The Sixteenth Rail

by Adam Schrager

  As for the New York police and the Bureau of Investigation, they didn’t even know Koehler existed in this case, since his involvement had been kept secret by Schwarzkopf and his associates, who were worried those agencies would steal the limelight from whatever, if anything, he might discover.

  Maybe on the morning of September 25, when Lamb first spoke to Bornmann about heading out to Hauptmann’s home, he had told him specifically about Koehler’s letter of a few days earlier, imploring them to keep an eye out for Rail 16 or, more specifically, advising them that a “board may have been taken from a local structure accessible to the maker of the ladder.” What Bornmann found certainly qualified under that description.

  “No one else looked for it except me,” Bornmann later said in a television interview on the case. “I was interested in the wood from the beginning.”

  When Bornmann reported back to Lamb about what he and Tobin had found, the next step was obvious.

  Schwarzkopf sent an urgent telegram to Winslow at the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison requesting Arthur Koehler immediately return to New Jersey to help with the case. Winslow sent his response at 5:19 pm central time, spelling his own name wrong in his haste: “Koehler will join you Trenton Friday morning. CP Winspow”

  Hauptmann had many planer blades in his garage. Koehler would conclude that one of those blades was used on the 16th Rail as well as the ladder’s rungs, linking Hauptmann to the construction of the kidnap instrument. (Courtesy: Dr. Regis Miller/Forest Products Laboratory)

  Koehler arrived once again at the Trenton Rail Station, on September 28, nine days after Hauptmann had been arrested. This time he didn’t immediately go to the State Patrol Training School in West Trenton, where he had done all of his previous work on the case. Instead, he was brought to NJSP departmental headquarters in Trenton, located across from the State Capitol, which faced the Delaware River to the west. As Koehler approached the headquarters, he could see a pack of reporters. Schwarzkopf saw Koehler’s visit as an opportunity to get positive press for his agency. The NYPD and Hoover at the bureau had reporters seemingly on retainer to write their view of the case, and the colonel wanted to show the world that the NJSP had been active throughout the investigation and had a scientist on retainer whose work would rival any detective’s. The press had already been briefed about his arrival and about his role in the investigation, specifically about his work tracing Rails 12 and 13 to the National Lumber and Millwork facility in the Bronx.

  After answering all of their questions, it was time for Koehler to get to work. He was transported back to his old stomping grounds, Troop C Headquarters, to examine first the southern yellow pine that Bornmann had picked up inside Hauptmann’s garage.

  He could see immediately that the boards weren’t the shape of the lumber in the ladder. “Furthermore,” he wrote in his report, “this lumber went through a planer with 8 knives in the top and bottom heads at the rate of 0.52" per revolution of the heads which is different than any lumber used in the ladder.”

  The next day, he gladly suffered the media once more, this time “posing for three different moving picture outfits,” before trying out the planes found inside Hauptmann’s garage. They had been brought in the day before with the rest of Hauptmann’s tools to Koehler’s temporary work space/laboratory.

  He fixed a board of pine in a workbench vise. Then he picked up Hauptmann’s biggest plane. The workshop was soon filled with the sounds of blade cutting wood.

  It was “a shriek of accusation,” he’d later say, “the complete betrayal of the author of the ladder.”

  His initial examination proved fruitful. “The largest plane, which has a knife 2-½" wide, has numerous nicks in the blade which make marks exactly like those on the pine rungs and rail 16. There is no question but what the rungs and rail were planed with that plane. It had not been sharpened or dulled further since then,” he wrote in his September 29 report.

  Over the next three days, Koehler itemized, measured, and remeasured all of the tools found in Hauptmann’s home and inside his garage. The accused had six planes in addition to the one Koehler believed had been used to fashion Rail 16 and the rungs in the kidnap ladder. The planes contained knives ranging from ¾ inch to the 2½-inch knife in the particular plane that drew his attention.

  Hauptmann had wood bits, steel drills, hammers, multiple screwdrivers, and eight different saws (crosscut, rip, circle, and keyhole) with different size blades. Of particular interest were the nails. The four in the package found by Bornmann when he went through the garage on September 26 had a “P on the shank like the nails in the ladder.” But more tellingly to Koehler, “the cut nails taken from the attic and garage fit the holes in rail #16 exactly, which indicates that the board probably was removed from some of Hauptmann’s previous work either for others or for himself.”

  Some of the tools found in Hauptmann’s garage. The accused was an unemployed carpenter at the time of his arrest. (Courtesy: Dr. Regis Miller/Forest Products Laboratory)

  Koehler looked at the fifteen pieces of lumber brought in from Hauptmann’s garage and cellar, each labeled with a letter of the alphabet. Some of it was the North Carolina pine apparent in the kidnap ladder. Unfortunately for the investigation, most of it had “no apparent connection with the ladder.” When it came to sample “O,” a triangular bracket found holding up a shelf in the garage, the knife cuts were “nearly the same as on rail #16.” Further, “The back edge was planed with a hand plane which made marks exactly like those on rail 16 and the pine rungs.”

  He also looked at a cigar box marked “Found by Detective Horn in closet in hall.” The NYPD envelope in the box held nails, screws, tacks, and keys. Of the six 8-penny nails in the envelope, Koehler found three to have a P on the shank. Another envelope labeled “Nails, (Det.) Petrosino (Bag in Garage)” held another twenty-two 8-penny common nails with a P on their shank.

  Interestingly to Koehler, the cigar box also contained a set of chisels. Aside from the ladder, a ¾-inch chisel was the only physical evidence found at the Lindbergh estate the night of the kidnapping. But “no chisel ¾" or 1" wide was found in the cigar box or tool chest, although the second recess from the bottom up in rail #16 of the ladder shows that a ¾" chisel was used in cutting out the recess,” he wrote in his report. This was a different conclusion from his very first report on the ladder back in March 1933, when he had written that it wasn’t possible to determine the width of the chisel used in the crime.

  There was a ¾-inch and a ⅜-inch cold chisel among Hauptmann’s tools, but the cold chisels were made of tempered steel and were used to cut “cold metals,” not wood.

  After chronicling the items brought to his laboratory, it was time to put some of the tools to work, specifically the saws. In order for Koehler to determine the width of the cuts of the blades in the saws, it was important to use them to cut pine and fir boards similar to those used in the ladder. To the uneducated, the measurements of the saw’s knives should have been enough to determine the width of the cuts they’d make, but Koehler knew better than to take that for granted.

  From the beginning, Koehler told Schwarzkopf that the ladder showed poor design and workmanship and that he did not believe its maker to be a “high-grade” carpenter. (Courtesy: Dr. Regis Miller/Forest Products Laboratory)

  In his investigation of the kidnap ladder, he had measured cuts that had been made too deep in the ladder rails and not completely mortised out, 0.033 inch and 0.034 inch in width. Now his goal was to use each of the saws to see if anything matched. The crosscut saws were for cutting across the grain of wood, while the ripsaws were for ripping or cutting with the grain.

  He tried the relatively new Disston ripsaw with the 25½-inch blade first. The condition of the saw’s teeth was good, but it cut the pine to a width of 0.043 inch and the fir to a width of 0.045 inch. That was close, but in Koehler’s world, a difference of 0.010 was too much
to prove anything.

  The next three biggest saws all cut the pine and fir to widths between 0.045 and 0.057, so he ruled them out.

  Next he shifted to an Atkins crosscut saw with a 22-inch blade. Its teeth were dull, but it cut both the pine and fir to a width of 0.035 inch. Another Disston crosscut saw with a 16-inch blade was also pretty new. Its tip was bent, but the condition of its teeth was good. It cut both boards to a width of 0.033 inch.

  “This shows,” he concluded, “that Hauptmann had two saws with which the cuts might have been made.”

  He then segued to “parallel, shallow, [and] oblique cuts” that were found on Rungs 1, 2, and 4. Three independent measurements determined they had been made by an 11-point saw of which Hauptmann had two: maybe not coincidentally the Atkins crosscut with a 22-inch blade and the Disston crosscut saw with the 16-inch blade.

  “The marks evidently were made by drawing the side of the board across the side of the saw or vice versa,” Koehler wrote. “The saw must have been very sharp, judging by the feather-edged cuts and a microscopic examination of cross sections of the cuts. It is highly probable, therefore, that if one of the two 11-point saws in Hauptmann’s tool chest was used in constructing the ladder, it was the shorter (16") saw because it still has sharp teeth while the other one is dull. This saw also appears relative new. Why Hauptmann got a new, short 11 point saw when he already had one equally fine although 6" longer is an open question.”

  Koehler theorized in his report to Lamb and Schwarzkopf that the shorter saw may have been specially purchased to make the ladder away from Hauptmann’s garage. The shorter saw was easily transportable, in a suitcase, for example. With it, a plane, a ¾-inch auger and brace, chisel, hammer, and clamp, one could make a ladder. He mentioned that Rails 14 and 15 clearly had been clamped together because “the saw cuts match perfectly as to spacing, direction and depth.”

  There were no marks on either rails or rungs to indicate they had been cinched into either a vise or clamp, but one of the clamps found in Hauptmann’s garage was a wooden carpenter’s clamp that Koehler figured “would leave no mark.”

  However, that led to another unanswered question: “If Hauptmann made the ladder away from home why did he use the largest plane he had when the next smaller one might have done just as well,” he wondered.

  Possibly the ripping and planing were done in Hauptmann’s garage but the notching of the rails and cross cutting the rungs to proper length (which would be a give away if someone had noticed it and remembered it later) together with the ladder assembly were carried out elsewhere.

  It seems logical that some secluded spot outside of the residential district where the ladder could be assembled full length and tried out without being seen would be chosen for that purpose. That would also explain why the hand plane marks on the side of the ladder, which undoubtedly were made when it was found that the top section fitted too tightly with the middle one, do not match with the plane marks on the edges or with any made by Hauptmann’s planes. Did Hauptmann take a smaller plane along, which was later resharpened or did someone else furnish the plane?

  New Jersey authorities, specifically Attorney General David Wilentz, were beyond the point of speculation. They didn’t want conjecture, they wanted a conviction, and to get it they would need concrete evidence to extradite Hauptmann to New Jersey on murder charges. And they weren’t the only ones. The country demanded justice and the dozen or so years in prison that Hauptmann was facing as a result of the New York extortion charges was simply not enough.

  Wilentz knew that under New Jersey law only a killing committed during a burglary, robbery, arson, or what was called a “straight law” felony would result in a punishment of either life in prison or death. Kidnapping was not one of those types of felonies in the New Jersey statues. In other words, if the murder indictment was based on a kidnapping charge, the death penalty would not be possible. So prosecutors resolved to call the kidnapping a burglary, so they would be in a position to ask for the death penalty even if the jury determined Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. had been killed accidentally in the commission of the crime.

  They found themselves in a hurry to get their evidence ready, as a judge in the Bronx did not want to wait for the New Jersey authorities to build their case. He had ordered the convening of a panel of 150 people to serve as a jury pool in an extortion trial against Hauptmann to begin on October 11, less than a month after he was arrested.

  “I am convinced that the Bronx case against Hauptmann will result in a conviction,” Bronx District Attorney Samuel J. Foley told reporters, including one from the Associated Press, on October 6. He had been telling the media for the last week that he was in perfect concert with New Jersey authorities on how to proceed, but in this weekend briefing he “would not say, however, whether the case would be adjourned to permit the German carpenter’s extradition to New Jersey.”

  Wilentz, meanwhile, was rushing to get together material to present a murder case against Hauptmann to a grand jury on Monday, October 8, at the Hunterdon County Courthouse in Flemington, New Jersey, near where the Lindbergh estate was located and thus where the crime was committed.

  Wilentz had been appointed New Jersey’s top law enforcement official, even though the case he hoped to prosecute would be his first ever in criminal court. He was born in Latvia at the end of the nineteenth century and immigrated to the United States with his parents around 1900. He lived the quintessential American success story, graduating from public school, working at a local newspaper after college, coaching a local basketball team, and traveling to Manhattan at night to attend New York University Law School.

  He enlisted in the army during World War I as a private, and at the end of the war he was a lieutenant. That was when he completed law school, opened up his own law firm, and became active in Democratic politics.

  Wilentz was described by a New York Times reporter covering the trial as a “short, wiry man [who] dressed nattily and spoke with a sharp, satirical tongue.”

  Koehler found himself on the other end of that tongue that first weekend of October as the attorney general wanted to know what the scientist could testify to in front of the grand jury. Could he say Hauptmann built the ladder? Could he prove that fact?

  Not yet, said Koehler, but he could speak to the tracing of the wood in Rails 12 and 13 back to the National Lumber and Millwork Company, and considering the fact Hauptmann used to work there, that was compelling. He could discuss how the nails taken from the board in Hauptmann’s attic fit perfectly into the holes in Rail Number 16.

  But maybe the best piece of evidence Koehler could provide was his conclusion that the largest plane found at Hauptmann’s, the Disston with the knife 2½ inches wide, had numerous nicks in the blade that made marks exactly like those on the pine rungs and Rail 16.

  “There is no question,” he told Wilentz, “the rungs and rail were planed with that plane.”

  First thing Monday morning, Koehler put on his best dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie and glanced at the front page of the local paper, with its blaring headline of the impending murder indictment being sought by New Jersey prosecutors. He had been told by prosecutors that the courtroom would be full because “all the grand jury people are telling their friends not to miss the wood expert.”

  Koehler held in his hand an official subpoena to testify. So did Colonel Lindbergh, Bureau of Investigation agents, New York police detectives, eyewitnesses, and other experts. When Koehler arrived at the historic Hunterdon County Courthouse in Flemington, New Jersey, a crowd of two hundred or more were waiting on the steps and milling about the lawn. They had been there since an hour before the grand jurors arrived, but not before numerous cameras had been set up on the courthouse portico.

  The twenty-three grand jurors, twenty men and three women, posed for pictures for nearly twenty minutes before filing into the courthouse. Those who entered seventy-one-year-old Ju
stice Thomas Whitaker Trenchard’s courtroom were about to hear evidence unlike any in the peaceful county’s 149-year history.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the Grand Jury,” Justice Trenchard began with his instructions,

  you have been convened today at the United request of the Attorney General of the State of New Jersey and of the Prosecutor of the Place of this County.

  Their purpose is to lay before you evidence they state tends to show that one Hauptmann murdered Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. in this County on March 1, 1932.

  The State’s representatives definitely state to the Court that they will ask you to return only an indictment for murder at the present time.

  They have stated to the Court that the evidence to be presented will tend to show that Hauptmann, the accused in this county, in the course of a burglary of the dwelling house of Colonel Lindbergh done for the purpose of committing a battery upon and stealing the infant son, Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. and its clothing, caused such child to be stricken and injured as a result of which he died; or that, in any event the evidence will show that the child was killed as the result of a blow or stroke closely connected with the burglary and which was inflicted by the accused in this County.

  After stating “the pertinent principles of law” for the grand jurors, Trenchard continued,

  If, then, the evidence presented to you in the Grand Jury room reasonably tends to show that the child was feloniously stricken in Hunterdon County by Hauptmann and afterwards died as a result thereof, and that the stroke causing death was inflicted in pursuance of the perpetration of a burglary and had an intimate and close connection therewith and was naturally consequent thereto, you should find an indictment for murder, regardless of whether the stroke and injury was accidentally or was intentionally inflicted.