Ethelyn Koehler, too, was interested in attending the trial when her husband testified. So was Carlisle Winslow. Captain Lamb said he would get them in “but couldn’t guarantee a seat.”
On the courthouse lawn were the gawkers and the hawkers. They sold flag pins and pins commemorating Lindbergh’s successful flight over the Atlantic. They sold pennies that had a picture of the courthouse on the back for a dime. One man sold pennies with the Lord’s Prayer on the back. Other vendors sold so-called “Lindy hats,” or the aviator/bomber hats with large ear flaps and a short brim in front turned up to show the fur lining.
Two eight-year-olds, Abram Case Parker and Charles Ryman Herr Jr., came out with their own newspaper, The Hauptmannville News, carrying their handwritten stories of the latest events in the trial. They charged two cents per copy.
But the most popular souvenir was a replica ladder.
One Flemington resident, six or seven years old at the time, made three hundred dollars—at the height of the Depression—selling the eight-inch ladders. As he would later tell the Princeton Recollector, “That was money to me. . . . I couldn’t tell you how many I sold but I’d sell ’em for a dime and I had a bigger one for a quarter. We sold a lot; couldn’t keep up. My father made ’em, my father and my brothers—my mother, too. . . . I’ll be honest with you, they couldn’t make the damn things fast enough.”
One of the defense lawyers tried to get the replica ladders removed from the grounds, saying they were prejudiced against his client. He failed.
The American Bar Association committee that later studied the trial called the marketing of souvenir ladders “morbid” and “pathetic.” It quoted one magazine writer’s impression of the trial: “What hit hardest at Flemington? Those ghastly souvenir ladders. . . . Once America despised ruthless greed, held life and law sacred, now greed is smart—and life and law are cheap. . . . When a people who once bowed before a cross snicker at a kidnap ladder—look out.”
The Saturday Evening Post summarized the whole trial atmosphere in contempt. “Among the lows we have reached in the depression is the new one in good taste, good manners and good policy accomplished at Flemington,” the magazine wrote. “Our criminal trials are apt to be public circuses, the more sensational the trial the more outrageous the circus.”
The circus was covered by media outlets worldwide. “The trial promises to be a long affair, although the swiftness of ‘Jersey Justice’ is proverbial,” wrote The London Times on the day the trial began. “While Mr. Justice Trenchard is known not to tolerate unnecessary delays, the prosecution alone has 180 witnesses to call, and the defence has perhaps half as many more.”
Wilentz’s opening statement was full of fire, displaying an open hostility toward the accused. “He broke into and entered at night the Lindbergh home with the intent to commit a battery upon that child, and with the intent to steal the child and its clothing. And he did,” he said in his forty-five-minute oratory. He described how the baby died when Hauptmann fell carrying him down the ladder. The motive for the crime, he told the jurors, was a timeless one: greed.
“He wanted money, money, money, lots of money,” Wilentz railed. He alluded to the importance of Koehler’s evidence even if he didn’t quite understand it, referring to a rung when he meant a rail.
“One rung of that ladder, one side of that ladder comes right from his attic, put on there with his tools and we will prove it to you, no matter how difficult it may sound—we will prove it to you so that there will be no doubt about it.”
He concluded by stating the obvious.
“We will be asking you to impose the death penalty; it is the only suitable punishment in this case.”
Reilly immediately asked for a mistrial, alleging that the prosecutor had unjustly prejudiced the jury against his client. Justice Trenchard denied, but he did remind the jurors to listen to all the evidence before making up their minds.
The first prosecution witness following those who testified to the location of the Lindbergh estate (using a billiard cue to point at numerous maps pinned to the wall) was Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Never before had she spoken publicly about the murder of her firstborn child. Any shifting in the chairs that took place during the earlier technical testimony quickly ceased. One reporter described the scene after her name was called by the attorney general as “an excited hum, and then sudden hushed silence.” The world had been waiting nearly three years to hear the Lindberghs’ testimony.
“I have seen one of the most magnificent exhibitions of human courage possible to imagine,” commentator Boake Carter told his radio audience that night.
I have seen a young mother, robbed of her first-born son, finger the tattered remnants of the clothes he wore the night of his murder, bite furiously on her lower lip to keep back the tears, and then proudly lift her head and tell without a quiver what a mother feels when she discovers that her child has been stolen from the crib in which, but a few hours before, she had bidden him good night.
And the emotional effort that it cost Mrs. Anne Lindbergh to recite for the first time for the world’s benefit what happened that fateful night of March 1st was so plain that the tension of almost every man and woman in New Jersey’s old Flemington courthouse was terrific for the entire duration of her softly spoken story. Had the story ended there and then when she stepped down from the witness stand, there would have been no need for the jury to leave the jury box to come to an opinion. . . .
Wistfulness marked every line of the almost severely dressed Anne, as she sat with hands folded in her lap. The nakedness of tragedy came when Attorney General Wilentz, in charge of the prosecution of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, handed Mrs. Lindbergh the tattered and torn remains of what had been her son’s night clothes and asked her to look at them carefully and identify them. The deliberate summoning of all her courage to do what he asked and the little upward thrust of a small, pointed chin, as though the action automatically choked off whatever may have been her inner feelings from the gaze of a curious and hushed public, left many a veteran newspaperman, cynical from years of contact with human nature, utterly silent in genuine admiration. . . .
The scene cannot be described in words. Not if one had a hundred thousand in which to say it. It was an exhibition of superhuman courage—for it was done not in the heat of the moment, but in the cold light of day, before the gaze of hundreds of curious pairs of eyes. It was courage one seldom sees.
The “Bull of Brooklyn,” rumored to spare no prosecution witness, demurred. “The defense feels that Mrs. Lindbergh has suffered enough anguish as it is and so it has no desire to cross-examine her,” Reilly said.
The next witness was the world’s most famous man himself. While his wife was emotional, Charles A. Lindbergh was matter-of-fact. Onlookers noticed a bulge in his coat pocket and surmised he was carrying a gun in a shoulder holster.
For two days, the famous aviator walked the prosecutor and then Reilly through the night of March 1, 1932, as well as what happened afterward. He spoke about finding his son missing and seeing a crib that “was in such condition that I felt it was impossible for the baby to have gotten out himself.” He described the initial ransom note and the others that had followed.
The next morning delivered the fireworks the media and a blood-thirsty crowd outside the courthouse had waited for. Lindbergh described going with John Condon to drop off the ransom money at St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx.
“I heard very clearly a voice coming from the cemetery, to the best of my belief calling Dr. Condon,” Lindbergh said.
“What were the words?” Wilentz inquired.
“In a foreign accent, ‘Hey, Doctor.’”
“How many times?”
“I heard that voice once.”
After some questions about what happened next came Wilentz’s hammer.
“Since that time have you heard the same voice?”
&
nbsp; “Yes, I have.”
“Whose voice was it, Colonel, that you heard in the vicinity of St. Raymond’s Cemetery that night, saying, ‘Hey, Doctor?’”
“That was Hauptmann’s voice,” Lindbergh said with conviction.
An audible gasp went up in the courtroom. Some reporters later speculated the trial ostensibly ended at that moment. If Lindy was convinced it was Hauptmann, they figured the jury would be convinced as well.
Reilly tried to cast aspersions on other possible suspects, ranging from Lindbergh’s neighbors to his servants, but Lindbergh never wavered. The resolve he had shown to fly across the Atlantic was fully on display in the Flemington courtroom. Lindbergh believed Hauptmann was guilty.
Koehler wanted to hear Lindbergh’s testimony himself, but he did not attend the first few days of the trial for a couple of reasons, the first being, as he said in a letter to Ethelyn, “the courtroom is so crowded that there is not room for all the witnesses.” The second reason was that he wanted to give Edward Davis a chance to be in the courtroom and “take a good look around himself,” in case he would be called to back up Koehler.
On the fourth day of testimony, after the prosecution had established the baby was kidnapped and murdered, it was time to enter the ladder into evidence. It had been in numerous hands since March 1, 1932, and Wilentz knew he needed to provide a timeline and concrete evidence detailing where and in whose hands the ladder had been in order for it to be admitted into evidence.
Koehler, Davis, and Bornmann went in the back door of the courthouse carrying the ladder and were chased by photographers trying to get whatever image they could. The courtroom was so crowded they all had to stand through the entire proceedings. Koehler borrowed the seat of one young lady as she stretched during a recess simply to rest his own legs.
Wilentz started with Detective Bornmann, who had responded to the call to the Lindberghs’ home the night of the crime and had found the ladder about seventy feet away from the house. He had brought it inside the home before turning it over to Trooper Frank A. Kelly, the New Jersey State Police’s fingerprint expert. Kelly was in possession of the ladder before it went to Captain Lamb, who released it back to Kelly in the summer of 1932 to take to Washington for an initial inspection. Then it went back to Lamb before pieces were sent to Madison for a detailed study by Arthur Koehler.
Each of those individuals were called to testify, albeit briefly, as Wilentz sought to have the ladder put into evidence. Many would be re-called for further testimony later in the trial, but for his present purposes, Wilentz needed to establish a chain of custody for his evidence. As the last one to have handled the ladder, Koehler went last.
“You live where, Mr. Koehler?” Wilentz began.
“In Madison, Wisconsin.”
“And you are connected with the United States Government in what capacity?”
“I am wood technologist in the forest service which is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.”
“Now on various occasions since this Lindbergh case, have you had, have you received from Captain Lamb this ladder?
“I have.”
“And by the way, will you tell us what is this cut that has been pointed out on No. 2 on section marked No. 1 with this little thumb-tack? I notice a cut there. Did you make that cut?”
“I did.”
“This piece of what appears to be a new piece of wood as compared with the other, did you have that affixed?”
“Yes.”
“And when you got through with it, did you return it to Captain Lamb?”
“I did.”
Koehler’s cross-examination was a bit more detailed, as the defense sought to preclude the ladder from being admitted into evidence.
“Where that light portion of wood is fastened to the side of the section of the ladder, you say you put that on there?” asked Frederick Pope, one of Big Ed Reilly’s assistant counsels.
“I helped in putting it on.”
“Why did you put it on there?”
“That rail was cut in two, and it was put on to bring them back into their original position.”
“Who cut it in two?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was it cut in two when it was brought to you?”
“Not the first time, but subsequently it was.”
“Was it cut in two while it was in your possession?”
“No.”
“Or in your department?”
“No,” replied Koehler.
For another five minutes, Pope continued to prod at Koehler, extracting details of how he had dismantled other parts of the ladder.
“While the ladder was in your possession, did you remove any of the nails?”
“Yes.”
“And did you remove any of the cleats?”
“Yes.”
“Did you take the ladders apart?”
“Yes.”
After Pope had completed his cross-examination, Wilentz moved to have the ladder admitted as evidence. Pope objected immediately.
“The ladder,” he said, “is not in the same condition that it was or in approximately the same condition, and it is not shown to be in the same condition it was when it was discovered, as is testified here, on the Lindbergh estate.” He continued,
It has been taken apart, put together again. . . .
There is still another reason and a very great reason, a very strong reason—there is absolutely no connection, either by circumstance or by direct evidence between this ladder and the accused, and until this ladder has been placed in the possession of the accused, or until there is some evidence in this case which would tend to show or which would be sufficient to go to the jury, to have them consider whether or not the ladder was ever in the possession of the accused, this ladder is not evidential against this accused.
It may be admitted for identification until that proof is complete, but until there is something in this case to show that Mr. Hauptmann, the defendant, was in some way either directly, immediately or remotely connected with this ladder, it is not evidential and should not be admitted in evidence.
He became even more passionate as he rebutted Wilentz’s argument that the government had established the chain of custody for the ladder.
“We are here defending a man for his life and his every right must be and will be protected by this Court,” Pope said. “And we insist that this ladder shall not be admitted in evidence in this case as evidence against him until he is shown to have been connected with it in some way.”
Koehler smiled to himself as he sat on the witness chair listening to the lawyer. If Pope wanted a connection between the ladder and Hauptmann, he’d be glad to give him more than one.
It just wouldn’t happen for another two and a half weeks.
10
160 steps.
Liscom C. Case and the other Hauptmann trial jurors knew that number by heart.
Five times per day, they climbed and descended sets of stairs, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner plus two times during breaks in the court action. From their rooms at the Union Hotel to where they ate their meals were forty steps. They trudged up forty-six more steps to wash up before the trial started for the day. They headed back down those forty-six steps to get out of the hotel and then, guarded by state troopers, walked through the gauntlet of thousands of onlookers across the street to the Hunterdon County Courthouse, where they hiked the final twenty-eight steps into Justice Trenchard’s courtroom.
Their compensation, besides stronger leg muscles, was three dollars a day.
For the eleven other jurors this was merely a workout, more strenuous for some than others. However, for the sixty-four-year-old Case, it led to chest pains and shortness of breath. Heart trouble had led to an early retirement a decade earlier from the Leigh Valley Railroad, where he had served as the forema
n of carpenters. And heart trouble would lead to him being treated by a physician throughout the latter half of the trial.
Press reports speculated on the possibility of a mistrial if Case couldn’t continue, as there were no alternate jurors. On multiple occasions, Justice Trenchard specifically and pointedly asked him if he was okay. Case would eventually take his meals in his room to cut down on the some of the stair climbing and exertion.
Case lived in the hills of Hunterdon County, in Franklin Township where he grew up. He and his wife, Ellen, ten years his senior, had shared three years at home together before she passed away in the spring of 1928, not long after their thirtieth wedding anniversary. They had no children.
He lived near his former employer’s spur line that connected the town of Clinton with Landsdown and the south branch of the Raritan River. His home was a simple two-story, painted white with dark trim around the windows, but since Ellen died, he spent most of his time “out behind his house in a white-washed little woodshed,” where he kept his carpentry shop.
Like 149 of his fellow Hunterdon County citizens, Case had been summoned in November 1934 to appear at the courthouse the day after New Year’s Day for jury duty. The jury pool had been chosen by Jury Commissioner Charles Holcombe and Sheriff John Curtiss.
Case watched as the prosecution and defense went to work on January 2. Their questions followed a pattern. Prosecutors wanted to know mainly if prospective jurors had religious convictions that would preclude them from issuing a death sentence and if they would “be able to render a verdict based solely on the evidence” they would hear at trial. Defense counsel focused on what, if anything, potential jurors had read in the papers or heard on the radio about the case and, specifically, about the defendant. Further, Lloyd Fisher, who handled the defense’s jury selection, wanted to know if they understood the rule of law that the accused is presumed innocent.
The Sixteenth Rail Page 21