Frustration didn’t begin to describe the mood of authorities working on the case. The investigation continued with an abundance of law enforcement resources, despite it being the middle of the Depression. But for nearly a year, detectives had been stymied. Leads had dried up. The ransom money had disappeared. Witnesses had clammed up. Suspects’ alibis had panned out.
“If the kidnaper came into this room and told me he had kidnaped the baby, I’d have no case against him,” Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, told the United Press in the summer of 1932. “There are no fingerprints, nothing that would directly connect an individual with the crime. When we get our break, we’ll depend on circumstantial evidence.
“We have scores of circumstances which we will seek to fit with the circumstances in the life of the man we find with the ransom money. If they dove-tail even 60%, we’ll send that man to the chair.”
Investigators knew the crime scene ladder provided an opportunity, but they didn’t know how. Forensic science was in its infancy, and forensic botany wasn’t even a sparkle in any detective’s eye. They had brought Koehler in to pursue any leads the ladder might generate.
And so, roughly a year after the crime, Koehler began his scientific detective work on the case. He traveled to New Jersey to take a detailed inventory of the ladder. He numbered the rails and rungs 1 through 17. He inspected each thoroughly. He took pictures. He cut slivers from the ladder and analyzed them under his microscope.
“The ladder was homemade,” he would later write, “which meant that it contained individual characteristics. It was not one out of a thousand or ten thousand, all superficially alike; it was the only one like it and could be expected to reveal some of the peculiarities and associations of the man who made it.”
The ladder’s rungs showed no signs of wear, indicating the wood had never been used elsewhere. Five of the six rails were like that as well, unused before the ladder. But one rail, Rail 16, was different.
The wood used in Rail 16 had four nail holes previously hammered into it that had no apparent connection with the ladder, so Koehler figured it had been used somewhere else before. Because it had no rust and no finish, he surmised it had been nailed down inside a barn, a garage, or an attic. Further, the rail’s two edges had been treated with a rather dull hand plane, leaving distinctive marks similar to marks on the ladder’s rungs. The longer the crime went unsolved, the more unlikely it was to find the plane in the same condition it had been in when it was used in the construction of the kidnap ladder.
Koehler had walked the streets of the Bronx, trying to glean what he could from simply looking at the outside of buildings, barns, and garages in the neighborhoods of some of the case’s key witnesses.
Other clues had led to the canvassing of more than 1,500 lumber mills on the East Coast. Koehler had traced two bottom rails of the ladder to a lumber mill in South Carolina. Planed with a defective knife, the wood carried a different kind of fingerprint, man-made and equally telling. Discovering where that wood had been shipped had become his next quest.
But searches of backyards, henhouses, outhouses, garages, and lumber yards throughout the New York/New Jersey area had led nowhere. Finally in the Bronx he had found a match: wood at a lumber yard with the same planer marks as those found on the ladder. He had been so close to finding the man who had made the ladder, only to find out that the yard didn’t have sales records because they no longer let customers buy on credit.
Now, as he sat in his favorite chair next to the brick fireplace on this September evening, his role in the investigation of the century had stalled. No New Jersey State Police detective was calling the Koehler family phone at Badger 7269 for his advice. Colonel Schwarzkopf had not called or wired him at the lab.
Yet he still felt sure he could help.
He turned back to his evening paper. There was more about detectives raiding the suspect’s house and finding some of the ransom money Lindbergh had paid more than two years earlier.
And then Koehler felt a jolt, a sense of adrenaline rushing through his body, as he read what followed.
“[Authorities] said the investigation of the suspect had not been completed. He is a carpenter, unemployed at the present.”
A carpenter.
And no wonder he was unemployed, Koehler thought.
He had told authorities from the get-go that the ladder showed poor design and workmanship and that he did not believe its maker to be a “high-grade” carpenter.
He closed his gray-blue eyes and lifted his muscular arms to rub the bald top of his head. Koehler had always loved wood, from when he was a little boy and called his father’s tool box a “toodle box.” His mother often had to call him several times for dinner because he was so engrossed in making something in his father’s shop.
When people knocked on wood for good luck, Koehler actually knew why. He could explain the superstition dating back to ancient times, when trees were held as deities of the forest and simply tapping on them invoked the aid of those higher powers to ward off evils.
Koehler knew that every tree in the world was distinct, just like every person. As he liked to say, “A tree never lies.”
And so the revelation came.
He raised his nearly five-foot-nine frame into an upright posture, pulled out his notebook, and began to write to his best contact at the New Jersey State Police, Captain J. J. Lamb, the man leading the Lindbergh baby kidnapping investigation. He wanted to remind Lamb of the report he had submitted on the ladder a year and a half earlier.
Dear Captain Lamb:
Congratulations on success so far.
In my work I have not said much about rail 16. That is the one that has the cut nail holes in it and has both edges dressed by a hand plane as if cut down from a wider board, perhaps matched or shiplapped. I have not tried to trace it on account of its apparently old origin.
That board may have been taken from a local structure accessible to the maker of the ladder, possibly because something may have gone wrong with a piece of 1x4 that originally had been secured for the purpose. I suggest that a search be made for such lumber on the premises of any suspect, so as to secure additional circumstantial evidence. The planer marks on the rail and on similar lumber should be a highly reliable check.
Then, of course, there may be chances of finding lumber as in the other rails or rungs, or even the dowel, around the premises; or the plane, saw, and ¾-inch auger, which you undoubtedly have considered.
Very sincerely yours,
Arthur Koehler, In Charge, Section of Silvicultural Relations
He decided he would send the letter from the lab first thing the next morning, and so he turned off the first-floor lights at 1819 Adams Street and headed up to bed. Koehler had overseen the design and construction of this house on Madison’s near west side, the first for him and his family, and of course it was outfitted entirely with wood floors. As Koehler climbed the steps to his second floor bedroom, he continued to think about what he’d just read—or more tellingly, what he hadn’t read—about the case. Not surprisingly, the steps creaked and moaned as he climbed.
Wood could talk, after all.
By the time he reached the top, he was convinced he could make Rail 16 and the rest of the ladder tell their secrets.
1
James Tarr surprisingly didn’t feel a chill as he hiked to the end of his grandparents’ driveway to pick up the mail. The mercury hovered at 37 degrees, balmy for two days after Christmas 1922 in central Wisconsin.
Twenty-year-old James looked around at the eighty acres Grandpa James Chapman had cultivated into a prosperous farm, with crops and dairying, having a good herd of graded cattle with a pure-bred Holstein sire at the head. Just a couple years earlier, Chapman had built a modern barn with a basement.
James’s mom, Lorena, had grown up here, an only chi
ld, nurtured and loved by her parents, James and Clementine. They shared their affection with young James and his siblings, Manning and Sadie, and on their grandparents’ farm the children were experiencing much of the life their mom had known as a child. Grandpa James had one of those great bushy mustaches that tickled when he gave kisses and held leftovers from an earlier meal.
Grandpa James and Grandma Clementine were popular in their neighborhood, and James was well-respected in Wood County. He served as chairman of the county board and as a member of the county drainage board. Various businesses sought his involvement as an investor, a consultant, anything to be able to associate with him.
So it wasn’t a surprise to find some straggler Christmas cards in the mailbox that day. It was the foot-long gray package that intrigued the boy, especially since it had no return address and listed his grandparents’ address as “Marshfild, Wisconsin,” instead of the accurate name, Cameron Township, which is located just a few miles south of Marshfield.
James kicked the slushy snow as he returned up the driveway. He stomped out his shoes before going back into the house and handing the package to his grandparents, who were in their dining room. As his grandma held the Christmas cards, his grandfather sat down with the package on his knees and took out his pocket knife to cut the wrapping paper lengthwise.
Clementine leaned over his shoulder and he cut through the twine. She never got to see what was inside the package.
Moments later, Tarr stumbled to the phone and called a family friend, Ole Gilberts, at the Klondyke General Store, a mile away from the home.
“For God’s sake, come up here!” he shouted into the phone.
Gilberts rushed to help the Chapmans. He later told authorities that when he got to the farmhouse, he found James Chapman lying unconscious near the dining room, with his left hand blown off and a bleeding leg. Clementine was face down in a pool of blood, dying from massive chest and stomach wounds and significant internal bleeding. Tarr suffered only minor physical injuries.
The dining room walls and ceiling looked like Swiss cheese studded with metal fragments. A six-inch iron pipe, stuffed with explosive picric acid, a dynamite substitute, was lodged in the Chapmans’ floor. Picric acid, usually used to clear land, left the odor of antiseptic soap. Those first on the scene after the blast swore they could smell it.
In this case, it had been used to make a bomb. The pipe had been encased in a block of wood, and the twine around the package had served as the trigger.
Authorities, including Wood County Sheriff Walter Mueller, wondered whether the motive was political, perhaps retaliation for a vote Chapman had cast that a neighbor didn’t like. But James Chapman had served his county for nearly two decades, and he had taken many controversial votes during his time in office. Recently, he had voted to authorize money to crack down on moonshiners and bootleggers to implement Prohibition, ratified in the form of the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution a couple of years earlier. Or maybe it had something to do with a ditch the county drainage board and Chapman had supported that headed through the southern part of the county. Many farmers didn’t like it because it traversed their properties. Just a couple of months earlier, a suspicious fire had destroyed the barn of one of Chapman’s fellow drainage commissioners. A few months before that, the equipment set to dig the ditch had been blown up with dynamite.
Forty-four-year-old John Magnuson, a native of Sweden, had fought for the British in the Boer War in Africa before owning a garage in Chicago and then moving north to eighty acres in Wood County. To authorities he was the most outspoken opponent of the drainage ditch. Witnesses said he had threatened violence against those who supported the ditch. Chapman later told investigators looking into the explosion at his house that Magnuson had threatened a lawsuit to stop the drainage ditch. If the best Chicago lawyer couldn’t stop the project, Magnuson said his guns would.
While the general public was fixated on the crime that killed Clementine Chapman, authorities were fixated on Magnuson. He would be arrested and charged with first-degree murder.
Just two days after the explosion at the Chapman home, the nearby Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune reported on its front page that “Marshfield has been transformed from a peaceful city to one of hubbub due to the influx of the government operatives and to the large press gallery which has assembled there. It is regarded by the press to be one of the biggest stories of the year and over a dozen of special correspondents were sent to the scene immediately by press associations and metropolitan newspapers.”
Prosecutors knew that the case, albeit “premeditated . . . to effect the death of a human being with malice aforethought,” would be circumstantial in nature. For example, no one had seen Magnuson make the bomb. No one had seen him put it in the mail along Rural Route 5, which was nowhere near his property. No fingerprints were found on the bomb materials left behind by the explosion.
The prosecution gathered handwriting experts from New York, Milwaukee, and Chicago. They brought in an engineering professor from the University of Wisconsin–Madison to testify that steel from a gas engine on Magnuson’s farm matched the steel in the bomb trigger. A UW chemistry professor matched the bomb’s metal with metal found at Magnuson’s.
And to Judge Byron B. Park’s Branch 2 courtroom, prosecutors brought a thirty-seven-year-old xylotomist, an expert in wood identification, to weigh in on the fifty-one wood shavings and chips found under the lathe in Magnuson’s workshop. The balding judge in his three-piece suit looked over his wire-rim glasses at a type of forensic science expert witness he’d never seen in his courtroom before.
Ever meticulous, Arthur Koehler had analyzed all fifty-one samples under his microscope. Now he told Stan Peters, the foreman of the jury, and his fellow Wood County citizens that forty-six of the samples were white oak. One was hemlock, and one was ash.
And three of the chips and shavings investigators had brought to Koehler’s Madison laboratory were white elm, the same wood from which the bomb casing had been constructed. According to Koehler, those wood chips displayed the “beautiful chevron-like distribution of pore structure on the cut surface.” The newspaper headline called Koehler’s testimony a “Blow to Bomb Defense” and “the most important” of the expert testimony delivered in court.
Despite the defense attorney lamenting that the case against his client was solely circumstantial in nature, and despite Magnuson protesting to the court, “Time will prove my innocence,” the Swede was convicted of murder.
For Koehler, wood identification, while new to a courtroom in 1923, was standard practice.
Arthur Koehler was born in 1885 on a farm south of Mishicot, which was about eight miles north of Manitowoc, nestled nicely along Lake Michigan and at the mouth of the Manitowoc River. President Andrew Jackson had authorized land sales for the region in 1835, and Koehler’s parents, Louis and Ottilie, took advantage four decades later, purchasing eighty acres for $1,800.
Louis bought the first combined reaper and mower in the area, cutting not only his own grain, but that of his neighbors as well. He also bought the first gas engine in the neighborhood and used it to saw wood at one dollar an hour.
Arthur Koehler was born in 1885 in this farm house near Manitowoc, Wisconsin. He was the sixth of nine children born to Louis and Ottilie Koehler. Four of those children would die before the age of 10. (Courtesy: George E. Koehler)
The Koehlers had five cows, two horses, a wagon, a sled, and a sow at the beginning. Shortly after moving in, Louis planted one hundred apple trees for use at home and for sale. He put in berry bushes as well: blackberries, strawberries, and black, red, brown, and yellow raspberries. They grew oats, rye, and peas. The cows provided milk and butter for every meal, with “a considerable quantity” of butter to be sold at market as well, along with eggs from the Koehlers’ chickens.
But the Koehler family derived most of its income from bees. The hive located on
the farm when the Koehlers bought it died that first winter, as did replacement hives he bought the following winter. Louis got a number of books on the subject and built a bee cellar to protect them from inclement weather, and by 1906 his apiary would number 250 hives. It was profitable as early as 1891, when Louis sold more than 10,000 pounds of honey at 18 cents per pound from 130 hives.
Louis’s interests didn’t stop at farming and bees. He gave eulogies for community members when the minister wasn’t available. He extracted teeth. One time he sewed up a young man cut by an axe using nothing more than an ordinary needle and thread.
But his passion was carpentry. The year Arthur was born, 1885, Louis built Ottilie a brick kitchen and turned the old frame kitchen into his carpentry shop. Once he built a coffin and lay down in it to give Ottilie a start and him a laugh.
The matriarch of the Koehler family was too busy for such shenanigans. “Ottilie milked the cows, raised chickens, knit socks, wove cloth and made clothing for the children,” Ben Koehler, Arthur’s brother, would later write. Ben’s wife, Edith, said of her mother-in-law, “I never saw anyone with more patience. . . . I feel that she was the most unselfish woman I ever met. I had great respect for her. I never heard her say anything against anyone. She was a truly Christian woman.”
She needed to be, with the losses she and Louis experienced. Both of their first two children, William and Martha, died before their first birthdays. Their third child, Amanda, was very healthy, but at just over a year old, she choked on a plum pit and died of suffocation.
Hugo, born in 1881, would be the first of the Koehler children to make it to his second birthday. Lydia was next, born in 1882. Arthur Koehler was the sixth child born to Louis and Ottilie, arriving in 1885. Three more boys, Ben, Walter, and Alfred, would come over the next eleven years.
The Sixteenth Rail Page 2