The Cases That Haunt Us (28 page)

Arthur Koehler testified that rail sixteen of the kidnap ladder had come directly from a floorboard in Hauptmann’s attic.

On January 24, Hauptmann took the stand in his own defense, beginning five days of grueling testimony, including eleven hours of brutal cross-examination by David Wilentz.

On February 13, after twenty-nine court sessions, 162 witnesses, and 381 exhibits, the jury retired to consider the case. Eleven and a half hours of deliberation later, they returned a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree without a recommendation for mercy, which under New Jersey law meant death in the electric chair.

During a period of appeals, several people, including Edward Reilly, approached Hauptmann in prison with the hope that he would confess in return for a commutation of his death sentence to life. He refused all entreaties, including a last-minute one from famed defense lawyer Samuel Leibowitz and another from New Jersey governor Harold G. Hoffman, who was troubled by the investigation and trial and did not believe that Hauptmann’s conviction told the entire story.

After all appeals were exhausted, Bruno Richard Hauptmann steadfastly maintained his complete innocence. He died in the electric chair of the New Jersey State Prison at Trenton on April 3, 1936. The controversy surrounding his guilt or innocence has refused to die.

With minor exceptions, everything we’ve covered in this chapter up to now is generally considered fact or reasonably accepted interpretation. Nearly everything that follows remains in dispute. That is one of the overwhelming problems with the Lindbergh case, and also one of the prime reasons it has continued to intrigue and remain so controversial after almost seventy years: so much of it comes down to which evidence—
orwhose evidence—
you believe.

Countless millions of words have been written about this case, and each succeeding generation has seen formidable and impressive advocates on both sides. At present, among the most staunch, most articulate, and best-researched proponents that Hauptmann was guilty of the kidnapping and acted alone is Jim Fisher. To my knowledge, he has read and studied as much of the record as anyone in preparing his 1987 book,
The LindberghCase
, and its follow-up volume,
The Ghosts of Hopewell
. A. Scott Berg, among the best and most respected biographers writing today, came away from his own research for
Lindbergh
with the belief that Hauptmann had acted alone in kidnapping the baby. On the other side we have Anthony Scaduto’s 1976 book,
Scapegoat
, and Ludovic Kennedy’s 1985 book,
The Airman and the Carpenter: The Lindbergh Kidnapping and the Framing of Richard Hauptmann.
The titles are self-explanatory.

Each author accepts a differing set of facts. If you go with one set, Hauptmann’s guilt appears highly questionable. If you go with the other, it’s virtually a no-brainer.

Let us consider the major pieces of evidence that slammed the lid on Bruno Richard Hauptmann.

THE
RANSOM
MONEY

This is a pretty tough one to challenge. Not only was Hauptmann in possession of almost a third of the ransom, he lied about it to police. At the least, he was dealing directly or indirectly with the kidnappers. As mentioned earlier, there was so much kidnapping for hire in the late 1920s and early 1930s that a subindustry grew up in laundering ransom money. It was not uncommon for a kidnapper (or other professional criminal, for that matter) to sell his illegally gotten cash to another party at a discount to prevent authorities from tracing it back to him. Hauptmann might have bought the money, or the mysterious Isidor Fisch, or maybe it had already been laundered by another associate by the time it reached either of them.

I have to say, though, the notion that Hauptmann accepted the shoe box from Fisch and stashed it in his kitchen pantry without even wondering what was in it strikes me as rather ingenuous. Are we to believe that if the ceiling hadn’t leaked into that closet, he would never have looked?

More important is the timing of Hauptmann’s essential retirement from the carpentry business. It coincides almost exactly with the payment of the ransom. Investigators found that as of April 1, 1932, he had no cash assets. Yet he would have us believe that an immigrant tradesman who had never shown a previous ability to make big bucks in the investment world is suddenly, while professional investors are losing their shirts, able to support his family comfortably enough in the stock market to afford fine new furniture and an expensive radio? You have to look at the background of the individual under suspicion, and in this instance, it doesn’t add up.

After Hauptmann’s arrest, ransom bills stopped turning up. On the other hand, let us remember that more than half of the ransom money was never found.

THE
RANSOM
NOTES

Altogether there were fifteen ransom notes. The expert firepower the prosecution arrayed on this point during the trial was impressive. There was little question that Hauptmann spoke in much the same way that the notes were constructed, and many of his letters and word formations taken from random samples of his writing were extremely close. For example, Hauptmann both said and wrote
signature
as
singnature
, as was repeatedly seen in the notes.

Hauptmann’s defenders have made the case that what the experts were really saying was that he wrote in the same European style as the actual writer and that any number of people from Hauptmann’s background would have compared as closely as he did. I am not a graphologist, though I have worked with a number of them over the years. While it is not an exact science, the evidence suggests to me a pretty close connection between the ransom notes and Bruno Hauptmann’s handwriting, style, syntax, and spelling.

At one point fairly early in the investigation, an analyst at Scotland Yard concluded that the interlocking-circles signature suggested a writer with the initials
BRH
.
B
came from the blue circle,
R
from the red, and
H
from the holes punched in the paper. I would wonder about this, since by the time of the kidnapping Hauptmann was thinking of himself as Richard rather than Bruno, but, hey, if this story is true, it’s pretty impressive. With all of my experience in criminal personality profiling and psycholinguistic analysis, I freely admit it’s not something I would ever have come up with.

THE
EYE
AND
EAR
WITNESSES

The prosecution made a big deal about all of the people who could identify Bruno Hauptmann at various stages of the case. These included Lindbergh neighbors who saw him cruising around the area before the crime, the taxi driver who came to Condon’s house, Condon himself, Lindbergh, the cashier at the movie theater in Greenwich Village, and the gas station attendant who wrote the license number on the gold note that led to Hauptmann.

Of all of these, Condon’s ID is the most important. He was the only one who spent extended time with Cemetery John and had two real conversations with him. Condon was unwilling to identify Hauptmann in a police lineup. Yet by the time the case got to trial, he stated in no uncertain terms that this was the man he had seen. What happened between those two events?

What probably happened is that the police and/or prosecutors got to him. Hauptmann was a pretty good match for the description of Cemetery John. A pile of evidence had been assembled against him and the police were confident they had the right man. But Condon wasn’t completely sure the man in the station lineup was the one he had dealt with and he took his role as a witness seriously enough that he neither wanted to condemn a possibly innocent man nor divert a police investigation by giving an iffy ID. But by the time of the trial, someone must have appealed to him with a variation of the following:

“Dr. Condon, we know that Hauptmann is our guy. He even matches up with your physical description. All we need is for you to confirm that in court. If you do, we’ve got him. If you don’t, it’s going to confuse the jury, give the defense something to run with, the brutal killer of that dear little baby is going to go free, and the Lindbergh family you admire so much will never be able to heal.”

Condon was just the kind of narcissistic personality to whom this kind of appeal would be effective. You let someone sit with this awhile and he gets surer and surer. That’s why I always want eyewitness testimony corroborated with some other type of more objective evidence.

The same scenario could have occurred with Lindbergh: “Colonel, we’ve got the right guy, the one who took your child from you. You said yourself he had a German accent. All you have to say is that this is the German accent you heard.”

Each of the other witnesses had his own motivations. One of the neighbors had been promised reward money. The other encounters were so casual that even a probable ID would have been impressive to a jury. And aside from a few highly questionable witnesses, the police and prosecution were unable to place Hauptmann at the crime scene.

I’m not saying these identifications were erroneous. All of these people may have seen and/or heard Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Or they may not have. I’m only saying that none of these identifications, including Condon’s and Lindbergh’s, seems sufficiently reliable to me to be authoritative. I don’t count them one way or another in our search for what really happened.

One interesting note, though. If the ID by Cecile Barr, the movie theater cashier, was accurate, then Hauptmann was in possession of Lindbergh ransom bills substantially earlier than he claimed he received the shoe box of money from Fisch.

THE
CHISEL

Along with the ladder, a three-quarter-inch Buck Brothers chisel was found at the crime scene. Presumably, it was to be used to pry open the window or shutters if necessary. When Hauptmann’s carpenter’s toolbox was examined, the three-quarter-inch chisel, and only that chisel, was missing. This isn’t a smoking gun, but it’s pretty damning circumstantial evidence, especially when taken with everything else.

In
The Airman and the Carpenter
, Ludovic Kennedy claims that two three-quarter-inch chisels were actually found in Hauptmann’s garage—one a Buck Brothers and the other a Stanley—and that they remained in police custody until Anthony Scaduto came across them. We asked Mark W. Falzini, the New Jersey State Police archivist, about this. Falzini has a comprehensive knowledge of the case and the evidence, but no personal opinion on Hauptmann’s guilt or innocence. He told us that he has no idea where Kennedy’s and Scaduto’s information comes from. No such chisels were ever in police custody.

Yet another example of whose information you want to go with.

THE
NUMBERS
BEHIND
THE
DOOR

On Monday, September 24, 1934, four days after the discovery of ransom currency in Hauptmann’s garage,
NYPD
inspector Henry D. Bruckman discovered an address and a telephone number written in pencil on a piece of wooden door molding inside a closet in Hauptmann’s son’s bedroom. The number turned out to be Dr. Condon’s old telephone number before he had it changed to an unlisted one; in other words, it was Condon’s number at the time of the encounter with Cemetery John. The address was Condon’s as well. Bruckman also found two serial numbers written on the molding, one for a $500 bill and another for a $1,000 bill.

When questioned about it by Bronx County district attorney Samuel J. Foley, Hauptmann conceded that the handwriting looked like his, but didn’t specifically recall writing it and continued to maintain that he had nothing to do with the kidnapping. As to why he might have written the telephone number where it was found, he could only suggest that he must have been reacting to news reports of the kidnapping.

“I must have read it in the paper about the story,” he told Foley. “I was a little bit interest, and keep a little record of it, and maybe I was just in the closet and was reading the paper and put down the address.”

What?

Ludovic Kennedy suggests that the evidence was probably planted as a joke by one of the newspaper men who had access to the apartment; in fact he even proposes a name. And then why would Hauptmann write down a telephone number when he didn’t even have a telephone?

Let’s take the second part first. You write down a phone number even if you don’t have a phone at home because you have to call the go-between, even if it’s from a public phone booth. And if you’re going to call this person, you have to know his number. If this is part of an illegal activity, you’re going to want to hide the number, and the inside of your son’s closet is as good a place as any.

As to the possibility of a plant: sure, very possible in those days when crime scenes were not as carefully protected as they are today (and still they’re often not protected as well as they should be). But what I can’t get past is, why would someone as careful as Hauptmann admit that this was his handwriting if he wasn’t certain it was?

I would have expected him say, “I have no idea what it is or how it got there, and this is the first time I’ve seen it in my life. If you say it’s a piece of evidence, then someone planted it!”

But that isn’t what he said. So either he wrote it there or had strong reason to believe that he did and didn’t want to get caught up in any more lies.

THE
MAJESTIC
ALIBI

One of the more controversial aspects of the Hauptmann defense was when he actually started work at the Majestic Apartments. He claimed that on March 1, 1932, the day of the kidnapping, he was working there until 5 P.M., which would have made it difficult for him to have been at the Hopewell house at the right time. The prosecution claimed that time and pay records indicated Hauptmann had not started working at the Majestic until March 16.

Ludovic Kennedy puts forth evidence that worksheets showing Hauptmann was on the job as a carpenter in Manhattan on March 1 were tampered with to make it look as if he had not started until after March 15, the next pay period. Prosecutor David Wilentz and the Bronx district attorney had seen these records and had them handed over to
NYPD
for “safekeeping.” The payroll records were never seen again. The sheets showing that Hauptmann quit on April 2 appear to have been tampered with. The defense subpoenaed the Majestic timekeeper, Edward Morton, to bring his time sheets to an extradition hearing, but Morton failed to show up. Enough muddiness exists on this issue to throw serious doubt on the prosecution’s contention about where Hauptmann was—or wasn’t—on March 1.