Reporters jumped on the story of Gaston Means, a felon living in Washington after serving two years in prison for lying to Congress about his actions issuing liquor permits during Prohibition. He told Evalyn Walsh McLean, a local socialite and mining heiress, that he could procure the baby for a fee that kept growing until eventually it hit $100,000. McLean was the last private owner of the forty-five-carat Hope Diamond and had married the heir to a publishing empire, so money usually was not a concern. However, when Means kept promising Little Charlie and continued to fail to deliver, she called the police.
Hoover would later call Means, who at one time made a living as a private detective and a salesman before becoming a bootlegger, forger, swindler, and con artist, “the most amazing figure in contemporary criminal history.” Criminal was the operative word in that description. Means would be convicted of larceny and sent to the Leavenworth federal prison for fifteen years.
The nonstop parade of cranks stymied Schwarzkopf and the others investigating the case. They just couldn’t get a break.
As Dr. Carl J. Wardon, a professor of psychology at Columbia University, told the Bureau of Investigation in 1932, “A great number of these letter writers are persons mentally unbalanced. They are border line case paranoiacs. By that I don’t mean they are insane but they are filled with delusions of grandeur owing to the Lindbergh case. They believe that Lindbergh may send them an answer which they can show to their friends. It makes them look important. Some of the writers of these crank letters are mono-maniacs, emotionally unbalanced. Some are evidently seeking publicity. If such letters could be stopped the real clue might be obtained.”
Arthur Koehler wasn’t a crank. He was a man of science who embodied the researcher’s motto: “Go as far as you can see and then see how far you can go.”
At the start of 1933, he wasn’t pining away to work on the kidnap ladder because he was too busy already. In addition to studying the usual number of samples sent to the lab for identification, he was working to identify several hundred timber samples for the city of Cincinnati. Government workers there believed they were buying longleaf pine, which grows primarily in the southeast part of the country. It’s a strong species, often used for lumber and pulp. The problem for Cincinnati was that only a few slivers under Koehler’s microscope were longleaf pine.
He had also been asked by a ladder company in Toledo to defend their product against two painters who were injured when a ladder rung supporting one end of their scaffold failed. The workers accused the company of using “defective material or ‘brash’ wood, as the term goes, in the rung that broke.” First he needed to test the other rungs. He found them to “show high resistance, slow yielding to pressure and a uniform splintering failure.” Translated, it was good wood. Then he looked at the part of the ladder that had broken and found that it carried “a normal load although being bent far out of line.” His conclusion was not one the painters wanted to hear. The ladder broke in all likelihood because of “severe damage in the earlier service life of the ladder, as may often happen.” The ladder company would win its case.
Back in New Jersey, Schwarzkopf was fighting a different kind of battle than he’d been used to in World War I. In war, there are winners and losers, land and prisoners to be captured. Police work seemed more plodding, with far fewer casualties but far fewer victories as well.
He had been injured in a gas attack in the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918. He knew both pain and agony after seeing friends and ninety-five thousand French soldiers die during that three-week fight.
He was appointed to be the first colonel and superintendent of the newly created New Jersey State Police force in 1921 after he returned from the war. He was twenty-five years old, and his experience was rooted in the formalities, rules, and regulations of the military. That was what he knew, so that’s what he brought to this new police force. Duty, honor, and fidelity would be its code.
Now, 5 percent of his enlistment was assigned full time to the Lindbergh case. Numerous others would play roles throughout the investigation. Still it wasn’t enough. He needed help, and despite reservations about others grandstanding for credit, he turned to the Bureau of Investigation and J. Edgar Hoover.
Three months after the kidnapping, when the ladder first made its way to Washington, R. Y. Stuart, the head of the Forest Service, had suggested to Hoover that instead of having Koehler identify only the seven samples sent to him, “Possibly you wish all the parts identified.” If that were the case, he said, “the Forest Service will be glad to send a representative from the Forest Products Laboratory at Madison, Wis., to wherever the ladder is stored to complete the identification of all parts and to make such further suggestions as may occur to him. This representative would bring with him the necessary apparatus for his work.”
The day after the crime, Hoover had offered the federal government’s facilities and resources to Schwarzkopf. He had passed Stuart’s request on to Schwarzkopf, but the New Jersey superintendent did not initially accept the offer. Then, more than nine months after the toddler had been taken, on January 17, 1933, the head of the New Jersey State Police finally asked Hoover for help.
“Can you obtain for us the approximate cost of this service,” he asked. “Said ladder is now being held at Troop C Headquarters, West Trenton, N.J.
“Thanking you for your continued cooperation and assuring you of our desire to be of service in each and every possible, I beg to remain,
“Sincerely yours, H. Norman Schwarzkopf.”
Hoover would respond four days later that he had received the request and was “seeking advice as to the approximate cost of the service.”
On January 25, Stuart wrote Hoover that it would cost approximately $150 to conduct the complete identification of samples. Hoover immediately forwarded the cost on to Schwarzkopf. Two weeks later, Schwarzkopf reiterated the request for a “more detailed examination” and confirmed that the total expense would be “approximately $150.00” before “respectfully” requesting that a representative come to New Jersey to inspect the ladder.
Stuart forwarded the request to the Forest Products Lab in Madison and Carlisle Winslow, assuring Schwarzkopf that Winslow would “detail the proper man to make the examination.”
Winslow once again climbed to the southeast corner office and closed the door. Koehler’s new workspace had windows all around. Looking east, he glanced at the State Capitol and the University of Wisconsin campus, before speaking to that “proper man.”
His official note to Schwarzkopf read:
I shall be glad to detail Mr. Arthur Koehler of our staff to make further examinations of the wood in the ladder referred to. Mr. Koehler is a specialist in the growth, structure and identification of wood and is well versed in wood properties and uses. I trust that he can be of assistance to you in this matter.
It is understood that his expenses will be paid by your organization. Since he will be traveling officially it will be necessary to keep his living expenses down to $5.00 a day. He would appreciate it if you would recommend a good, reasonably priced hotel to stop at.
It would be most convenient for Mr. Koehler to arrive at Trenton on the evening of February 27, but if the following day is an inconvenient time for you to see him, other arrangements can be made.
I suggest that any communications regarding this matter be addressed to me and marked “Confidential” on the outside, or if by wire that all reference to Lindberg be omitted, as we do not want to have the matter receive publicity here.
On February 26, 1933, Arthur Koehler was aboard a train for Trenton and looking forward to his first up-close look at the ladder. He didn’t know he wouldn’t be home again until the second week of April.
“As I sped eastward, I tried to visualize the paths that might lie ahead of me, the objectives that might develop and the guide marks that might direct me in a successful search,” he would later remember.
“The ladder had apparently offered no decisive clues to police experts. Would my wood detection methods prove adequate to this critical test, or would the ladder be as devoid of fruitful suggestion to me as to any layman? Well, the prospect was vague; it might somehow become clearer through my microscope. I determined to examine that ladder up and down, inside and out, without mental reservations.”
Late on the night of February 27, Koehler arrived at the Trenton Rail Station, on Clinton Avenue along the Delaware River and the Raritan Canal. It was one of those great, nineteenth-century brick urban railroad stations with closed gabled bays in the front and back and large eaves to protect passengers from rain or snow. He went first thing the next morning to the State Police Training School in the Wilburtha section of West Trenton, a series of red brick buildings, Craftsman-style, constructed not a decade earlier. They all had low-pitched roofs and extensive porches. The facilities, which were used for training, housing, and managing the force, comprised an oval-shaped courtyard with a giant US flag and the mess hall greeting visitors at the traffic turnaround.
Koehler duly noted the deciduous and coniferous trees symmetrically placed throughout the compound. The land used to be a farm, so its soil was good for growing.
Schwarzkopf’s headquarters was not part of the compound, but he tended to hold staff meetings in his private dining room at the mess hall since it provided more space for his team. His office was across from the State Capitol and was staffed 24/7, as the colonel believed the public should always be able to speak with a trooper if need be.
Next to the mess hall was Building 7, along the southwest part of the courtyard. It featured seventeen windows on each side, a horse corral out back, and a full basement below that contained a holding cell. Built in 1925, it was the second structure at the complex to be completed and served as a barracks for the troopers before becoming the zone headquarters of Troop C.
Now it held arguably the most scrutinized piece of criminal evidence in the twentieth century.
Koehler walked up to the door with “old faithful,” his favorite microscope, in one hand and the other extended to meet Colonel Schwarzkopf. Koehler was immediately impressed with the state police facility’s “atmosphere of earnestness and hard work.” After Schwarzkopf offered him the full cooperation of his force, he introduced him to Captain J. J. Lamb, who was in charge of the day-to-day doings of the Lindbergh investigation.
The two men walked Koehler over to the ladder. It was February 28, one day before the one-year anniversary of Charles Jr.’s kidnapping. The moment wasn’t lost on Koehler.
Arthur Koehler would finally get an opportunity to study the kidnapping ladder in 1933, nearly a year after the crime. He would join the investigation after New Jersey authorities asked Bureau of Justice chief J. Edgar Hoover for help from the federal government. (Courtesy: Dr. Regis Miller/Forest Products Laboratory)
“If it had been the steps to a gallows,” he said, “it could not have repelled or fascinated me more.”
For the next four days, he would inspect, examine, and analyze every piece of that instrument of evil.
His first reaction was disdain. “What it seemed to speak out loud was a charge against its maker, indicting him as a slovenly carpenter,” he would later remember.
“Those carpenters who build things for experiments and tests out at our laboratory, you can’t hurry them. If you say, ‘Just knock these boards together because I’m in a hurry,’ you hurt their feelings. They simply have to do a good job, their best because their trade has old, old traditions.
“But this ladder was shamefully done.”
It was a telescoping ladder, a hybrid between a stepladder hinged in the middle and a full extension ladder, meaning it was either extendable or compressible in nature, as its sections overlapped. The three sections before him were strangely narrow, in Koehler’s view. Their width decreased from 14 inches at the bottom to 11 inches at the top, so that they “could be nested together for transport purposes.”
Each section was 6 feet, 8½ inches long, so together they reached a total height of 18 feet with overlapping parts. Immediately he could see why Squire Johnson had believed its wood had come from crating stock. The material, Koehler observed, was “flimsy,” its construction, “at best, slipshod.”
The ladder hadn’t been jointed together carefully. All the maker had done was overlap the uprights some eight inches and pinned them with ¾-inch dowels running through bored holes of that diameter. The support for the joints was “inadequate,” which was proved when, sometime during the crime, the lower ends of the middle-section uprights, starting at the holes, had split.
“There had been some kind of accident,” Lamb said to Koehler when he showed him the ladder for the first time. Further, he told Koehler it did not appear that the third, or top, section would have been needed for access to the nursery. The combined length of the two bottom sections was sufficient to get to that second-floor window.
Koehler shifted his attention from the rails to the rungs, more aptly described as cleats. They were atypically square-edged, not round, and those on the top two sections were recessed or hammered into the uprights. Further, he noticed that the notches mortised by the chisel in the side rails were uneven.
“It clearly was a job no man had pride in,” he later remembered. “For a job that was to pull down $50,000, it showed poor foresight. The only piece of good workmanship on the ladder is that most of the nails were driven with the head of the nails flush with the surface of the wood, without making dents with the hammer around the nail head, as most ‘wood-butchers’ are apt to do.”
Interestingly, the rungs were spaced 21 inches apart, “abnormally” far by Koehler’s estimation. Traditionally, ladder rungs are anywhere from 10 to 14 inches apart. Whoever had built this had wanted fewer steps to navigate.
That was the clinical, once-over picture. Next, Koehler would perform the “autopsy.”
The ladder had to be taken apart. Every rung, every rail was numbered and measured again, calipered for width and thickness, identified by species, and scrutinized for every mark, man-made or machine-made in nature. Koehler explained to the law enforcement officers,
There are in the United States about 160 species of wood that are sufficiently abundant to be designated as commercial. Some of these are easy to identify exactly; others are almost impossible to distinguish from their nearest relatives, but any one can be quickly assigned to a narrow group by those who know the signs. For instance, there are about 40 American pines, but they fall into three groups of species at most having the wood virtually alike, and these are usually close neighbors geographically.
Barring finer structural details, the criteria of wood identification are the annual growth-ring structure, the pore or resin-duct structure and the cell structure, besides helpful incidental features such as knots and other defects.
Tree rings, or “annual growth layers,” Koehler explained, can be seen with a simple handheld magnifying glass. Each ring tends to mark the passage of one year in the life of the tree. The science of tree-ring research, or dendrochronology, was not yet known to a mass audience, and certainly not to the New Jersey State Police. A. E. Douglass was working in the field at the University of Arizona, but he was still four years from opening the country’s first laboratory on the topic.
Douglass, Koehler, and other experts knew of only one year in history, 1816, when rings were missing in oak and elm trees in the northeastern United States. In the “Year without a Summer,” as it was called, temperatures worldwide had decreased by almost 1.5 degrees. It snowed the first week of June in upstate New York and Maine, and lakes and rivers as far south as Pennsylvania remained frozen until August, choking off tree growth throughout the region.
That was the anomaly. The norm could offer terrific clues to wood identification.
Cutting crosswise into a tree trunk shows the observer the growth
layers as rings, while cutting lengthwise of the trunk and through the center shows them as parallel bands. For identification purposes, Koehler preferred to cut along the side of the trunk to get “the so-called tangential section, which affords the most highly figured view of the layers as they emerge at the surface in flowing curved contours.”
By looking at the rings on the ends of lumber, Koehler could roughly estimate the size of the trees the wood came from. “Sharply curved rings throughout [the wood] indicate small trees, usually the ‘second growth’ from lands previously logged over. Rings whose curvature is slight indicate large trees from virgin stands.”
The size of the trees could also be indicated by the diameter of the heartwood, or the darker-colored core, found in all pine logs and most other tree species.
But over the next four days, Koehler found the formal identification of the wood species in the ladder “to be no mere academic exercise.” It was a “pick-up job,” meaning it appeared the person who built it simply picked up what lumber the kidnapper had at his disposal.
The ladder was disassembled for a closer examination. Each of the rungs (1-11) and the rails (12-17) were numbered for the investigation. (Courtesy: Dr. Regis Miller/Forest Products Laboratory)
“The different kinds of woods used in this ladder indicate that the maker had a limited amount of material to choose from,” he reported to the New Jersey State Police.
Koehler identified each piece of the ladder with a number. The bottom cleat or rung was Number 1; the top cleat or rung was Number 11. The ladder rails ran from Number 12 on the bottom left to Number 17 on the top right.
He set about his inspection. Starting from the bottom of the ladder moving upwards, the uprights or rails on the first section, Numbers 12 and 13, measured ¾ by 3⅝ inches, as finished at the mill. The standard piece of lumber in the industry measured 1 inch by 4 inches (1x4) before it was processed at the mill to a traditional ¾ by 3¾ inches. Numbers 12 and 13 also had sharply curved growth layers and a very small amount of heartwood, indicating they came from a smaller tree. Koehler labeled them examples of “North Carolina pine,” a term that came about because lumbermen from that state were the first to cut and market wood from smaller trees. The wood was not exclusive to North Carolina and could be found in other southern states.
The Sixteenth Rail Page 8