house. Familiar images kept emerging out of the shadows, each time in a different place. I couldn’t tell whether I was moving toward a solution or just wandering in circles.

  Finally, I started the engine and pulled onto the street. As I headed home, I called Jonathan on the car phone and filled him in on the meeting. After I finished, I said, “I need one more favor from you.”

  “Sure.”

  I told him I wanted to try to close the loop on Warnholtz. When did he die, and where? Were there any living relatives? If so, where were they today? That sort of thing.

  “The prison authorities keep some records on former inmates,” he said. “I’ll make a call in the morning.”

  “That’s great. Now tell me how you’re feeling.”

  “I’m getting there. I may go to the office for a couple of hours tomorrow. Good luck in court, Rachel.”

  “Thanks. ’Bye.”

  As I pulled into my driveway I slowed to wave at the two officers in the police car idling in front of my house. At Jonathan’s insistence, the security detail had been expanded to include me, too. I was not merely another victim of the highway assault, he argued, but a potential witness as well, and someone sure seemed determined to eliminate potential witnesses to that incident. On the prior Saturday night a pair of southern Illinois fire departments had responded to the report of a fire behind an abandoned warehouse. They arrived to find the smoldering remains of a late-model pickup truck. Inside were the blackened corpses of two adult males, both burned beyond recognition. The truck had dents along the passenger-side panel consistent with those on Jonathan’s car. The prospects of tracing the truck to its owner had been impeded by removal of the license plates and the VIN number. The prospects of identifying the victims through dental records or fingerprints had been impeded by removal of their heads and hands.

  Although the security patrol should have been reassuring, it seemed to have the opposite effect on me. Every time I peered out my window and saw that police car parked under the streetlight, it triggered an image of those charred and headless corpses seated upright in that burnt-out truck.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Ruth Alpert, God bless her, drove them absolutely crazy. Kimberly Howard strode into the courtroom that morning with a gleam in her eye and a fifteen-page cross-examination outline in her hand. She was, as they say, loaded for bear and ready to rumble. Problem was, she had the wrong scouting report. The only bear Ruth resembled was a Teddy, and she wouldn’t have known a rumble from a rhumba. Even their outfits were a mismatch. Kimberly had dressed for the part of steely legal assassin. She wore a severe gray pinstripe suit hemmed short, starched white blouse, dark hose, and spiked heels. Ruth, who’d been a little chilly on the witness stand yesterday afternoon, had added a pink cardigan sweater to the latest in her series of frumpy, floral-print calf-length dresses. As for me, I’d aimed for somewhere in the middle today: a navy pinstripe shirtdress with cream collar and cuffs, hemmed above the knee but not as short as Kimberly’s.

  Kimberly spent an increasingly frustrating five hours—three before the lunch recess, two after—stalking Ruth from one testimonial forest to another without ever getting close enough for a kill shot. Even when she seemingly had Ruth trapped in a contradiction between her deposition testimony and her trial testimony—the ultimate cross-examiner’s bull’s-eye—Ruth glided away. Ordinarily, cross-examination through use of prior inconsistent testimony is a powerful, low-risk way to undermine a witness’s credibility, and frankly, Kimberly was one of the best at the technique. In a hearing in another case, I’d watched her adroitly draw and quarter a witness using prior testimony like honed surgical knives. Although the inconsistencies between Ruth’s deposition testimony and trial testimony were not glaring, there were plenty of minor ones in all those transcript pages. Kimberly’s goal was to highlight enough so that the cumulative impact would destroy Ruth’s credibility. It was a technique that would work with a typical witness.

  But Ruth was no typical witness.

  “I see,” Kimberly said, a pitiless smile forming at the corners of her mouth. “And when Ms. Gold asked you that yesterday afternoon, you said yes, correct?”

  Ruth nodded courteously. “I certainly did.”

  “I take it that your answer today is also yes, correct?”

  Ruth gave Kimberly a puzzled look. “Why, of course, dear. It was yes before, it is yes today, and it will be yes tomorrow.”

  “Why, of course,” Kimberly said, the sarcasm dripping from her voice. “It was yes before, it is yes today, and it will be yes tomorrow. However”—dramatic pause—“it certainly wasn’t yes last December fifth, was it?”

  Ruth looked confused. “I am afraid I am not following you, dear.”

  Kimberly turned toward Laurence Browning, who smugly held out the transcript from that day of Ruth’s deposition. There was a red tab attached to a page about two-thirds of the way toward the back. Kimberly
flipped it open to that page as she approached the witness.

  “Ms. Alpert, allow me to show you page 193 of the transcript of your deposition from last December fifth.” She placed it on the front ledge of the witness box and spun on her heel to face the defendant’s table, where Browning was waiting with another copy of the transcript open to the same page. She moved toward Browning and took the copy. “Line fourteen, Ms. Alpert,” she announced, back to the witness. She turned to face Ruth. “You’ll see that I asked you precisely the same question. Please, Ms. Alpert, be kind enough to read to this jury the answer that you gave back then.”

  Ruth frowned at the page. “Oh, my goodness,” she said. She reached down and lifted up her large purse. She placed it on her lap and unsnapped it.

  “Ms. Alpert?”

  “I am terribly sorry,” Ruth mumbled. She was rummaging through her purse.

  Kimberly turned toward the jurors. She crossed her arms beneath her breasts as she tapped her foot, the former beauty queen seizing center stage to heighten the drama.

  “There,” Ruth said with an embarrassed smile as she held up her glasses case. “I am afraid that I am blind as a bat without these.” She put on her reading glasses and peered over them at Kimberly. “What line was that, dear?”

  Perfect, I said to myself.

  Kimberly glared at her for a moment, the tension seeping out of the scene. “Fourteen,” she said through clenched teeth.

  Ruth studied the page and looked up, puzzled. “Now I am a confused.”

  Kimberly smiled. “I thought you might be, Ms. Alpert. Why don’t you just read aloud what you said.”

  Ruth looked down at the page and then up at Kimberly. She shook her head. “I didn’t say anything at line fourteen. I believe that you are the one speaking there, my dear.”

  Kimberly looked down at her copy with a frown and read it. “Uh, right. Line fourteen is my question. Read your answer.”