He used a very oblique beam of light on the samples in a dark room to detect even the minutest of ridges. The biggest challenge with tracing the Ponderosa pine rungs was that there were more than a thousand mills in the West shipping the lumber to the East Coast. That was a large canvas, but one Koehler thought he could narrow down if he could determine the number of knives dressing the wood’s top and bottom. He already calculated there had been six cutting the side heads.
Koehler got permission from Lamb to cut a sliver off of Rung 2 so he could analyze it under the microscope. He found parallel slanting cuts at an angle of 21 degrees to the surface of the wood, made by exceedingly sharp knives and exactly one millimeter apart. He told Lamb that this was a “striking fact” that “would indicate strongly that the instrument was of foreign make, since we do not use the metric system much in this country.”
Further analysis led him to conclude that six knives had dressed the Ponderosa pine in the top, bottom, and side heads and that the lumber had traveled through the planer at the rate of 0.56 inch per revolution of the top and bottom cylinders. That meant if the speed of a planer’s cylinder was 2,700 rpm, then the speed of the lumber feed was 126 feet per minute.
Koehler sent another form letter to all the lumber dealers in the Bronx to see if they sold the Ponderosa pine in 1930–31 and, if so, where they had bought it from. He was looking in this case for 1x6-inch dressed stock.
By spring, not many retailers had answered Koehler’s letter. In fact, on March 20, 1934, only eighteen of the sixty-six retail lumber dealers he had queried had responded. He was having better luck with the wholesale dealers but still didn’t have answers from nearly a third of those questioned.
With Captain Lamb’s permission, he followed up with the companies, writing, “Perhaps you considered the matter of no vital significance, and for that reason we wish to state that the inquiry is in connection with a criminal investigation about which we cannot go into detail at present, except to say that we do not expect your firm or any wholesaler to be involved.”
He continued his checking, cross-checking, and rechecking of his samples and his measurements, but they still added up to just numbers and no suspects. As spring turned to summer, he sent the occasional update to Lamb about a mill that might have dressed the Ponderosa pine rungs or about three vertical marks on the right face of Rail 15 that apparently had been visible before the silver nitrate was applied for fingerprints.
He asked Schwarzkopf whether he should travel out west to visit the mills that might have provided the Ponderosa pine and the Douglas fir, but that trip was not authorized. By September, Koehler could only look at his map of the Bronx nailed to a piece of plywood and speculate.
Finn had done enough speculating over the last thirty months to know that he was tired of speculation. After getting New York 1934 license number 4 U 13-41 from gas station manager Walter Lyle, he called the state’s motor vehicle division and was advised that plate belonged to Bruno Richard Hauptmann, 1279 East 222nd Street, in the Bronx, for a 1931 Dodge sedan.
Hauptmann’s license described him as thirty-five years old, born on November 29, 1899, five-foot-ten, white, 180 pounds, with blue eyes and blond hair. Finn called Special Agent Sisk, who was at the New York office of the Bureau of Investigation with Lieutenant Keaten of the New Jersey State Police. The group met up and proceeded to East 222nd Street to begin surveillance of the home.
While Finn, Sisk, Keaten, NJSP Corporal William Horn, and Special Agent William F. Seery watched the house and the garage on one side, where he apparently parked his sedan, other agents immediately started digging into Hauptmann’s life. They discovered he had a wife, Anna, and a roughly one-year-old son. The family had lived there since 1931. Hauptmann appeared to be unemployed. Copies of his driver’s license and automobile registration were forwarded to the Bureau of Investigation laboratory to check against the ransom notes.
The Hauptmann home was the upstairs part of a two-story house in a predominantly German neighborhood. The Hauptmanns rented the flat, at the corner of East 222nd Street and Needham Avenue, which was a fairly unpopulated section.
The investigators decided to follow Hauptmann if he left the home for any reason. The original five on scene stayed on their shift from 4:00 pm until 9:00 pm that night, at which time two NYPD detectives and two NJSP troopers arrived in a Ford sedan. The second shift got out of the car and walked up and down Needham Avenue, directly in front of the Hauptmann home on several occasions, even peering into the garage at least once. In addition, they drove up and down East 222nd Street multiple times. At one point, a woman in the neighborhood came to the door with a dog and “sicced” the dog on the officers, causing quite the commotion. They were not the most subtle of detectives.
At 1:00 am on the morning of September 19, Finn and Keaten discontinued the surveillance until 7:00 am, as the officers at the scene had been stopped and questioned by precinct officers patrolling the neighborhood after a number of storekeepers and residents in the neighborhood complained, worried that a robbery was being planned. The surveillance team agreed to come back in the morning with a limited presence to avoid unwanted attention.
The federal agents, though, did not want to let the suspect out of their sights. Sisk instructed Seery to proceed to the nearest subway station as though he were heading home for the night but to return immediately to continue the surveillance. Sisk drove Keaten to his hotel and headed back to the surveillance location at 3:00 am.
The next morning, all the respective agencies violated their agreement to keep a low profile by bringing numerous men to the surveillance. Before it could be straightened out, they spotted a man fitting Hauptmann’s description leave the house at 8:55 am, head into the garage, and drive out in a Dodge sedan with New York plates 4 U 13-41.
Detectives from the New York City Police Department, agents from the Bureau of Justice, and troopers from the New Jersey State Police would stake out the house of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, at 1279 East 222nd Street in the Bronx after he bought gas with one of the ransom bills. A gas station attendant wrote down his license plate number. (Courtesy: Dr. Regis Miller/Forest Products Laboratory
The agents, troopers, and detectives scurried into their respective vehicles to pursue. While the plan had been to follow him to see if he passed any more ransom money, Finn noticed him driving fast and constantly looking in his rear-view mirror as if to elude pursuit. One of Finn’s officers pulled him over on Park Avenue between East 178th Street and East Tremont Avenue. Hauptmann was pulled out of his car and searched. Keaten pulled the wallet out of Hauptmann’s back left pocket and found a twenty-dollar gold certificate, serial number A-35517877-A.
“What is this about, what are they doing, what is it?” Hauptmann asked the police officers.
“It’s counterfeit money,” Sisk responded as Seery searched his booklet listing the serial numbers of the ransom bills. “Did you purchase gasoline at a gas station at the corner of Lexington Avenue and 127th Street a few days ago?”
“Yes.”
“Did you tell the attendant that you had a hundred more just like this twenty?”
“Yes, I said that,” Hauptmann said.
Seery took a while to search the list of ransom bills, but finally on page 77, he found a match.
The police handcuffed Hauptmann and took him back to his house for an initial search of the property.
The world and Arthur Koehler would soon learn what they found.
8
While police were arresting Bruno Richard Hauptmann, Special Agent Charles Appel was ensconced in the Bureau of Investigation’s crime laboratory. He had been there nearly every day since the summer of 1932, analyzing the handwriting from the thirteen ransom notes and comparing it to that of hundreds of suspects.
Like the others working the case, he’d had no luck finding the kidnapper.
But the balding, bookish, round-f
aced Appel knew from the beginning that science would help solve this case. Now he couldn’t wait to get a handwriting sample from the German carpenter.
Appel was born in the nation’s capital in 1895 and was a second lieutenant bombardier during World War I. Since joining the bureau in 1924 after going to law school at George Washington University, Appel had pushed for scientific detection in solving crimes, and his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, had encouraged him to pursue further studies.
He had taken classes in serology, toxicology, handwriting and typewriting analysis, and moulage (the making of casts, or impressions) at the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory at Northwestern University Law School. The facility had been established after the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago, when Al Capone’s gang murdered seven members of his rival Bugs Moran’s gang on February 14, 1929.
The crime so shocked one of the jurors in the case, a wealthy financier named Bert Massey, that he had bankrolled the creation of the lab at a cost of $125,000. Calvin H. Goddard, a New York forensic consultant, was hired to establish the facility. It was a challenge; forensic science was in its infancy, and Goddard later stated that many law enforcement officers were “quite satisfied with the ‘good old fashioned methods’” and would “turn up their noses at anything that savors of science.
“This being the first time that a really comprehensive attempt to combat crime in all its phases by scientific laboratory methods had been undertaken in the United States, we had no precedent to go upon—at least on this side of the water,” Goddard wrote in a 1930 American Journal of Police Science article.
In what is believed to be the first time science or medicine was used to solve a crime, a Chinese author wrote a book in 1248 describing how to distinguish drowning from strangulation. The first microscope would be developed roughly 350 years later, and a couple of centuries later, in the early nineteenth century, the first toxicology book was published.
Europeans were far more advanced in using forensic science to help solve crimes than Americans. Scotland Yard investigators used bullet comparisons to catch a murderer in 1835, and just a year later an English chemist became the first scientist to testify before a jury about toxicology results that concluded arsenic was present at a crime scene. The first police crime laboratory was established in 1910 by Edmond Locard in Lyon, France.
As the twentieth century began, the popularity of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective who solved crimes using logic and science, was skyrocketing on both sides of the Atlantic.
Hoover wanted his agents to be up to speed on the latest, most modern ways to outsmart the criminals. In 1930, he had sent numerous agents to a conference Goddard hosted, at which the Chicago coroner said simply, “The only way in which crime problems in our American cities can be successfully attacked is by the use of modern scientific methods of investigation.”
Rex Collier, a reporter for the Washington Daily News, was sold by Hoover on the new crime-fighting techniques and subsequently wrote on May 15, 1930, that the director was “progressive” and that his detectives were “ultra-modern” and were “being trained to out-Sherlock Sherlock Holmes.”
Appel had been building contacts with forensic scientists and exploring what it would take to open up a forensics facility at the bureau, but he hastened his efforts after the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. In two memos to Hoover in July of 1932, Appel encouraged the creation of a “criminological research laboratory” that would become “the central clearing house for all information which may be needed in the criminological work and that all police departments in the future will look to the Bureau for information of this kind as a routine thing.”
Hoover agreed and over the fall of 1932 set up Appel at the Old Southern Railway building in Room 802, a former break room for agents from the Identification Division. So, with stale cigarette smoke still apparent to those with a keen sense of smell, Appel went to work with his ultraviolet light machine, a kit to make molds of tool marks, a wiretapping kit, photographic supplies, chemicals, and a microscope on loan from Bausch & Lomb until the requisition to purchase one was approved.
He got a carpet from another unit, ordered custom cabinets to hold some of the new equipment, and began immediately to look at the Lindbergh ransom notes. It wasn’t the only case Appel was working on. The first year of the Criminological Laboratory, he and his staff performed 963 examinations.
The following year, Appel was joined by an expert in chemical analysis, Samuel F. Pickering, and the lab was renamed the Technical Laboratory. At Hoover’s urging, Appel was writing a manual called Scientific Aids in Crime Detection. While Hoover realized the scope of work Appel was undertaking, the director nevertheless wrote to an aide, “I fear we will all be dead of old age before Rip Van Winkle gets this done.”
Appel completed the guide in the spring of 1934, moved the lab to the Department of Justice Building, and by fall had been joined by two more special agents. Appel would continue to focus on handwriting analysis and ballistics research. His new staff would pursue fingerprint technology, blood grouping, and infrared research.
Wood science, and even more generally botany, or the study of plants, were not on the list. Those were two fields of study reserved for the marble buildings of America’s universities, not its police stations. The nexus of the two wasn’t widely understood. Indeed, even Sherlock Holmes wasn’t considered an expert in botany. When extolling his virtues and chronicling his knowledge in A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes’s confidante, Dr. Watson, also listed his friend’s limits, describing his friend’s knowledge of botany as “Variable. Well up in belladonna, opiums, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening.” No, not even the world’s most famous fictional detective solved crimes using wood identification or wood technology.
Koehler wasn’t much of a reader, let alone of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. When he had free time, as rare as that was, he preferred to spend it in his own basement, at his own workbench, and with his own tools. In addition to a full complement of carpenters’ hand tools, he used a “buzz saw” (table saw), jointer (for planing one surface smooth), drill press, and band saw, all mounted with their motors on two stands. This was his headquarters for home improvements and repairs, and for the creation of the occasional family gift. By the fall of 1934, though, he spent less time at his passion and more time as an avid consumer of news—whatever he could find related to Hauptmann.
While he had received regular and prompt replies from Schwarzkopf and Lamb in the past, the duo had gone silent, not responding immediately to his note of Friday, September 21, encouraging them to keep a look out for any lumber at Hauptmann’s home that might have been used to create Rail 16. He had also suggested a securing of any tools found at the home of the suspect.
He didn’t hear back because the investigators were busy pursuing other angles. His Friday Wisconsin State Journal explained that detectives had found a significant amount of the ransom money. Detective Sergeant John Wallace was dispatched by Schwarzkopf himself “to make a search of the Hauptmann residence for any ransom money that may be hidden.”
Wallace was joined on September 20, the day after Hauptmann was arrested, by three other NJSP troopers, three NYPD detectives, and a Bureau of Investigation agent. After finding nothing in the house, they brought Anna Hauptmann out to the garage, where she advised that “no one else had excess [sic] to the garage.”
At 11:40, they found “two packages of gold certificates on the south wall of the garage concealed in a compartment between the second and third upright from the rear end of the garage. These two packages contained 183 gold certificates to the amount of $1850.00 which was wrapped in a New York Daily News newspaper of June 25, 1934 and New York Daily Mirror of Sept. 6, 1934 (the certificates found were 10 dollar denomination).”
They counted the money in Mrs. Hauptmann’s presence and then resumed the search.
They would
soon discover even more money.
[NYPD] Detective Murphy found on the south wall underneath the work bench and window a can concealed by a board nailed across the uprights, the said can was supported by two nails driven into the wall to prevent the gallon can (shellac can) from falling to the floor. On examining the can it was found that same can was cut open at the top and on opening the can there was a towel and a large cloth concealing the money in the can. Further examination of the can proved that there were 12 packages of 10 and 20 dollar gold certificates wrapped in both the New York Daily News and Daily Mirror of June 25, 1934 and September 6, 1934. A count of the gold certificates amounted to $11,950.00, making the total amount of bills found $13,750.00.
The authorities back at headquarters advised them to bring in Anna Hauptmann for questioning. She would later be released from custody and taken out to dinner by detectives as they tried to get information from her about her husband. While there, reporters heard patrons at the restaurant insult her and others scream, “Stone her! Hang her!”
She was “spirited out the back way,” the UPI reported.
While in the garage—and this was not reported by the newspapers—Wallace also “found a large wooden plane with the blade nicked on the east end of the garage and same was taken by the investigator and kept in his possession and later tagged to be held as evidence, as it was believed that this plane may have been used in the construction of the ladder found at the Lindbergh residence on March 1, 1932.”
Meanwhile, Bruno Richard Hauptmann was being held in a cell with a throng of curious onlookers standing outside the Greenwich Street Police Station in New York City trying to get any information about where the case was headed. John F. “Jafsie” Condon was brought in to look at a lineup of twenty men, including Hauptmann, to see if he was “Cemetery John,” the man to whom Condon had given the ransom money more than two years earlier.
The Sixteenth Rail Page 16