In handling a matter of this kind it is our policy to exhaust the possibilities of the matter in hand. The progress made so far thoroughly justifies a continuation of our investigation and forcefully brings to attention the necessity of exhausting every possibility of obtaining information.
Under these circumstances, it is respectfully requested that Mr. Koehler be granted an extension of time to work with us, in fact an extension long enough to satisfy the absolute completion of the investigation and the exhaustion of the possibilities of obtaining information. Daily discoveries and contacts lead to further possibilities and it is impossible at the moment to estimate just how long it will take to complete this phase of our investigation.
After promising Winslow that he would continue to pay Koehler, this military man who had little to be happy about in his floundering investigation became effusive in his praise for the scientist. “Our contacts with Mr. Koehler have been such, up to this time, that we have learned to feel the utmost confidence in his ability and integrity,” he wrote. “I feel that the earnestness and interest, as well as the effort and ability, which he has so generously displayed, is deserving of the highest commendation.”
He copied R.Y. Stuart, the head of the Forest Service, who was first to respond, saying he was “very glad indeed to know that the cooperation that Mr. Winslow and Mr. Koehler of the Forest Products Laboratory have been able to extend to you has been satisfactory. . . . It is my sincere hope,” he continued, “that Mr. Koehler will be able to find some clue, however small, that will be of some use to you.”
Winslow also expressed his contentment that the partnership seemed to be going well and told Schwarzkopf that he had wired his charge to continue “his work with you for whatever period of time he feels desirable. I am quite satisfied to rely on your and his judgment as to how long he should stay,” his letter read. “I, of course, hope that his work with you will lead to something of definite and tangible value in the important problem which confronts you.”
Meanwhile, Koehler and Bornmann were back at the Institution for Epileptics at Skillman for a second time, and again they found no wood similar to that used in the ladder. Over the next week, they racked up the mileage, going to Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and back to New York City. They visited lumber yards, broom handle companies, and furniture warehouses. They brought samples, Rail 13, Rail 14, and Dowel 18, to show their interview subjects. They learned that Douglas fir samples could be roof boards or door jambs and that birch dowels could be flag sticks or chair stretchers.
Finally, back at Troop C, Koehler would look again at Rails 12 and 13, the North Carolina pine boards cut from the same piece of wood. He had initially noticed depressions on the wave crests on one edge of Rail 13 and thought it was a compression from the building of the ladder. But with his “old faithful” microscope there to help him out, he discovered that the depressions were actually cut away.
That meant the wood had been treated or trimmed before it became part of the ladder. He knew Rail 16 and the rungs had been hand-planed with the same instrument, but that likely remained in the possession of whoever made the ladder and thus would need to wait until an arrest was made for comparison purposes.
However, the machine planer marks on Rails 12 and 13 might be able to be traced. Koehler knew he needed to go back to New York City. With Bornmann alongside him, he went back to the Yates-American Machine Company in the Chrysler Building. A representative from the S. A. Woods Company joined them. Between them, the two companies manufactured about 90 percent of all the machine planers used in planing mills nationwide.
They agreed the depressions were likely due to a projection on one of the knives in the side cutter head of the machine that had planed the wood. That meant the distance between the depressions would indicate one revolution around the side of the wood. There were six individual knife cuts on the edges per revolution and eight individual knife cuts per revolution on the top and bottom faces of the rails.
Bornmann could follow along so far, but the conversation soon eluded him.
“Assuming a speed of 3600 r.p.m. for the side heads,” Koehler said to the group, “the rate of feed through the machine was calculated as 258 feet per minute and the revolutions of the top and bottom heads as 3304 r.p.m.”
The resulting conclusion, however, Bornmann could understand. One of the edges of the two rails was off. It wasn’t planed smoothly. The planer had left telltale marks on it that, if the tool had been working correctly, would not have been there. It was a clue, albeit a difficult one to trace.
“The fact that the top and bottom heads apparently revolved at a different speed than the side heads indicated that the machine was not electrically driven,” Koehler wrote in his report. The Yates and S. A. Woods representatives agreed, saying it sounded “reasonable,” but they didn’t think there were many machines like that in operation in the North Carolina pine district and that “such machines probably were equipped with automatic feeding devices since it is impracticable for a man to feed the machine by hand.”
Koehler would leave the seeming contradiction of whether the planer was automatic or manually fed for later. He had the outline of fingerprints on the rails in question and needed to get back to Troop C Headquarters so he could more precisely measure those markings.
After what he called a “careful check up,” he calculated the distance between revolution marks on the distinctive edge of Rails 12 and 13 was 0.86 inch. There were six knife marks per revolution, and the width of those knife marks was 0.143 inch. On the faces, or the top and bottom, the distance between the revolution marks was 0.937 inch. They showed eight knife marks per revolution and were 0.117 inch wide.
He submitted the supplement to his report to Captain Lamb along with illustrations backing up the numbers, diagrams highlighting certain features of the ladder, and drawings of the planing marks. He explained that a machine with different speeds for its top and side heads is belt driven, not electrically driven, and that it would have had an automatic feeder.
Koehler’s next step was to send a letter to Yates-American and S. A. Woods headquarters, asking if and where they had sold planers in the eastern United States that might “do the work indicated by the planer marks on the North Carolina Pine rails Nos. 12-13.” Koehler also decided to send a request to J. A. Fay & Egan Co. in Cincinnati; the company usually dealt with smaller woodworking machines, making it unlikely it would provide useful information, but Koehler wanted to be thorough. So he prepared another letter, this one for the West Coast Lumbermen’s Association in Seattle to see if it knew which mills might have had planers that could have left the marks in question.
“An attempt is being made to trace the origin of the lumber in the ladder used for kidnapping the Lindbergh baby, and your cooperation is solicited,” the letter began. Koehler went on to describe the distinct revolution marks and knife cuts on the North Carolina pine’s edges and faces and asked the companies if they put out a machine that did such work.
“Finally one edge of the ‘North Carolina’ pine used in the ladder shows rough work, as if the knives had not been jointed or the spindle was loose in the bearings, and a projection on one of the knives cut out a short, shallow groove each time it came around, which may make it possible to locate the particular mill that dressed the stock.”
Koehler and Bornmann started visiting homes again in the area, looking at wood samples and bringing planers and other woodworking tools back to headquarters for further inspection. They looked through chicken coops, basements, pottery stores, barns, attics, backyards, and wood piles. The end result was a lot of stories for Koehler to tell his wife in the strictest of confidences, but no evidence. Yet their efforts weren’t completely unproductive.
“The net result of this preliminary search was to exonerate adjacent residents from any suspicious connection with the ladder and this was something gained,” he would later write.
; At the end of March, Koehler took a day trip to Washington to meet with his colleagues, H. S. Betts and Arthur T. Upson, who ran the National Lumberman’s Manufacturers Association. From there, he went back to Philadelphia, to the freight yards of the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroads to look for 1x4 North Carolina pine strips.
As the calendar turned to April, Koehler had been gone from home a full month, and like M. M. Baringer, whom he met at Hill’s Refrigerator Factory in Trenton, he remained “at a loss to explain the shallow interrupted groves on . . . rails #12 and #13.” Bornmann told his superiors that the ladder investigation “can be advanced no further at the present time,” until replies came to the form letters Koehler was preparing to send out to planer manufacturers.
The detective’s summary of their status wasn’t all that encouraging. Starting with the dowels or pins connecting the ladder sections, they knew they were white birch, but it was “of a common variety and could have been purchased or picked up at any one of a thousand different sources, therefore must be eliminated as a possible lead to the solution of this crime.” When it came to the Ponderosa pine rungs, “the only possibilities” were the hand plane marks, but they needed to find a suspect before they could make any comparisons.
As to the Douglas fir Rails 14, 15, and 17, Bornmann said the general opinion of lumbermen interviewed and of Koehler was that the rails provided “no possibilities,” due to a lack of distinguishing marks.
“The only possibilities,” he wrote, “lie in the North Carolina pine rails #12 and #13.” But even they didn’t offer much hope, according to the detective. “It is the consensus of opinion of most of the lumbermen and woodworking machinery manufacturers interviewed that there is a bare possibility that these yellow pine rails can eventually be traced to the mill from which they originated.”
Further, “the only one who would be in a position to have noticed indentation marks made upon one of the edges of these rails, and which indentation marks are the only characteristics whereby this lumber might be traced would be the operator of the planer at the time this stock had been run through. He would have to view this lumber and the indentations thereon, inasmuch as, he is the only one who was in a position to notice any peculiarities or defects in the planer and would remember correcting same.”
Bottom line: he thought the services of Arthur Koehler could “be dispensed with for the time being.”
The scientist, however, was more optimistic, still believing the wood could talk.
Koehler headed back to Madison and his lab. Winslow would arrange a strictly private workspace and all the necessary optical equipment needed. Parts of the ladder could be sent there under strict guard. Privacy was vital. Even Cora Bilsey, his secretary, would be sworn to secrecy.
“I concluded that it had not divulged all its clues, and I resolved to study it,” he later said. “Really study it, this time.”
5
General John Pershing had been in France less than two months when he knew what needed to happen. The French and British wanted not just US military help in their battle against the Germans in World War I, they also wanted our lumberjacks. Trained lumbermen were desperately needed to build plank roads at the front, bomb proofs to protect from shelling, barbed-wire stakes, and ties to repair or build railroads.
So America’s top field officer cabled the War Department asking for a force of “lumberjack soldiers,” capable enough to cut upwards of 25 million board feet per month. A year later, the requirements of the American Expeditionary Force would be more than 73 million board feet per month.
In May 1917, the 20th Engineers began accepting 250-man companies across the Atlantic Ocean. Over the next twelve months, forty-seven more companies of forest and road engineers would go to southwestern France. A forty-ninth would go to England to help cut lumber for the British government.
The Landes forest, or La foret des Landes in French, is the largest maritime-pine forest in Europe, bordering the ocean on the west and with rivers running every other direction. It is rare in that it is a manmade pine plantation, created in the eighteenth century to prevent erosion. In its early days, residents needed stilts to get across the wet terrain, but by the time the American servicemen got to the 3,900-square-mile forest, it had been rehabilitated.
Interestingly, the pines surround a natural forest created by the glaciers, with oak, alder, birch, willow, and holly trees. Commercial interests wanting wood, paper, and pine resin had dominated the area in the decade before the war, so the infrastructure was in place to support the army’s needs.
To staff the forestry units, the call went out to men with lumber companies and associations, to men who grew up on farms just like “Black Jack” Pershing in Missouri, and to men who simply liked getting their hands dirty. They came from every state in the Union, hardy and resourceful, to help. As Lieutenant Colonel W. B. Greeley told American Forester magazine after the war ended in June 1919, “They came straight from her forests and sawmills, trained in her woodcraft, with all of the physical vigor, the adaptability to life in the open and the rough and ready mechanical skill of the American woodsman. They knew their work and were ready to put all that they had into it.”
Edward Manning Davis and John Brown Cuno were two such men. They willingly cut fuel wood, hauled logs, and built sawmills and docking facilities for landing soldiers, their shoulders aching from long, back-straining hours of chopping and hauling lumber.
They may not have been on the front lines, facing fire, but still Greeley said of providing the infrastructure to win the war, “It is doubtful if American resourcefulness was ever put to harder test than during the first months of forestry work in France.”
Cuno was in one of the first lumberjack companies after receiving his undergraduate degree in forestry from Penn State University and a master’s degree in the same topic from the New York State College of Forestry in 1915.
He was working for a lumber company in Columbus, Ohio, supervising the felling and scaling of timber, when the signs of war emerged. He wasn’t a farm boy, having grown up in Brooklyn as the son of an editor before earning a first lieutenant commission as the supply officer for one of the forestry battalions.
Davis was born on a farm in Iowa and raised in small-town Connecticut. He had started at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh before moving back to Iowa for family reasons after his freshman year and finishing his undergraduate degree in forestry at Iowa State College in Ames in 1917. While on campus, he worked in the school’s forest nursery.
He was working for the US Forest Service in Priest River, Idaho, when the war broke out. Then he was a private in the 17th Company of the 20th Engineers, serving as an acquisition specialist, a tree scaler, and an instructor in forestry at a French university.
When Cuno, Davis, and their fellow lumberjack soldiers returned from France in the spring and summer of 1919, their legacy was impressive. They had built and operated eighty-one sawmills, cutting two million feet of lumber, ties, poles, and piling every day. In their first year alone, the forestry troops would cut 300 million board feet of lumber and ties, 38,000 piles, nearly 2.9 million poles of all sizes, and 317,000 cords of fuel wood.
“It is impossible, in a few words, to tell of the labor, the Yankee ingenuity, and the resolution to back up our fighting doughboys which were called for to win these results,” Greeley wrote. “Nor is it possible to describe the pressure upon all of us . . . when every lumberjack in the regiment felt the tenseness of the final grapple and put everything he had into it.”
Both Cuno and Davis wanted to continue their careers in forestry. Both knew the preeminent place to do so was the US Forest Service, particularly the Forest Products Laboratory.
Davis arrived at FPL in October 1922 after working as a wood inspector for the Erie Railroad Company in Georgia and as a yard foreman with a lumber company in Kansas City. He was hired as a wood technologist and while work
ing there finished up his graduate work in forestry at Iowa State in 1925.
In 1932, he was put in charge of the lab’s efforts to study how different hardwoods act when put through woodworking machines like a lathe or a planer. This came on top of the work he’d already done on machining defects on native softwoods in the south, north, and east. He had also completed studies on density, rings, and growth in southern pine and had testified for the government as an expert witness in a case before the Federal Trade Commission.
Cuno’s path to Madison took him first to Washington, DC, where he served as the Forest Service’s liaison with the army and navy. After working there as an associate wood technologist, he was transferred to the Forest Products Laboratory in 1926 to work on research in logging, milling, and wood utilization.
In 1932, he co-wrote a technical bulletin for the Department of Agriculture about sawmill and logging activity in the pine forests of North Carolina.
Both men’s performance reviews at the laboratory gave them very high marks in dependability, thoroughness, initiative, and having a “scientific or professional attitude; fairness, freedom from bias.”
They were trusted employees, much like their colleague Arthur Koehler.
Koehler knew when he returned to Madison and his familiar surroundings in early April 1933 that the investigation of the kidnapping ladder needed to center “more and more closely on the machine planing that the lumber had received at the mill.” The marks on Rails 12 and 13 had been “recorded in the faint transverse waves and ripples that the fast revolving cutters leave on the wood surface.”
The question was whether it was possible to find a sawmill with equipment that had the defining characteristics found on those bottom uprights of the ladder. It wasn’t necessarily a needle in a haystack, but it wasn’t Koehler’s expertise, either.
But it was Davis’s expertise. He was FPL’s expert on planing.
The Sixteenth Rail Page 10