The Kidnap Years:

by David Stout

  Friends of Van Meter said he should have had some $10,000 on his person, although his corpse yielded about a thousand dollars. In any event, there was nothing ennobling about the dispatch of Homer Van Meter. But then, there had been nothing very noble in how he lived.

  Now, Hoover could devote himself to catching—better yet, killing—Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, whom he still blamed, at least officially, for the Union Station Massacre of 1933 and the death of an FBI agent.

  *In recounting the movements of the Barker-Karpis gang and John Dillinger’s final journey, I summarized from accounts in the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and FBI files. And I am especially indebted to Bryan Burrough, whose riveting Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–1934 is essential reading for those seeking deeper understanding of that desperate time in American history.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  VIGILANCE AT THE GAS PUMP

  New York City

  Friday, September 14, 1934

  Walter Lyle met all kinds of people without going very far. That was the nature of being the day manager at a big service station in Upper Manhattan.

  The week seemed to be ending on a good note. It was cloudy, and there might be light showers in the afternoon. But the temperatures promised to be in the high sixties, ideal for working outdoors, manning the pumps, checking oil, and cleaning windshields. The station was a busy one, taking up an entire block on the east side of Lexington between 127th and 128th streets.

  Lyle, who was thirty-three, was happily married. He and his wife had a seven-year-old daughter. Life was good, especially considering the hardships that some Americans were enduring. Lyle knew he was fortunate to have steady employment. On this very Friday morning, newspapers were full of disturbing reports about strikes against textile factories from Rhode Island to the mid-Atlantic states and into the Deep South.

  There had been numerous deaths and injuries. Only a week before, six strikers had been shot to death in Honea Path, South Carolina, in a pitched battle between pickets and workers who sided with management. Other incidents were almost as ugly, with governors in some states blaming the labor actions on Communists and other “red agitators” and calling up National Guardsmen to maintain order at bayonet point.

  The violence was ugly enough to cause thoughtful Americans to wonder what was happening to their country.* Was the nation tearing itself apart?

  Of course, Lyle knew that dealing with the enormous problems he read about in the newspapers was beyond his place. What he didn’t know was that this day was to be one of the most important of his life.

  Lyle and his assistants were on the lookout for counterfeit money, particularly gold certificates and bills of large denominations. The chain that owned the station wouldn’t put up with being swindled. That’s why Lyle and the other men who pumped gas were instructed to be alert, writing license-plate numbers on bills when customers didn’t seem quite right.

  Just lately, there had been some bad bills passed in the neighborhood, Lyle and his coworkers had been warned. The alert had gone out to all service stations in the area as well as retail merchants.

  It was around 10:00 a.m. when a dark Dodge sedan pulled in.

  Fill her up? Lyle asked the driver routinely.

  “Five gallons will be enough,” the driver said.

  “That’ll be ninety-eight cents,” Lyle told him.** Lyle had noticed that the man had a German accent. He pumped the gasoline and was surprised when the driver handed him a ten-dollar gold certificate. “You don’t see many of these anymore,” Lyle said.***147

  “Ah, yes, you do,” the motorist said a bit boastfully. “I’ve got a hundred of them left at home.” After taking nine one-dollar bills and two pennies for his change, the driver started his engine and drove off—but not before Lyle wrote his license number on the ten-dollar gold certificate: 4U-13-41.

  Then Lyle approached two station attendants, Joseph McCarthy and John Lyons, who were working nearby, and shared his suspicions about the motorist: Who the hell brags about having a bunch of gold notes at home? And why pay with a ten when you’re buying less than a buck’s worth of gas?

  What Lyle and his coworkers did not know was that the general warning to watch out for suspicious money was not aimed just at counterfeiters. The warning had been issued because, after a lull, money from the Lindbergh ransom was appearing again in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx. In recent weeks, a twenty-dollar gold certificate from the ransom money had been used by a man buying a pair of shoes in the Fordham section of the Bronx.

  On the morning of Monday, September 17, the deposits from the service station where Lyle worked were tallied at a branch of the Corn Exchange Bank at Park Avenue and 125th Street. A ten-dollar gold certificate bearing the notation “4U-13-41” was identified as being from the Lindbergh ransom.**** Bank officials notified the Justice Department, which in turn notified the police in New York City and New Jersey.

  The New York motor vehicle agency quickly determined that the license-plate number was assigned to a car owned by Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who lived in a rented apartment at 1279 East 222nd Street in the Bronx with his wife, Anna, and their infant son, Manfred. A special squad was immediately assembled to track Hauptmann’s whereabouts. Then several investigators called on Walter Lyle, who confirmed that he was the man who had jotted the license number on the bill.

  Yes, Lyle remembered the guy who bragged about having a hundred of these notes. And, sure, he could describe him.*****

  The investigators noted that the general description offered by Lyle corresponded with that offered by John Condon, who more than two years earlier had come face-to-face with the man who took the ransom money.

  Please keep quiet about this, the investigators urged Lyle. They had decided that, instead of arresting Hauptmann at once, they would follow him to see if he might lead them to accomplices. But by Tuesday night, the surveillance had produced no clues, and lawmen decided to arrest Hauptmann, lest he sense that he was being watched.

  On the morning of Wednesday, September 19, about seventy-five police officers and federal agents were ready to ambush Hauptmann. Some surrounded the house where he lived, while others sat in cars in neighboring streets.

  Hauptmann was seen emerging from his house and getting into his car. When he had gone about two blocks, he was pulled over by plainclothes detectives. Without showing any nervousness or changing facial expression, he demanded to know why he’d been stopped.

  Without answering, the detectives patted him down for weapons—there were none—and searched Hauptmann’s pockets, finding a twenty-dollar gold note.

  “Where’d you get this?” a detective asked.

  Hauptmann replied that he’d been saving gold notes for years, thinking them protection against runaway inflation, which he’d experienced in his native Germany.

  “What do you know about the Lindbergh kidnapping?”

  “I? I know nothing at all about the Lindbergh kidnapping, gentlemen. I am a decent man. I live near here with my wife and child. I am a carpenter, gentlemen.”

  Hauptmann was taken back to his apartment, where investigators discovered the pair of shoes that had been bought recently at a store in Fordham. It was quickly determined that the twenty-dollar note found on his person was from the ransom money.

  Hauptmann was taken to the Greenwich Street police station in Lower Manhattan. There, he underwent hours of relentless interrogation of the kind that would become unthinkable decades later when the Supreme Court decreed that a suspect had the right to keep his mouth shut and demand a lawyer. Hauptmann’s wife was also questioned, although it is not clear what, if anything, her answers contributed. At the time and for the rest of her life, she insisted that her husband was innocent.

  Investigators learned that Hauptmann hadn’t worked for months, yet neighbors said he and his wife, who had quit her job as a waitress, seemed to live quite comfortably. Hauptmann said he had done well as an investor.
Indeed, investigators learned that he had $24,000 or $25,000 in a brokerage account. But as details of his background emerged—Hauptmann had served prison time in Germany for robbery and theft before escaping and making his way to the United States illegally as a stowaway on a ship—investigators didn’t believe he could have prospered on Wall Street, where so many sophisticated Americans had come to ruin.

  Having noticed that Hauptmann had glanced uneasily out his apartment window toward his garage, investigators searched the structure—and found $13,500 in cash from the Lindbergh ransom. Hauptmann had a ready explanation: a friend and fellow German, Isidor Fisch, had given it to him. Hauptmann said he and Fisch had been partners in a fur-trading venture and that Fisch had entrusted him with the money before going back to Germany where, unfortunately, he died.

  The money found in Hauptmann’s garage had been wrapped in newspapers. Some of it was crammed into an old oil can, some of it secreted under the floorboards, and some of it concealed in the walls of the garage. Hauptmann offered no good explanation for these unorthodox business practices, yet he seemed unfazed when confronted by the absurdities in his story. In fact, he was behaving just as Dr. Dudley Shoenfeld, the psychiatrist and early criminal profiler, had predicted the kidnapper would if he were ever captured.

  Well into the night of Wednesday, September 19, investigators dug and poked around Hauptmann’s garage, toiling under the glare of spotlights. Incongruously, baby clothes for the Hauptmanns’ infant son still hung on a clothesline, flapping softly in the breeze.

  In the apartment, investigators found more of the ransom money in a shoe box in a closet. They also found a telephone number, scribbled on a closet door. It was the number of John Condon, who had acted as a liaison between Lindbergh and the kidnapper.

  Inevitably, the commotion around the house and garage drew the attention of neighbors and soon of reporters, who picked up rumors that the New York police had a prisoner of great importance. So after wanting to keep the arrest secret for as long as possible, on Thursday, September 20, the authorities announced Hauptmann’s capture.

  Journalists were allowed to view him in the police station and noted that the “sullen and defiant” suspect had fought for the kaiser during the Great War. Police officers posed Hauptmann for the benefit of news photographers, with and without his hat, as the cameramen requested.

  Oddly enough, John Condon was not absolutely sure that he recognized Hauptmann from the nighttime cemetery encounters. But other witnesses were more certain.

  After Hauptmann’s image was on the front page, a Manhattan storekeeper came forward to say he recognized Hauptmann as the man who had paid for a purchase with a ten-dollar gold certificate, later confirmed to be from the ransom, on March 1, 1933.

  By early October, Hauptmann had been transferred to a jail in the Bronx, the borough where on April 2, 1932, the crime of extortion had taken place—i.e., the transfer of money from Condon to the mysterious man in St. Raymond’s Cemetery. On October 3, 1934, at the request of investigators, a cashier at a movie theater in Lower Manhattan sat in a Bronx courtroom as Hauptmann made an appearance.

  Yes, she said without hesitation. That was the man who bought a ticket to see a gangster movie (Broadway Through a Keyhole) on November 26, 1933. There was no doubt about the date: the very next day, Detective James Finn had visited her and revealed that the five-dollar Federal Reserve note the man had given her was from the Lindbergh ransom. The bill had been folded in eight parts so as to fit in a watch pocket, and the man hadn’t so much handed her the bill as tossed it at her, rather rudely and arrogantly. (Finn recalled his conversation with Dr. Shoenfeld months before when the psychiatrist had predicted that the kidnapper would carry some of the ransom bills as trophies.)

  The foreman and cashier at the Cross, Austin & Ireland lumberyard in the Bronx identified Hauptmann as the man who had intended to use a ten-dollar gold certificate to pay for a piece of plywood the previous February, then rushed out for no good reason.******

  It also became known that Hauptmann had worked for a time at National Millwork and Lumber Company, the Bronx lumberyard where, it seemed all but certain, the kidnapper had obtained much of the wood used to construct his ladder.

  Lewis Bornmann, the New Jersey detective who had worked with Arthur Koehler to trace the ladder wood, was checking the attic of the house where Hauptmann lived to see if there was yet more ransom money squirreled away. Bornmann found no more money—but he discovered what was probably the most damning evidence of all against Bruno Richard Hauptmann.

  The attic flooring was incomplete, leaving sections of the beams, or joists, exposed. The partial flooring consisted of thirteen wooden planks nailed to the joists. Bornmann saw that one of the planks was shorter than the others. Looking more closely, he saw that about eight feet of the shorter plank had been sawed off, leaving a residue of sawdust and exposing four nail holes on the joists.

  Arrangements were made to bring Koehler from Wisconsin to the Bronx to compare a section of the ladder made from “used” wood (containing old nail holes) with the shortened plank in the attic. Using a magnifying glass, Koehler determined that the grains in the ladder section and the plank were the same—meaning they had once been part of the same board.

  Then came the real moment of truth. Koehler placed the ladder section on the joists and saw that the old nail holes on the ladder and those on the joists lined up exactly. When he pushed nails through the holes of the ladder section, they slid perfectly into the joists.

  We can only imagine the joy felt by Koehler, the man who loved wood, and Detective Bornmann. The journey from a South Carolina sawmill to a Bronx lumberyard had ended, at long last, in the attic of the man accused of one of the most sensational crimes of the twentieth century.

  New York Police Commissioner John F. O’Ryan said the arrest of Hauptmann was the culmination of great cooperation among the New York Police Department, the Jersey troopers and the Department of Justice. New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia said he was pleased that his city’s police were “cooperating so fully with other agencies.”148

  In reality, the two and a half years between the kidnapping and the arrest of Bruno Hauptmann had been marked by occasional jealousy and deliberate withholding of information between the police in New York and their counterparts in New Jersey. There had been the mistreatment of Violet Sharpe, the Morrow household maid who had been driven to suicide. And Hoover had been lurking on the sidelines, hoping to swing the spotlight onto his FBI.

  New York prosecutors were ready to bring Hauptmann to trial for extortion.

  No, don’t bother, New Jersey prosecutors said in effect. We want to get this guy for kidnapping and murder and send him to the electric chair.

  But that might not be as easy as the evidence suggested. Yes, there seemed to be plenty of evidence to prove that Hauptmann was the kidnapper. But it might not be possible to prove that he had intended to kill the baby. Maybe he had dropped the infant accidentally.

  If kidnapping had been a felony in New Jersey at the time, prosecutors would have been home free. That is, if they could prove that the baby died—accidentally or not—during the commission of a felony, then the kidnapper would be guilty of murder. But incredibly, given that the most famous kidnapping in American history had occurred in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, kidnapping in the Garden State was still a misdemeanor.******* And an unintentional death that occurred during the commission of a misdemeanor would only have been manslaughter. In other words, prison for the kidnapper but not the electric chair.

  Hauptmann might have spent the rest of his life behind bars had he been convicted of manslaughter in New Jersey, then convicted of extortion in New York State, and then convicted of entering the United States illegally as a stowaway. But that was not deemed enough.

  Fortunately for prosecutors, larceny and common-law burglary (breaking into another’s house at night with intent to commit a felony) were felonies in New Jersey at the time. So maybe prosecutors c
ould show that Hauptmann committed a burglary, then committed larceny when he stole…the baby’s clothes?

  The rationale might have seemed a bit odd, but prosecutors were willing to thread any needles, jump through any hoops, to nail Hauptmann for murder. And while they didn’t say so, they surely knew that the good people of the Garden State and their representatives on a grand jury wouldn’t mind fancy semantics as long as the killer of the Lindbergh baby paid the ultimate penalty.********

  The Hunterdon County prosecutor, Anthony Hauck, decided that he and the people in his office had enough to do without tackling the Lindbergh case. So he gave the mission to the New Jersey attorney general, a little dynamo of a man named David Wilentz.

  As the American public absorbed the stunning news of the arrest of the suspected kidnapper of the Lindbergh infant, then followed the day-to-day procedures required to bring him before the bar of justice in New Jersey, Hoover was keeping track of sightings of Pretty Boy Floyd, whom he stubbornly blamed for the Union Station Massacre in Kansas City.

  Hoover’s prayers were answered in October 1934 when Floyd and his accomplice Adam Richetti were tracked into Ohio. On October 20, they traded shots with police near Wellsville. Floyd escaped, but Richetti was captured.

  Two days later, Floyd stopped at a farm near East Liverpool, Ohio, to ask for something to eat. A farmhand notified the police, who swarmed onto the farm with federal agents, led by Melvin Purvis. While fleeing across a field, Floyd was cut down by machine gun and pistol fire.

  Some accounts, including one in the New York Times, said that as he lay dying, with presumably nothing to lose in this world or the next, Floyd denied any role in the Kansas City carnage. Other accounts say Floyd was more ambiguous, refusing to say anything about the train station shooting but muttering his contempt for the law as he breathed his last.