But even if you should not find that the stroke which resulted in death was inflicted in the perpetration of a burglary, if you nevertheless find that the evidence presented to you in the Grand Jury room reasonably tends to show that the stroke which caused death was caused or delivered by the accused in Hunterdon County with intent to do serious bodily harm to the child while the accused was carrying away the stolen child and its clothing, you should return an indictment for murder.
If you return an indictment for murder, the grade or degree of the crime will be determined by the trial jury, if they find the accused guilty.
You may now retire and proceed with consideration of the matter at your convenience.
At 10:30 am, the grand jurors proceeded into the grand jury room to hear the evidence presented by Wilentz and Hunterdon County Prosecutor Anthony Hauck. Dr. Charles H. Mitchell, the neighboring Mercer County physician, who performed the autopsy on the baby boy, was the first witness to testify. He told the grand jurors the baby’s death was caused by a “blow to the head.”
Next, two handwriting witnesses shared their common belief that the writing on the ransom notes matched the writing that Hauptmann had provided on the forms to register his car.
By that time, several hundred people were outside the courthouse waiting for Lindbergh. His car arrived at 11:30 in a convoy with three New Jersey state troopers on motorcycles. Dressed in a gray suit, blue shirt and tie, and brown shoes, Lindbergh was greeted by Schwarzkopf and Hunterdon County Sheriff John H. Curtiss, and they walked through the crowd on a path carved out by other troopers and entered the courthouse.
Lindbergh waited just a few minutes in the grand jury’s anteroom before being called in. His testimony took only six minutes, but in that time he identified the original ransom note, a photo of his son’s body when it was discovered two and a half months after he disappeared, and most importantly for the purposes of the case, the voice of Bruno Hauptmann as the one he had heard from afar when Condon paid the $50,000 ransom to the kidnappers.
Roughly fifteen minutes after he arrived, Lindbergh departed. A flurry of eyewitnesses followed his testimony, placing Hauptmann with ransom money, with the ladder, and in the vicinity of the Lindbergh estate at Hopewell.
After an hour lunch break, finally it was Koehler’s turn. He answered questions for almost fifteen minutes, providing what The New York Times called “technical testimony,” chronicling the construction of the ladder and where the lumber to build it came from. Schwarzkopf later told him that he had made a good impression on the grand jury.
Just after 3 pm, with all of the testimony completed, Hauck abruptly burst out of the grand jury room to learn the score of Game 6 of the 1934 World Series. It had been a tight series up to that point, with the Detroit Tigers up three games to two over the St. Louis Cardinals, who were vying for their third championship in nine years. “The grand jurors want to know how the ball game is getting along,” he said.
Hauck learned that future Hall of Fame first baseman Hank Greenberg had just hit a single in the bottom of the sixth inning, scoring another future Hall of Famer, Charlie Gehringer, to tie the game at 3 apiece. If he had stayed out of the grand jury room just a few more minutes, he would have heard the Cardinals retake the lead in the top of the seventh, but an indictment was more important to Hauck than a baseball game.
After hearing from twenty-four witnesses, the grand jury deliberated for an hour before foreman George N. Robinson instructed Hunterdon County Clerk C. Lloyd Fell that the group had a verdict. It was handed to Justice Trenchard and officially entered into the record.
“The Grand Inquest for the State of New Jersey in and for the Body of the County of Hunterdon,” it read, “upon their respective oaths present that Bruno Richard Hauptmann on the first day of March in the year of Our Lord, One Thousand Nine Hundred and Thirty-two, with force and arms, at the Township of East Amwell in the County of Hunterdon aforesaid and within the jurisdiction of this Court, did willfully feloniously and of his malice aforethought kill and murder Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. contrary to the form of the statute in such case made and provided against the peace of this state, the government and dignity of the same.”
Wilentz told Koehler that the indictment was not the end of his work. The scientist wanted to see Hauptmann’s home firsthand, to witness what Bornmann had witnessed. So the two men went first thing the next morning out to the Bronx. Koehler hoped to sift through the wood from the now torn-down garage. He wanted to climb into the attic. He needed to make sure the detectives hadn’t missed anything.
Looking first at the lumber from the old garage and in the basement, he found none that resembled the lumber or had plane marks like those in the ladder. In the kitchen, he found an unpainted wooden platform that had been planed by hand, but the marks did not correspond to the Disson 25½-inch planer that had been used on the ladder.
Koehler and Bornmann headed up to the attic, accompanied by Cramer and Enkler, the two police carpenters who had been present when Bornmann discovered the missing board two weeks earlier.
“On this day,” Koehler wrote in his official report of the visit, “we took back the piece taken up in the attic and replaced it, driving the cut nails partly back into their original position.” He continued,
At that end of this board which was near the middle of the attic there was sawdust on the lath and plaster below; and in direct line with the end there was a short saw cut into the adjacent board. Both of these facts indicated that a piece had been cut off from the board right there in the attic. Furthermore, the joists beyond the end of this board had cut nail holes in them from which the nails had been removed, all of which indicated that part of the board had been removed at some previous date.
I had in my pocket note book measurements of the distances between the four nail holes in rail #16 and Detective Bornmann and I compared those distances with distances between nail holes in the joists and found that four of those in the joists corresponded exactly with those in the rail.
Bornmann called Captain Lamb with Koehler’s findings and was ordered back to headquarters in Trenton to immediately give a verbal briefing to Colonel Schwarzkopf. Schwarzkopf instructed the men to return to Hauptmann’s home the next day and to bring Rail 16 with them.
“Take pictures,” he suggested, “to show [Rail 16’s] relationship to the remaining length of flooring and its original position on the attic joist.”
First thing the next morning, the scientist, detective, and two carpenters were joined in the attic by Detective Tobin. They looked at one another with trepidation. Koehler laid Rail 16 on the joists where the wood was missing. He took the cut nails that had been in the board Bornmann pulled up and placed them in the holes of Rail 16.
He took a deep breath and began tapping lightly on the first nail with a hammer. Cramer followed suit on another nail. By the time they had finished, there were smiles all around.
The nails fit into the joists perfectly. Their angle and depth was spot on. Their size and spacing matched.
“This rail [16] had been a part of that particular piece which still remained in the flooring of the attic,” Bornmann wrote in his report.
Even more bluntly put, Rail 16 and the attic floor had once been attached.
They took pictures from all angles and brought the negatives back to headquarters to be developed.
Koehler took the 16th Rail into Hauptmann’s attic and discovered its nails fit into the joists perfectly. Rail 16 and the attic floor had once been attached; Koehler called it “a wonderful detective stunt.” (Courtesy: Dr. Regis Miller/Forest Products Laboratory)
“It was a wonderful detective stunt,” Koehler later wrote. “Such a result simply could not happen as a mere coincidence.”
To scientists like Koehler, coincidences were taunts or dares that lead to further calculations with a goal of finding certainties.
“I w
orked it out that nails of such size could be driven into 10,000 places in the surface of that board without duplicating holes,” he said.
By the laws of chance it would take a world much vaster than our own to provide a coincidence of those four nail holes matching accidentally four other nail holes with which they had no connection.
The way you work that out is this: Let us say no chance involves the first nail hole and a suspected mate, but let us further say that the chance that a second nail hole likewise would fit directly to another is as one in 10,000. The third nail hole to match has but once chance in 10,000 times 10,000 less three—the spaces occupied by the three nail holes, but let’s not quibble—and so the fourth, if it should be linked together with another in conjunction with its mated companions, well that would be the product of another 10,000 minus four.
Moreover, only one board in 10,000 would have cut nails of that size in it. The chance of being wrong about the identity in such a case of circumstantial evidence might be written so: 1/10,000,000,000,000,000.
What a lawyer would call circumstantial, Koehler called proof. “There simply is not such a chance in human experience,” he said.
The next day, he was back in his temporary lab studying and comparing the grain and planer marks on the board from Hauptmann’s attic with those on Rail 16. He was looking at tree rings found on every piece of wood.
The growth rings on the board from the attic matched the growth rings on the 16th Rail. They came from the same board. As Koehler would later say, “A tree never lies.” (Courtesy: Dr. Regis Miller/Forest Products Laboratory)
“Any country boy who ever saw a stump knows fairly well how to count the rings and figure out an approximation of the age of the tree that once stood there,” he later said.
Every tree within itself has written all its history. The growth in spring shows white and pithy, but in the summer the slower growth becomes, in most trees, darker tissue. This is repeated year by year, and that is why these rings seem double and confuse those who try to say a tree is such and such an age. Count the band of white and black as one year’s growth.
The board end of the piece of flooring that had been robbed to make a ladder showed its rings quite clear, and so did the ladder rail. A gap of one and three-eighth inches had been trimmed off, yet the rings matched.
They had the same curvature and the same width. “Striking similarity,” he said. Further, he deduced that three adjacent rings located on the same place in each are narrower than the rest. Subsequent study would lead to more proof.
“A board is cut lengthwise of a tree so that the rings of small stuff of second growth are curved and several rings expose their edges along a board in what we call the grain. It is a pattern that is always varied and yet the pattern of the grain in ladder rail and floor board matched as perfectly as if the interrupted curving lines they plotted years ago had been etched within the tree just to be a trap for anyone who dared so to misuse wood as to form it into a kidnap ladder,” he would later tell a reporter.
His official report was more direct: “Since it can be said that no two pieces of wood are the same, it is evident that these two came from the same piece.”
He planned to elaborate before the jury in the murder trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. He told Wilentz that he intended to tell jurors there was “no doubt that the board from the attic floor and the ladder rail were at one time one piece, which was nailed down in the attic as part of the floor and that part of it was cut off, removed and used for the ladder rail.”
9
Milton and Eva Apgar stood at the door with their mouths wide open, staring at the man who would be sleeping at their house for at least the next month. Their guest had the most stature of anyone to ever visit their home, so they had assumed he’d be taller.
But the lean, wiry writer standing on their doorstep sported size 5½ shoes and weighed 140 pounds after a steak and potato dinner. He hoped, though, that his attire would set him apart. He liked to say the clothes he picked out each morning were “the first sentence of his day’s story.”
On this day, he wore a fifty-dollar blue suit from Nat Lewis’s on Broadway and a pure silk shirt from Charvet et Fils on East 53rd Street with his initials, DR, stitched in red on both the lapel and the inside of the cuffs.
Damon Runyon had a cigarette in his mouth, two bags in his hands, and round, wire-framed glasses covering his pale blue eyes. As he always said to those who mocked people with glasses, “Napoleon gets taken out in Russia because he cannot see when they give him the weather report.”
Speaking of weather, he would have much preferred to be at his house in south Florida, spending days watching his racehorses at the Hialeah track and his nights on the veranda with temperatures far warmer than the mercury would rise to here in Flemington, New Jersey. But his best filly, Angelic, needed significant medical care, and so the nation’s most famous sportswriter couldn’t turn down an assignment to the nation’s most widely anticipated trial.
In fact, he never turned down an assignment—mainly because he couldn’t count on another one being offered if he did. And with the high life he lived, he needed that next assignment. After all, another of his regular sayings was, “The payroll is a more important document than the Bible.”
So here he was at the home of Milton, a dentist, and Eva, a public school teacher, on Mine Street in Flemington, New Jersey. By the time he had been tasked with writing about the upcoming trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, all of the rooms at the Union Hotel, the only hotel in town, had been spoken for. Located directly across from the courthouse, the hotel had received more than nine hundred requests to inhabit its fifty rooms. Even with cots in the hallways—and Runyon was too big a deal for that—there was simply no space.
So the residents of Flemington were pressed into service. Numerous members of the community allowed reporters, actors, and athletes to stay in their homes during what H. L. Mencken described as “the greatest story since the Resurrection.” That came from a reporter who had covered as dramatic a fight over religion as the country had recently seen in Tennessee in the so-called Scopes Monkey trial, featuring legendary lawyers Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan.
Runyon’s hosts were ebullient to have him in their humble abode, and it was humble compared with his usual Parc Vendome ninth-floor apartment on West 57th Street, just steps from New York’s Central Park. There, his living room featured a two-story-high ceiling, parquet floors covered with Persian rugs, and polished Queen Anne wood chests. His temporary Flemington residence was far more quaint, but he wouldn’t be there often, as he planned to crank out up to five thousand words per day at the trial.
Nevertheless, Runyon was unfailingly polite to the Apgars, as he didn’t want to be what he would call one of the “clunks,” or in other words, a dullard. There were certainly numerous things the couple wanted to talk about with their guest. After all, Arthur Brisbane, who was staying with a Mrs. Johnson at her place at 4 Main Street, had called Runyon the best reporter of the era as he traveled easily between prize fighters and gangsters. Two of Runyon’s short stories had recently been made into films, the second of which, Little Miss Marker, starred a young actress named Shirley Temple. The movie would launch her past Greta Garbo as the nation’s biggest film draw of the year.
Runyon wasn’t the only journalist staying at the Apgar’s home, but he certainly was the highest profile. Lou Wittimer, who was helping longtime Hearst reporter Jim Kilgallen with the International News, had a smaller bedroom in the Apgar home. Kilgallen’s daughter, Dorothy, who wrote for the New York Evening Journal, was also in Flemington to cover the trial. Other reporters were scattered around town as well. Still others, like Walter Winchell, chose to commute daily to Flemington from hotels in Trenton, about forty-five minutes away.
Flemington had been, simply put, overrun. In an effort to support the two-plus million words set to be written about t
he trial every day, large swaths of the sky were blacked out by the extra telegraph wire put up by Western Union and Postal Telegraph companies to transmit the stories worldwide. It was the biggest wire setup in history.
As the members of the criminal law section of the American Bar Association later described the scene,
The statement made that there were in Flemington during the trial 700 newspaper men, including 129 cameramen, was probably not an exaggeration. Motor, plane, telegraph and telephone raced with each other to get the first copy to metropolitan New York for world-wide distribution.
This little town, ordinarily with one telegraph operator, had forty-five direct wires, a special teletype machine connected directly with London, a direct wire to Halifax, quick service to Paris, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Melbourne and other capitals of the world.
Another press report stated that 180 telegraph wires had been installed. Special parking places had been established, “with special prices,” The New York Times reported. The paper also reported that food prices went up at restaurants and markets around town, but Mame Pedrick, who helped operate the Union Hotel later told a Knight Newspapers writer, “We didn’t raise our prices at all. It was a $1 meal to everybody, the same as always.”
Runyon expensed his meals these days. The fifty-five-year-old, who was born in Manhattan, Kansas, had made his reputation covering not just sports, but also the more famous Manhattan and the “guys and dolls” that inhabited that part of New York. He grew up in Colorado the son of a newspaperman, and after fighting in the Spanish-American War, he tried to start a baseball league. He failed and headed to work as a sportswriter for one of the Hearst papers in New York.
The Sixteenth Rail Page 19