Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  She was released within a few hours, appearing to know nothing of any criminal activity on her husband’s part. On her return home, she saw police still combing her apartment for clues. They had made two significant discoveries. In one of Hauptmann’s notebooks, they found a sketch of a ladder, of the same crude design as the one left on the Lindbergh property. They also found that Hauptmann’s toolchest was complete except for the standard three-quarter-inch chisel, which was one of the few pieces of evidence left at the scene.

  The police subjected Hauptmann to twenty-four hours of punishing examination. He consistently denied any participation or knowledge of the Lindbergh kidnapping. He said he had worked on a construction crew at the Majestic Apartments on March 1, 1932—the day of the kidnapping—and remained on the job through the following month, at which time he quit carpentry. Later that night, Joseph Perrone, the cab driver in the Bronx who had delivered one of the ransom notes to Dr. Condon, was brought into the interrogation room at the 2nd Precinct. Pressed by the police, he identified Hauptmann as the man who had dispatched him to Dr. Condon’s house two years earlier.

  Close to one o’clock in the morning—when Hauptmann was hungry and weary—they asked if he would provide samples of his handwriting. He agreed, offering specimens of both his printing and cursive. The writing varied in style, as though Hauptmann were trying to disguise it. Even so, dozens of idiosyncrasies in the spelling of words and the shapes of letters, which bore startling similarities to the Lindbergh ransom notes, kept appearing. After a solid day and night of relentless investigation, the suspect slumped over the writing table.

  A fresh team of FBI agents and New York and New Jersey police arrived in the Bronx that morning to dismantle the Hauptmann garage. Behind a board nailed across two joists above the workbench, a detective found two newspaper-wrapped packets. One contained one hundred ten-dollar gold notes, the other eighty-three bills. All their serial numbers were on the ransom list. Removing more boards from the joists, the police found another hidden shelf, this one with a one-gallon shellac can. Inside, beneath some rags, were a dozen packages of gold notes, tens and twenties—another $11,930 of ransom money. Anna Hauptmann was shown the money and was dumbstruck. Downtown, the police were informed of the discovery and asked Hauptmann if he had any gold notes hidden away. Three times he denied having any, until they told him of their discovery.

  Caught in another lie, Hauptmann proceeded to explain the presence of more than a quarter of the Lindbergh ransom in his garage. He said a tubercular friend of his from Germany named Isidor Fisch, with whom he had invested in the stock market and in a sideline business trading furs, had gone home to his parents in Leipzig the previous winter. Before leaving, he had stowed several containers of belongings for safekeeping, including a shoe box, which Hauptmann said he placed on the top shelf of a broom closet in his kitchen. During a recent rain, water leaked through the kitchen ceiling and into the closet. While inspecting it for damage, he discovered the forgotten shoe box, which he opened—only to discover $40,000 in gold certificates. Hauptmann said he hastily removed the money to his garage to dry it out. Because Fisch had owed him $7,000, he had no qualms spending that much. Unfortunately, Fisch could not confirm the story. He had died the preceding March. Fisch’s family later reported that not only had Isidor returned to them penniless, but over the next year they heard from several people from whom he had borrowed money.

  After listening to the story, the police obtained several more incriminating details, which refuted other Hauptmann assertions. The suspect had claimed to have worked at the Majestic Apartments on Central Park West and Seventy-second Street for two or three months in 1932, starting on March first, the day of the Lindbergh kidnapping. The New York police investigation uncovered that Hauptmann did not begin his work at the Majestic until the twenty-first of March … and that he had quit the job on April second, only hours before the ransom money had been passed at St. Raymond’s. It was the last date on which Hauptmann worked as a carpenter before becoming a Wall Street investor.

  Almost simultaneously, Albert S. Osborne, the eminent “questioned documents examiner,” who had been studying the handwriting of the ransom notes since May of 1932, confirmed what seemed obvious to many who casually compared the ransom notes to Hauptmann’s handwriting, samples written before and after his arrest. He said they were written by one and the same person. His colleague-son concurred.

  Several secondary witnesses paraded through the 2nd Precinct, each picking Hauptmann out of a lineup, though the one on whom the police counted most did not pull through. John F. Condon spent hours at the police station, much of it in the immediate presence of Hauptmann. While he felt strongly that this was “Cemetery John,” Jafsie was reluctant to assert as much. Condon insisted that he had to be careful, that a “man’s life is in jeopardy.” He might have meant more than Hauptmann’s, as he revealed to Agent L. G. Turrou. Upon fingering a suspect, Condon said, he felt his own life “wasn’t worth five cents” because “They” would “kill him.”

  Hauptmann’s character came further into question on Thursday afternoon, when the police received information from authorities abroad. Contrary to Hauptmann’s insistence that he had no criminal record prior to his arrival in America, German police reported that he had been convicted of grand larceny and armed robbery. In one instance, he had entered a house through a second-story window by way of a ladder. In another, he had held up two women at gunpoint, seizing groceries they were carting in baby carriages. He had served close to four years in a German prison. Shortly after his release, while still on probation, he was arrested for another series of burglaries. He had barely been reincarcerated when he escaped from prison grounds and attempted to stow away to America.

  Still lacking a confession to the Lindbergh kidnapping, the police handcuffed a weakened Hauptmann in a chair, turned out the lights, and threatened to “knock [his] brains out.” They almost made good on the threat, kicking him and beating him, probably with a hammer, delivering blows to the shoulders, arms, abdomen, and head. More questioning followed; but he never confessed to any knowledge of or participation in the Lindbergh kidnapping.

  While teams of police tore his story apart, others did the same to his house. Back at 222nd Street in the Bronx, more evidence piled up. On the doortrim inside a closet in the Hauptmann baby’s room, a detective discovered some writing in pencil: “2974 Decatur” and “Sedgwick 3–7154.” They were the address and former phone number of Jafsie. The board was pried loose and presented to Hauptmann, still in custody. More than once he admitted that the writing was his, and he provided an explanation for writing Condon’s address that was as peculiar as his admission had been unexpected. “I must have read it in the paper about the story,” he said. “I was a little bit interest, and keep a little bit record of it and maybe I was just in the closet and was reading the paper and put down the address.”

  Then another discovery was made at the house. Although the lead detective from New Jersey had been in Hauptmann’s attic several times, he had not previously noticed one of the pine planks in its southwest corner was shorter than the other boards by a good eight feet. This detective suddenly recalled the wood expert, Arthur Koehler, commenting that rail 16 of the ladder had some prior use. Rail 16 was brought to the Bronx and laid across the crossbeams of the attic floor. Four holes in the rail lined up exactly with four nailholes in the floor joists.

  Arthur Koehler was summoned. Although a little more than an inch of wood had been cut away between the rail and the original floor plank, the number, color, dimension, and pattern of the rings indicated to him that the one piece of the wood had been cut from the other. Koehler also examined a hand plane taken from Hauptmann’s garage, whose blade markings, he said, revealed that it had been used in making the ladder.

  The police searched for some implement that might have been used to punch the holes in the strange design of interlocking circles on the ransom notes; but no such tool nor the symbol’s sign
ificance was ever discovered. They did find, however, yet another stash of money in the garage, this one in a two-by-four, which had been pounded between two wall joists and drilled with six holes. In five of them were rolls of ransom money. In the larger sixth hole they found a small, loaded pistol. Again authorities asked Hauptmann if he was concealing any more money before they confronted him with the goods.

  Upon the Lindberghs’ return to New Jersey, Colonel Schwarzkopf informed them of the evidence being marshaled against Hauptmann. For two and one-half years, the police and the press had referred to the unknown perpetrators of the crime in the plural. With the apprehension of Hauptmann, all such references changed to the singular. Although Anna Hauptmann claimed not to have known that her husband’s first name was anything other than Richard, the press now spoke of him as Bruno.

  On Wednesday, September 26, 1934, Lindbergh appeared before a grand jury in the Bronx County Courthouse. He had little to add to the evidence against Hauptmann, but his mere presence reminded the twenty-three jurors why it was so important that they serve justice. After fifteen minutes answering questions—mostly about the ransom money—a juror asked if Lindbergh would recognize the voice of “Cemetery John” if he heard it again. “It would be very difficult to sit here and say that I could pick a man by that voice,” Lindbergh said of the few syllables he had heard shouted from a distance of some two hundred feet over two and one-half years earlier. Upon completing his testimony, however, District Attorney James Foley asked if he wished to see the man they had arrested and hear his voice. Lindbergh said yes.

  Hauptmann was indicted for extortion that afternoon. The next morning he was brought to the D.A.’s office in the Bronx, where a group of detectives were waiting. Hauptmann was ordered to stand in various parts of the room and say, “Hey, Doctor! Here, Doctor! Over here!” After Hauptmann was ordered back to his prison cell, the tall man wearing a cap and sunglasses huddled among the detectives went to Foley’s desk and averred, “That is the voice I heard that night.”

  In October 1934, a grand jury sat in the Hunterdon County Courthouse in Flemington, New Jersey, to determine if there was enough evidence to indict Hauptmann on murder charges. New Jersey law stated that if a death occurred during the commission of a felony, the felon was responsible for the taking of that life even if it were accidental or taken by somebody else. The State had only to prove that Hauptmann had entered the house to commit a theft and that the baby had been killed as a result of that crime. Instead of five to thirty years for kidnapping, the state’s Attorney General, David Wilentz, could ask for the death penalty. Under Wilentz’s direction, most of the case’s leading players faced the grand jury, including a cameo appearance by Charles Lindbergh. He attested to his recognizing Bruno Richard Hauptmann’s voice.

  Hauptmann was indicted for murder in the first degree, and the dozens who had gathered outside the courthouse in the small town cheered. A crowd of one thousand stood in silence beneath their lit torches the night of October nineteenth, when he was extradited to New Jersey and incarcerated in the new Flemington jail, just behind the courthouse. He pled not guilty at his arraignment, and his trial was set for January 2, 1935. Until that time, round-the-clock guards were forbidden to speak to him. The overhead light in his cell burned day and night so long as he was in custody.

  Primarily for financial reasons, Hauptmann changed attorneys. His wife had retained a sympathetic but ineffectual noncriminal lawyer to represent him until a reporter from the New York Journal approached her with an intriguing offer. For the exclusive rights to Anna Hauptmann’s story, the Journal agreed to hire well-known criminal attorney Edward J. Reilly to defend her husband. The Hearst paper would also pick up such miscellaneous expenses as Anna Hauptmann’s lodging in New Jersey during the trial. The deal seemed irresistible, even though the former “Bull of Brooklyn,” as he had been called, was now referred to as “Death House Reilly,” for defending so many murder suspects. Unknown to the Hauptmanns, the fifty-two-year-old Reilly was a syphilitic alcoholic, loud of voice and dress. In other ways, he was even worse suited for the role of defending a man the press had already convicted. Reilly not only kept a photograph of his hero Charles Lindbergh on his desk but also believed, as he told an FBI agent, “that he knew Hauptmann was guilty, didn’t like him, and was anxious to see him get the chair.” On being named Hauptmann’s counsel, Reilly printed special stationery for the case, which featured a ladder embossed in red.

  Reilly mounted his basic defense—gathering witnesses to support Hauptmann’s alibis: that he had been in New York picking up his wife at work on the night of the kidnapping; that he had been at a party with friends in the Bronx the night the ransom had been paid; and that the money in his garage had come from Isidor Fisch. Meanwhile, the Lindberghs tried to resume their lives at Next Day Hill. Fortunately for Anne and Charles, just as the case threatened to consume them all over again, a houseguest arrived.

  Harold Nicolson—whom the Lindberghs had met the previous year—had been engaged as the official biographer of Dwight Morrow. He moved into Next Day Hill for ten weeks so that he could peruse his subject’s papers and interview his friends and relatives. Although trying to concentrate on Morrow, Nicolson was suddenly in a position to have greater access to Lindbergh than almost anybody outside his family had ever had. And while Nicolson was meant to be recording the past, it was impossible not to be drawn into the current controversy.

  “This is the only household in the United States in which the L. baby is not discussed,” Nicolson wrote his wife, Vita Sackville-West. Although Nicolson had heard that Lindbergh was silent and aloof, he was surprised to find him affable and even garrulous. His somewhat nervous “chatter, chatter, chatter” at breakfast allowed him to keep his mind off the one forbidden topic. “I daresay I shall get the whole tragic story one day in a flood of confidence,” Nicolson reported to his wife. “But one has the feeling that the wound is still terribly raw and cannot be touched. He is interesting about America, which he knows very well. I find him, apart from his actual physical charm, a really delightful companion.” Nicolson was one of the few to detect his host’s humor from the start, as when Lindbergh warned him about his dog, telling Nicolson that if he tried to pass him, Thor might grab hold of him. “By the throat?” Nicolson asked. “Not necessarily,” Lindbergh replied. “And if he does that, you must just stay still and holler all you can.”

  Nicolson surprised himself, succumbing to Lindbergh’s personality as he did. Anne’s former mentor from Smith, Mina Curtiss, for one, initially found him “really no more than a mechanic, and that had it not been for the lone eagle flight, he would now be in charge of a gasoline station on the outskirts at St. Louis.” Nicolson, on the other hand, discovered “a sensible man, without unthoughtful prejudices and with a direct approach to things.” His admiration only deepened as he observed Lindbergh’s uncommon decency. He was repeatedly impressed with the hero’s sense of proportion, how he “never shows off and never talks big.” He found Lindbergh’s reputation for sulkiness and bad manners entirely the result of the public’s desire to pick at his public image. “What I loathe most,” Lindbergh told Nicolson one day, “are the silly women who bring their kids up to shake hands with me at railway stations. It is embarrassing for me, and embarrassing for the kids. It makes me fair sick.” After ten days in his company, the rather particular houseguest was finding Lindbergh “as simple and refreshing as a stream in the woods.” Another month, and he decided that Lindbergh was nothing less than American royalty, that he “really is a hero in this continent and he never cheapens himself.”

  He admired Anne as well. Nicolson read her article “Flying Around the North Atlantic” in the latest National Geographic and pronounced it “excellent.” He turned to Charles and said, “You should take another trip so that she can write another story, for the writing instinct, once it is started, is much stronger than the flying one!” Anne was flattered, further encouraged a few weeks later when Nicolson report
ed that his wife also liked the article.

  Before daybreak on the morning of December 3, 1934, the night watchman at Next Day Hill knocked on the Lindberghs’ bedroom door. “Colonel, Pasadena calling,” he said. Mrs. Morrow was in California, where Elisabeth had recently been operated on for appendicitis, so this predawn call did not bode well. Lindbergh took the phone and said, “I’m afraid that’s bad news.” Anne stood by his side, scribbling on a pad, “Tell her I’ll come out.” Charles had only to shake his head. They returned to their bed, where he tried to comfort her. After all Anne had been through in the past two years, it was difficult to accept yet another family tragedy. The pain only increased when Mrs. Morrow returned to Englewood and, in an utterly thoughtless moment, blurted to Anne, “Of all my children, why did it have to be Elisabeth?”

  Her sister’s death increased Anne’s devotion to her husband. While he took charge of the burial arrangements, she realized “how I must be good to Charles and love him always, and the things I must cherish and the things I must crush.” Like him, Anne began to steel her emotions, realizing she could not “count on anything.” She vowed to rededicate her life to Charles, as she resolved “to finish the book for him, to give him a home and a sense of freedom and power and fulfillment.” But first of all, she resigned herself “not to disappoint C. at the Trial.”

  The Lindberghs had little time to mourn, only a few weeks before they had to present themselves to the public again. Hundreds of reporters, photographers, columnists, radio announcers, and technicians were already converging upon the little courthouse in Flemington. The fifty rooms at the town’s Union Hotel had not had a vacancy in a month, forcing the majority of visitors to scramble for places to sleep. Half the houses in Flemington opened their doors to strangers, including one where Anna Hauptmann stayed. Country clubs, taverns, and poolhalls rented rooms and floorspace. By New Year’s Eve, thousands of tourists were angling for ringside seats. There was carousing in the streets.