The Sixteenth Rail

by Adam Schrager

Charles Walton Sr., a machinist and former semi-pro baseball player, was the first Hunterdon County citizen agreed upon by both the prosecution and defense to serve, and thus became the foreman of the jury.

  Juror number 2 was Rosie Pill, a widowed housekeeper who lived with her son, his wife, and their three kids. When she wasn’t caring for her grandchildren, she was doing beadwork.

  Juror number 3 was Verna Cole Snyder, a housewife married to a blacksmith. She was devoted to their seven-year-old adopted son and to her Methodist faith.

  Juror number 4, Charles F. Snyder (no relation to Verna Snyder), was a farmer and had served on three previous juries deliberating murder cases.

  Juror number 5 was Ethel Morgan Stockton. She was married to a machinist at the Milford Paper Mill and had a seven-year-old son. Her husband and brother-in-law were in the jury pool as well, but both were dismissed.

  Juror number 6 was Elmer Smith, who had only recently returned with his wife and son to New Jersey after spending a year in California. He was a former justice of the peace and an insurance salesman.

  Juror number 7, Robert Cravatt, was a schoolteacher who also worked with a local Civilian Conservation Corps camp and as the treasurer of his hometown basketball team. At twenty-eight, he would be the youngest member of the jury.

  Juror number 8 was Philip Hockenbury, who worked as a track inspector for the Central Rail Road of New Jersey. He had been fixing switches on the rails since 1920.

  Juror number 9 was George Voorhees, who, like Charles Snyder, was a farmer in Hunterdon County. He was married with two grown children.

  Juror number 10, May F. Brelsford, was the only native of Flemington on the panel. Her husband was an electrician, and she helped care for her two stepchildren.

  After Brelsford was selected, the lawyers and Justice Trenchard adjourned for the night. In all, fifty-seven prospective jurors had been screened. Prosecutors used seven of their twelve peremptory challenges and the defense used fifteen of its twenty. More than two dozen others were disqualified for reasons ranging from illness to prejudging the case.

  There were still two members of the jury to be selected, so Case would have to wear his Sunday best, a light brown suit, again on Thursday, January 3. He showed up first thing that morning and once again sat in the courtroom near dozens of others who’d also been summoned. Earlier concerns from the jury commissioner that he would need to find more potential jurors had faded, as both sides were running out of challenges.

  Just before Daisy Emmons’s name was called, there was a stir in the courtroom as Anne Morrow Lindbergh entered. She was set to be the first prosecution witness, leading those in attendance to anticipate that the jury selection would wrap up soon. But then the defense rejected Emmons.

  “Liscom C. Case,” Sheriff Curtiss called out. The mild-mannered carpenter walked up to the chair next to the judge and was “sworn in on voir dire”—an old French legal phrase meaning to speak truthfully. After ascertaining where specifically in Franklin Township, Case lived, Fisher began to question him.

  “Have you formed any opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the accused in this case?”

  “I can’t say that I have,” said Case.

  “None at all?”

  “None at all.”

  “Have you discussed the case with anyone?”

  “Well, I have spoke of it, not to discuss it.”

  “In your discussions did you express an opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the accused?”

  “No,” Case replied. “To the best of my knowledge I never have.”

  He told Fisher he’d read about the case in the paper and heard about it on the radio over the last couple of nights, but still had no opinion on Hauptmann.

  “If you are permitted to sit on this jury, would you be guided by the evidence that you hear from the witness chair in the course of the case in arriving at your verdict?”

  “The only thing I could do.”

  “You would not be influenced by anything that has gone before?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say that I would.”

  “But solely by the evidence that you hear here?”

  “That is the way I understand; that is the evidence I should go by.”

  “And that is the evidence you would go by, sir, is that right?”

  “That is the evidence I would go by,” Case said, wondering why he’d been asked roughly the same question several times in a row.

  Fisher said he had no challenge for Case. After learning the prospective juror had no “conscientious or religious scruples against capital punishment” and that he would follow the evidence, the prosecution had no challenge for him either.

  “We are content, your Honor, with this juror,” Fisher said.

  “The State is content,” the prosecutor said.

  And with that, Case became juror number 11.

  Shortly after that, Howard V. Biggs, an unemployed accountant who used to be the county assessor, became juror number 12. Married with two sons, he had never spent any significant time away from his wife in the nearly twenty-seven years they had been together.

  “Not one of us was great,” jury foreman Walton would tell reporters after the trial, “but no dunces were in the box. None of us had had such a stuffing of education that we had lost our common sense.”

  Common sense could have predicted how the jurors’ lives would be turned upside down in that kind of media environment. Reporters scoured their personal lives, telling their stories in sometimes cruel fashion.

  They regularly mocked Verna Snyder for her weight, writing the words “261 pounds,” in every sentence about her. One reporter put her weight at 278 pounds in a story midway through the trial. Rosie Pill was ridiculed for seemingly falling asleep during testimony. Robert Cravatt was tweaked in the media for insisting on having his eggs basted at breakfast every morning.

  “After dinner, in the early days of the trial, we were taken for walks,” Cravatt would later recount. “These expeditions had a sort of circus parade air, with us as the circus. Everyone turned out.

  “We were looked at, gawked at, gazed at, smiled at, laughed at, photographed and shouted at, so that when we got back to the hotel we were glad. State troopers were before us and behind us and all around us.”

  Liscom Case, known to his fellow jurors as “Silent Cal,” was not spared the sharp critique of the media. Reporters seemed fixated on his “munching his mustache” and on the fact that he was a “little man” who had to cup his hand to his ear to hear every word at the trial as he sat in the second row of the jury box.

  The press called him the Mystery Juror, as he was always covering his face with a handkerchief or dropping his eyes to the floor when they sought to take his picture. The Middletown, New York, Times Herald ran a photo of him, handkerchief blanketing all but his forehead with a caption that read, “[Here] he is shown fooling the photographer again.” Another newspaper ran the same picture with the caption “Peek-a-boo in the jury box.”

  Three weeks into the trial, Liscom Case was exhausted. Besides the stress of the trial, the steps were taking its toll on his heart. He was going more and more slowly, bogging down his fellow jurors, who had to wait for him, as they were required to travel as one everywhere they went.

  He was tired of being confined. He was tired of reading censored newspapers and no magazines at all and being offered Shakespeare and Dickens by the officers in charge of their seclusion. Mainly he was tired of not being able to work in his carpentry shop. He missed his tools.

  But now, finally, there was a line of questioning that piqued his curiosity. In the first three weeks of the trial, Case had listened intently to the testimony of John Condon, the retired educator who became an intermediary between the kidnapper and the Lindberghs. He had followed the money trail with the respective federal, New Jersey, and NYPD authorities who had found
more than $14,000 of the ransom money in Hauptmann’s garage. He had heard the witnesses who tied Hauptmann to New Jersey for the crime and to New York for the collection of the ransom. And he had sat quietly, hand covering his brow, during the numerous handwriting experts who linked the writing on the ransom notes with Hauptmann.

  But all the while, as a carpenter himself, he was intrigued by the ladder. He saw it in the courtroom every day. Dozens of witnesses had come and gone since prosecutors had first tried to introduce it as evidence only to have Trenchard reserve judgment.

  Wilentz would try again on January 22 to have the ladder admitted into evidence by re-calling Detective Lewis Bornmann to the stand. The defense objected immediately.

  “We submit,” defense counsel Pope said, “that the history of this ladder has not been told. . . . No one has ever suggested that this defendant had anything to do with this ladder.”

  Wilentz knew that Koehler could and would do just that. He also knew Koehler’s testimony would not be allowed if the ladder was not officially accepted as evidence. He rose to address the court again, to stress once more that the chain of custody of the ladder had been accounted for and that, with few exceptions, “it is as it was found when brought up Lindy’s lane the night of the kidnaping.” Before he could speak, Justice Trenchard intervened.

  “I wonder whether Mr. Pope recalls the testimony of an old gentleman that on March 1st I think it was that he saw a ladder in the defendant’s car,” Trenchard said, referring to eighty-seven-year-old Amandus Hochmuth, who earlier had told jurors that he had seen Hauptmann in the vicinity of the Lindbergh estate on the day of the crime.

  Trenchard heard brief arguments from both sides before issuing his ruling.

  “I feel constrained to admit this ladder in evidence,” he said. “It will be admitted.”

  “It was a distinct victory for the state,” the Associated Press reported, “for the defense during the past three weeks had been able to block the exhibit each time the ladder was offered.” The ladder was given the number Exhibit S-211. The chisel found on the grounds of the estate soon followed into evidence.

  With the ladder officially in evidence, Wilentz and his team would do exactly what the defense feared: tie the ladder directly to Hauptmann. This was the testimony Liscom C. Case, an avid carpenter, had been waiting to hear.

  The prosecutors began to set the stage for the tracing of the wood evidence. They called Max Rauch, Hauptmann’s landlord, who swore the attic had no boards missing when he rented the upper apartment to the Hauptmanns. Senator J. J. Dorn flew in from South Carolina to detail his “one by fours” and the visit Koehler had made to his lumber yard. At one point he was speaking so softly, he was asked to pretend that he was at the State Capitol, after which his booming voice could be heard by everyone in attendance. Then they called a representative from the Long Island wholesaler who had bought the lumber in question from Dorn. And the prosecution brought in the co-owner and an employee of the National Lumber and Millwork Company in the Bronx, who swore that they had received the lumber in question and further that Hauptmann had worked there off and on in the early 1930s and had purchased wood from the yard a couple of months before the kidnapping.

  Next the prosecution sought to recreate the scene in Hauptmann’s attic by re-calling Bornmann and then each of the NYPD carpenters who had joined the detective and Koehler when they were tracing Rail 16. The prosecutors brought the piece of wood Bornmann had ripped up from the attic to compare to the ladder rail. It was introduced into evidence and labeled S-226.

  The carpenters were the final witnesses of the day, setting the stage for the prosecution’s eighty-seventh witness in the trial.

  Former judge George K. Large, who was aiding the prosecution during the trial, told The New York Times what to expect from Koehler’s testimony. “The long strip that was brought into the court room,” Large declared, “is a part of the board that Hauptmann used to make the right upright of the largest section of the ladder. It has been set right down on the floor in the attic of Hauptmann’s home and even the nail holes fit perfectly.”

  Whether Large was intentionally being deceptive is unclear, but Rail 16 was the upper left-hand rail in the kidnap ladder, not the upper right-hand rail. His rhetoric didn’t stop there, as he told the reporter that “Mr. Koehler started from scratch and sent out 40,000 circulars to lumber mills over the country” to help trace the wood in the ladder. That was about 38,500 more than he really sent out, but it sent the message to the newspaper audience that Koehler was credible.

  Large concluded, “In some respects Mr. Koehler’s testimony will be the most interesting in the trial because of his achievements. He had placed that wood right in the lumber yard in the Bronx before anybody had ever heard of Hauptmann. When Hauptmann was arrested, we could trace him from that yard.”

  Koehler had spent his time between appearances on the stand as an interested bystander at the trial. He told Ethelyn that one day he “was the most photographed man in Flemington” when he ended up in the backseat of the same car as the Lindbergh’s nanny, Betty Gow. As for the famous aviator, Koehler was star struck and had “made up my mind I wouldn’t speak to him first.”

  Lindbergh would break the ice, coming up to Koehler, shaking his hand, and beginning a conversation about their shared admiration for Madison. Lindbergh called it “one of the nicest cities in the country.” Koehler wrote Ethelyn that “as would be expected, Lindbergh is just like any other fellow when you talk to him.”

  Ethelyn would join her husband in New Jersey the weekend before he was set to testify, and as she wrote the children, she was “excited.” She told them she was feeling confident she’d get into the courtroom because “[t]he head jailer at Flemington asked Papa for his autograph which Papa gave and he told the jailer that in return, he should get me in to the trial which he agreed to do.”

  She was so nervous for her husband she became absentminded, leaving her galoshes in Grand Central Station. When she went back to New York City to try to find them, the porter asked her, “Is your husband that wood expert? I read about him.” She wrote her children that “he was ready to stand on his head to be of service to me, but he could not find my galoshes.”

  A second concern for Ethelyn was the lovely turkey dinner she ate on Sunday night that “did not digest and about 7:30, I started vomiting. I kept it up every hour all night,” she wrote to her kids.

  She wasn’t going to miss the trial, though. On Monday, she boarded a bus for witnesses and members of the media to head to the courthouse. Initially, the reporters objected to wives riding along, but there was enough room for everyone. However, sitting there waiting for the bus to go, Ethelyn “got sicker and sicker. I did not know whether I was going to faint or vomit, but either one would have made a spectacle so I clambered out again. Papa and a state trooper helped me over to the hotel. Of course we had to face every camera in the place.”

  Koehler tried to cover his wife with a newspaper, to prevent her from the embarrassment of being sick in front of others, but she figured they got thirty or forty pictures. She was mortified in addition to being sick. He got her a doctor, and after sleeping all afternoon, she felt much better.

  The next day was the day before Koehler was set to testify. He and Ethelyn posed for pictures at the request of the Associated Press on the courthouse steps, and reporters swarmed him at the end of court that day, leading to some stress. His anxiety had been building since Wilentz told him he “was going to use him for his ‘big shot.’”

  He had trouble sleeping that night. He told Ethelyn about the “home runs” he planned to deliver. She smiled and suggested they both try to get some rest.

  Tens of thousands of people descended on Flemington on January 23, 1935, in anticipation of the prosecution wrapping up and Hauptmann taking the stand in his own defense. At one point over the past week, the Associated Press had reported that sixteen th
ousand cars and sixty-four thousand visitors had converged on or passed through Flemington. Those arriving on the sixteenth day of the trial would have to deal with a driving snowstorm that made traffic conditions especially difficult.

  “Manitowoc Man Helps in Bruno Prosecution,” read the headline in Arthur Koehler’s hometown newspaper that day. The story gave him another middle initial he didn’t have, “Arthur J. Koehler,” and spoke of him as “the No. 1 wood technologist in the government service.”

  When Koehler approached the stand at midmorning, dressed in a three-piece gray suit with a dark tie and a white handkerchief in the breast pocket, he expected this stint to certainly be longer than his first time in the witness chair.

  Ethelyn sat in the front row, a reassuring presence. Next to her was one of the US senators from New Jersey. She sat two chairs away from Lindbergh and directly in front of the reporters.

  As Koehler placed his left hand on the Bible and swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, Liscom C. Case perked up. He had been sitting just under the American flag, head against the wall and his legs stretched out comfortably. When Koehler took the stand, reporters noticed that he “sat on the edge of his chair” and seemed prepared to become “an absorbed listener.”

  “Mr. Koehler, will you please tell us where you live and what your business is?” Wilentz began.

  “I live at Madison, Wisconsin and I am employed there at the United States Forest Products Laboratory.”

  “Do you mean that you are employed by the United States Government?”

  “I am.”

  “And what does the Forest Products Laboratory work consist of?”

  “The work of the Forest Products Laboratory consists of making tests and investigations on wood.”

  “Tell me whether or not you are the wood expert of the United States Government?”

  “I am the expert on the identification of wood for the Government,” Koehler gently corrected his questioner.

  “Are you in charge of the Department?”