The whole experience was rather dramatic, he told his wife, as “Bornmann and I were both close to arrest some say but I would like to see [Hoffman] try it.”
Koehler concluded his official report on March 30 by writing, “After this recent visit to Hauptmann’s attic I am more than ever convinced that rail #16 came out of Hauptmann’s attic.”
Hoffman was not, saying what was found was “not conclusive.” He accused the prosecutors of acting as “personal attorneys” for Bornmann and said he was “wondering at the sudden and jealous protection” of the ladder and floor boards from the attic.
Further, he said, “the whole case reeks with unfairness, passion and prejudice. I believe other persons were connected with the crime and that State police are making no honest effort to find them.”
Still, he did not issue a second stay of execution. He had said he would not do so unless the attorney general consented, and that would not happen. Wilentz was quoted by reporters after the attic confrontation as saying Hoffman’s detective work was “improper.”
So on the night of April 3, 1936, the Newark Evening News reported,
Bruno Richard Hauptmann, principal in the most celebrated criminal case in history, went to his death at State Prison last night in much the same manner as did the great majority of the 116 who have died in the same chair.
The witnesses waited tensely in the small, brightly lighted execution chamber for fifteen minutes before the steel door to the death house opened. Flanked by prison guards and accompanied by his spiritual advisors, Hauptmann walked firmly and without hesitation to the chair. His eyes roved about the chamber and no detail seemed to escape his glance, his last on earth.
Hauptmann uttered no last word. He remained mute from the time he entered the death chamber until the fatal current was applied. . . .
It was exactly 47 minutes, 30 seconds, after 8 p.m., when he was pronounced dead.
A crowd outside the state prison erupted in cheers as a reporter shouted, “He’s dying.” When Hauptmann’s body was removed in a hearse, it was closely followed by a car with a photographer on the roof trying to get pictures.
His spiritual advisors said his last few hours brought him peace. They reported that he remained consistent with his story about the case until the end, saying, “I repeat that I protest my innocence of the crime for which I am convicted.”
Damon Runyon, back on the sports and Broadway beats, returned to New Jersey to finish the story he’d started at the beginning of 1935. The day after the execution he wrote a column entitled “Lest We Forget,” designed to remind his readers about the evidence that had led to Hauptmann’s conviction.
He walked his audience through the thousands of dollars of ransom money found in Hauptmann’s garage, the defendant’s handwriting samples that matched the ransom notes, the identifying testimony of Condon and Lindbergh, and, of course, the wood witness who had traced a rail from the kidnap ladder to a board in Hauptmann’s attic and in the process captured Runyon’s imagination.
“One Arthur Koehler, a woodsman who venerates wood, knows it from seed to flower and is one of the United States government’s highly specialized experts. A pudgy, prosaic man, this Koehler, but what a story he told! He made new history in the science of criminology. They will be quoting him decades from now.”
13
Thomas Maloney walked out of his home in Wilkes-Barre’s Georgetown neighborhood to pick up the mail. It was Good Friday, April 10, 1936, just a week after the chaos in neighboring New Jersey had come to an end with the execution of Bruno Richard Hauptmann.
Maloney, a Catholic, was observing the holiday at home with his four-year-old son, Thomas Jr., and his sixteen-year-old daughter, Margaret, but he’d been home a lot lately. He had been laid off from his mining job a year earlier due to his efforts as president of the United Anthracite Mine Workers of Pennsylvania (UAMP), an organization set up to combat the perceived collusion between the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) and the coal companies.
The Wyoming Valley’s history was written by the miners who extracted so much anthracite coal in the nineteenth century that Wilkes-Barre was nicknamed the Diamond City. In 1917, the region was producing 100 million tons of anthracite, but during the Great Depression, consumers went for cheaper energy sources like oil, electricity, and natural gas. By 1930, annual production had dropped 31 percent to 69 million tons.
The coal companies cut costs, which meant they cut shifts, and then they cut staff, usually the older miners who earned more. Anger grew, not just at the coal companies, who had also outsourced operations to nonunion companies, but at the union, which workers felt did not confront management appropriately.
Maloney, who was working for the Glen Alden Coal Company, had formed the rival union in 1933 and conducted numerous strikes over the next few years. When his union took on his employer, it lost an estimated $5 million, and Maloney lost his freedom when a judge ruled him in contempt of court after he defied an order to call off the strike. He had spent a month in jail, and when he got out, he was promptly fired.
The UMW was actively trying to resist its renegade counterpart, and Maloney didn’t feel it was a battle he could win, so he dissolved his union. Now some of his members felt he too had sold out.
Inside the mailbox that day was a nicely wrapped package with the word Sample written on top. He sat at the kitchen table to open it with a penknife. Thomas Jr. and Margaret huddled close, eager to see if it was Easter candy. Their disappointment at seeing an expensive cigar box was counterbalanced by their father’s happiness at the same sight.
He pried open the lid, tripping a tiny battery-operated circuit. The bomb inside detonated with a force so powerful it blew a hole through the back wall of his house. All three Maloneys were knocked unconscious. Father and son would eventually die from their injuries. Margaret Maloney would spend the next two months in the hospital.
Police had barely had time to respond to the Maloney’s home when another nicely wrapped package was opened by Michael Gallagher, a sexton at Wilkes-Barre’s St. Mary’s Cemetery. He was killed and his son-in-law was critically injured.
Word got out immediately to the newspaper offices and radio stations. Extras and bulletins quickly spread the word not to open any packages delivered through the mail. Wilkes-Barre postal inspectors searched records and found six identical parcels were mailed in the city on Holy Thursday. One was caught at the post office before it could be delivered. Another one was intercepted by a letter carrier on his route.
That left two to be accounted for. One young man found a package delivered for his father and immediately doused it in water and called police. The final package, sent to a former sheriff, was opened, but the current short-circuited and the bomb did not explode.
Tips to the police from a cigar store clerk and witnesses who had seen a man around the mailbox on the date in question led authorities to arrest fifty-two-year-old Michael Fugmann, a former artilleryman in the German army who had deserted during World War I and after the war immigrated to Pennsylvania with his wife and child. He was a miner who had been part of Maloney’s renegade union before it dissolved.
Fugmann insisted he had nothing to do with the bombs when he was questioned that summer. The evidence was circumstantial. The local police and the FBI noted that the cigar box was made of wood and samples had been recovered. The logical phone call to find help was to the man known nationwide as the Wood Wizard.
Koehler analyzed the wood samples and established that “the wood from four different bombs could be intermatched so as to show that they were made from the same pieces of wood.”
Further, he’d discovered that
[t]wo pieces of wood from the defendant’s home were of the same kind, method of manufacture (rotary-cut veneer), and one of them was of the same thickness as the partitions in the cigar-box bombs. The two pieces were of the same width as one of th
e reconstructed slats from which some of the bomb pieces were cut, and of the same length as two pieces which matched end to end from one of the bombs; they showed the same type of stapling at the ends, and then similar horizontal hand saw cuts at the ends which were not cut by a circular saw as did the pieces from the bombs.
When Koehler testified in the case that fall, Fugmann’s lawyers moved to strike his testimony as conjecture, speculation not based on science. Like Justice Trenchard in neighboring New Jersey, the Pennsylvania court rejected that motion. Fugmann would be convicted and sentenced to die for his crimes.
“The evidence was not as positive as in the Hauptmann case,” Koehler wrote his brothers, “but without [it] I doubt that he would have been convicted.”
Koehler also was asked by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to help in the case of the abduction and murder of ten-year-old Charles Mattson in Tacoma, Washington. An earlier effort using a homemade ladder to kidnap a neighboring boy had been unsuccessful, but it led J. Edgar Hoover to contact Koehler for his help in the Mattson case. Koehler worked on tracing the ladder for three weeks before the authorities found out it had been taken from a vacant garage across the street from where it had been used in the unsuccessful kidnapping attempt. That case would never be solved.
But Koehler’s reputation would help solve other mysteries as the years progressed.
Wisconsin Deputy Fire Marshal William A. Greenwald credited Koehler with helping solve the arson of a vacant home in Sheboygan. Basswood chips were found in the basement of the house and also in an adjacent blacksmith shop. Koehler matched the samples, and Greenwald took that evidence into an interview with the homeowner. The newspaper headline the next day read, “Wood Chip Probe Brings Confession,” with a picture of Koehler and the story of the arson solved.
The police chief in Fort Wayne, Indiana, sent him a piece of wood from a burglar alarm and a knife. The question was whether the knife had cut the wood. It left no marks on the sample, but Koehler found wood paint on the knife edge. That led to an indictment.
By and large, though, Koehler went back to his usual role as the federal government’s chief wood identifier. He continued his work of going through thousands of samples each year, bolstering dreams and destroying grandiose visions in the process.
He helped a Wisconsin man prove that his old violin was a Stradivarius. As he peered through the microscope, Koehler “marveled at the exquisite finish of the wood, shading from orange to red, the secret of which Antonio Stradivari took with him to the grave,” back in seventeenth century Italy. The musician would be very happy with that result.
Milwaukee Journal war correspondent Robert J. Doyle, who was with Wisconsin soldiers in the Trobriand Islands, off the eastern coast of Papua New Guinea, would end up with a less thrilling reply. The Wisconsin unit had seen “the ghostly skeleton of a ship strewn along the coral beach” and had visions of it having been sailed by Captain Cook or another famous explorer.
“The massive hand hewn keel, ribs and mast strewn along the beach stirred in the minds of the soldiers visions of treasure chests bulging with gold and precious gems hidden in some cavern by a one-eyed pirate when his ship was blown on a reef scores of years ago,” Doyle wrote in the newspaper before sending samples to Koehler at the Madison laboratory.
Koehler’s inspection proved that “ancient” wreckage had likely been there no more than a year. He identified the keel as a species of pine “of the botanical genus, Agathis,” several species of which grew in the south Pacific. The mast was made of wood of the Dipterocrap family, which consisted of more than 380 species “confined almost exclusively to the Indo-Malayan region, but not including Australia or New Zealand.”
The ribs of the ship confused Koehler, as they were made of balsa (Ochroma lagopus), which besides growing naturally only in the American tropics, was not a particularly strong wood, susceptible to decay. “The fact that the balsa wood does not show any advanced stage of decay indicates that the wreck could not have been there very long,” Koehler wrote to Doyle.
Doyle would have to be satisfied with simply discovering a neat-looking ship. The final line of his article describing the experience and entitled “Wood Expert Wrecks Myth of Trobriands ‘Pirate’ Ship” read, “A great fellow, that Koehler. Don’t try to pawn off the ship of some ancient mariner on him. He’s too smart.”
The scientist also dashed the hopes of New Orleans city leaders when a swimmer off Lake Pontchartrain stepped on a wooden shoe that had the date 1492 carved in its wood. Could that have been the first stop of Christopher Columbus as he discovered America?
They sent the shoe to Koehler and got a reality check.
The “shoe” wasn’t really a shoe “but a hand-carved model of one.” Further, “the wood was northern white pine, which grows much farther north than Columbus would have sailed.”
Koehler enjoyed giving tours at the lab, sharing his knowledge and improving the general public’s understanding and appreciation of wood. When groups got to his office, he liked to pull out of a cabinet two pine boards bowed like cowboy legs.
“These were straight when they were cut—then they bent,” he’d say. “We had to find out why.”
Across the room was an exhibition of southern pine mounted on the wall. “This shows what we learned. When this tree was young there weren’t many others around it to shut out the sun and it grew fast—see these rings?” he’d point out. “Later on, other trees grew up around it; it had more shade so it grew slower—the outer rings testify to that.
“The resulting uneven quality of the wood resulted in the bowing, so now we can advise keeping southern pine forests more dense while the trees are young so they won’t grow so fast.”
But inevitably he would be asked by someone in a tour group about the Hauptmann case. It was both his and the Forest Product Laboratory’s claim to fame among the general public.
After reading an article in the local paper saying that Governor Hoffman was doling out reward money to those who helped lead to the conviction of Hauptmann, Koehler asked whether he was entitled to a share. Even if he had been on better terms with Hoffman, who had all but called him a liar in the attic before the execution, he wouldn’t have received any money, as government workers were prohibited from accepting that kind of payment.
The public’s fascination with the kidnapping and the trial never faded, as books about the case came out and anniversaries of the kidnapping and trial passed. Koehler’s work on the evidence continued to be praised by Hauptmann’s own legal team.
Egbert Rosecrans, one of Hauptmann’s lawyers, wrote down his thoughts on the trial after Hauptmann was executed and was effusive in his praise of Koehler: “Since not one person in thousands knew of the existence of one Arthur Koehler, wood technologist, it never occurred to Hauptmann that the wood in the ladder would be traced to the very lumber yard from which he bought it; nor that the now famous ‘rail 16’ would be proven conclusively once to have been part of a board from his attic.”
Edward J. Reilly discussed Koehler with Edward D. Radin for his book 12 Against Crime, published in 1950. “We would have won an acquittal if it hadn’t been for that guy, Koehler,” he said. “What a witness to ring in on us—somebody they plucked out of a forest. Do you know what he is? He’s a, a xylotomist.” Radin said Reilly sputtered indignantly at that last point, “almost making the word sound obscene.”
As early as 1942, Koehler was discussing retirement; the six-day work weeks and a restriction on vacations during World War II taking their toll.
“My hobby still is to make things,” he told a colleague at the lab. “I have a well-equipped workshop in my basement with power saws, planers, drill, etc., but unfortunately I have little time to use them.” He had recently bought a book entitled The Art of Leisure, but as he told his brothers, “so far I have not had time to see what it is about.”
He had done solid work d
uring the war, applying his science to helping the armed forces best use their wood. His efforts led to stronger aircraft and ships, from gunstocks to textile shuttles, and to helping create artificial limbs for disabled soldiers. Another primary focus of his work during that time was determining how to preserve forests as the nation’s supply of virgin timber decreased. Specifically, he studied how young trees could be grown to produce defect-free lumber needed for the future of the country.
Still, he wasn’t sure how long the government wanted him to stay around. “Unless the Forest Service changes its mind, they are going to be very hard boild [sic] about letting employees stay on after they are 62 years old—partly to promote efficiency and partly to give the young ones a chance to work up faster,” he wrote to his brothers in June 1943. “The law is that if a person wants to, he can stay on till he is 70 years of age provided he is not letting down in efficiency. That means I may have to quit in four years from now. By then I will be eligible for retirement on half salary (if they do not change it by then), and I think I won’t mind.”
He had identified California as the ideal place he and Ethelyn would spend their retirement years. His brother Alfred lived in Santa Barbara and loved it. As early as the late 1920s, Arthur was pining to live in California, writing to his brothers and parents in 1929 that he loved Berkeley as well. He reminisced fondly about Monterrey, where one could find the Monterey cypress and Monterey pine, and about a spot between Los Angeles and San Diego, the only place in the world where Torrey pines grow.
But instead of settling in any of those locations, in 1946 the Koehlers bought a five-bedroom home in central Los Angeles with a view to the west. They rented it out until Arthur was able to retire.
The Sixteenth Rail Page 32