Dead Men Walking

by Bill Wallace

  Lindbergh, becoming worried that the kidnappers might be running out of patience, ordered the money to be made ready even without proof that Charles Jr was still alive. On Tuesday 31 March, Condon was instructed in a note from ‘John’ that the money should be be handed over the following Saturday evening.

  The money that was prepared consisted of gold notes which had distinctive round yellow seals and, being relatively rare, would be more easily traced.

  On Saturday 4 April, at 7.45 p.m., a note was delivered to Condon’s house telling him to go to a florist shop where he would find another note under a table outside the shop. Accompanied by Charles Lindbergh who was armed, he drove there and was directed to another cemetery. Lindbergh remained at a distance as Condon approached the cemetery. There was a shout of ‘Hey, Doctor!’ and Condon saw ‘John’ in the shadows. He handed him the $50,000 in return for an envelope giving directions to a boat called the Nelly where the Lindberghs would find their child. Sadly, no trace was ever found of a boat by that name.

  On 12 May 1932, more than two months after Charles Jr had disappeared, a truck driver stopping to relieve himself in some woods to the north of Mount Rose, New Jersey, stumbled upon a baby’s head and foot sticking out of the ground. It was the badly decomposed body of Charles Lindbergh Jr, buried in a shallow grave. It would emerge later that the child had been killed by a blow to the head, sustained, it was speculated, when the ladder broke back at the Lindbergh house on the night of the kidnap.

  The world was horrified and the Lindberghs were, naturally distraught. Meanwhile, police tracked locations all over New York City where the marked gold ransom notes were turning up. Throughout the remainder of 1932, and into the next year the notes were found in numerous places. Finally, in summer 1934, a teller at the Corn Exchange Bank in the Bronx found one of the marked notes with a car’s registration scribbled in the corner, probably by an attendant at a petrol station. When the attendant was questioned, he described the man who had paid with the note as of average size, with a German accent and driving a blue Dodge. The owner of the vehicle was Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a thirty-five-year-old carpenter who lived with his wife Ana in the Bronx.

  The following morning, when Hauptmann was arrested, almost $14,000 was discovered in his garage. He told police officers that he had found it in a box given to him for safekeeping by a business associate, Isidor Fisch, who had returned to Germany and had recently died there. This story became known in the media as the ‘fishy’ story.

  Hauptmann was further compromised, however, by a smudged telephone number found on a cupboard door in his house. It was the number of Dr John Condon. Furthermore, in his attic there was a plank of wood cut out of the floor. It matched the wood of the home-made ladder found at the Lindbergh house. He was indicted for murder and 2 January 1935 was set as the trial date.

  It was a circus. Jack Benny, Walter Winchell and Damon Runyan were just a few of the celebrities who arrived in town for the trial and the courthouse in New Jersey was besieged by hundreds of reporters and cameramen. Miniature kidnap ladders and locks claimed to be of the Lindbergh baby’s hair were amongst the souvenirs on offer on the streets outside the court.

  The defence attorney, Edward J. Reilly, nicknamed the ‘Bull of Brooklyn’ pursued an odd defence, suggesting that the killers of the baby had actually been neighbours of Lindbergh who had been upset by Lindbergh’s decision to ban them from hunting in a forest he owned. He also tried to place the blame on the Lindbergh domestic servants. Astonishingly, he also suggested that Dr Condon might himself have been behind the kidnapping.

  One major piece of testimony was given by eighty-seven-year-old Amandus Hochmuth who lived near the Lindbergh estate. He claimed to have seen a man driving a green car with a ladder in it pass his house on 1 March 1932. When asked if that man was in the room, he immediately pointed his finger at Hauptmann. It was extraordinary because Hochmuth was almost blind.

  It was stacked against Hauptmann from the outset. Lindbergh said his voice was the same one that he had heard shout ‘Hey Doctor!’ to John Condon on the night of 4 April 1932 even though it seemed a bit of a stretch to remember a voice that said only two words some two years ago.

  However, John Condon was the most important witness, because he had actually met the kidnapper. When asked who ‘John’ was, he replied dramatically, ‘John is Bruno Richard Hauptmann’.

  The handwriting on the various notes was confirmed to be a match for that of Hauptmann and an expert in wood, confirmed the matching of the wood on the ladder and in Hauptmann’s attic.

  After one hundred and sixty-two witnesses had delivered their testimony and the lawyers had summed up their cases, the jury went out to deliberate over its verdict at 11.21 a.m. on 13 February. Eleven hours later, at 10.28 p.m., they announced that Bruno Richard Hauptmann was guilty of first degree murder. He was sentenced to die in the electric chair.

  Hauptmann continued to protest his innocence to the end and his wife tried to have the case re-opened until her death in 1994. However, at 8.44 p.m., on 3 April 1936, as hundreds of people waited outside the prison walls, Bruno Richard Hauptmann felt the surge of 2,000 volts of electricity coursing through his body.

  Sacco and Vanzetti

  It was 1919, the era of the ‘Red Scare’ in the United States, when Americans, not for the last time, lived in fear of their capitalist system falling to the communism that had killed the royal family in Russia and taken over the country. It was a time of suspicion and terror, when radicals and foreign nationals were rounded up and, without trial, locked up or deported, a kind of hysteria that ruined many lives. Two of the lives that were runined were Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti who, accused of murdering two men during an armed robbery in Massachusetts, were executed in 1927. Their case, however, highlighting many important issues and concerns about American society that are still relevant today, has become one of the most controversial cases in American legal history.

  The issues are, firstly, did Sacco and Vanzetti actually have anything to do with the murders and, secondly, did they get anything approaching a fair trial?

  The events that would lead the two men to the electric chair began with the theft of a couple of sets of vehicle licence plates on 22 December 1919 and 6 January 1920. Such thefts were usually the precursors to a robbery, the plates to be used on getaway cars. It was the kind of thing professional criminals did routinely.

  Between 7.00 a.m. and 7.30 a.m., on 24 December, two men, one armed with a shotgun, the other with a revolver, attacked a payroll truck that was carrying $30,000 in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. The truck, containing three men, crashed into a telegraph pole as the bullets flew. It was soon apparent to the robbers that they had underestimated the response from the payroll guards. They fled in a car containing at least two more men.

  Although there was no evidence to support it, the police chief of Bridgewater, Michael Stewart, suggested that the attempted robbery had been carried out by ‘radicals’ who wanted to use the money to fund their activities. His reasoning was that the robbers had been described as ‘dark and foreign’. The getaway car had been a Buick Overland which led Stewart to suspect the involvement of an Italian named Mario Buda who lived in Cochesett. Buda shared a house with Ferrucio Coacci, also of Italian origin, who had recently been served with a deportation order. Both Broda and Coacci had alibis for the time of the robbery, however.

  Four months later, on 15 April 1920 there was a more successful robbery at South Braintree, Massachusetts. Frederick A. Parmenter, paymaster for the Slater and Morrill Shoe Factories was being accompanied by a guard, Alessandro Beradelli, as he carried almost $16,000 for two hundred yards between two buildings. On Pearl Street, two men, dressed in dark clothing were leaning on a fence. One of them lunged at Beradelli as the other two passed. The other opened fire, hitting Beradelli three times and Parmenter once. Parmenter staggered towards some nearby workmen but was felled by another shot and Beradelli had two more bullets pumped into him a
s he kneeled in the gutter. A seven-seat Buick arrived at speed and the gunmen, carrying the payroll boxes, leapt into the car. A third man appeared from behind a pile of bricks and also jumped into the vehicle which sped away. As the car drove out of town, rubber strips with nails attached were tossed from its windows with the intention of puncturing the tyres of any pursuing vehicles. It vanished on a road leading to thickly wooded countryside.

  The following day, Chief Stewart visited Ferrucio Coacci, already in trouble for missing a deportation hearing. He found him packing his trunk, apparently in a hurry to leave the United States. He was not arrested.

  Two days after the robbery, the getaway car was found in a wooded area. That same day, Mario Buda took his Buick Overland to a garage to be repaired and Stewart, still suspicious of the Italian, asked the garage owner to let him know when he came to pick up the car. On 5 May, Buda arrived on a motorcycle and sidecar, with a friend, Ricardo Orciani. Two other men of Italian origin, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, arrived with them on foot. The garage owner pointed out to Buda that his vehicle did not have the correct 1920 licence plates and while he explained this to the men, his wife phoned the police. Eventually, unable to drive the car away, Buda left the garage with Orciani as they had come, and Sacco and Vanzetti caught a trolley bus back to Brockton where they lived. At Campello, two police officers boarded the bus and arrested Sacco and Vanzetti, recognizing them from the Garage owner’s description. When they were searched Vanzetti was discovered to be carrying a loaded .38 Harrington and Richardson revolver and Sacco a .32 Colt automatic.

  When questioned, they lied about where they had just been and how they had obtained the weapons. When the names Buda and Coacci were mentioned to them, they denied knowing them. When asked about their political beliefs, they were vague. They were locked up for the night, probably thinking they had been picked up because of their anarchist beliefs or for draft-dodging. The robbery was not mentioned until the following day when Frederick Katzmann, the District Attorney, questioned them.

  Meanwhile, Ferrucio Coacci was arrested and even though he managed to establish the alibi that he had been at work at the time of the robbery, he was deported. Mario Buda sailed for Italy three days later.

  Sacco had been at work on 24 December, but had not been at work on 15 April. He was arrested and charged with robbery and murder. Vanzetti, who sold fish from a handcart for a living, was charged with robbery and murder but was also charged with assault with intent to murder for the failed robbery.

  Sacco and Vanzetti had both immigrated from Italy in 1908, seeking the opportunity that America offered. They were both from prosperous families, Sacco, seventeen at the time, from Foggia and Vanzetti, twenty, from Cuneo. They would meet for the first time in 1917.

  Sacco first settled in Massachusetts where he trained as a shoe edger. He married an Italian girl, Rosina and had a son, Dante, in 1913. He was a hard-working family man who was earning good money and had even managed to save some. Although steady in his work and family life, in his politics Sacco was a rebel. He followed the teachings of the leading Italian anarchist thinker, Luigi Galleani, and engaged in fund-raising activities for the cause. At the outbreak of World War One, both Sacco and Vanzetti moved to Mexico with other Italian anarchists to escape being called up to fight. Galleani taught them that the war was for capitalists and not ordinary people. Missing his family, however, Sacco returned home a few months later.

  Vanzetti’s first years in America were spent in a variety of menial jobs. After the armistice, he returned to America from Mexico and began peddling fish from a handcart. He never married, did not drink and rented a room from an Italian family. Like Nicola Sacco, he read voraciously and he believed passionately in the same politics.

  Anarchists were popularly seen as bomb-throwing agitators who wanted to see the eradication of all forms of government and laws. There were actually several different types, however, and they ranged from versions of communism, to syndicalism, to pure anarchism. Men such as Luigi Galleani, who Sacco and Vanzetti followed, advocated the use of violence and that included the use of bombs. Galleani had even written a bomb-making manual.

  The trial of Vanzetti for the failed robbery opened on 22 June 1920 at Plymouth, Massachusetts, with Judge Webster Thayer presiding and Frederick Katzmann prosecuting. His defence team was led by J. P. Vahey who advised him not to take the stand as the prosecution would very quickly expose his radical views to the jury. His defence rested, instead, on sixteen witnesses, all Italians, who had seen him selling fish at the time of the robbery. The prosecution, on the other hand, brought forward witnesses who claimed to have seen him at the robbery. Importantly, it was revealed that when arrested, Vanzetti had shotgun shells on him. Ridiculously, one witness identified one of the robbers as a foreigner from the way he ran.

  He was found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years in prison, even though the customary jail term for attempted armed robbery was eight to ten years.

  The trial for the successful robbery at South Braintree began on 31 May 1921, with the same judge and prosecutor. The prosecution produced eleven witnesses who placed Sacco and Vanzetti in the area at the time. Only one of them had actually seen the shooting. They also produced testimony from experts that the type of bullet that killed Baradelli was ‘consistent’ with being fired by Sacco’s Colt pistol. There was no certainty that the bullet had actually come from Sacco’s weapon. The prosecution also argued that Sacco and Vanzetti behaved like guilty men. They focused in particular on the way they had fled the garage when Mario Buda was unable to drive his car away. The defence argued that in fact they wanted the car in order to dispose of incriminating anarchist literature. The guns they were carrying were explained away in the light of an incident that had occurred shortly before they were arrested. A fellow anarchist, Andrea Salsedo, had fallen or was pushed to his death from a window while in the custody of Department of Justice officials. Sacco and Vanzetti feared that if they fell into those officers’ arms, the same fate would await them.

  Katzmann played on the jury’s patriotism in a savage cross-examination of Nicola Sacco, emphasizing his flight to Mexico and his draft-dodging. He was encouraged in this by Judge Thayer who was outrageously biased against the two Italians throughout the proceedings.

  On 14 July 1921, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death on very little evidence.

  The appeals process was long and torturous and lasted six years. However, Massachusetts law gave Judge Thayer total control of the process and it was, consequently, a lost cause from the outset.

  Remarkably, even a confession by another man, Celestino F. Mederos, in 1825, failed to change matters. He had been a member of a band of robbers known as the Morelli Gang whose leader bore a remarkable resemblance to Nicola Sacco.

  There were protests across the globe about the verdict and the treatment of the two men. Amongst the notable people who campaigned for a retrial were George Bernard Shaw, Dorothy Parker, Upton Sinclair and H. G. Wells. There were demonstrations in cities around the world.

  It was to no avail, however, and when the last appeal was finally exhausted, Bartolomeo Vanzetti said eloquently to Judge Thayer, ‘I would not wish to a dog or a snake, to the most low and misfortunate creature of the earth – I would not wish to any of them what I have had to suffer for things that I am not guilty of. But my conviction is that I have suffered for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical, and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I am an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian…If you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already.’

  Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti died in the electric chair on 23 August 1927 but their case is still being tried on film, in books and in music, more than eighty years later.

  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

  The trial and execution of the Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
in Sing Sing Prison in New York on 19 June 1953, can only be viewed against the background of the remarkable and frightening times in which it took place. It was the time of the second ‘Great Red Scare’, a period of suspicion and fear of communism in the United States. The first such phenomenon occurred in America between 1917 and 1920 and produced its own martyrs, the Italian-American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Barolomeo Vanzetti who died in the electric chair in 1927. The second wave of communist hysteria featured the invasion of South Korea by Chinese and North Korean forces, an invasion that led to the Korean War; numerous revelations by lapsed communists and spies; the detonation of the Soviet Union’s first atom bomb; the witch-hunt mentality of McCarthyism and a pervasive anti-semitism. It would produce another two tragic characters – Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

  It has all the elements of a Cold War spy story – passwords, codebooks, mysterious assignations and a cast of undesirable characters relentlessly promoting their own agendas.

  In Canada in 1945, a clerk attached to the Russian Embassy, Igor Gouzenko, defected to Canada, taking with him GRU – Soviet military intelligence documents that implicated British physicist, Alan Nunn May, in spying for the Soviet Union. May was arrested and confessed. Around the same time, a partially burned KGB codebook was discovered in Finland, leading to the cracking of codes used by the Russians. One document decoded was a report on the progress of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, the United States’ effort to develop the atom bomb during World War Two. It was written by another British physicist, Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs was persuaded to confess.