by Susan Hertog
Once the New York police identified Hauptmann as the suspect, they informed Schwarzkopf and Hoover. Immediately, city, state, and federal agents streamed into the Needham Avenue vicinity to watch the area and the house. Still fighting for jurisdiction, like children grabbing for the prize, each demanded the right to have an equal number of agents present on the scene. The men caused a ruckus in the streets, blaming one another for creating suspicion that might tip off the suspect. They were warned by neighbors, bitten by a dog, and admonished by the local police. After several days of negotiations, they developed a plan, agreeable to all agencies, for arresting Hauptmann with the least resistance.11
Cautioned by the forensic psychiatrist Dudley Schoenfeld, the officers agreed that it would be better not to take him from his home. By studying the ransom notes and the kidnapper’s bargaining behavior, Schoenfeld had deduced that he was a schizophrenic who viewed himself at once as helpless and powerful. Schoenfeld believed that he would have homosexual tendencies and would be quiet and restrained. Furthermore, he predicted that the man would carry a ransom note with him at all times as an emblem of his victory.12
As Hauptmann drove at a fast clip down White Plains Avenue toward Manhattan, the black police sedans followed, but with enough space to avoid detection. Hauptmann nonetheless saw them through his rearview mirror and sped through the streets at forty miles per hour. When traffic was blocked by a city sprinkler truck a half-block north of East Tremont Avenue, the lead police car pushed Hauptmann’s Dodge to the side of the road and brought it to a stop. One detective rushed into the passenger seat beside the driver; the other police stopped behind and scrambled toward him. At gunpoint, they pulled Hauptmann out of the car, frisked him, and handcuffed him.
In deference to Schwarzkopf and the New Jersey State Police, Arthur (Buster) Keaton had been called to the scene to make the arrest. He pulled Hauptmann’s wallet out of his pocket, and had what must have been the inestimable pleasure of removing from it a $20 gold ransom note.
To Anne and Charles, visiting with Elisabeth and Aubrey at Will Rogers’s ranch in Santa Monica, Schwarzkopf’s call came with little warning.13 While the hunt for the kidnapper had been unrelenting, so too had been their efforts to put Charlie’s murder behind them. Now they were forced to confront it again. Anne and Charles flew east, retracing the route they had flown at leisure just a few weeks earlier, and Jon was rushed by train from North Haven back to Englewood.14 There, the family gathered once more to decide what to do.
Things were happening fast, and evidence was quickly mounting.15 In spite of Hauptmann’s cool denial of complicity in the crime, within hours of his arrest the police found two stashes of Lindbergh gold notes, totaling $14,600, hidden between the joists of his garage. Along with the notes, they found fieldglasses, several maps of New Jersey, drawings of a homemade ladder and two windows, lumber and nails that matched those used to build the ladder, a small, empty green bottle marked “ether,”16 a loaded pistol, paper that matched that of the ransom notes, and Condon’s phone number scribbled on his closet wall.17 The next morning, the FBI called Schwarzkopf to congratulate him. Hauptmann’s handwriting samples, spelling, and grammar matched those of the ransom notes.18 Within a week, on the same day that Anne wrote to Evangeline, Charles, disguised in a hat and horn-rimmed glasses, had come face to face with Hauptmann in a line-up. Unknown to Hauptmann, Lindbergh had unequivocally identified his voice as that of Cemetery John.19 Another half-century of archival investigation would turn scholars into detectives and facts into allegations, but within a week of his arrest, a worldwide network of police, reporters, and criminologists were convinced that Hauptmann was the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby. MYSTERY SOLVED, declared the New York Times.20
While Schwarzkopf commandeered Hauptmann’s extradition to New Jersey, Hauptmann’s lawyers gathered evidence to support a plea of insanity. State examiners, however, deemed Hauptmann sane and morally cognizant.21 He exuded not “evil” but humanity insensate; intelligence unmediated by common emotion. He spoke in a low, barely audible voice and displayed no excitement, perspective, or imagination, consonant with a man of above normal intelligence. Born with a speech defect and a form of disgraphia, which caused him to affix an e to the ends of words, he suffered spells of imbalance and dizziness resulting from his wartime head injury.22
Day after day, Hauptmann sat in a wooden chair answering the questions of police and psychiatrists. He spoke matter-of-factly in his high-pitched voice, showing no signs of doubt or fear. With his physical endurance and his steadfast denial of guilt, he wore out everyone; he never asked for his wife or his lawyer. Yet he could not account for his actions on the day of the crime and had no alibi.23 He had sought employment at the Majestic Apartments in Manhattan on the morning of March 1, but he had been turned away, had driven home, put his car in the garage, and, as far as anyone knew, had disappeared. Lacking proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Hauptmann was not in New Jersey on the day of the kidnapping, the New York City police had no choice but to release him to the custody of Colonel Schwarzkopf.24 His trial was set for January 2 at the State Courthouse in Flemington, New Jersey.
17
Testament
Anne testifying in the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, January 3, 1935.
(AP/Wide World Photos)
TESTAMENT
But how can I live without you?—she cried.
I left all the world to you when I died:
Beauty of earth and air and sea;
Leap of a swallow or a tree;
Kiss of rain and wind’s embrace;
Passion of storm and winter’s face;
Touch of feather, flower, and stone;
Chiseled line of branch or bone;
Flight of stars, night’s caravan;
Song of crickets—and of man—
All these I put in my testament,
All these I bequeathed you when I went.
But how can I see them without your eyes
Or touch them without your hand?
How can I hear them without your ear,
Without your heart, understand?
These too, these too
I leave to you!
—ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH1
CHRISTMAS 1934, ENGLEWOOD, NEW JERSEY
It was the week before Christmas 1934, but no one in the Morrow home felt like celebrating. To the friends who had gathered for Sunday dinner, Next Day Hill reeked of death.2 The silver was laid, the china was set, the Christmas holly was about to be hung, but the stately blue dining room, once bustling with warmth and vitality, seemed cold and bare.
Elisabeth had died three weeks earlier of pneumonia in the wake of abdominal surgery. The doctors had believed her appendix was diseased, but surgery revealed a thick adhesion that had strangled her bowel.3 Three days later, Elisabeth contracted pneumonia and, within a week, was dead.
When Anne received the phone call from her mother in the early morning hours of December 3, she instinctively knew it signaled “the end.” For Anne, Elisabeth had died too soon—they had so much left to see and share with each other. There were roads without ends, sentences half-finished, and sketches of the future only half-drawn, and now there would be no completion. Life had a “pasteboard” reality—ephemeral, illusory, suspended in time.
Again, birth and death commingled, turning Anne’s thoughts to Charlie, imbuing her daily life with sorrow. As she paced the gravel paths in the Morrow estate, the trees and sky were disconnected from her “former life.” Her desire to preserve the memory of Elisabeth was reflected in her poem.4
“REVISITATION”5
… No, I must go
Back to the places
Where you put your hand
To see them now without you
Gutted bare, swept hollow of your presence
I must stand alone and in their empty faces stare
To find another truth I do not know
To balance those unequal shifted planes of our exis
tence
Yours and mine
To fix the whirling landscapes of the heart
In which I walk a stranger both to space and time…
Then I shall be able to refind myself
And also you.
But with the turn of the year, Anne’s former life returned, its laws the same as they had been. On January 2, the madness took hold again—the crowds, the reporters, the frenzied energy of the human hunt. Everyone, from the ordinary spectator to the celebrated personality, craved the touch and feel of the Lindbergh kidnapping. It was as though the violation of an icon permitted them access to forbidden places within themselves. Energy rushed into the quiet town of Flemington, New Jersey, like air into a giant vacuum.
No one standing on Main Street on that bright winter morning, as the limousines and vans filled with celebrities and journalists moved like juggernauts through enemy territory, would have known that the nation was still in the grip of the Depression. The trial breathed new life into the town’s faltering economy. The population doubled nearly overnight. The Union Hotel, across the road from the courthouse, hired sixteen new hands and filled all of its fifty rooms. Vendors filled the streets, selling trinkets and phony memorabilia: replicas of the three-piece ladder, bookends shaped like the courthouse, photographs of Lindbergh with false signatures, and snippets of baby hair sold by a young man with suspiciously fine curly blond locks.
In a perverse way, it was American capitalism at its best. Products flooded the market, and the market grew bigger every day. A hundred and fifty prospective jurors, a hundred reporters, fifty cameramen, twenty-five communications technicians, prosecution and defense lawyers, dozens of investigators, thirty court officials, and three hundred spectators, red-faced and cold, pushed up against the large courthouse windows, waiting for a glimpse of a celebrity.6 The century-old courthouse, with its pillared façade, stood as a symbol of calm above the fray.
But inside, the unimposing nature of the courtroom, with few architectural details, blurred the edges of rank and function. It looked more like an Elizabethan playhouse than a court of law, and, in many ways, it had the intensity of theatre.
Hired by the New York Times because of her novelist’s eye, Edna Ferber analyzed the voyeurism of the hovering crowds and the allegorical quality of the unfolding drama. Disgusted by the behavior of the publicity-seeking socialites who attended the trial for “trend rather than tragedy,” she wrote in her piece, “Vultures at the Trial,” “we are like the sans-culottes, like the knitting women watching the heads fall at the foot of the guillotine.”7
Indeed, there was the smell of execution in the air. The spectators turned their gaze from Lindbergh to Hauptmann as they listened to the opening words of the Attorney General for the State of New Jersey, David T. Wilentz. Although he was an experienced prosecutor, he had never before tried a criminal case, but he had appointed himself to the task of representing the state when Hunterdon County could not afford to support the case.
A Russian-born Orthodox Jew who had been brought to America at the age of one, Wilentz had made his way up the legal and political hierarchy by his precise and scholarly mind. The thirty-eight-year-old father of three, small and wiry, with dark penetrating eyes and slicked-back hair, dressed in stylish, double-breasted suits, a white felt hat, and a Chesterfield coat.8 But his air of restraint turned electric on the floor of the courtroom as he paced among the desks and chairs, sitting, standing, waving his hands, and modulating the tone and power of his voice to tell his story. Choosing his words with a storyteller’s flair, he addressed the jury of housewives, farmers, and laborers, taking them through the ten-week ordeal, conjuring up images of violence, shock, betrayal, and grief.9 Hinging his case on murder committed in the act of felony,10 Wilentz told the jury that the state would prove that Bruno Richard Hauptmann was a cold-blooded killer who, acting alone, had kidnapped the Lindbergh baby for the sole purpose of extorting money.
Edward J. Reilly, the attorney for the defense, was so moved by Wilentz’s opening speech that he called it an “inflammatory summation” and asked that the case be dismissed as a mistrial. The judge denied the request. Reilly was Hauptmann’s second lawyer,11 hired by Anna when the Hearst newspapers offered to pay a retainer of $25,000 in exchange for exclusive interview rights to the New York Journal.12 At the height of his career, Reilly had been known as one of the most successful trial attorneys in New York City. Shrewd, skillful, and disarming, he had defended difficult cases—from bootleggers to female killers—two thousand in all, earning him the reputation of “the bull of Brooklyn.” Now fifty-two years old, with a florid face from years of drinking, he was slow and plodding in comparison with the ubiquitous Mr. Wilentz. His courtroom demeanor had become erratic and his flamboyance had turned to eccentricity. Dressed in a black morning coat, striped pants, and spats, as though he were a groom at a brideless wedding, he shifted his eyes behind heavy-rimmed glasses and moved his hands in sweeping gestures. Using his low and resonant voice like a finely tuned instrument, he carefully formed his words. From the beginning, his self-conscious wit had tried the patience of the judge, who saw himself as a paternal figure, protecting the reputations and lives of all those within his courtroom.13
Thomas W. Trenchard was an experienced trial judge with a reputation for fairness. While some criticized his slow and deliberate manner and his liberal interpretation of his role, none questioned his integrity. After twenty-eight years on the bench, the seventy-one-year-old judge was known as a principled and compassionate man whose belief in the American court system and the inalienable rights of the accused had translated into a record rarely achieved. He had never ruled on a capital offense that was reversed on appeal.14
Anne and Charles were among the first to be called. As Anne rose to take her place on the witness stand on the morning of January 3, all sound and gesture ceased. The moment, one journalist wrote, hung in suspense so painful that one could not fail to register the gentle quality of her presence.15 Unused to the rhythms of the court, Anne sat down too soon and was asked to rise to take the oath. She was dressed in a blue silk suit and a black satin beret, and sat tall and straight, her legs crossed and her eyes riveted on Wilentz’s face. In a measured voice, formulating her responses with care, Anne followed Wilentz and told the story from the arrival of Betty Gow, on March 1, at the Hopewell estate, to the discovery of her baby’s body ten weeks later. Without evidence of emotion, she examined each of her baby’s sleeping garments, confirming their authenticity as those he had worn on the night of the kidnapping. Satisfied, Wilentz turned his witness over to the defense. As the court watched Reilly rise, no one could have anticipated the compassion of his words.
“The defense feels,” he said softly, “that the grief of Mrs. Lindbergh needs no examination.” Anne glanced gratefully at Reilly and then nearly leaped up from her chair.16
Charles was next. With a formality that almost smacked of the absurd, Wilentz opened with two simple questions.
“Are you the husband of the lady who was just in the stand?”
“I am,” Charles said.
“What is your occupation?”
“My occupation is aviation.”
Wilentz then led him into a moment-by-moment narrative, replete with charts and documents of the sequence of events from his arrival for dinner on the night of March 1, through the ransom exchange in the Bronx cemetery, to the identification of his child at the morgue in Trenton. For several hours, Charles answered Wilentz’s questions in a precise and careful manner, noting exact times, dates, and places. To those unfamiliar with the case, Charles’s narrative was a seamless story. But Reilly knew there were issues that Wilentz had deliberately left un-addressed.
Once Reilly took the floor, there were no holds barred. Moving back and forth in time, dealing with personalities and theories rather than facts, Reilly hacked away at Charles’s composure, challenging both his memory and his judgment, forcing him to admit investigative possibilities that had gone un
explored: Charles’s refusal to have lie-detector tests given to the Morrow and Lindbergh servants or to permit probes of their personal and professional backgrounds; his refusal to cooperate with the police except on his own terms, making unilateral decisions at key points in the investigation. Furthermore, the investigation was hindered by the dissension among the police agencies; the mishandling of the evidence at the scene of the crime; Condon’s unusual role in the ransom exchange and possible complicity in the execution of the crime; and Charles’s espousal of John Hughes Curtis’s gang theory.
Pressed to articulate the reasons for his unconventional course of action, Charles stated that once the Condon-kidnapper liaison had been established, he decided “the events would probably be peculiar, not according to the ordinary logic of life.”17
True to his reputation, without documents, facts, or substance, Reilly had exposed Charles as controlling and unreasonable. While all unexplored channels would remain in the realm of theory, it was clear that Anna Hauptmann had hired a masterly lawyer.
If Reilly had punctured Charles’s persona, Anne had not noticed. Overwhelmed by the trauma of recounting the kidnapping of her child in a public forum, she left the courtroom, intending not to return. Charles, however, went every day, with a .38–caliber pistol strapped to his chest, in the company of his brother-in-law, Aubrey Morgan.18 Sequestered at the Morrow home, Anne knew of the trial only what she viewed through her husband’s mind.