The Sixteenth Rail

by Adam Schrager

  “The package you were expecting came yesterday,” Dorn told his visitor.

  Koehler opened it in front of them to display a piece of wood that he explained was part of an instrument used in the crime of the century. Dorn and Rush looked at it carefully as Koehler explained in specific detail why he had arrived, hat in hand and hope in heart. He showed them the eight-knife and six-knife planer marks on the ladder rail and the spacing between them that matched the samples from their mill.

  They nodded their heads before he explained the key factor missing between the samples and the ladder upright. There were those shallow intermittent grooves, or indentations, on the kidnap ladder rail and nothing similar on either set of Dorn samples.

  “It awakened no special recollections,” Koehler would later write, “apart from the general recognition that it might have come from there.”

  The men decided to sift through old lumber around the yard to see if they could find any similarities. To the naked eye, they found scraps that matched both the slower and faster variations in the rate they were dressed, but no detectable grooves on any stock.

  It was unlike any mill Koehler had studied, and he didn’t understand it, but Dorn did.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said. “The largest feed drive pulley that came with our planer gave us too fast a feed, and the next smaller one gave us too slow a feed for much of stock. So, we bought a pulley of intermediate size from a hardware merchant over here in Augusta, Georgia. That pulley was not standard equipment, but we have used it quite often, and if the ladder uprights were dressed with it, that would explain the matter.”

  They’d bought the third pulley in August 1929, six months after buying the standard planer and matcher from S. A. Woods.

  The men decided to test things out right there. Rush asked the others to stand back and proceeded to dress three separate pieces of 1x4-inch North Carolina pine. One was treated on the largest pulley, another on the smallest, and the third on the intermediate, nonstandard equipment.

  They held up each next to the kidnap ladder sample. The first showed marks that were spaced farther apart than those on the ladder rail. The largest pulley went too fast to have dressed the lumber. The second showed marks too close to one another. The third could not have made Koehler happier.

  “Sure enough, the planer feed, when driven by the pulley obtained in Augusta, gave exactly the same spacing of planer marks on the edges and sides as were on the ladder!” he later wrote. Because the “pulley was not obtained from the manufacturer of the planer . . . therefore, it is unlikely that another machine would have the same sized pulley, even if the machine were otherwise the same.”

  Thus, he concluded, “That left practically no doubt that the mill that dressed the uprights of the bottom section of the ladder had been located.”

  As for the grooves, or indentations, Koehler deduced that those went away when the knives were sharpened. “Here today and gone tomorrow” is how he described them.

  Rush told the men he usually dressed ten to twelve carloads of lumber before resharpening the top and bottom knives, and anywhere from twenty-five to thirty cars before resharpening the side heads. That was provided he didn’t hit a nail or break a blade in the process.

  J. J. Dorn owned the mill with his brother. A pulley they bought from a local hardware shop dressed the lumber that made up Rails 12 and 13. Their detailed sales records also significantly helped Koehler’s research. (Courtesy: Dr. Regis Miller/Forest Products Laboratory)

  They moved to the office and turned their attention from wood to a wood product: paper. Now that he had a time frame, Koehler needed sales records. He knew the rails had been dressed by that intermediate pulley, which the Dorns had purchased in September 1929. He decided to cast a broad net and asked Dorn to provide records for any North Carolina pine dressed and sold between August 1929 and March 1, 1932, the date of the kidnapping.

  Koehler felt a jolt of energy. The investigation had life. The “wild goose chase” would continue. Even if it remained a challenge, to say the least, the North Carolina pine tree that had produced the wood in Rails 12 and 13 had come from McCormick.

  The men pored over the company’s sales account sheets covering that thirty-month time frame. Under the heading “Manufacturers of building material, rough and dressed lumber, North Caroline Pine roofers a specialty,” they found numerous handwritten entries of lumber being shipped all over the eastern seaboard. Dorn sold to wholesale dealers, the lumber loaded on cars run by the Charleston and Western Carolina Railroad Company. There were records of wood sold and sent to Connecticut; Maryland; New York City; Norfolk, Virginia; Philadelphia; Trenton, New Jersey; Staten Island; Massachusetts; and other places on the East Coast.

  Dorn’s records indicated date sent, destination, dealer to whom shipped, car initials, car numbers, board feet in question, and the width of the lumber shipped.

  Koehler smiled. Dorn was a man with an attention to detail, like himself. He gathered up the records, thanked his hosts profusely, and took the bus back to Calhoun Falls to board a train to Trenton. It was time to brief Schwarzkopf, Lamb, and the others.

  On the way, he crafted another letter to be signed by the colonel to send to the places the forty-six carloads of 1x4-inch North Carolina pine had been shipped. He chose to focus on those lumber buyers north of the Potomac River right off the bat, figuring wood of this quality was so common, it likely had not been transported a long distance before being used in the crime. He arrived in Trenton at 2:45 pm on November 9.

  “We are trying to locate the place where some 1x4” North Carolina pine lumber was obtained and used in connection with a crime,” his note read. “It is definitely established that the lumber was dressed by the M. G. & J. J. Dorn Company, McCormick, South Carolina. Their records show the following destinations for dressed 1x4" stock purchased by you. Please let us know as soon as possible the names of the respective firms to whom the lumber was shipped so that we can contact with the firms directly in tracing the lumber.

  “We are interested only in shipments over the period given, and only in 1x4" stock dressed to ¾ inch thickness and 3-¾ inches width.”

  The original measurements of Rails 12 and 13 were closer to 3⅝ inches wide than 3¾ inches. In fact, one end was just 1/32 of an inch shy of 3⅝ inches wide.

  Initially, he had wondered whether they had been dressed to the thinner width, or if they had been dressed to the wider width and had simply shrunk over time. From his experience at the lab, he knew that some types of wood shrink excessively along the grain, while in other, more normal wood, the “longitudinal shrinkage is negligible.”

  He deduced that the wood had shrunk after manufacture, and since one was still a trifle wider than 3⅝, both must have been 3¾ inches wide at the time of dressing. That would help, as there were eighteen carloads of lumber shipped north that had been dressed at 3⅝ inches wide. They could now be eliminated from the search.

  Schwarzkopf, who had charged his expert with the directive “that nothing will be omitted,” assigned Detective Lewis Bornmann to continue his work with Koehler. The two men were once again tasked with traveling around the area to find lumber from South Carolina with the missing grooves.

  “The temporary character of the blade defect causing the chip marks made that slight grooved pattern seem a really priceless indicator to guide us to perhaps a single shipment and locality,” Koehler later told a reporter. “But inasmuch as the shipments began more than two years before the kidnapping and this hunt was beginning a year and a half after that event, the trail was cold enough. Still, it was a trail.”

  The day after arriving back in New Jersey, he and Bornmann were on that trail. Eighteen of the shipments in question had gone to that state (fourteen to Manville and four to Trenton), to two factories.

  The rest of the shipments would not be in such close proximity to Troop C Headquarters. On Novembe
r 16, the two men left New Jersey, and for the next week and a half put a significant number of miles on the squad car. They started in New York City, where eleven of the shipments had been sent, six to Brooklyn and five to Manhattan. First, they visited the National Lumber and Millwork Company, which had received a shipment of 1x4-inch lumber from the Dorn mill in November 1931. National said it didn’t have any left and that starting in spring 1930 its sales had been cash only—with the Depression raging, every dime was vital to the business’s survival. Further, the wood could have gone to any of National’s five-hundred-plus customers who bought in small lots.

  Later that day, Koehler and Bornmann headed up to Poughkeepsie, New York, to visit a firm that had received a Dorn shipment in October 1931. A sample taken from a 1x6-inch board found at the J. S. Keathing yard showed the familiar planer marks, but records showed the company didn’t get 1x4-inch wood from South Carolina until after the kidnapping in March 1932.

  From there they went to Germantown, New York, to the Leland L. Crawford Lumber Company, which had received a McCormick shipment on November 6, 1931. They did not have any of their stock remaining.

  The Fishkill Landing Lumber Company in Beacon, New York, had two pieces left from the carload they had unloaded in September 1930. It showed the characteristic planer marks of Dorn’s machine, but not the defect on the edge.

  Next up was the Cornell-Haverland Company in Pleasantville, New York, where Koehler and Bornmann were told the company “had none of the stock on hand since common lumber is like sugar in a grocery store in that it sells if nothing else does.”

  They stayed the night in New York City and visited four companies the next day only to be told none of the Dorn stock was still on hand. There was little evidence at any of the four as to where it had gone.

  A company in Stamford, Connecticut, had received more than eight thousand board feet of the North Carolina pine from the Dorn mill in August 1931. Nothing to see there. Koehler and Bornmann moved on to New Haven and the Lampson Lumber Company, which did have around a quarter of the carload it had received on September 17, 1931. The planer marks were evident, but the defect on the edge was not.

  Still, this wood did show a narrow intermittent indentation produced by a defect in one of the knives. It was narrower and closer to the edge than on the kidnap ladder rails, but it was worth checking out. The plant manager sent them to a nearby house where some of the shipment had been sold. With a light on an extension cord, they could see the faces and edges of the lumber used for shingle lath. The marks were identical with the marks on the lumber still in the yard. As Koehler would write in his field reports, that showed “that a defect in one of the planer knives may persist through perhaps a whole carload and undoubtedly through many thousand board feet before it is remedied by resharpening.”

  After hitting another dead end at another New Haven yard, Koehler and Bornmann went on to a Boston firm that had received 18,597 board feet from the Dorn facility in June 1931. The company had been liquidated and had practically no lumber on hand. Three other stops in Boston also led to nothing.

  From there they drove to Springfield, Massachusetts, and for the first time encountered some resistance when a local company didn’t want to answer their questions. Finally they got through to the manager who, after they explained what they were doing, put the full resources of the company at their disposal, even though he was “certain none of the lumber was now in [his] yard.”

  They spent the next day, November 24, tracing where the Springfield company had sold the lumber. They stopped at a Miss La Brie’s apartment and were told the stock was under wall board and no longer visible. They found some stock at the unfinished home built by J. A. Garneau, nailed to the base of the studding and in the garage. Leo De Blois, a contractor in the Springfield suburb of Longmeadow, had used 1,900 feet of the 1x4-inch North Carolina pine for shingle lath. A. R. Cuzzane lived nearby and had used the 1x4-inch lumber under his shingles. It was visible to a light on an extension cord.

  After measuring some of these samples, Koehler ruled out the Springfield yard as the source. He saw the general irregular planing marks, but no edge defect, so the two men were on their way back to Connecticut before the day was over. One lumber yard had no samples left, and another had gone out of business two years earlier.

  They went back to New York City, where they stopped at a yard in Brooklyn. A fire a week after the kidnapping had destroyed much of the lumber and all the sales records. A nearby lumber company had some of the scorched remnants of lumber, but after two hours of wandering around the yard, Koehler and Bornmann found none matching that from the Dorn mill.

  Their search had yielded lumber dressed on the fastest pulley in South Carolina, but none with the planer defect on the edge. They had traced the lumber from the yard to homes, hen coops, dog kennels, attics, and basements, but came up empty. The following week they planned to head to lumber yards in Baltimore and Philadelphia, both of which had received a shipment of the 1x4 North Carolina pine.

  After taking Sunday, November 26, off, they were back in New York City, this time at the Queens County Lumber Company, which had received a shipment from McCormick on December 3, 1931. All the company had left was around fifty pieces that it had used to build small bins for storage of lumber and molding in the yard.

  Koehler didn’t tell the dealer what he was after, only that he was trying to trace some lumber used in connection with a crime. The dealer said to him, “You got a hopeless task. They tried to trace the lumber in the ladder used for kidnapping the Lindbergh baby and did not succeed.”

  One look led Koehler to believe he would prove that dealer and every other doubter wrong.

  “I got it! I got it!” he wrote to his wife, Ethelyn, immediately after getting back to the Hotel Lincoln in Manhattan around noon. He went on,

  I found the lumber yard that handled the particular shipment of lumber from which part of the ladder was made. It is located in Brooklyn. That lumber, you remember, showed a defect in the planing of one edge and this yard still had some lumber on hand with that same defect in it. Since that defect is due to a dull knife it would be removed in the next sharpening which was every ½ to 2 days and therefore, it is impossible that it would also show up in the next shipment of 1x4 stock which was made 25 days later . . .

  Considering the seeming impossible success that we had so far it ought to be possible to finish the job.

  He concluded by asking Ethelyn to “Keep it quiet, for if reporters there or anywhere got a hold of it, there would be a stampede.”

  Two days later, the night before Thanksgiving, he wrote to his wife again, from the Hotel Hildebrecht in Trenton. This time, he was less self-congratulatory.

  “Well, I was all wet in what I wrote Monday, but I am dry again,” he started.

  Although I was sure that the defect in the planing of one edge of the lumber we found in Brooklyn was the same as on the ladder, that lumber was dressed at a faster speed as I could see by the width of the planer marks. Of course they had only a little left in the yard and knowing that it is a simple matter to change the speed, I thought that some of that shipment might have been dressed at a slower feed. So I asked the lumber dealer if he knew where some of the lumber went to. He said the first half of the carload all went into some 2-family flats in the Bronx and the rest went to miscellaneous places.

  He explained how he and Bornmann tracked down the contractor who built the homes. Even though most of the wood would have been used in subfloors, they had gone to visit the site anyhow to see if there were any scraps used around basements. The contractor “seemed to know the occupants and walked right into the basements except one which was locked.” They found no 1x4 pine. Koehler told the contractor they were very eager to see some of the lumber, so he took out a skeleton key and said, “I try this” and proceeded to go into the locked basement, where they found 1x4 pine that matched what they’d found a
t the yard.

  “That wasn’t so good,” he wrote to his wife, “for now I wasn’t so sure that the ladder came from the Brooklyn yard, and my enthusiasm curve took an abrupt drop. I had also noticed that the planing defect on the lumber was not as close to the corner of the edge as on the ladder. Evidently, they had removed the cutter head and put it back on between the time the ladder rail was dressed and the Brooklyn shipment was dressed—at least as much as we saw of it.”

  “Und dann ging mir ein Licht auf!” he wrote in German. Ethelyn, who had taken eight German courses in college, knew what he was saying, roughly: “And then, a light went on.”

  However frustrated he was by coming so close at the Queens County Lumber Company, Koehler was so close. He had traveled two thousand miles and figured he was “hot at last” in his quest.

  “Perhaps the previous shipment would also show the defect,” he speculated before quickly digressing, “Oh, if I hadn’t been to McCormick and learned all about their practices how could I have managed?

  “Now the previous shipment of 1x4 was made 10 days earlier to the Bronx—I have a complete list of their shipments. Ordinarily, they should have re-sharpened their knives several times . . . for they were dressing a carload a day.”

  Koehler and Bornmann decided to focus on the previous shipment, dated November 24, 1931, on the itemized sales sheets they had from the Dorn mill. The latter one happened twenty days later to Youngsville, Pennsylvania, and dressed wood ⅛ inch narrower than the stock they were looking for. They figured they could rule that out and head to the Bronx.

  As he continued in his letter written the night before Thanksgiving to Ethelyn, they went again to the Bronx to visit the National Lumber and Millwork Company, which had received that previous shipment.

  We had been there once before, before we went to New England, for it seemed like a likely spot and their lumber from McCormick came in about 2½ months before the kidnapping. He had told us then that he had none of the lumber left—that was nearly two years ago since he got it and he said so again today. But we had learned by this time that lumber dealers don’t always know their own business so we asked him if we could go in the yard and look around.