Leon was skeptical of Samuelsohn when he wrote up the interviews in his 1934 official report:
Mr. Samuelsohn’s identification of the ladder was very vague, and that the marks which he identifies same from, were put there evidently, by the person who cut the notches in the sides to insert the rung, and that the marks which Mr. Samuelsohn told the investigator, he could identify the lumber by, previous to seeing the ladder, was not on the lumber. It is the opinion of the investigator that Mr. Samuelsohn is trying to seek notoriety in connection with this case. However, several pieces of lumber, which he claims were of the same board which the above strip was made from was obtained and sent to Mr. Koehler at the Training School to be compared with that of the lumber in the ladder.
There is no record of Koehler having checked those samples. However, he remained convinced, more so than if he’d seen it with his own eyes, that the attic board and Rail 16 came from the same piece of wood.
As Koehler, Wilentz, and the others speculated as to the governor’s true intentions the following day, Fulton Oursler, the editor of Liberty magazine, received a phone call at his Massachusetts home from Hoffman’s secretary, William Conklin. Conklin told the editor that “the governor was about to fire his big gun in the Hauptmann case and would be able to prove conclusively that Hauptmann had been framed. It was the governor’s earnest desire that [Oursler] come to New York at once to be present as the only representative of the press to witness this demonstration.”
He and his wife immediately packed their bags to drive to New York.
This is the view from Hauptmann’s attic, looking down into the closet and the shelves arranged into steps. Koehler returned there to face criticism from New Jersey Gov. Harold Hoffman, who believed the 16th Rail evidence was planted. (Courtesy: Dr. Regis Miller/Forest Products Laboratory)
At roughly 9:45 am, cars began pulling up to Hauptmann’s old home in the Bronx. Oursler’s taxi got him there first. Hauptmann’s lawyer, Lloyd Fisher, and Hoffman’s press agent, George Maines, pulled up next. The next car held Wilentz, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Hauck, Bornmann, and Koehler. Another police vehicle brought Keaten and Captain Russell Snook. The last vehicle to arrive bore New Jersey license number 1 and Hoffman, his secretary, Loney, Hoage, and Professor Louis Hazeltine, a chemist at the Stevens Institute of Technology.
“No one at this time, except Governor Hoffman and Lloyd Fisher, had any idea what this meeting was called for,” Oursler would later write. “I asked Fisher what to expect and he said: ‘This is a shot that will be heard around the world. We have unmistakable evidence that the state has framed Hauptmann and that the evidence of rail sixteen is of absolutely no value whatsoever.’”
The men all headed into the narrow closet, up the four shelves arranged into steps, and through the small opening into the attic. When Loney, the first man up, broke the second shelf, Oursler said, “the steps in Hauptmann’s ladders seem to have the habit of breaking.” Hoffman scowled at him. Seeing the rather rotund chief executive hoist himself through the hole in the ceiling, Oursler wrote, was a spectacle of “agility and celerity.”
When the crowd was gathered in the attic, all fourteen of them, the plan of action became clear. Oursler had been invited because, while he believed that Hauptmann was guilty, he also thought Hoffman was justified in seeking to have his questions answered.
Wilentz was angry. He had known Hoffman since childhood. They had grown up in the same area and so when he addressed him, he didn’t call him “Governor” or “Sir” or “His Excellency.” He called him Harold, and that morning he wanted to call him some other names as well.
“I consider this an outrageous proceeding,” he said. “I am here only to protect state troopers against intimidation. If you think that son-of-a-bitch Hauptmann is innocent, why don’t you turn him loose? You are encouraging him in his son-of-a-bitch attitude of not confessing. He knows Governor Hoffman is his friend and is relying on the governor to keep him from paying the penalty of his crime.”
Meanwhile, Loney and Hoage acted, Oursler wrote, “with a self-conscious truculence as if they were Sherlock Holmes twins about to disclose the secret of a great mystery.”
At its tallest point, the attic ceiling was only six feet high, and it was hot in there. Standing up also ran the risk of being poked in the eye or face by one of the exposed and protruding nails. So everybody was either hunched over and sweating or sitting on a beam with perspiration and dust gathering on their suits.
“Well, they tried to find all kinds of faults,” Koehler would later write Ethelyn, “but Bornmann and I knocked them over one by one.”
Hoffman, “like a good showman,” Koehler wrote his wife, had Oursler stand next to him to witness everything. The goal was to conclusively demonstrate that the attic board and Rail 16 were never one and the same and/or that the police had planted the attic board and then sawed off part of it before attaching it to the ladder. They believed Koehler’s testimony “was unreliable guesswork and untrue in fact,” Oursler wrote.
First, with the ladder rail in position over the nail holes, Hoage insisted that because Rail 16 was thinner than the attic board, they could not have been one and the same. Koehler said he was accurate, but diminished the fact’s importance.
“The difference was not great,” Koehler would later write in his report.
I suggested that the thickness of the two boards be measured not at the edges, because both edges of the board from which the ladder rail was cut were trimmed off, but more nearly between the two edges and preferably near the adjoining ends of the two boards. When measured there the rail was just a shade thinner. All of these differences are insignificant when it is considered that the lumber was low grade and therefore poorly dressed and not dry when dressed because it obviously had shrunk considerably after it was nailed down in the attic.
Consequently, slight variations in thickness would be expected due to uneven shrinkage.
After an hour of debate, the men continued to disagree.
Oursler said that Koehler was “appalled at the aura of antagonism surrounding him” and that Loney was a “bulldozing man who called Koehler an ignorant four-flushing son-of-a-bitch to me.”
Loney wanted to know why the ladder rail was heartwood and the attic board from which it had been cut was sapwood. Koehler told him both were sapwood and showed him some boards in the attic that were heartwood and thus darker in appearance.
“He did not seem to be convinced,” Koehler wrote in his report.
Then, Hoffman and Hoage pointed out that only one of the twenty-seven boards in the attic had any nails driven into it from the surface. Both the attic board and Rail 16 had surface nail holes. Their intimation was “that the cops, not being good carpenters, had ignorantly nailed down this fake board known as [State’s Exhibit S-226] and also driven the holes through rail sixteen through the top because they did not know any better.”
Koehler told him “this board undoubtedly was the first one laid and it had to be fastened securely so that the others could be driven against it.” He told the group it was common practice for carpenters to nail down the first board with surface nails while other boards would subsequently have nails in their sides, so they could attach.
Hoage asked Koehler if he knew how many nails there were in the other boards.
“Now wait a minute,” he said. “Don’t look.”
At that, Wilentz, who was sitting quietly and listening after having confronted Hoffman earlier, flew “into a rage,” Oursler wrote.
“I want to know for Christ’s sake who the hell you think you are,” he shouted at Hoage. “I’ll be goddamned if you’re going to talk to Koehler that way. Who do you think you are to give him rules not to look? Who gave you the right to lay down rules here? Who are you anyway and what are you doing here?”
“I was only trying to—,” Hoage responded before Wilentz cut him off.
“I don’t give a goddman what you were going to do. I said before this was an outrageous proceeding but you’re not going to talk to Professor Koehler [sic] that way because he doesn’t have to stand for it and I’m not going to let him stand for it.”
Hoage sat down next to Oursler and said, “I don’t want discord, but he can kiss my ass.”
Then Loney took up the case, pointing out that there were thirteen boards on each side of the attic ridgepole, a literal center-point for the room. He contended the twenty-seventh board, the one that constituted S-226 and Rail 16 “had been added . . . for the purpose of framing Hauptmann.”
Koehler said “there was no reason why a rough floor in an attic should be centered,” and that, regardless, “floors were not laid both ways from the middle but beginning at one side” and continuing until they were finished.
Another hour of debate over symmetry or lack thereof ended with continued disagreement.
Then the governor’s group turned its focus to Bornmann. Loney stated openly that it “would have been impossible for [Bornmann] to have pulled the board up . . . without breaking the tongue.” Koehler stood up for his partner in the investigation by stating that “many of the boards in the floor had shrunk enough so that the tongue was completely exposed.”
Hoffman then pulled out a piece of cardboard, about 5x7 inches, attached to a thin wooden handle to prove his next point: that the shallow saw cut through the edge of the adjacent board to S-226 did not correspond with the cut made through S-226.
“The evidence seemed very convincing to Governor Hoffman,” Oursler wrote. “It was utterly unconvincing to me. In days of manual training, I could never keep a saw straight under any circumstances and anyone knows that no matter how tightly the saw is held, it will wiggle one way or another.”
They had been in that attic for roughly three hours, having kept the windows closed until only recently in an effort to keep the conversation confined to those in the room. A crowd of reporters had by that time gathered around the home, creating a sense of déjà vu for many of those who’d been there a year and a half earlier when Hauptmann had been arrested.
Hoffman had saved what he felt was his most compelling evidence for last.
“I want to say that I have never known a more dramatic moment than when this demonstration was made,” Oursler wrote. “It seemed to make all these other preceding lesser matters more important.”
Koehler described it as the governor and his group pulling “their biggest rabbit out of their hat.”
Hoffman asked everyone to sit down. They had all removed their coats and vests and loosened their ties by now. He pointed out the importance of the nail holes found in Rail 16 and how they attached perfectly with the attic board when the original nails were produced.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “the jury did not see this. The jury heard about it. But I have these original nails in my possession here and I want to fit them into these nail holes.”
Koehler had done this very experiment himself back in October 1934. He had described the chances of being able to perfectly fit those four nails into Rail 16 and the attic board as a one in ten trillion chance.
He had declared that this wasn’t a coincidence, as “there simply is not such a chance in human experience.”
Hoffman had brought a bunch of little white sticks, the width of soda straws and cut to the length of the nails, and began dropping them into the nail holes. They should have gone in 1¾ inches.
That’s not what happened.
“They went in only one half an inch and there they stuck,” Oursler recalled. “You couldn’t make them go any farther.”
Koehler didn’t understand. His notes from those October visits to Hauptmann’s attic clearly stated, “all nail holes in joists are 1¾ inches deep.” He turned to Wilentz with a confused look and told him, “I had measured the holes originally and they were deep enough, and I had it right in my notebook.”
“The answer seemed self-evident,” Oursler wrote.
The thing was framed and the police had not taken the trouble to drive the nails all the way. All they wanted was holes that would match in order to convince the jury.
I have never seen such consternation in my life. Wilentz was pale and so was Hauck. There was no answer that could be made. There the thing was! The nails did not go into the holes. And thereby was demolished all the evidence that linked the ladder with Hauptmann’s attic. The temperature in that room, which had seemed 120 degrees, suddenly felt like zero. I felt a chill down my back.
Wilentz found his voice and said the defense, which had controlled the attic for the last number of months, could have tampered with the boards. Behind his back, Loney and Hoage called Koehler a “son-of-a-bitch with every other breath” and said he was a laughingstock in the lumber industry.
Hoffman insisted Bornmann join him in the middle bedroom on the home’s second floor, where he told him to confess that he had “framed the whole affair.”
“I want you to tell the truth about that board,” the governor said. “Do you still say that it was nailed down solid when you found it?”
“I told the truth,” Bornmann said. “The board was nailed solid with the nails flush when I first saw it.”
“For God’s sake,” Wilentz interjected, “if there’s anything wrong up there that I don’t know about, tell the Governor and let’s get it over with.”
Bornmann said there was nothing wrong and that he knew everything.
“I told the truth,” he insisted, “and I wouldn’t change it for no son of a bitch.”
Hoffman continued, time after time, to say there was no way the board could have been nailed down. Bornmann kept responding that he had told the truth, “nothing but the truth and that I could pull the switch right now on Hauptmann with a clear conscience.”
“Do you think the board was framed?” Wilentz asked Hoffman.
“Positively,” the governor said.
Koehler, however, wasn’t convinced, later writing in his official report that he “felt confident that Det. Bornmann would not have ‘framed’ the whole matter, and that he could not have done it without my detecting it if he had wanted to.”
More important to the moment, he thought the nail holes were simply plugged up with wood shavings, the result of nails going in and out numerous times since he’d discovered the evidence on October 9 and 10, 1934. Hauck then suggested that parts of the joists containing the nail holes be cut out and split open to see if the holes ever were deeper than they now appeared.
Alfonso Maclario, a carpenter who lived on the next block, was summoned, and Oursler described it as “a groaning, horrible sound as those joists were sawn off.” Hoffman and Hoage picked three of the joists for examination, and Bornmann picked another three. The question was where to go for that exam.
Koehler suggested Yale. Oursler said “that looked like a stall” to him, and he suggested Columbia. The journalist said Koehler “reluctantly consented.”
The convoy of vehicles, with six pairs of joists and twelve nail holes in all, drove to the Manhattan campus of Columbia University. They went to the Michael Pupin Physics Laboratories, named for the nineteenth-century Serbian and Montenegrin immigrant who became an instructor of mathematical physics, developing on campus such things as rapid X-ray photography, secondary X-ray radiation, and sonar-related technology.
The building would later that decade be associated with the splitting of the atom that led to the creation of a nuclear weapon. Other research was taking place there in 1935, including that by George Pegram, the dean of Columbia’s physics department, who was investigating the newly discovered neutron phenomena.
The entire crew walked through the doors to the Renaissance-inspired building constructed almost a decade earlier and into Pegram’s office.
“He was interested but a little frightened that Colu
mbia’s name would be drawn into it,” Oursler believed.
Pegram took them into a large laboratory and supplied them with an “iron blade, a chisel and two hammers.” Then, he appointed Associate Professor Lincoln T. Work, who had been at Columbia in chemical engineering since receiving his graduate degree there in 1921, as an “independent observer.”
With that, Koehler and Loney, each with a hammer in hand, took aim at the joists. The results in all but one of the twelve holes would completely exonerate Koehler and Bornmann.
“The most charitable explanation, and the one everyone seemed disposed to accept, was that nails had been put in and out of those holes so often during the investigation that they had rubbed enough so that dust from the sides was packed at the bottom one and a half inches to two inches in depth,” Oursler wrote. “This substance had to be removed, but the full mark—the full shell of the nail hole—was painfully apparent.
Koehler, Hoffman, and others took the boards from the ladder to Columbia University for further examination. Upon being split open, Koehler was vindicated as the nail holes were simply plugged up. (Courtesy: Dr. Regis Miller/Forest Products Laboratory)
“There was no doubt that one was as Koehler had represented it. The big cannon cracker had fizzled. It just wasn’t so.”
Koehler would over the next couple of days investigate the plugged material under the microscope and find it conclusively to be wood fibers. He wrote up what had happened in case Wilentz needed his account for the Board of Pardons set to meet about Hauptmann. He listed thirteen reasons he did not believe the evidence could have been planted. He wrote to Ethelyn that while he “did not make any slanderous remarks about the Governor, it wasn’t exactly complimentary to him.” He continued to his wife, “Well, what could he expect if he tries to make me out to be a liar.”
The Sixteenth Rail Page 31