The Sixteenth Rail

by Adam Schrager

  Case nodded his head knowingly as Koehler continued.

  Once in a while a knife may not be lined up properly with the rest of them, as is shown here for knife No. 5. As a consequence when it comes around it doesn’t make as heavy a cut as the other knives, it makes a narrower cut and I have shown that here with cut No. 5. You will see cut No. 5 is narrower in each case. And there are eight cuts from one to the other, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. In other words, every eighth cut is a narrowed cut in that case. Therefore, by examining the surface of a piece of lumber, it usually is possible to tell how many knives there were in the cutter head that dressed the lumber because as a rule there is something wrong with a knife somewhere, maybe a little nick in it or the knife may be out of line and so it is possible by examining the surface of a piece of planed lumber in most cases to determine how many knives there were in the cutter head that dressed the lumber.

  In addition to these cutter heads planing the top and bottom of a board as it goes through the planer, there are similar cutter heads standing vertically on the two sides of the board and plane the edges of the board as it goes through the planer, so that all four sides of a board are planed as it goes through the planer. . . .

  Now the number of knives in those cutter heads that plane the edges may be the same as in the top and bottom cutter heads, but usually they are less. Very often if there are eight knives in the top and bottom cutter heads, there will be six in the side heads, as they are called, or if there are six knives in the top and bottom cutter heads, there will be four in the side heads.

  Now here I show a photograph of rail number 13 of this ladder, that is one of the rails of the bottom section of the ladder. This is a photograph of a portion of the side of one of those rails. You will notice that there is a periodic mark occurring at regular intervals. That is due to one of the knives not protruding as far as it ought to and every time it came around it didn’t make as wide a cut as it should. Consequently I can tell how far that lumber moved through the planer per revolution of these cutter heads. The cutter head dressed the surface. I find in measuring that distance on the lumber itself that that distance is regularly 93 hundredths of an inch.

  Hauptmann and the rest of the defense table did not move. The defendant sat with his arms folded and his legs crossed.

  Koehler proceeded to walk the jury through his detective work: the discovery of the type of machine planer used, the canvassing of lumber mills from New York City to Alabama, the collection of samples from those that held the right kind of machine, and eventually the visit to McCormick and Senator Dorn’s lumber yard.

  “I visited their mill to see if I could definitely determine whether they had dressed this lumber,” Koehler said. “And I found that when they ran lumber through their planer with a certain sized feed pulley on that planer it made revolution marks exactly like on that ladder rail.”

  Then he testified about studying sales slips to find the car loads of 1x4-inch North Carolina pine shipped north, traveling with Bornmann to the mills that had received that lumber, and how because planer knives would be sharpened from time to time, not all of those carloads would have the distinguishing mark in question.

  “Knowing that, you started to trace it further. Tell us about it,” Wilentz asked.

  “I would like to show what that distinguishing mark looks like. Here is an edge of the bottom rail of the ladder and here is the edge of a board which I obtained from the National Lumber and Millwork Company. You will notice these waves in there, periodic waves, they are spaced exactly the same distance apart in the two,” he said, once again using a pencil to point to places on a picture of the lumber. “The thing I have in mind particularly is a little shallow groove, a little difficult to see perhaps, but you see it in some places, here, which occurs every so often. In fact, they are 86-hundredths of an inch apart. That was due to some irregularity in the edge of one knife, and I knew if I could find a shipment in which that irregularity showed up, I could locate the shipment from which these ladder rails were made.”

  He described going to the Bronx lumber yard and what he had found there. “A sample of lumber at the yard . . . showed exactly the same defect in the planing on one edge as occurred on the ladder rail; and I also found that there was a defect on the face of the board,” he said as he pointed to another photo. “There is a periodic defect in the knife that shows up near one edge in both pieces, also due to a defect in the knife that dressed that lumber.

  “Therefore, having a defect in the planing on one edge and also on one face of this lumber from the National Lumber & Millwork Company, which corresponds exactly with that similar defect in the ladder rail, I was convinced that I had found the yard from which this ladder, these ladder rails were obtained.”

  “Sounds like a fairy tale,” Ethelyn heard a reporter say.

  Wilentz now moved on to an exhibit that showed a photo of Rails 14 and 15, from the middle section of the ladder. Koehler had deduced that if the two were placed alongside each other, the saw cuts made for their recesses matched up perfectly, which showed that those two pieces had been clamped together when they were cut.

  Hauptmann had owned clamps, already introduced into evidence as State’s Exhibit 196.

  “Can you tell whether or not those were the clamps, or were they similar clamps?” Wilentz wanted to know.

  “I can’t tell. The clamp did not leave any mark on the wood, but neither would that clamp,” Koehler replied. “Any one of those could have been used.”

  Koehler was next shown photographs magnifying the excess saw cuts used to make the recesses on Rails 16 and 17 from the top section of the kidnap ladder. He described how he had measured the width of the saw cuts made in cutting out the recesses, ranging from 35 to 37-thousandths of an inch.

  “Was there a saw in Hauptmann’s tool chest that is in evidence that made a similar size cut?”

  “Yes,” Koehler said. “I tried out all the saws and found two saws in that tool chest that will make cuts of that width.”

  Before they went any further, Wilentz’s attention was drawn back to two earlier exhibits showing the cutter head knives from the Dorn lumber yard. He asked what they were intended to show.

  “In examining this ladder,” Koehler explained, “I tried to find out as far as I could what sized lumber was used in its construction. Now these Ponderosa pine rungs are two and three-quarter inches wide and they were planed on one edge. That means that they originally were wider. Now, the only way I could determine how wide the board was from which those rungs were made was to see if they would match together in any way, and I found that the four rungs of the bottom section of the ladder, and the four rungs of the middle section of the ladder . . . could be matched together, end to end and side to side, by means of their grain, so as to show without any doubt, that those eight rungs were cut from one board, so-called one by six Ponderosa pine. The board was first stripped lengthwise, and then the edges were planed, because the hand plane marks ran consecutively from one rung to the next one on those edges; and after they were planed, then the strips were cut into four pieces of the proper length.”

  Since they were on the topic of the width of wood, Wilentz asked Koehler about the attic board that he had testified had at one time been connected with Rail 16. Both prosecutor and witness were thorough.

  “Please look at [Rail 16] and then tell us why it is if the rail of the ladder was a piece of [the attic board], why is it that one is wider than the other?”

  “All the other rails of the ladder are so-called one by four stock, and this one was dressed down the same width which is also indicated by the fact that both edges are hand planed; in other words, it is ripped down from a wider board so as to be the same width as the other rails in the ladder.”

  It was getting late. Wilentz encouraged Koehler to sit back down in the witness box, as he would just ask a few more questions until cou
rt would adjourn at 4:30. He asked about Koehler’s first trip into Hauptmann’s attic. This testimony was anticlimactic considering the ground they’d covered earlier, but it gave the reporters a fighting chance to write their pieces in time to make their evening deadlines.

  Wilentz asked the judge if he could bring back Koehler to the stand the next morning as he had “surely overlooked one or two things.” But there certainly was nothing major left to cover. As Koehler was leaving the courtroom that day, Lindbergh clutched his arm, leaned toward him, and said he was “absolutely amazing” and that he’d “never heard anything like it before.”

  Arthur turned to Ethelyn and smiled.

  “I’m so proud of you,” she said.

  “It’s the greatest day of my life,” he responded with a gentle clasp of her hand, “except the day I got married.”

  A prosecuting attorney told the Chicago Daily Tribune that “Koehler was a pretty good witness” and that the state was satisfied with its case.

  Maybe more tellingly, as the defense lawyers left the courtroom they were surrounded by reporters asking about the day’s events and in particular about the so-called wood wizard, as one reporter would call him.

  “What’d you think of Koehler’s testimony?” the reporters all cried out.

  “There has been nothing better than it,” said a frustrated Pope, who had tried continuously and unsuccessfully to stop Koehler’s demonstrations. “It is perfect.”

  The Universal Service reporter copiously took notes on Reilly’s answer to the question. “I have never heard more damaging testimony or seen a more enthralling demonstration than that presented in the courtroom today by Arthur Koehler,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that we have had anything better than it, but we are going to break it down on cross-examination.”

  11

  By the time Arthur Koehler returned to the witness stand on the seventeenth day of the Hauptmann trial, he was known around the country.

  Newspaper headlines crowed with above-the-fold, bold-face praise.

  “Science and Justice,” screamed the Washington Evening Star.

  “Highlight of the Trial,” declared the Boston Herald.

  “Sherlock Holmes in Witness Box,” read the headline in the Wheeling, West Virginia, paper.

  Koehler’s testimony was praised from coast to coast in the syndicated prose of Damon Runyon. “One of the most astonishing tales of scientific detective work ever related as fact or fiction is poured into the ears of the amazed jurors in the Lindbergh baby murder trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann today, as the state of New Jersey practically closes its case by apparently keeping its promise to ‘wrap the kidnap ladder around Hauptmann’s neck,’” he began.

  What Hauptmann can say in his own defense, how he will attempt to alibi out of the damaging evidence of the ladder made with tools said to be his own and including a piece of board from his attic, will come to light tomorrow at noon when Hauptmann, by agreement between defense and prosecution, will take the stand himself.

  The tale of scientific wood and tool detection, told today by a bald-headed, mild looking middle-aged man from the woods of Wisconsin, an expert for the government of the U.S. named Arthur Koehler, puts the greatest fictional exploits of Sherlock Holmes in the shade.

  Carlisle Winslow, director of the Forest Products Lab, would immediately send Runyon a copy of the architects’ drawing of the lab with a note saying that “this is the back woods where Koehler works.”

  Other reporters were equally effusive in their praise.

  Arthur B. Reeve with The New York Post wrote, “After hearing the testimony of Arthur Koehler, Hauptmann is finished.”

  The Reading, Pennsylvania, Times called him “the only real detective (in the case).”

  The Columbia, South Carolina, newspaper, The State, labeled him a “woodsman Sherlock Holmes.”

  They weren’t the only ones to make the comparison to the fictional sleuth. The New York Times said Koehler testified “in the role of a modern Sherlock Holmes while Attorney General Wilentz played the part of Dr. Watson by asking questions now and then to draw him out. . . . The jurors followed the testimony with signs of intense interest, leaning forward in their chairs and following every word closely. . . . Liscom Case, Juror No. 12 [sic], a retired carpenter showed special interest, calling for several of the photographic exhibits while Mr. Koehler testified and apparently discussing this evidence with the juror sitting next to him.”

  Under the headline, “Adventure on Prosaic Roads,” the Marietta, Georgia, Times wrote, “Today, there was revealed before a court room jammed almost beyond human endurance a drama so vivid and stirring that the least imaginative of the spectators could see, in their mind’s eye, a tall, gaunt German carpenter sawing, planing, chiseling and hammering upon a strange three-section ladder. The medium of this drama was annual rings, pitch marks and knots, ridges and depressions, nail holes and saw cuts in pieces of South Carolina [sic] and ponderosa pine.”

  Willard Edwards from the Chicago Tribune called Koehler’s work “an amazing piece of detective work” and described the Wisconsin man as “a hard-working, plugging detective with astonishing qualities of perseverance.”

  The New York Post, realizing the importance of Koehler’s testimony, presciently wrote: “The Hauptmann trial may go down in legal history less as the most sensational case of its time than as the case which brought legal recognition to the wood expert on a par with handwriting, fingerprint and ballistic experts.”

  The Associated Press said he delivered a “smashing blow” to the defense.

  He was called a “super scientist detective,” a “bloodhound,” a “relentless tracker” who told a tale “more engrossing, more breath-taking than any detective story ever heard in court or written in type.”

  Maybe the most complimentary comment came from a Brit, Ford Madox Ford, an English novelist, poet, critic, and editor who sat through the trial and contributed to the New York World Telegram on occasion. Koehler’s testimony provided one of those occasions, underneath the headline “Destiny’s Role Given Koehler.”

  “A little, baldish, shining, implacable man with an amazingly clear vocal organ, he was like the instrument of a blind and atrociously menacing destiny,” Ford wrote.

  You shuddered at the thought of what might happen to you if such a mind and such an inconceivable industry should get to work upon your own remote past . . . a man who searched 1,900 factories for traces of the scratches of a plane on a piece of wood, it was fantastic and horrifying.

  I have never—and in my time I have seen some things—imagined that any moment could be so shockingly moving as when with the air of a conjurer producing a rabbit from a top hat, he brought out from invisibility a common plane and proceeded, utterly matter of fact, to plane a piece of plank, producing exactly the grooves and scratches that are to be found on the ladder that is the principal item of the State’s evidence. You felt that if the motionless—and always motionless—prisoner sits in the end motionless in the electric chair, that little sleuth, with the implacability of a weasel hunting by scent an invisible prey, will be the man who will have sent him there.

  Ford was more definitive in a conversation with a reporter from the Chicago Daily Tribune as he told him that Koehler’s testimony “is going to send Hauptmann to the [electric] chair.”

  The superlatives flowed in person as well.

  Walter Winchell told Koehler after his testimony, “You’re the tops, Koehler.”

  Adela Rogers St. Johns, a prominent New York journalist with the Hearst papers, pulled Koehler aside and said to him, “My father was a criminal lawyer and tried over 170 cases of which I heard a great deal and I have been in the Hearst service for 30 years, but yours was the most impressive testimony I ever heard.”

  The court stenographer, Charlton Shell, told Koehler, “I have had 19 years’ experience as a court reporter,
but your testimony was the cleverest and most convincing I ever heard.”

  The Western Union lady at his hotel gasped audibly when he came to send a telegram, asking, “Are you the man?!” After he said yes, she said, “I am glad I saw you. Now, I can go home and brag to my family.”

  Speaking of family, Arthur’s brother Ben wrote him that his “picture has been published in all the newspapers of the land, I think. . . . [Your testimony was] just as interesting as any detective story ever written and it is not a novel.”

  At 10:27 on January 24, Koehler once again faced Attorney General Wilentz. In answer to Wilentz’s questions, he made clear that the only parts of the kidnap ladder that came from South Carolina were Rails 12 and 13 and that the Forest Products Laboratory was the only one of its kind covering “all kinds of research on wood” in the country.

  The two men had one more critical point they wished to convey to the jury. Wilentz introduced State’s Exhibit S-251, a photo of Hauptmann’s car taken on the day he was arrested.

  “Did you take this ladder, Exhibit S-211, and attempt to fit it into that car?”

  “I did,” Koehler responded.

  “Did it fit in the car?”

  “Yes. When I took the three sections assembled and nested together, they fit in on top of the front and rear seats, and there were several inches to spare.”

  “Do you mean that when you put them together like this,” Wilentz said, breaking down the ladder from being extended, “put the three sections together?”

  “Yes.”

  “That is, one within the other?”

  “Yes.”

  With that, Wilentz said, “Take the witness,” and defense attorney Pope began his efforts to fulfill Reilly’s earlier promise to the media that they would “break down” Koehler’s testimony. He began where Wilentz left off, asking about whether a bystander could have seen the ladder inside Hauptmann’s car.