Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  And there was more. Some of Hauptmann’s explanations of his financial affairs seemed so outlandish that they prompted bursts of laughter from the spectators. By the end of the day, the defense told the press that it intended to use both the laughter and Wilentz’s improper questions as points on which they would appeal if Hauptmann were convicted. Judge Trenchard announced that he would thenceforth disallow people to stand in the courtroom, thus limiting the number of spectators.

  The next day, the State caught the defendant in another lie. While Hauptmann had earlier testified that he and Isidor Fisch had begun their partnership speculating in the stock market in 1932, staked by Fisch, Wilentz produced two letters Hauptmann wrote Fisch’s brother, which described their partnership beginning in 1933, with Hauptmann contributing most of the cash. The rest of the day was devoted to Hauptmann’s “sudden wealth” in the spring of 1932. He had to admit that he had lied to Fisch’s brother about $5,500, which he said had come from a private bank account. During his seventeen and a half hours on the stand, eleven under cross-examination, Hauptmann’s memory failed him too many times. “Hauptmann made a good witness,” Wilentz told the press upon the conclusion of his cross-examination, “considering the fact that he has told so many different stories and has had to admit both damaging truths and untruth.”

  Hauptmann’s wife, who had already invoked considerable public sympathy, followed him on the stand. But her plight would ultimately work against him. “How long should a woman stick to a man, anyway?” wrote Kathleen Norris, marveling at the faith of Anna Hauptmann. By the time the “thin, fuzzy-headed woman, plain, long-nosed, [and] pale,” testified, the world had already heard her husband admit that he concealed most of his financial affairs from her, “that he deceived his wife even when she was working hard to help him save.”

  In two hours of testimony, Anna Schoeffler Hauptmann supported her husband’s three alibis—accounting for him on the nights of the kidnapping, the ransom payment, and the money being passed at the movie theater. She also refuted Mrs. Achenbach, denying that she had told her that she and Richard had just returned from a trip during which he had sprained his ankle. Under cross-examination, a polite Wilentz challenged her never having seen the box of money that was allegedly resting on the top shelf of her broom closet. Then he reminded her of her testimony in the hearing in the Bronx just a few months earlier in which she claimed that she could not remember whether her husband had been with her on the night of March 1, 1932. During the next short recess, Mrs. Hauptmann walked toward her husband, who wagged his finger at her, saying, “Cut out that don’t remember stuff.”

  The next several days of trial saw a ragtag assortment of defense witnesses, who harmed the defendant more than they helped. Elvert Carlstrom claimed to have seen Hauptmann in Fredericksen’s Bakery on the night of March 1, 1932; but in rebuttal the prosecution presented a witness who asserted that Carlstrom had been with him that night, in Dunellen, New Jersey. August von Henke said he met Hauptmann that night as well; though he turned out to be a shady character who had changed his name twice and who ran a speakeasy. Louis Kiss said he was also in Fredericksen’s that night and claimed to have seen Hauptmann; he remembered because he was supposed to deliver two pints of rum he had just made that night and got lost. He was later refuted as well, as the friend purchasing the rum testified that the delivery occurred more than a week later. The gallery became amused at the popularity of Fredericksen’s Bakery—busier, one lawyer derided, than Grand Central Station.

  So impeachable were many of the other defense witnesses, it was often difficult to keep track of who was on trial. Reilly brought forth an ex-convict, a “professional witness,” a mental patient, and several others whose testimonies were easily challenged. While on the stand to testify that he had seen a group of people at St. Raymond’s the night the ransom money was paid, a cab driver with theatrical aspirations broke into an impersonation of Will Rogers. Back in his cell, Hauptmann asked Lloyd Fisher, “Where are they getting these witnesses from? They’re really hurting me.”

  A few did help Hauptmann’s case. Two people credibly supported his alibi for the night of his birthday in 1933. And Dr. Erastus Mead Hudson, a physician who made a hobby of fingerprinting, testified that he had shown the New Jersey State Police his new method of silver-nitrate fingerprinting, which allowed him to lift more than five hundred usable prints from the kidnap ladder. None of them was Hauptmann’s. And though the defense’s team of handwriting analysts had shrunk to one, John M. Trendley acquitted himself well, suggesting that Hauptmann’s handwriting resembled that of many Germans for whom English was a second language.

  The defense knew it would not be enough to refute charges against the accused, that it would have to introduce alternatives scenarios. Reilly did everything he could to suggest the guilt of Isidor Fisch. Unfortunately, at least a dozen defense witnesses who might have helped make that case ignored their subpoenas, failing to show up at the last minute. Most of those who still put faith in the defense’s “Fisch story” were quieted by several prosecution rebuttal witnesses, including Isidor Fisch’s sister, who testified that he had died with only 1500 marks—$500—to his name.

  As the trial concluded its fifth week, the proceedings appeared in newsreels one night at most of the first-run theaters in New York City. Audiences saw both Lindberghs and Dr. Condon as well as Hauptmann and Wilentz during one of their testy exchanges. The films were the product of Fox Movietone News, who along with Universal, Paramount, Hearst Metrotone, and Pathé, had housed a large motion-picture camera in a muffled box in the gallery, its lens fixed on the witness stand. They had also rigged a microphone halfway up one of the courtroom windows, about thirty-five feet from the witness stand.

  Although it seemed unlikely that the attorneys, the judge, and the police had no knowledge of the setup—indeed, a state trooper was stationed right next to the camera to make sure it could not be heard—all officials denied sanctioning the filming. While the few minutes of film presented to the public were sympathetic toward the prosecution, the Attorney General blew the whistle on further exhibition of the newsreels. The judge ordered the equipment removed from the court for the rest of the trial and indicated that there would be no legal action taken provided none of the twelve thousand feet of film was exhibited again so long as the case was being tried. As a result of motion pictures’ ability to sway emotions in the Lindbergh case—both in the performances they encouraged within the courtroom and in the reactions they could manipulate outside the courtroom—cameras were banned from virtually every trial in America for the next sixty years.

  When the defense took a final stab at implicating Morrow and Lindbergh servants in the crime, Lindbergh informed the prosecution that he wished to retake the stand in their defense. Wilentz felt further testimony on the subject was unnecessary, especially as he had what he considered a more dramatic final witness. On Saturday, February 9, 1935, he called Elizabeth Morrow to the stand. There was little information Anne’s mother could supply; but her presence in court provided a gracious finale to the pageant. Anne accompanied her to court and found the day more harrowing than when she had testified, for this time she allowed herself to observe the surrounding hysteria. With Betty Morrow’s appearance, Wilentz had only to mention “the late Senator” to remind the jury how New Jersey’s first family had suffered.

  The trial took its toll on the Lindberghs. Anne was as distraught as ever, but Charles would not allow her to express as much in his presence. Having to put on her best face for her husband as well as the public rendered her “completely frustrated,” boxed in and climbing walls. She rambled about the grounds depressed, miserable except for the time she spent with Jon. She but pecked at her book. Only to her diary, she felt, could she express her feelings. “I must not talk. I must not cry…. I must not dream,” she wrote on January 20, 1935. “I must control my mind—I must control my body—I must control my emotions—I must finish the book—I must put up an appearance, at
least, of calm for C.” At night, she shrank into a corner of their bed, “trying not to cry … not to wake C., trying not to toss or turn, trying to be like a stone, heavy and still and rigid, except for my tears.” Other diary entries from that year were even more morose, so dark that Charles later urged her to burn them. Persuaded that their immolation would help eradicate her pain, she did.

  Meantime, Charles continued to focus completely on the case, still bottling all his anguish. Although he thought he never revealed as much, he was as grief-stricken as his wife. Having been his family’s emotional pillar since adolescence, he nonetheless needed somebody to lean on and felt unable to express such human frailty. His sorrow and self-pity surfaced in the form of anger. Because Anne was closest to him, it was inevitable that she would become the ultimate victim of his distress.

  Early in the morning of Monday, February eleventh, Charles snapped. Before leaving for the start of summations in court, he lost his temper and dumped years of frustration on his wife. He told Anne she had been living too much within herself and was controlled by her feelings. He showed no mercy for her fragile state of mind; in fact, he chastised her for not using her mind, for neglecting work on her book. He called her a “failure,” then left for Flemington. For one of the few times in her life, Anne found solace from her mother.

  “Talk to Mother, and strength pouring into me,” is all Anne would impart to her diary that day. But Betty Morrow’s diary is more revealing. “Anne came into my room with tears in her eyes,” she wrote before citing her husband’s verbal abuse. “Oh! Mother,” Anne continued, “Elisabeth helped me so much with Charles.” For the first time Mrs. Morrow saw that “Charles isn’t capable of understanding her—the beauty of her soul and mind,” and that for years she had been forced to become two people, the person she was and the person Charles wanted her to be. “He loves her,” Mrs. Morrow realized, “but he wants to reform her—make her over into his own practical scientific mold. Poor Charles! What a condemnation of him!” Betty Morrow realized she must support Anne now more than she ever had. But she felt hampered, knowing she could not quarrel with her son-in-law—“no matter how stupid he is.”

  Charles spent his thirtieth day in the Flemington courthouse, listening to the first round of summations. Anthony Hauck delivered a forty-five-minute “opening” of the State’s closing argument, ultimately reminding the jurors: “… we are not required to have a picture of this man coming down the ladder with the Lindbergh baby. But we have shown you conclusively, overwhelmingly, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Bruno Richard Hauptmann is guilty of the murder of Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr.”

  Edward Reilly, in his old-fashioned black coat and striped trousers, began his summation by raising a Bible and quoting St. Matthew: “Judge not,” he said, “lest ye be judged.” Then in a deliberate (and slightly patronizing) manner, his hands often clasped behind his back, the New York lawyer asked the jury to rely on “horse-sense” and “motherly intuition,” not the testimony of hired “technicians and experts.” He wondered aloud how one man alone could have pulled off such a crime. Toward that end, he suggested a conspiracy, one which might have included any number of people, starting with the “disloyal” servants of the Morrows and Lindberghs. He implicated Violet Sharpe and Olly Whateley and Betty Gow. Then he suggested the complicity of Isidor Fisch, “Red” Johnson, and Dr. Condon. He moved on to accuse the police of doctoring and planting evidence—the attic board that fit too conveniently with the ladder rail, the board from Hauptmann’s closet with Dr. Condon’s address, the payroll record that indicated that Hauptmann did not work the day of the ransom payment. He stacked his handwriting and wood experts alongside the prosecution’s. He finally got around to challenging Charles Lindbergh himself, asserting:

  Colonel, I say to you it is impossible that you, having lived for years in airplanes, with the hum of the motor in your ears for years, with the noise of the motor and the change of climatic conditions that you have lived under since you made your wonderful flight, to say with any degree of stability that you can ever remember the voice of a man two and a half or three years afterwards, a voice you never heard before …

  “I feel sure in closing,” Reilly said, “even Colonel Lindbergh wouldn’t expect you and doesn’t expect you to do anything but your duty under the law and under the evidence.”

  The next day, Attorney General Wilentz delivered a summation that United Press reporter Sidney Whipple said “made up in vituperation what it may have lacked in logical argument.” Over four and one-half hours, he pleaded with the jury to throw the book at Hauptmann, because since his apprehension, nothing “has come to the surface or light that has indicated anything but the guilt of this defendant … and no one else. Every avenue of evidence, every little thoroughfare that we traveled along, every one leads to the same door.”

  Then he pelted Hauptmann with insults—calling him “a fellow that had ice water in his veins, not blood,” an “egomaniac who thought he was omnipotent,” a “secretive fellow … that wouldn’t tell anybody anything,” the “filthiest and vilest snake that ever crept through the grass,” an “animal … lower than the lowest form in the animal kingdom, Public Enemy Number One of this world.”

  In response to the defense’s suggestions of police improprieties, the Attorney General asked Colonel Schwarzkopf to stand up. “Does he look like a crook?” Wilentz asked. “Does he deserve that sort of treatment for this burglar, this murderer, and convict?” Whipped up by his own frenzy, he even launched into a description of the killing of the baby that he had not mentioned before, one at complete variance with the murder he described six weeks earlier in his opening argument. Wilentz had originally stated that the baby died when the ladder broke. Now he suggested the baby was killed prior to that—“What else was the chisel there for? To knock that child into insensibility right there in that room.”

  Wilentz spent most of the day effectively recapitulating the evidence. He said that a parade of living witnesses had come to testify against Hauptmann, while the defense conveniently blamed people who were dead. To accept their argument, Wilentz argued, one had to accept a “grave conspiracy.” Late in the day, he played his trump card: “Colonel Lindbergh’s identification of his voice,” Wilentz said plainly, “—if it is good enough for Colonel Lindbergh under oath, if Colonel Lindbergh says to you, ‘That is the man who murdered my child,’ men and women, that is good enough.”

  The next morning, Judge Trenchard delivered a seventy-minute charge to the jury. Lindbergh lunched in town at attorney George Large’s house with Colonels Breckinridge and Schwarzkopf, then drove home to Englewood. Fortunately, the tension was lessened by another visit from Harold Nicolson.

  After spending two months in England, Nicolson returned to Englewood that very morning to continue his research on Dwight Morrow. He spent the afternoon sipping sherry with Betty Morrow, Aubrey Morgan, and Anne Lindbergh. Shortly after Charles returned from Flemington, dinner was served. They turned on two radios as they sat, one in the pantry, the other in the drawing room. “Thus there were jazz and jokes while we had dinner and one ear strained the whole time for the announcer from the courthouse,” Nicolson would later write his wife. After dinner, Nicolson withdrew to the library, the Morrows and Lindberghs to another room.

  Close to seven thousand people gathered around the Hunterdon County Courthouse, completely blocking Flemington’s Main Street. At 10:27, an assistant to the Sheriff was sent up the courthouse stairs to the belfry, where he tolled the bell. The crowd shouted for several minutes in anticipation of the verdict—chanting “Kill Hauptmann! Kill Hauptmann!”

  At 10:31, Hauptmann was ushered in from his cell, manacled to a state trooper and accompanied by five other policemen. The jurors entered, none of them looking his way. It was not until 10:45 that Judge Trenchard returned to the bench, asking the jury, then the defendant, to rise. “Mr. Foreman, what say you?” the judge asked. “Do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty?” The foreman repl
ied that they found him “guilty of murder in the first degree.”

  Messenger boys bolted toward the door, but Judge Trenchard forbade anybody from leaving until the business of the court was done. The jury was polled, and at the court’s suggestion, Attorney General Wilentz moved for immediate sentencing. Looking at the convicted man through his hornrimmed glasses, Trenchard pronounced that he “suffer death at the time and place, and in the manner provided by law.” At 10:50, the condemned man was led out of the courtroom, his face “white as a death mask, his eyes sunken,” observed one reporter. Anna Hauptmann sat looking at the floor, not lifting her head until her husband had left the room—at which time she began to cry. A few minutes later, Hauptmann fell facedown on his cot and sobbed uncontrollably. By then word had reached the street, shouted from a second-story window by a messenger boy. The crowd roared.

  Betty Morrow poked her head into the library at Next Day Hill to tell Harold Nicolson, “Hauptmann has been condemned to death without mercy.” By the time he joined the others around the radio in the drawing room, he could hear what Anne remembered as “the howling mob” over the radio. They sat in silence, listening to the newscaster declare, “You have now heard the verdict in the most famous trial in all history. Bruno Hauptmann now stands guilty of one of the foulest …” Anne at last spoke up and said, “Turn that off, Charles, turn that off.”

  They all went to the pantry for ginger beer. Charles perched himself upon a countertop and began to speak to Nicolson about the trial. “There is no doubt at all that Hauptmann did the thing,” he said. “My one dread all these years has been that they would get hold of someone as a victim about whom I wasn’t sure. I am sure about this—quite sure.” Then he analyzed the case, point by point. “He pretended to address his remarks to me only,” Nicolson observed. “But I could see that he was really trying to ease the agonised tension through which Betty and Anne had passed. It was very well done. It made one feel that here was no personal desire for vengeance or justification; here was the solemn process of law inexorably and impersonally punishing a culprit.” They all went to bed, Charles commenting on his way out, “That was a lynching crowd.”