After complaining that the defense would be “terribly handicapped by a total lack of the funds” compared with the prosecution, Fisher summed up simply, “We will hide nothing and produce everything and, when you have heard all the testimony, we trust that if you are not already satisfied that the State of New Jersey has utterly failed to make out a case against Bruno Richard Hauptmann, we are quite sure you will be convinced, after you have heard such testimony related as we will present.”
With that, the court took a twelve-minute recess, after which Big Ed Reilly called the defendant, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, to the stand. The world had been waiting for this moment since March 1, 1932.
Hauptmann’s testimony unfolded over a period of four days and featured numerous denials from the accused regarding whether he had ever seen Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., whether he had kidnapped and murdered the boy, and whether he had made the ladder that helped the perpetrator of the crime.
There it stood, over his shoulder and propped up against a wall, during the duration of his testimony.
“Now, how many years, Bruno, have you been a carpenter?” Reilly asked him.
“About ten years.”
“You have seen this ladder here in court, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you build that ladder?”
“I am a carpenter,” he said while openly laughing.
“Did you build that ladder?” Reilly asked again.
“Certainly not.”
“Come down and look at it, please.”
“Looks like a music instrument,” Hauptmann said after descending from the witness stand to examine it.
“In your opinion,” said Reilly, “does it look like a well made ladder?”
“To me it doesn’t look like a ladder at all. I don’t know how a man can step up.”
“Now did you take this ladder in your automobile or any automobile from the Bronx and convey it to Hopewell, New Jersey?”
“I never transported a ladder in my car.”
He went on to deny having anything to do with the construction of the ladder as Wilentz cross-examined him, with Wilentz even raising his voice numerous times in an effort to rattle the accused.
“The first time you built a ladder, you don’t build a good one, do you?” he asked bluntly.
“I never build a ladder,” Hauptmann replied, refusing to buckle.
During his opportunity to address his client again, Reilly discussed the plane and chisel evidence put forth by Koehler. “Now they have brought into court here and exhibited a large plane. Is this your plane?”
“That’s my plane.”
“How long before your arrest had you used this plane?”
“This plane was never used since [19]’28.”
“And are there any chisels missing from this [tool] box?”
“There are three Stanley chisels missing, them chisels they are no good at all, they were laying in the garage. But the Stanley set, good chisels, but I see it disappeared.”
“When did you last see them in that box?”
“I would say a couple days before I get arrested.”
Wilentz’s cross-examination was ruthless, with the lawyer at times shouting at Hauptmann in an effort to break him. In one moment, he showed Hauptmann sketches of a ladder and window in the defendant’s own notebook. Hauptmann denied he had drawn them and yelled back at Wilentz, “Stop that!” as the attorney general pressed on witheringly.
The defense team knew somehow they had to poke holes in the ladder evidence, and to get there they would have to create doubt in Koehler. They had their work cut out for them. The wood scientist’s testimony had made him a celebrity. He was the subject of a Ripley’s Believe or Not strip that focused on how his name was thirteen letters just like David T. Wilentz, Edward J. Reilly, Lindbergh baby, and Hauptmann Case. He was the focus of a New York Evening Journal cartoon showing him with a 2x4 and the caption, “You can get by as a big shot here in Flemington now just by carrying around a chunk of wood and a serious look.”
Pope pulled Koehler aside on February 1, before putting any witnesses on the stand to challenge him directly, and said, “I don’t want to flatter you, but in my 30 years of experience, [your testimony] is the best piece of work I ever saw.”
Still, they had a client to defend. They first called Erastus Mead Hudson, who had done the fingerprint analysis on the ladder and found none matching Hauptmann. However, more importantly for the defendant, Hudson also testified that when he was testing the ladder for prints, he did not remember there being four nail holes in Rail 16. He testified that to the best of his knowledge, there had been only one nail hole in that rail.
The implication was that the evidence had been planted by police, the original Rail 16 replaced by one that matched a board from the attic. However, on cross-examination, Wilentz would get Hudson to acknowledge the rail he was studying in court, number 16, was the same one he had originally inspected for fingerprints, not a different board altogether. Pope objected, saying Wilentz had “confused the witness with a shrewd question,” but Trenchard overruled him.
The next defense witness designed to poke a hole in Koehler’s testimony was Stanley Seal, a wood pattern maker for the Foran Foundry in Flemington. He was called to discuss nicks and marks a plane can make depending on the angle at which it is held. He was not as well versed on the topic as Pope would have liked.
“Now, from your experience as a woodworker, is it possible to recognize with any degree of certainty the markings of a plane bit upon a piece of wood?” Pope asked him.
“I don’t know,” Seal replied.
“And trace it from the wood to that particular plane bit?”
“I don’t know,” he answered again.
Once again turning Trenchard’s bench into an improvised workshop, Seal planed a board’s edge, first using the plane “parallel with the edge of the board” and then running it “on an angle.” The side planed on an angle was labeled with an A and the one planed straight with an S.
There was a difference in the markings on each side. Pope’s point was to show that planer marks are not as distinctive as human fingerprints.
Defense witness Charles DeBisschop came from Waterbury, Connecticut, because he was convinced Koehler was talking nonsense. He’d been around trees and lumber in some capacity or another for thirty years, since William McKinley was president at the end of the nineteenth century. He told the court that he hadn’t read any books on the topic of wood identification, but he subscribed to Farm & Forestry magazine.
He said he had spent “about pretty nearly every night and Sunday,” matching up grains of birch, bird’s eye maple, and North Carolina pine for cabinetmakers and others.
“There isn’t hardly a day gone by but what somebody wants a piece of wood to match something that they broke,” he told the court.
He showed the jury two boards, one purportedly from Connecticut and the other from Massachusetts, and showed that despite the fact they were from different trees, he believed the grain in the two pieces of lumber matched. He testified that one was forty-seven years old and the other was eight years old and yet, in his view, they matched.
Wilentz and Pope fought over whether DeBisschop should be considered an expert witness.
“We don’t say that the gentlemen hasn’t handled and dealt with lumber and that he doesn’t deal in lumber pretty nearly every day,” Wilentz said, “but we feel that he hasn’t the technical knowledge to qualify as an expert.”
Pope countered, “Well, that depends upon what you mean by ‘as an expert.’ I didn’t think that even the State’s great witness qualified as an expert.” Even though he had expressed his admiration privately to Koehler, publicly he had a job to do that required defending his client to the best of his abilities.
They settled on calling DeBisschop a “
practical man,” rather than a technical expert. Pope had him on the stand because DeBisschop said that, practically speaking, there was no way the attic board matched Rail 16 from the kidnap ladder.
“I would say they are [from] an entirely different board,” he testified.
His testimony fell somewhat flat, though, when he was asked more about the two boards matching and looked over at Koehler, who was sitting at the prosecution table, and asked him, “This is the way it is supposed to be matched isn’t it? Is that the way they are supposed to be matched? Which is the top? Which is the top here?”
Trenchard admonished the defense witness not to ask questions. “He ought to answer questions,” the judge said. Reporters noted that juror number 2, Rosie Pill, “shook with mirth” after that exchange.
Koehler said later to his wife that the practical lumberman “seemed willing to say anything.” But he wondered, “Just the same, the question is or was, what effect will the testimony of this ‘practical man’ have with a jury composed of ordinary, country village folk?”
Fisher told reporters afterward that Hauptmann was more impressed with DeBisschop than he was with Koehler. The defendant told Fisher, “any man who works for thirty years in the wood business has got more brains in his head than a man from Washington.”
The final defense witness related to the ladder was Ewald Mielk, who had been a carpenter and millwright by trade for more than forty years. He too described himself as a practical lumber man without formal training in wood identification.
Mielk was called to dispute the notion that State’s Exhibit S-226, the board from the attic, and Rail 16 were the same board. He explained that he believed this because S-226 was far darker than the upright from the kidnap ladder, and thus it showed more life than Rail 16.
“Look at these boards and in view of the fact that you have stated that there is more life in the one board, known as the attic board, than there is in the board known as the ladder rail, that there is a difference in the kind, the size and the spacing of the knots and there is a difference in the grain colors, can you as a practical wood man, tell this jury whether they ever were, in fact, a part of the same board?” Pope asked.
“They are not,” he answered.
Under cross-examination from Wilentz, Mielk conceded the extent of his investigation of the ladder and S-226 consisted of “possibly five minutes” spent looking at the two pieces of wood the day before. Further, he acknowledged he did not know the impact of the chemicals used in fingerprint gathering on wood. Koehler had testified that the silver nitrate had stained the wood in question.
Koehler was called as a rebuttal witness and resumed the oath he’d taken earlier. He methodically and, as James Kilgallen from the International News Service reported, “in his cool, unemotional way” went to work debunking the defense’s claims.
First, in relation to Seal, the man who had planed the board straight up and down and at an angle for the jury, Koehler said the markings from the edge marked S were “identical to marks found in the wood of the kidnap ladder.”
Second, he said the two pieces of wood DeBisschop had brought, allegedly from Massachusetts and Connecticut and of vastly different ages, were once part of the same board.
“Those two boards were at one time part of the same board for a number of reasons,” he said as DeBisschop “twisted nervously” in his seat, reporters noted. “In the first place the pattern or the groove produced in the middle of these two boards is in identically the same place and of the same depth and width as can be demonstrated very simply by putting these two boards together, one on top of the other with the edges corresponding and then that center bead corresponds exactly.
“Having the edges of the two boards parallel,” he said, once again demonstrating before the jury, “you can see that the center bead in the two boards is in exactly the same place; also the middle bead is in exactly the same place and you can see that better by close inspection.”
He went on to point out that DeBisschop had said a board had five annual growth rings in it when in reality it had six. He also stated that wood defined by the Connecticut lumberman as “yellow pine” was actually white pine.
As it related to the number of nail holes in Rail 16, Koehler said there were four nail holes in the ladder upright and that he had measured the distance between them and marked it down in his notebook more than a year before Hauptmann was arrested.
Finally, Wilentz asked bluntly once again, “Do you still say that the attic board and the rail were once the same board?”
“Yes.”
On Saturday, February 9, the twenty-ninth day of the trial of the century, both the defense and the prosecution would rest. Between them they had called 146 witnesses. Closing statements would be given the following Monday in front of a courtroom as crowded as it had ever been throughout the trial. Reilly had a crew in from Brooklyn sitting in special seats to the left of Trenchard.
Koehler ended up on the windowsill to the right of the jury.
Hunterdon County Prosecutor Hauck delivered the initial message for the state, complimenting in the process the wood scientist whom he said had delivered “the most wonderful” testimony he’d ever heard.
“A year and a half before anyone had ever heard of Bruno Richard Hauptmann,” he said, “Koehler traced the kidnap ladder lumber to a lumber yard in the Bronx where Hauptmann worked. And after Hauptmann was arrested he found that one of the ladder rails came from the very attic of the house where Hauptmann lived.
“But that wasn’t all he showed you. He showed you that this defendant Bruno Richard Hauptmann had a plane and that he planed the rungs of the ladder with that plane. He showed you that the chisel used in making the ladder was the same size chisel that was missing from the tool chest of Bruno Richard Hauptmann.”
He concluded by shouting and pointing his finger at Hauptmann, “Oh, there is plenty of evidence here that cries Hauptmann, Hauptmann, Hauptmann. Plenty of evidence to justify my request that you convict Bruno Richard Hauptmann of first degree murder.”
If Reilly had been “a heavy, listless lawyer” throughout the trial, as some in the media had alleged, he morphed into a “brilliant advocate in the midst of the legal battle of his life” during his closing statement. Speaking from midmorning until dusk and without consulting notes, documents, or testimony transcript, he never once “groped for a word or a fact,” according to reporters.
He began with a copy of the Bible in his hand. Walking over to the jury box, he said conversationally,
I want to give you a text. It is “Judge not lest ye be judged.”
Perhaps after hearing the distinguished prosecutor, you feel that this defendant must prove his innocence. That is not the case. The State must prove his guilt and I want you to carry that thought with you into the sanctity of your jury room.
You are big enough not to be swayed by the wealth and prominence of the family involved. You are big enough not to be swayed by the fact that this defendant is a poor German carpenter. Justice demands that the still voice of your conscience be given full freedom to decide this case.
If the beginning of his remarks were thoughtful, what came next was explosive. Reilly accused three of Lindbergh’s household staff of being involved in the crime. “Colonel Lindbergh was stabbed in the back by the disloyalty of his servants,” he said.
He attacked the prosecution’s eyewitnesses for being old, for being glory-hounds, for being wrong. He said there was not enough evidence to convict on a murder or kidnapping charge. “Don’t send this man away because ransom money was found on him,” he said. “That is a charge of extortion, not murder. Let New York prove that. . . .
“Circumstantial evidence is no evidence.”
But his main contention was that his client had been set up. The four nail holes had been put there by Bornmann, he said, who had swapped out the original Rail 16. The ladder
“was a plant, and nobody went up that ladder that night, if it was ever up against the house.” The police wrote Condon’s phone number on Hauptmann’s closet door. They stole his Stanley chisels, including the ¾-inch one.
“It is the most outstanding example of police crookedness in my career,” he said.
As Arthur Koehler sat on the windowsill in the courtroom, he knew he would not be spared. Reilly wagged his finger at him and spared him no quarter, calling him a fake and “a lumber cruiser.”
“I don’t see how he can sleep nights after giving testimony like that with a man on trial for his life,” Reilly thundered.
Do you suppose the board used in the ladder was ever taken out of any attic floor? Examine it carefully. It doesn’t bear a mark from any hammer. But Mr. Koehler comes in and here we are again with expert evidence as opposed to horse sense and he would have you believe that the carpenter, Hauptmann, building a ladder for kidnap purposes, with a lumber yard around the corner, with lumber in his basement, crawled up into the attic and tears out a board for the ladder.
Here we have billions and billions of feet of lumber down in South Carolina and Koehler has the nerve to come in here and say there are no two alike, like fingerprints I suppose.
“I’ll stake DeBisschop, the lumberman from old Connecticut, against Koehler any time,” he shouted.
That’s the good old common theory of hearsay against expert evidence. Can you believe that, with billions of feet of lumber being put out each year, that there could never be two boards alike? DeBisschop took a board 47 years old and one 8 years old and showed you they were alike.
So Koehler, testifying for glory, vanity, preferment, advancement, goes back on the stand and says that DeBisschop’s two boards were also the same. He was afraid otherwise to go back to face the laughter of his fellows in Washington.
The Sixteenth Rail Page 28