Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  Within earshot of the uproar, Bruno Richard Hauptmann tried to remain calm as he lay upon his cot, smoking cigarettes and reading. But he spent most of his time pacing the prison bull pen. “His reading has been confined to short periods, then the pacing would resume,” observed one of the guards. “He also has a worried expression.”

  12

  CIRCUS MAXIMUS

  “The newspaper idea of not surrounding oneself with

  mystery was to tell them everything they wanted to know.

  I had no intention of doing this.”

  —C.A.L.

  “OYEZ! OYEZ! OYEZ! OYEZ!” SANG OUT THE COURT crier at 10:10 o’clock on the Wednesday morning of January 2, 1935.

  Microphones and cameras were banned from the courtroom so long as the trial was in session, but a telegraph pole at the slushy corner of Main and Court streets in the center of Flemington, New Jersey, radiated a dense network of wires in every direction, connecting the entire world to the proceedings in the snow-covered, century-old courthouse.

  Up the seven stone steps from Main Street and past the four thick Doric columns, practically every square inch of the two-and-one-half-story, white neo-colonial building was requisitioned for purposes of communication. The Associated Press had installed four teletypes, each capable of sending an astonishing 3,600 words an hour. Western Union had installed 132 wires, enough to transmit three million words a day. The Postal Telegraph and Cable Company had fifty operators manning thirty-six wires, providing a capability of one million words a day.

  Direct broadcasting of the court proceedings may have been prohibited, but many of the nation’s leading news commentators came to Flemington to deliver their nightly reports of the day’s events in court. Gabriel Heatter, for one, also intended to issue live reports every day during the noon recess. The leading stations in New York City hired famous attorneys and legal scholars to deliver commentary.

  Newspapers assembled teams to cover the trial from every angle. The New York Mirror, for example, sent its editor in chief and lead columnist, Arthur Brisbane, for commentary, Damon Runyon for reportage, and the nation’s most powerful columnist and popular radio commentator, Walter Winchell, for his staccato personal impressions. The New York Evening Journal, another Hearst paper, had two young “sob sisters” vying for scoops, Dorothy Kilgallen and Sheilah Graham. Both played second fiddle to Hearst’s star reporter, Adela Rogers St. Johns, who showed up every day in a different Hattie Carnegie outfit paid for out of her expense account. The Herald Tribune placed no limitations on the length of the pieces Joseph Alsop submitted. For the duration of the trial, many of the nation’s most famous authors could be seen in town, reporting on what everyone agreed was “The Trial of the Century.” With but a touch of irony, H. L. Mencken went even farther, calling the trial the biggest story “since the Resurrection.”

  “His Honor Justice Trenchard,” announced the court crier; and the seventy-one-year-old Thomas W. Trenchard of Trenton entered the courtroom. Ordinarily the thirty-by-forty-five-foot room—with its high ceiling, large windows, and electric lights suspended from the ceiling—gave a capacious feeling. But some five hundred people were sardined into space meant to accommodate a third that number. Trenchard, with his gray hair and mustache, was known to most of those present for never having had one of his decisions in a murder trial reversed.

  At nine o’clock that morning, several dozen members of the public had been permitted up the narrow winding stairs and into the courtroom. Some were sent to seats in the upstairs gallery—supported by four white pillars—on a first-come, first-serve basis. After a few minutes, the courthouse doors were closed and admission was by ticket only—red for journalists and photographers, white for officials and members of the bar, yellow for telegraphers, who were allowed into the top-story wire room but not the courtroom itself. The county sheriff himself signed every one of the 150 press tickets, each of which had a number that corresponded to a place at one of the unpainted benches and tables behind a low chestnut balustrade or off to the side. No typewriters were allowed in the court, so most reporters scribbled in notebooks. One reporter estimated that a million words a day would spew out of that small room, not counting the court transcripts, which would be released to the press as fast as they could be reproduced.

  Shortly before ten o’clock that morning the supporting players had taken their places. The prosecution lawyers entered first, seating themselves around a table in front of the balustrade close to the jury box. The short and lean Attorney General, David T. Wilentz, not yet forty but already a star in the state of New Jersey, led them in. The son of Latvian Jews, he had come to America when he was four, at which time his father established a cigar factory in Perth Amboy. David did not attend college but read law at New York Law School. A smooth talker, he became a leading attorney in his hometown. Active in Democratic politics in Middlesex County, he attracted the attention of the party bosses. After helping elect A. Harry Moore governor of New Jersey, he was named Attorney General. A devotee of the racetrack, Wilentz—with his snazzy suits, turned-down hat brims, and ever-present cigar—was a press favorite, always good for a dramatic photograph and a ready quote. His son Robert later held that his father was personally against the death penalty and probably would not have prosecuted Hauptmann himself had he not been completely convinced of his guilt.

  Colleagues just as sure surrounded him: his chief assistant, Anthony Hauck, Jr., the district attorney of Hunterdon County, who had prosecuted John Hughes Curtis; Joseph Lanigan, who worked out of the state attorney general’s office; and George K. Large, a former judge and Flemington attorney.

  Close behind them entered the attorneys for the defense. The voluminous and florid chief attorney, Edward J. Reilly, and his assistant Frederick Pope wore dark-gray morning coats and gray striped trousers. The rest of their team—Egbert Rosecrans of Blairstown and C. Lloyd Fisher, who had defended John Curtis—wore business suits.

  Seconds after Judge Trenchard had mounted the U-shaped bench and settled into his high-backed chair, a murmur spread through the courtroom. Bruno Richard Hauptmann entered, wearing a grayish-brown, double-breasted suit, a handkerchief in his breast pocket. He was not handcuffed. Pale but neatly groomed, he walked slowly to his chair near the middle of the row just inside the rail. After a brief word with his counsel, Hauptmann looked up to find a thousand eyes staring at him.

  Before the audience could ponder his blank expression, their attention was drawn to the most anticipated entrance of the morning. Although the rumor was that he would appear only to testify, Charles Lindbergh—in a gray suit without a vest—strode into the courtroom, walking between the attorneys’ desks and the rail, right past Hauptmann. Without making any eye contact with him, he sat four chairs away. Whenever Lindbergh leaned forward to confer with the state’s attorneys, some could see that he was carrying a pistol in a shoulder holster. Sun streamed through the dozen large windows of the courtroom. Outside in the January cold, hundreds filled Main Street, many pressing their noses against the windows of the courthouse.

  The once quiet town, which served as the marketplace for the surrounding chicken farmers, had become nothing less than an amusement park devoted to the Hauptmann trial. The press dominated the social activity, turning a salon at the back of the four-story, red-brick Union Hotel into “Nellie’s Tap Room,” their private saloon, at which they drank, swapped stories, and discussed every detail of the case. Tourists swarmed about the New Jersey town, and vendors hawked autographed pictures of the Lindberghs—with forged signatures—along with courthouse bookends and replicas of the kidnap ladder, with green ribbons, to be worn around the neck. One entrepreneurial towhead snipped his own curls and sold packages of them at five dollars each as the Lindbergh Baby’s locks. Over the ensuing weeks, the level of tastelessness would only increase.

  Normally the sidewalks of Flemington rolled up at sundown, and the proprietors of the Union Hotel served fifty meals a day. Now they kept their dining room
open from seven o’clock in the morning until midnight, offering such specialties as Lamb Chops Jafsie, Baked Beans Wilentz, and, for dessert, ice cream sundaes called “Lindys,” to as many as a thousand people. Even the Women’s Council of the Methodist Church learned to turn tidy profits, serving as many as one hundred lunches every weekday to the overflow of attorneys and writers. With the arrival of the trial, the Mayor of Flemington proudly announced, not a single townsman was on relief, as any local could find a job as a waitress or messenger boy.

  Lindbergh’s businesslike demeanor that first morning made it clear that he had no intention of interacting with the press or public. In fact, he and Schwarzkopf, who had driven with him, had parked the car on Main Street and walked openly through the crowd into the courthouse with great solemnity. For Lindbergh, more than Hauptmann’s fate rested in the balance that month; he was judging America.

  “For several weeks it will be necessary for me to devote most of my time to the trial at Flemington,” he wrote in a memorandum to himself. “After it is completed,” he added, “I feel that it may be advisable to take my family away from the New York area for an indefinite period. Under the circumstances which now exist I doubt that it is possible for us to live near New York in reasonable safety or peace. The combination of our present-day press and the uncontrolled crime situation necessitates our leading such a guarded and restricted life that among other reasons I feel is detrimental for my son to grow up under its environment.” Lindbergh hoped time might improve living conditions for him and his family; but, he added, “until it does I must find a home where my family can live in safety and under conditions which better permit constructive thought and action.” The pandemonium aside, Lindbergh hoped the citizens of Flemington could conduct a fair trial. Without that, he feared, the case would never die.

  With rapt attention, Lindbergh leaned forward in his chair and rested his chin on his hand, as Judge Trenchard ordered the Sheriff to begin jury selection. The names of local citizens were written on pieces of paper and placed in a glass-and-wooden box, from which the Sheriff pulled one name at a time. Each person was sworn in, then seated in what visiting English author Ford Madox Ford described as “a common kitchen chair.” Then the lawyers tested the integrity of each by asking about the influence of the press, specifically the most notorious member of its corps, who had already served as “Bruno” Hauptmann’s judge and hangman. Time and again the defense asked potential jurors, “Have you read the Winchell column in The Daily Mirror? Or heard his broadcast? And from what you have heard, have you formed any opinion?” Nobody familiar with Winchell’s position claimed to have been influenced by it.

  Six men and four women, most in their thirties and forties, were selected. They were a cross-section of the town—a machinist, an insurance salesman, a worker at a CCC camp, a railroad worker, two farmers, a widow, a stenographer, and two housewives.

  Judge Trenchard had intended to adjourn that day at four o’clock, but the old clock suspended on the front of the gallery had stopped ten minutes before the hour. It was almost another hour before he realized what had happened. Then Trenchard ordered four constables to escort the jurors to the Union Hotel, where they would be quartered on the fourth floor for the duration of the trial. He remanded Hauptmann back across the “Bridge of Sighs” to his cell.

  On the town’s streets one could literally hear the clacking of typewriters, as journalists filed their reports for their morning papers. As novelist Kathleen Norris noted in an article for The New York Times, “The big story is on its way to every corner of the world. In Africa, in China, in Soviet Russia and Fascist Italy they will be reading what American justice has done here today…. history is to be written in these next few weeks, never to be obliterated from our records.”

  The second-day crowd in Flemington was even larger than the first, with hundreds queuing up in the predawn cold for admission tickets. The mob hoped for a glimpse of Lindbergh. When they broke ranks to rush his arriving car, Lindbergh and Schwarzkopf drove to the rear of the jail and entered the courthouse through the back.

  Before noon a retired carpenter and an unemployed bookkeeper had joined the jury. The only interruption in the procedure occurred during voir dire, when Anne Morrow Lindbergh, long sequestered from the public, entered the courtroom.

  Wearing a black silk suit, a shell-pink blouse, a simple black satin beret, and a blue fox fur, the diminutive figure briskly entered the room from behind the bench with Mrs. Norman Schwarzkopf. As they found their seats in the second row of chairs, behind their husbands, the audience audibly whispered her name. Many actually stood to get a better look. Judge Trenchard had to tap his gavel and raise his hand to bring the spectators back to their seats. Charles watched her until he realized she was perfectly composed, then returned his gaze to the jury selection.

  Once the twelfth juror was chosen, the judge dismissed the dozens of others in the pool, leaving a block of vacant seats in the courtroom. When the Sheriff opened the doors to fill them, hundreds flooded past him—filling the aisles, standing against the back walls, hanging over the balcony.

  Judge Trenchard turned to the jury, admonishing the eight men and four women to refrain from reading newspapers, listening to the radio, and attending public assemblages of any type, “more particularly where public addresses of one kind or another are to be made.” With that, he ordered the case to commence.

  Attorney General Wilentz’s opening statement explained the New Jersey law that stated that the death of anyone during the commission of a burglary is considered murder in the first degree. “Now, on the first day of March 1932,” Wilentz asserted, “the State will prove to you that a very distinguished citizen of this country” was a resident of Hunterdon County and that his son—“a happy, normal, jovial, delightful little tot”—was killed by “the gentleman in the custody of the sheriff’s guards right in the rear of the distinguished members of the Bar who make up the defense counsel.”

  For the next forty-five minutes, Wilentz detailed the crime as he believed Hauptmann had committed it. “He came there with his ladder, placed it against that house. He broke into and entered at night the Lindbergh home with the intent to steal the child and its clothing. And he did. Not only with the intent, but he actually committed a battery upon the child and did steal it and did steal its clothing…. Then as he went out that window and down that ladder of his, the ladder broke. He had more weight going down than he had when he was coming up. And down he went with this child. In the commission of that burglary that child was instantaneously killed when it received that first blow. It received a horrible fracture, the dimensions of which, when you hear about it will convince you that death was instantaneous.” Wilentz proceeded to describe Hauptmann’s subsequent flight with his “dead package,” the hasty burial after removing the baby’s sleeping suit, the Lindberghs’ shocking discovery that their child had been taken, the ransom notes, the role of Dr. Condon, the meetings at Woodlawn Cemetery and St. Raymond’s, where the ransom money was exchanged for false instructions to the missing child. He told of Lindbergh, Dr. Condon, and Colonel Breckinridge getting into a plane and how “Lindy, who could find a speck at the end of the earth, couldn’t find his child because Hauptmann had murdered it.” He described Lindbergh’s having to return empty-handed “to the home of sorrow.” He graphically described the accidental discovery of the baby’s corpse in the woods off a New Jersey backroad. As he did, Lindbergh showed no emotion, fixing his gaze on Wilentz. His pallid wife lowered her head, casting her eyes down. By the time she looked up, she had blanched further.

  By then, Wilentz was describing Hauptmann’s capture. He explained how the defendant had spent the ransom money and how he had lied about how much he had hidden in his house and garage; how he had written Dr. Condon’s address and telephone inside his child’s closet; how the government had traced the wood of the ladder to the very lumberyard at which Hauptmann had purchased his own lumber. Not only that, Wilentz said, “he has got
this ladder right around his neck; he took part of that attic of his and built the ladder with it—and we will prove that to you beyond any doubt.”

  Wilentz concluded his opening remarks insisting that Hauptmann had “committed this crime, he had planned it for months, because he wanted money—money—money—lots of money he wanted, and he got it.” He said Hauptmann wanted that money so that he could “live a life of luxury and ease so he would not have to work.” Indeed, Wilentz noted, he quit his job the very day he collected the $50,000 … and in “the midst of the worst depression of this land, in May 1932, he spends four hundred dollars for a radio,” thousands of dollars more in the stock market. After assuring the jury that the State would prove all these “facts” to them, Wilentz demanded the ultimate penalty for murder in the first degree. Hauptmann sat through most of the formal accusation with his arms across his chest, watching Wilentz as he paced before the jury. When Wilentz finished, a few spectators applauded.

  Edward Reilly rose to move for a mistrial “on the grounds that the impassioned appeal of the attorney general was not a proper opening. It was a summation intended to inflame the minds of this jury against this defendant before the trial starts.” Judge Trenchard denied the motion, though he cautioned the jury to “keep their minds open until the last word has been said in this courtroom.”

  With a few minutes until the lunch break, Wilentz called his first witness, a civil engineer and surveyor who described the precise location of the Lindbergh house and property. The Lindberghs lunched with the Schwarzkopfs at the nearby home of prosecuting attorney George Large.