Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  An hour into the afternoon session, Wilentz called Anne Lindbergh to the stand. She nervously sat in the witness chair even before being sworn in. She stepped down to take her oath then returned to the wooden chair. While her testimony was not crucial to the case, the State knew that the presence of the baby’s young mother would be powerful. She was able to identify her son’s sleeping garment, the undershirt Betty Gow had sewn, which had been found on the corpse in the woods, and the baby’s thumbguard. She detailed her last day with her son, including how she had stood beneath his window, thus explaining the set of woman’s footprints found in the mud. With great composure, she looked at a photograph of her child, smiling slightly as she identified it. Then she told of the frantic search through the house for the baby that night. Anne’s voice was faint but firm, commanding the attention of everybody in the room—including Hauptmann, who almost never took his eyes off her. Charles took obvious pride in his wife’s “perfect self-control” during her forty minutes on the stand.

  Edward Reilly approached the bench, only to say, “that the grief of Mrs. Lindbergh requires no cross-examination.”

  At 3:30, Wilentz called his next witness. In a gray suit and gray shirt and tie, Charles Lindbergh’s tall, lanky frame practically seemed too big for the witness chair. He was no longer armed. Wilentz walked him through the first days of the crime, up until receiving the second ransom note, which arrived through the mail. It being the close of an already impactful day, Wilentz kept his star witness from dropping any bombshells.

  Gathering from the reaction in court that the media would be swaying public sentiment against his client during the next few hours, Defense Attorney Reilly went to Trenton, where he spoke over Station WNEW. He told the public that he was preparing a powerful defense, one which would establish that Hauptmann had nothing to do with the crime and that the kidnapping had been planned and executed by a gang. Knowing that Lindbergh would be moving public opinion even more the next day, Reilly asserted that he had “an awful lot of questions to ask Colonel Lindbergh, an awful lot of things I want answers to. An awful lot of questions.”

  The next morning, Lindbergh returned to the stand, where, prompted by David Wilentz’s questions, he continued his narration. When he reached the night of April 2, 1932, at St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx, he spoke of seeing Dr. Condon cross Whittemore Avenue and hearing “very clearly a voice coming from the cemetery, to the best of my belief calling Dr. Condon.” Lindbergh said he heard, “in a foreign accent, ‘Hey, Doctor!’” Wilentz quickly moved Lindbergh through the rest of his testimony—another fifty questions—before bringing him back to the night of April second. Then he asked, “… since that time, have you heard the same voice?”

  “Yes, I have,” Lindbergh replied.

  “Whose voice was it, Colonel, that you heard in the vicinity of St. Raymond’s Cemetery that night, saying ‘Hey, Doctor’?”

  Lindbergh turned from the Attorney General and, for the first time, looked directly at the defendant. “That was Hauptmann’s voice,” he declaimed loudly and clearly. The accused stared right back at him, with a stone-cold expression. A hush fell over the courtroom, then an audible communal gasp. A few more questions followed about Lindbergh’s hearing the voice a second time in District Attorney Foley’s office in the Bronx and about viewing his son’s corpse in the Trenton morgue.

  Colonel Breckinridge was present for his client’s testimony and later told his stepson, Oren Root, “The minute Lindbergh ‘pointed his finger’ at Hauptmann, the trial was over. ‘Jesus Christ’ himself said he was convinced this was the man who killed his son. Who was anybody to doubt him or deny him justice?” Another month of testimony remained.

  In the next hour before lunch, Edward Reilly tried to regain some ground. Instead of challenging Lindbergh’s testimony, however, he attempted only to plant doubts. He asked about the Lindbergh and Morrow servants and some of their mysterious demises, about Betty Gow’s relationship with “Red” Johnson, about the failure of Wahgoosh the dog to bark, about any hostility from neighbors in the Sourland Mountains, about the possibility that the kidnapper abducted the baby and exited through the front door of the house. None of it seemed to matter. At one point, Reilly tried to impugn the fallibility of the police; and when Lindbergh replied, “I think we have very good police,” many in the court broke into laughter and applause.

  At another point, Reilly tried to set a trap for Lindbergh but fell into it himself. Reilly asked the witness if he had not, in fact, believed that John Curtis had been in contact with the gang that had kidnapped his child. The court interrupted, pointing out to Reilly that he was assuming that the people with whom Lindbergh was negotiating had possession of the child. Prosecutor Wilentz said that he did not object to the witness answering the question so long as Lindbergh was asked his present belief. Reilly accepted the condition, and the jury was allowed to hear Lindbergh state that he currently believed that the defendant was guilty of the kidnapping. Lindbergh’s opinion was no doubt as prejudicial as it was immaterial.

  Furthermore, Reilly never attacked the part of Lindbergh’s testimony which was as vulnerable as it had been damaging. He did not ask one question about the three syllables—“Hey, Doctor”—Lindbergh claimed to have heard. In fact, Lindbergh had testified before the grand jury that the voice he had heard had uttered two syllables—“Hey, Doc”; and Wilentz had said in his opening that Lindbergh had heard the phrase twice, not once, as Lindbergh now testified. Even overlooking these variances, Reilly did not raise the issue of Lindbergh’s reliability, his ability to recall three distant syllables over three years.

  President Roosevelt delivered his State of the Union Address that day, but The New York Times relegated it to its far left-hand column, making room for a four-column headline on the right: COL. LINDBERGH NAMES HAUPTMANN AS KIDNAPPER AND TAKER OF RANSOM; COOL IN 3-HOUR CROSS-EXAMINATION. In a letter to her mother-in-law, Anne Lindbergh passed along the observation of one reporter: “I think Reilly withstood the cross-examination very well.”

  The Lindberghs spent the weekend at Next Day Hill, but it was impossible to keep the subject of the trial out of the house. The topic filled the papers and the airwaves; and the Lindberghs were hosting Betty Gow, who had returned from Scotland for the sole purpose of testifying, knowing her absence would only fuel further speculation as to her involvement in the crime. Although Lindbergh had scrupulously avoided discussing the case, except in court, on Sunday he granted a special interview to Lauren “Deak” Lyman of The New York Times, a reporter he liked and trusted, expressing his wish that the trial be conducted as fairly as possible. The article contained no quotes from Lindbergh, but it stated that he did not view the case as the battle the press had been depicting. Lyman said Lindbergh wanted “to bring out the truth regardless of whether it should create doubt or conviction of the defendant’s guilt, and regardless of whether the facts were brought out by the defense or the prosecution.” Toward that end, Lindbergh said he deliberately avoided ever looking at the jury for fear of prejudicing them.

  More than sixty thousand tourists descended upon Flemington that Sunday. Many drove to the narrow Mount Rose Highway, where the baby’s body had been discovered. More than five thousand people visited the courthouse, and local peace officers admitted groups of two hundred at a time into the courtroom, allowing them to sit in the jury box, the witness stand, and the judge’s chair. The most awesome sight on the tour, however, was of the connecting building. The light that glowed through one of its windows came from the bulb that hung over Hauptmann’s prison cot.

  The featured witness during the trial’s second week was Betty Gow. In three hours of testimony, the thirty-year-old nurse corroborated the Lindberghs’ accounts of the events of March 1, 1932. She identified the undershirt she had made for the baby, establishing that the kidnapper had committed a burglary by breaking and entering and stealing these articles of clothing. Betty Gow’s further identification of the baby’s sleeping suit
suggested that the kidnapper and the ransom collector were one and the same person.

  Edward Reilly tried both to implicate and imprecate Betty, failing in each attempt. He asked about her relationship with “Red” Johnson, which she described as an innocent friendship with an innocent man. When Reilly tried to discredit her because the State was paying $650 for her testimony, Betty explained that she was being paid only for her passage between America and Scotland and compensation for lost wages. “Mr. Reilly got very short change out of Betty,” Kathleen Norris added in her column in the Times that day. Upon leaving the stand, Miss Gow collapsed in an anteroom of the courthouse.

  The next day, two witnesses identified Hauptmann. The first was Amandus Hochmuth, an eighty-six-year-old man who lived near the Lindbergh property and claimed to have seen a man in a green car with a ladder turn toward the Lindbergh estate on the morning of March 1, 1932. When asked if he could identify the man in the car that day, Hochmuth pointed a trembling finger at Hauptmann. Suddenly the lights in the courtroom went out, and Reilly thundered, “It’s the Lord’s wrath over a lying witness.” The crowd laughed, but Trenchard brought order to the court. Wilentz re-posed his question, and this time, the old man trudged from the witness chair to Hauptmann and touched his knee. Hauptmann only shook his head, then turned to his wife and said, “Der Alte ist verrückt!” (“The old man is crazy.”)

  He may have been, and then some. The bespectacled octogenarian apparently had cataracts. But during cross-examination, Reilly questioned the witness’s sanity, not his vision. The spry old man came across as credible, thus placing Hauptmann in the vicinity of the Lindberghs’ estate on the day of the crime.

  The second identification came from Joseph Perrone, the Bronx taxicab driver, who had delivered the letter directing Dr. Condon to his first meeting with “Cemetery John.” When the prosecution asked if that man was present in the court, Perrone walked over to Hauptmann, slapped his shoulder, and said loudly to the jury, “That is the man.” Hauptmann stared at him, then snarled, “You’re a liar.”

  Six hundred people packed into the courtroom the following morning, anticipating a dramatic day of testimony. Jafsie was taking the stand. A natural ham, the corpulent Dr. John F. Condon strutted slowly to the witness chair and proved incapable of responding to the plainest question without gilding his answer. When asked, for example, where he had lived his seventy-four years, Condon replied: “In the most beautiful borough in the world.”

  For five hours, David Wilentz had to prod Condon through his bombast, trying to get the witness to limit his responses. Edward Reilly, no stranger to grandiloquence himself, encouraged him to blather, hoping to trip him up in his own testimony. With great fervor Condon described advertising to be the go-between, hearing from the kidnapper, meeting Lindbergh, and his subsequent encounters with “John” at the two cemeteries. Although he had a few moments of confusion—as when he mistestified about the first time he had seen the unusual hole-punched signature—nobody got the better of Jafsie, whose appearance on the stand included extravagant hand gestures and re-enacted dialogue, complete with an imitation of “Cemetery John”’s German accent. At day’s end, three moments from the performance lingered in everybody’s memory, the three occasions when Wilentz asked Condon to identify John.

  “John,” Condon bellowed each time in stentorian tones, articulating each syllable as he stared into the sleepless eyes of the defendant, “is Bruno Richard Hauptmann!” Hauptmann sat with his arms and legs crossed and stared right back. Lindbergh leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, fixing his eyes on the witness. After court that afternoon, the defense attorneys suggested to the press that Condon’s few fumbled answers indicated that he was both unreliable and possibly an accomplice to the crime. But the general consensus was that Condon had been a powerful witness.

  Over the next week, the trial settled into the presentation of evidence. Even though the expert testimony occasionally lapsed into scientific jargon, the Lindbergh trial maintained its primacy in the media. The New York Times ran nearly complete transcripts of each day’s sessions. Wilentz noticed that the jury seemed to be able to tolerate only two hours at a time of scholarly explication. He goaded his witnesses into making their points as quickly as possible. He broke the monotony by interrupting the experts with other witnesses.

  His choreography proved effective. Looking at large charts placed on a rack near the jury box and at eleven-by-fourteen-inch photostats that were passed among them, the jurors were able to understand Albert Osborn’s explanation of the remarkable similarities between Hauptmann’s handwriting samples and the handwriting in the ransom notes. He pointed out similar misspellings—“haus” for “house,” “note” for “not,” “anyding” for “anything,” “gut” for “good,” and “boad” for “boat,” for example, as well as similar Germanic formations of certain letters. Even more incriminating were “inventions” in forming certain letters—such as the inverted capital “N”s and “y”s that looked like “j”s. There were literally dozens of matches.

  Reilly spoke to the press every day. Although the prosecution had another week of witnesses, the defense attorney felt impelled to present his upcoming strategy, issuing the questions he would be asking Hauptmann, including those about his friendship with Isidor Fisch, whom Reilly insisted was the man Jafsie had met in the cemeteries. In realizing that he might be biting off more than he could chew, he hastened to add, “our purpose is not to try to solve the crime or to prove who did it, but to prove that Hauptmann is not guilty.” In Trenton, Reilly posed a panel of eight handwriting experts for pictures, a team that he said would affirm that Richard Hauptmann could not have written the ransom notes.

  The picture was seen around the world—almost everywhere except the top floor of the Union Hotel in Flemington, where the twelve jurors were sequestered. According to the constables, the jurors were not allowed to see any newspapers, because after clipping all the articles pertaining to the Hauptmann case, little remained. Besides the Hauptmann trial, the big news that week was a jailbreak at San Quentin resulting in the death of the warden, a bank heist in Ottawa, Illinois, in which a bank officer and sheriff were killed, and the killing of two notorious murderers and kidnappers, “Ma” Barker and her son.

  The Lindberghs rested that weekend at Next Day Hill. Anne was not much company, as the trial dragged her into a deep depression. While Charles, with Nordic sangfroid, could show up for the trial every day and observe it with objectivity, Anne could not. Many days she walked around the estate’s fenced grounds and sat on a tree stump to cry. Many nights she whimpered herself to sleep. She had frequent nightmares, not just about her firstborn, but about her father and Elisabeth as well. She often awoke in tears.

  Although Anne seemed to be suffering an emotional setback, she would later realize that she had entered a painful but salutary period. The trial had churned up feelings of remorse, self-pity, and nostalgia, which proved to be normal, healthy stages of grief.

  Charles, on the other hand, remained rigid in his refusal to acknowledge his pain. Anne would come to believe that such stoicism was “courageous” but that it was only a halfway house on the long road to recovery. “It is a shield, permissible for a short time only,” she would write years later, clearly thinking of him. “In the end one has to discard shields and remain open and vulnerable. Otherwise, scar tissue will seal off the wound and no growth will follow. To grow, to be reborn, one must remain vulnerable—open to love but also hideously open to the possibility of more suffering.”

  Writing during this dismal period saved Anne’s sanity. “If I could write out moods which could be admitted to no one, they became more manageable, as though neatly stacked on a high shelf,” she would recall several decades later. “Brought to the aseptic light of the diary’s white page, the giant toadstools withered.” It was a turning point in her growth as an artist, her self-confidence increasing as she found her literary voice.

  Entering the third week of
the trial, the prosecution persisted in what they considered a case of “identifications.” They would continue to place Hauptmann at every twist in the kidnapping story. As a surprise witness, Wilentz called Hildegarde Alexander to the stand. Swathed in fur, this twenty-six-year-old model and evening-gown saleswoman cut a glamorous figure. She testified that one evening in March 1932, in the Fordham Station of the New York Central Railroad in the Bronx, she had seen Dr. Condon, whom she knew slightly. Curiously, she added, she noticed another man in that Bronx station that night “watching him very significantly.” That man was Hauptmann, whom she subsequently recognized in a photograph after he had been arrested. There was little way of refuting her recollection.

  Reilly fared just as poorly trying to impugn the handwriting experts that followed—two that day, two more the day after. As another four followed, two of the defense’s handwriting experts announced that they were walking off the case. Reilly explained to the press that he had been unable to pay them; but each of them was quoted the next day as saying his analysis would not have been favorable to the defense.

  The trial continued to take its toll on Richard Hauptmann. Guard reports revealed that he was pacing more and crying in his cell. After the appearance of the men who discovered the baby’s corpse and the doctors who examined the body, Hauptmann’s case took another turn for the worse. Edward Reilly announced in court that he did not intend to claim that the body was other than that of Colonel Lindbergh’s child. Members of his own team felt he should not have allowed any Achilles heel in the case to go unattacked. Lloyd Fisher, for one, leapt to his feet and said, “You are conceding this man to the electric chair!” As he stormed out of the room, the defendant said to his attorney, “You are killing me.”

  Hauptmann was furious. After two dozen witnesses testified that day, he finally blew his top. Special Agent Thomas Sisk had described Hauptmann’s capture and how his furtive glances out the window of his house led to the discovery of the ransom money in his garage. The normally sphinxlike defendant scowled, shaking his head from side to side. Then Sisk talked about the jug containing water, which he had unearthed inside the garage. He said he found no money in the jug, but that the next day, when questioning Hauptmann, the defendant “admitted that he had that money in there three weeks before he was arrested.” That provided a neat explanation for the dampness of the money when it was discovered; but Hauptmann had consistently maintained that the money had got wet from the leak in his closet, where he claimed it had sat for years.