He had gained such a following that stories were being written about him. In one academic work published by a University of Wisconsin researcher, Svend Riemer, Runyon’s humor was described as “cosmopolitan, bohemian, smart-alecky or whatever other expression we want to use.”
“Runyon’s genius,” Riemer wrote, “derives from a natural fusion of form and content. His style is in close affinity to the mood that predominates in his narrative, and the plot of his stories furthermore underlines the sociopsychological attitude that he wants to get across, or, better, in the attitude which he exploits and upon which he elaborates.”
Runyon would have called that description bunk. He was just a guy who told other guys and dolls stories. There were lots of those forthcoming in Flemington.
His first column written from Flemington, though, wasn’t about Hauptmann or Lindbergh at all; it was about the result of the Rose Bowl played on New Year’s Day between Alabama and Stanford.
“The writer refrains from comment on the Alabama-Stanford Rose Bowl football game other than to say he told you so,” he wrote. “He received 1718 letters from the Pacific coast when he predicted that Alabama would win the game, a somewhat larger number than he received a year ago when he stated that Columbia would defeat Stanford.
“Some of these letters were of a high personal nature. The authors do not seem to realize that, in imparting this advance information on football games, the writer is merely endeavoring to be helpful to his readers, hoping that he may dissuade them from betting on the wrong team.”
His gloating about Alabama’s 29–13 victory would be his last lighthearted prose for weeks.
Hauptmann’s legal team had changed since his early court hearings. His original counsel, James M. Fawcett from the Bronx, had not been successful in a two-day hearing to fight the extradition charges from New York. He had allowed Hauptmann to take the witness stand to defend himself and to bolster the testimony of his wife and two friends who gave him an alibi for the night of the kidnapping. However, Hauptmann had had trouble containing his emotions, shouting his denial of the crime as Attorney General Wilentz questioned him.
“At the previous proceedings,” The New York Times reported, “he had shown complete mastery of himself, but never was he more self-possessed than during his court room fight to stay clear of New Jersey.”
Fawcett told reporters he planned to appeal the Bronx County judge’s ruling to allow Hauptmann to be sent to New Jersey to face murder charges, but The New York Times reported that Fawcett said, “There may not be enough money in the defense funds to make possible an appeal to the United States Supreme Court.”
Fawcett would appear one more time with Hauptmann, at the arraignment in Flemington on October 24. An hour before the arraignment began, the court was packed, with every fixed seat occupied and some set-out folding chairs filled as well.
Handcuffed to a Hunterdon County deputy sheriff, Hauptmann, dressed in a gray suit and dark tie, sat down at the defense table before immediately rising to stand before Justice Trenchard to hear and respond to the indictment.
“Bruno Richard Hauptmann,” the prosecutor said, “you have been indicted by the Hunterdon County Grand Jury . . . on the charge of murder. . . . How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?”
“I plead not guilty,” Hauptmann said.
A trial date of January 2, 1935, had been set—in theory to accommodate Fawcett, but also, Wilentz said, to prevent jurors from having to serve over the holidays. If money was a concern for Fawcett, it was not for his new lawyer, Edward J. Reilly, who came on board at the beginning of November. He would be paid by the Hearst newspapers in exchange for Anna Hauptmann agreeing to interviews and photographs throughout the trial. Fawcett did not seem skilled nor sophisticated enough for Anna Hauptmann.
“[Fawcett]’s out,” Reilly told reporters. “I’m in. Mrs. Hauptmann was thoroughly explicit.”
Reilly’s reputation and nickname was “Big Ed,” and at six feet and two hundred pounds with a baritone voice that never missed the chance to talk into a microphone, he fit the description. The New York World Telegram described him near the end of 1934 as looking like a “retired policeman with a flair for clothes.”
He had represented defendants in many of the most sensational murder cases to come through the Brooklyn area over the last couple of decades and had earned another nickname, the “Bull of Brooklyn,” for his gruff and aggressive trial tactics. The case that had attracted the attention of Anna Hauptmann involved nineteen-year-old Cecelia McCormick, who had faced first-degree murder charges in 1933 for smuggling a gun into a local jail to her husband, who was an inmate. He shot and killed the jail keeper before shooting himself, committing suicide. Reilly got her off by claiming that the state was trying to “whitewash” the case and pin the whole mess on “this little girl.”
His reputation had been cemented roughly a decade earlier, though, when he defended a spurned nurse from Cincinnati who followed her former beau to Brooklyn, where she shot and killed him in broad daylight. He’d produced a “scientist” in that case to show that the defendant was an honorable woman who’d suffered a “brain explosion” under stress. Women showered the defendant with flowers when she was found not guilty.
He had some failures through the years as well, and the family members of those defendants called him by yet another nickname, “Death House” Reilly. The Hauptmanns were unaware of that nickname when they brought him on board.
While he never missed an interview or an opportunity for a free drink, he did miss much of the elaborate preparation the prosecution was dedicating to the case. If Reilly’s strategy was to excel in bombast and hyperbole, he would find a worthy foil in the scientific witnesses of the prosecution, who based their conclusions and opinions on research.
For example, Koehler spent the two-plus months before the trial measuring and remeasuring all of his earlier findings. He also continued to try to trace the Douglas fir found in Rails 14, 15, and 17, which didn’t match the 1x4 taken from the fence in back of Hauptmann’s home.
He and Bornmann tried to trace the Ponderosa pine found in the ladder’s rungs, visiting lumber mills and yards in New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania. They were hoping to replicate the results they’d had in tracing Rails 12 and 13.
They drove to Philadelphia to track the history of Hauptmann’s 11-point saw with the 16-inch blade. There, the folks at Henry Disston & Sons looked at the blade through a reading glass and determined, as Koehler would write in his report, that “it had been filed but not set since it left the factory. . . . [They] were of the opinion that the last filing was done by an expert saw filer.”
Koehler and Bornmann took more pictures of Hauptmann’s attic, and they reinterviewed Max Rauch, the son of the Hauptmann home’s owner, for the third time, and he swore again that the flooring in the attic had been intact when he inspected it roughly two weeks before Hauptmann rented the apartment.
Koehler went back to Madison over the Thanksgiving holiday, to see family but also to catch up on his day job, “since the work [had] piled up” at the Forest Products Laboratory. “Furthermore,” he wrote Schwarzkopf, “we had to make our estimates this week for a large increase in federal relief appropriations which may or may not materialize.”
The colonel wanted Koehler back at the very beginning of December for the duration of the trial, but Koehler was hoping to be in Madison for Christmas.
Koehler and his colleague Edward Davis arrived in New Jersey on Wednesday morning, December 5. Davis was prepared to testify about the planer marks found on Rail 16 as well as those on Rails 12 and 13 if prosecutors needed him to. Immediately they went to work at the state police barracks, studying the number of knives in the planer that had dressed Rails 12 and 13 and recalculating the rate of feed of the planer per revolution of cutter heads, all to ensure that the wood in those rails had, in fact, come from Senator
Dorn’s lumber yard down in South Carolina.
Then they continued the process Koehler had started a year earlier, comparing under the microscope the samples from the National Lumber and Millwork Company against Rails 12 and 13 to ensure that the peculiar machinery defect on both was consistent.
Next they turned their attention to Koehler’s more recent discovery that Hauptmann’s 2½-inch wood block plane was the one that had made the marks on Rungs 1 through 10 and on Rail 16. And Davis analyzed Koehler’s deduction that Rail 16 had come from Hauptmann’s attic.
The World War I veteran found his Forest Products Laboratory superior to have been accurate on all counts. Further, the two scientists actually discovered two new pieces of information that they would note on their joint report as “significant.”
First, they found that a ¼-inch chisel found at Hauptmann’s was of the same make and model as the ¾-inch chisel found at the scene of the crime. “It will be recalled that the mark of a ¾" chisel was found on one of the ladder rails and that no chisel of that size was among Hauptmann’s tools,” they wrote. Again, this differed from Koehler’s original report on the ladder, in which he had stated that he couldn’t tell what size chisel had made a mark carving out the mortises on the ladder. When that belief changed is not reflected in any of his reports.
Second, they found more information to bolster the connection between Rail 16 and the floor board from Hauptmann’s attic. Besides confirming that the growth rings matched, they discovered that “there was rather extreme torn grain on corresponding sides of all knots in both pieces. Also there was a pronounced degree of raised grain on corresponding sides of several dips and irregularities of grain in both pieces.”
Koehler believed evidence like that had never before been offered in a courtroom anywhere in the world.
The two men did their own woodworking next. It was as if Koehler was in his own basement using his “smooth plane,” a popular tool in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century northern Europe that likely came to America with his grandfather in 1852, to work on the sides of a short board.
“The rungs of the ladder (middle and top sections) were set in recesses cut out of the rails,” they wrote. “In making these recesses or mortises deeper saw cuts than necessary had been made in several places. These deep saw cuts sometimes extended into the rails as much as 3/16" beyond the bottoms of the mortises making it possible to measure the width of the cut and so determine whether any of Hauptmann’s saws could have been used in the ladder’s construction.”
So they used each of Hauptmann’s nine saws to make two cuts about 1⅛ inch deep across the grain of both a piece of North Carolina pine and a piece of Douglas fir. They then measured the width of each cut “with a machinist’s thickness gauge,” or, in other words, to the thousandth of an inch.
The experiment reaffirmed Koehler’s earlier thought that Hauptmann’s 11-point Atkins saw or his 11-point Disston saw could have been used, and that since the Disston was the newer, sharper one of the two, it was more likely to have been the tool used.
Koehler and Davis next created diagrams and models and labeled the photographs to be used at trial.
Finally, after a year and a half working on this case, Koehler would acknowledge it in his turn writing the Dutchman letter to his brothers on December 14, 1934. On State of New Jersey Department of State Police stationery, he wrote, “You may have seen something in the papers about me recently. Some of the things that I found out leaked out in a mysterious way although the newspapers had things so badly mixed up that it sounded questionable. I will have to appear as a witness at the trial and by the time some of you get this the whole story may be out in the papers. . . . I will have to be there throughout the whole trial so that if anything in my line comes up I can call it to the attention of the attorneys.”
He asked his brothers, Alfred in California in particular, to pick up newspapers that included mentions of him. His parents would later tell a reporter that “Our letters from Arthur say little about the Hauptmann case. Maybe [they] don’t allow him to discuss the case.”
After nearly two full weeks of work, Koehler and Davis spent all of December 18 briefing Attorney General Wilentz, his staff, and officers with the New Jersey State Police in person. From 11:30 am to 4:30 pm, with a short break for lunch, Wilentz and his staff peppered Koehler with questions, trying to make sure his story had no holes and that he’d be ready for an attacking defense.
Koehler wrote his brothers afterward that Schwarzkopf came to him following the “dress rehearsal” and said that if Koehler wanted “to write a book on science in crime detection, he will write the preface for me.”
Wilentz left this meeting feeling far more secure about his wood expert than he had going into the grand jury. That’s because no longer was he just dealing with the tracking of Rails 12 and 13.
Now he could use Rail 16, as he would say later to reporters, to “wrap the kidnap ladder right around Hauptmann’s neck. I mean it. That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
At one point, Koehler worried about keeping what he was working on secret. Schwarzkopf had said reporters were hounding him to tell them who the “star witness” was going to be. “I’m not telling them, it’s you,” he told Koehler. “We are going to keep that secret.”
So when Koehler heard directly from reporters about a note in Walter Winchell’s column saying that the wood expert had “definitely” traced a piece of wood in the kidnap ladder to Hauptmann’s home, Koehler panicked at the same time he was listening carefully to the reporters’ questions.
Specifically, Winchell had reported one of the ladder rungs was identical to a piece of wood nailed to a ceiling in Hauptmann’s home.
“There is absolutely no truth in the matter,” Koehler told reporters looking for verification of the story. To the nonscientists, this might have seemed a stretch of the truth, but Koehler dealt with details. First, he had not traced one of the ladder rungs back to Hauptmann’s home, but one of the ladder rails. Second, it had not been nailed to a ceiling, but rather to the attic floor.
Semantics, maybe, but to Koehler it wasn’t lying when he said, “there is absolutely no truth” to the reporters seeking comment on those specific details. The premise of Winchell’s story, though, was entirely accurate. Koehler had linked the ladder to Hauptmann’s home.
For his part, Wilentz had dealt with reporters enough to simply say he had not received a report yet from Koehler and that he expected one the next day. He may not have had the report in hand yet, but he knew exactly what Koehler had found. Even though he had never prosecuted a case before, he knew enough to know he wasn’t going to tip his hand or share whatever he had with the defense before he absolutely had to.
Koehler and Davis headed back to Madison for the Christmas holiday. They would return to New Jersey for the start of the trial on January 2, 1935. Naïve as to how crazed the NJSP would be on that day, Koehler suggested to Captain Lamb that “if a car is available, you might send one to the depot at that time.”
On his way back to New Jersey, Koehler stopped off at Pittsburgh, where his brother Walter, studying at the University of West Virginia in Morgantown, came to pick him up to spend the New Year together. While there he gave an autograph, his first, to his nephew, Walter Jr., and gave his second to a neighbor boy.
During his nearly two weeks back at the lab over the Christmas holiday, Koehler had sketched out a thirty-page question-and-answer guide for Wilentz and his staff to follow. He had also put together suggested testimony for Senator Dorn that the prosecutors could review. The prosecution would appreciate the help, as January 2 brought a spectacle unlike any witnessed before in an American courtroom.
In theory Justice Trenchard’s courtroom, used to handling the routine legal affairs of a rural county, held 260 people. On January 2, a panel of 150 jurors had been summoned. Lawyers, attendants, and witnesses represented dozens more.
Then there were the 135 newspaper reporters—more, it was speculated, than the number that had covered World War I—each of whom wanted a place to sit and write. And that doesn’t even mention the radio producers, the movie stars, and the star athletes.
Finally, there was the crowd of spectators who wanted to get in. What started the first day of the trial as just an aggressive group of hundreds that brushed aside the one state trooper guarding the front door of the courthouse, breaking one of the glass panels in the front door in the process, would become a crowd of roughly twenty thousand on the day Hauptmann testified.
People stood in the aisles. They sat on the window sills. They clogged the aisles.
“The Bronx subway was never like the court house here,” the New York tabloid Daily Mirror wrote during the trial under the headline “Court Jam.” “So many spectators were crowded into the chamber where Hauptmann is on trial that one woman, caught in the milling during the noon recess today, narrowly escaped falling through a side window which broke, fragments of glass showering a dozen other women below in the street.”
One random woman pleaded with Koehler to help her get in. “Please take me in with you,” she said. “They will let me in if I am with you.”
Koehler said she could try but cautioned, “I can’t make any plea for you.” She walked in right after him without any questioning from the police.
Another part of the problem was subpoenas, which were supposed to be handed to witnesses but instead had been given to friends of the lawyers on both sides, creating a mockery of the legal requirement to appear in court. On one day during the trial, there were more than one hundred such “subpoenas” issued.
Writer Edna Ferber described the court room as a “shambles . . . planned to accommodate perhaps a hundred, it was jammed with what seemed at least a thousand, seated, standing, leaning, perched on window sills, craning over balcony rails, peering through doorways.”
The Sixteenth Rail Page 20