“Mister, Mister, you stop lying,” he shouted, springing toward the stand, brandishing his finger. Guards restrained him, but he lurched forward and cried, “You are telling a story.” For the second time in all the hours court had been in session, Lindbergh looked at Hauptmann. Even before Judge Trenchard had restored order, Lindbergh was looking back at the witness stand.
Hauptmann’s contempt was contagious. The next morning, the prosecution called Ella Achenbach, a former neighbor of the Hauptmanns, to the stand. She testified that a day or two after the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Hauptmanns had called on her, saying they had just returned from a trip. Anna Hauptmann shrieked from her chair at the defense table, “Mrs. Achenbach, you are lying!”
Attorney General Wilentz seized the situation, objecting “to these demonstrations, whether they are staged or otherwise.” A legal tussle ensued as the defense objected to Wilentz’s implication. When Judge Trenchard restored order, Mrs. Achenbach went on to reveal that Mrs. Hauptmann had also told her that Richard had recently sprained his ankle and that she had even seen her neighbor limp. “Lies, lies—all lies,” Mrs. Hauptmann muttered throughout the testimony.
The week ended with even more incriminating evidence. The jury saw the board from Hauptmann’s closet with Dr. Condon’s telephone number written on it; and they heard the stenographer of Bronx District Attorney Foley read the testimony of Hauptmann in which he admitted that the handwriting was his and that he had written the information down because he had been interested in the case. “Everybody is against us now,” Anna Hauptmann told the press after court had recessed. “Nobody has a good word to say. They lie—lie—lie.”
A cold snap struck the East the fourth week in January, and with it came some of the most chilling testimony in the Hauptmann trial. Unfortunately for the accused, his lead attorney’s faith in him seemed to dwindle along with most of the public’s. Either through insufficient preparation or a simple desire to get to the next phase of the trial, Reilly let whole chunks of testimony go unchallenged:
The first witness that Monday was an agent of the Intelligence Unit of the Treasury Department of the United States government. He had computed Hauptmann’s finances between the dates of the ransom payment and his apprehension. Transaction by transaction, he showed how during that time, the unemployed Hauptmann’s assets had increased by $44,486. Reilly asked nothing about Hauptmann’s possible earnings from freelance carpentry or from his business dealings with Isidor Fisch, to say nothing of cash he might have kept in the house before April 2, 1932.
The timekeeper for the Reliance Property Management Company took the stand with records from 1932. He attested that Richard Hauptmann did not start working for the company until March twenty-first, that he did not show up for work the day the ransom was paid, and that he worked for the company only one day more after it had been paid. Reilly asked nothing of other company records that showed Hauptmann had worked for the company as early as March first, or about possible tampering of the books. He made no attempt to test the character of the witness, called a liar by many in the years since his testimony.
A theater cashier identified Hauptmann as the man who gave her a strangely folded five-dollar bill on November 26, 1933—which happened to be Hauptmann’s birthday, a night he insisted he celebrated with his wife and friends. Reilly asked the cashier nothing about her original statement to the police, in which she said the man who passed the money was an “American.”
The next day saw two more people identify Hauptmann in and around Hopewell. Then Hauptmann’s landlord testified that after the arrest, he noticed that part of a board was missing from the attic floor above his tenant’s apartment. This heralded the arrival of the prosecution’s eighty-seventh and final witness.
“It’s a long story,” asserted Arthur Koehler, who took the stand on Wednesday and whose testimony would spill over to the next day. “We want the long story, let’s have it,” Wilentz said. Technical though Koehler’s testimony was, the jury, gallery, and even the prisoner sat spellbound. Lindbergh, with his infinite faith in scientific scrutiny, was riveted. The middle-aged man detailed the eighteen months he spent deconstructing the “kidnap ladder,” narrowing down the forty thousand mills and yards in the country in which wood was dressed and sold to the National Millwork and Lumber Company in the Bronx. Thus, more than a year before the police had apprehended Richard Hauptmann, Arthur Koehler had found himself standing in the very yard where Hauptmann used to buy his wood.
After Hauptmann was captured, Koehler was able to examine his tools as well as lumber used in building his attic floor. As a result of his study, Koehler swore that one of the uprights in the ladder had originally been part of a plank in the flooring of Hauptmann’s attic, fitting right down to the nail-holes. The rest of the lumber in the attic, he maintained, also came from the very yard at which his search had ended. Furthermore, a study of the tools found in Hauptmann’s garage revealed that the plank from the attic had been planed down by one of his tools.
Hammering a final nail into Hauptmann’s coffin, Koehler said that a three-quarter-inch chisel was used in making the recesses for the rungs of the ladder, and that upon inspecting the Hauptmann toolchest he found no such tool, one that would be standard equipment in an ordinary carpenter’s kit. That was the exact tool found at the Lindbergh house. Hauptmann returned to his cell with his head bowed and eyes cast down.
The trial in Flemington had become the hottest ticket in the world. Sheriff Curtis declared that he had five thousand applications for seats from all over the country and from a dozen foreign nations. “The trial should have been held in Madison Square Garden,” he said. The general public could not help noticing the number of famous faces increasing every day. On this last full day of the prosecution’s case, Flemington’s largest crowd in weeks was rewarded for waiting in a blizzard by getting glimpses of Mrs. James Farley, wife of the Postmaster General, author Ford Madox Ford, and actress Lynn Fontanne, sporting a leopard-skin coat.
Temperatures dropped into single digits that night, producing four-foot snowdrifts throughout the state of New Jersey. Charles took Anne for a walk in the storm, and she felt exhilarated by the touch of his hand, pulling her up the hill. The next morning, making his customary drive from Englewood to Flemington, he got stuck between drifts. State troopers came to his rescue, allowing him to abandon his car, as they drove him to the courthouse. Even arriving a half-hour late, he had not missed much. Judge Trenchard was similarly delayed; and the first few minutes of business that morning were given to some final observations of Arthur Koehler under direct examination. In the end, Koehler’s testimony had been so dumbfounding in its precision that there was little for the defense to challenge. As Ford Madox Ford observed in a column for The New York Times, Koehler “was like the instrument of a blind and atrociously menacing destiny. You shuddered at the thought of what might happen to you if such a mind and such an inconceivable industry should get to work upon your own remote past—a man who searched 1,900 factories for the traces of the scratches of your plane on a piece of wood. It was fantastic and horrifying.”
Defense attorney Fred Pope at least got Koehler to agree that the ladder had been poorly constructed, from which he hoped the jury would infer it was hardly the work of a professional carpenter. After a few more questions from each side, the State rested.
Egbert Rosecrans for the defense moved for a verdict of acquittal. He held that no evidence had shown that the crime was even committed in the county in which court was convened (the corpus delicti having been discovered in Mercer County), that the State had failed to show proper intent to commit a felony (“Stealing clothes of the child, the sleeping garments?”), and that there was a paucity of evidence placing his client at the scene of the crime. Trying not to deliver his summation, Wilentz addressed every one of Rosecrans’s points, insisting that “there is not only sufficient evidence but overwhelming evidence … which requires this defendant to answer.” He argued statutory def
initions, maintaining that “murder … which shall be committed in perpetrating or attempting to perpetrate any … burglary … [or] robbery … shall be murder in the first degree.” The Court concurred.
That afternoon, Lloyd Fisher took center stage for half an hour, presenting the defense’s opening argument. Everybody in town suspected that this was to be the most startling day of the trial. Rows of observers stood shoulder-to-shoulder, right up to the edge of the Judge’s bench. Fisher promised the capacity crowd that the defense would provide alibis for Richard Hauptmann on three significant nights in the case—March 1, 1932, April 2, 1932, and April 26, 1932, the night the theater cashier swore he gave her a five-dollar-note that turned out to be ransom money. He also promised handwriting experts of their own—not as many as the prosecution, he said, because of lack of funds—and further compromising information on Isidor Fisch. Fisher maintained that the ladder had been so manhandled since the crime that it had been rendered a worthless piece of evidence and that many of the prosecution’s most important witnesses were impeachable.
Then, at 3:09, Edward Reilly boomed, “Bruno Richard Hauptmann, take the stand!”
Guards on either side stood with him, then allowed the man in the brownish-gray sack suit to step forward. For all his sleeplessness, there was spring in his walk, an animal magnetism about his muscular body and chiseled face. He spoke in a low, often guttural voice. Reilly coaxed the thirty-five-year-old witness to speak up as he limned his background. After describing being wounded and gassed during the war, serving time in prison, and illegally entering the country, Hauptmann’s counsel interrupted him in order to bring forth two other witnesses. The owner of the bakery at which Anna Hauptmann worked and his wife were sworn in to testify that they recalled Hauptmann’s presence in their shop on the night of March 1, 1932. They proved to be of little help to the defendant, as Wilentz’s cross-examination reduced their recollections to vague suppositions.
Hauptmann resumed his testimony, laying the groundwork for his alibis. He discussed his employment in 1932, but he offered a scanty account of his time on March 1, 1932, other than the morning. He stumbled over the date on which he started work at the Majestic Apartments, having to be corrected by his attorney.
The next day—Friday, January 25, 1935—should have seen Hauptmann’s best testimony. Six hours were given to his batting answers to his attorney’s lobbed questions, so that he could account for himself under oath. But he made two grave errors. One was over the misspelling of the word “signature,” which had appeared in the ransom notes. Reilly got Hauptmann to tell the jury that the police had directed him to misspell the word when they asked him to write it. In truth, the police had never asked Hauptmann to write that word. Even worse, when Reilly asked him to spell it on the stand, he got it wrong. The second mistake came toward the end of his direct-examination when Hauptmann described how the police had roughed him up—a “couple of knocks … in the ribs, when I refused to write.” That he had been beaten was never challenged; but Hauptmann had previously asserted that he was “glad” to give writing samples, for they would clear him.
The day ended with thirty minutes of cross-examination by Wilentz, who wasted no time hurling questions at Hauptmann about his illegal entry into the United States, the extradition hearings in the Bronx at which he admitted telling the truth only “to a certain extent,” his criminal record in Germany, his business dealings with Fisch, his hiding the ransom money and a pistol in his garage. Then the Attorney General confronted Hauptmann with one of his old notebooks which contained the word “boat”—spelled “boad.”
Reporters noticed more than once that Hauptmann used his handkerchief to pat his face and wipe his hands, and that whenever he heard the word “baby,” his hands fluttered and his lips trembled. “What Bruno needs,” commented Jack Benny, after visiting the courtroom, “is a second act.”
By this time, most of Flemington was convinced of Hauptmann’s guilt. At Nellie’s Tap, the press sang their version of the Schnitzelbank song, each new verse spilling onto the streets, where locals took up the chorus:
Is das nicht ein singnature?
Ja, das ist ein singnature!
Is das nicht peculiar?
Ja, ist damn peculiar!
Singnature?
Peculiar!
Is das nicht ein ransom note?
Ja, das ist ein ransom note!
Is das nicht ein Nelly boad?
Ja, das ist ein Nelly boad!
Ransom note?
Nelly boad!
After one day in Flemington, Edna Ferber became disgusted with herself for joining the fashionable crowd, talking about how “divine” and “wonderful” it all was. She admitted that it was thrilling theater. But she left town so sickened by what she had seen, she wrote that “it made you want to resign as member of the human race and cable Hitler saying, Well Butch, you win.”
“There is a steadily deepening tension and a steadily increasing horror in the Flemington courthouse as the most unfortunate man in the world makes his fight for his life,” wrote novelist Kathleen Norris for The New York Times that evening. “For no matter what may be proved against him, nor how intense the detestation in which the American people may hold him, there is no doubt that Bruno Richard Hauptmann is unfortunate—pitiful. Menace gathers like a storm-cloud over him, the central figure of a living drama that will be known throughout all our history as the great kidnapping trial …” In an adjacent column, Alexander Woollcott dropped all pretense of neutrality. While commenting on the number of “lonely and itching women who find him so physically attractive as to be above all suspicion,” he believed: “The most recurrent imbecility is the little notion cherished by those who say that, whereas they suppose Hauptmann was naughty enough to take the ransom money, they still doubt if he had anything to do with the kidnapping.” He said that if both Dr. Condon and Colonel Lindbergh have been willing to swear that Hauptmann was the man they recognized from the cemetery, then it was certainly Hauptmann.
The SRO crowd on Monday caught the best show of all—when Wilentz subjected Hauptmann to five hours of intense interrogation. At several points, Hauptmann’s waxen face came to life, his jaw jutting and his eyes blazing. His monotone erupted into sarcastic laughs and angry shouts. But Hauptmann maintained his control, never breaking down and confessing as the prosecution hoped and the audience expected. At times, he appeared to enjoy the sparring, occasionally smiling when Wilentz failed to land a blow. But he did have to concede a number of damaging points.
The jury heard Hauptmann admit to several untruths and to withholding information. He confessed that he had lied to the police upon his arrest when he told them that the twenty-dollar gold certificate in his wallet was part of his innocent hedge against inflation. Then he asked the jury to believe that the $15,000 the police found had belonged to his friend Fisch. He admitted that he had lied when he told the police that the first cache of ransom money they found in his garage was all that he had, only to have the police discover another $840. He admitted that he had lied in the Bronx court about having met Fisch in the Bronx in May 1932, and now asked the jury to believe that he had met him through a friend in March or April of that year. He admitted that upon Fisch’s death he had withheld from Fisch’s family the fact that he had left a bundle of money behind.
When confronted with the piece of wood from his closet with Jafsie’s address and telephone number written on it—pencil markings he had admitted in the Bronx County Court were his—Hauptmann now said he had not written them. Wilentz tried to get Hauptmann to explain his contradictory answers, but he kept evading them. At last he explained that he had been “quite excited” when first presented with the evidence (which some have long held was falsified, possibly by a journalist playing a prank) and so wrongly admitted that the writing was his. Now he went so far as to say that the handwriting did look like his but that he could not remember “putting them numbers on” and that he was “positively sure I wouldn’t write
anything in the inside of a closet.”
Fed up with Hauptmann’s obduracy, Wilentz said, “You are having a lot of fun with me, aren’t you?” Hauptmann said no, but Wilentz pointed out that every few minutes the defendant smiled at him. Then, interjecting some theories he had acquired from the State psychiatrist, who had drawn a psychological profile of the criminal, Wilentz said, “You think you are a big shot, don’t you?”
“No,” Hauptmann replied. “Should I cry?”
“No, certainly you shouldn’t. You think you are bigger than everybody, don’t you?”
“No, but I know I am innocent.”
Although he was seated and further shackled by his imperfect English, Hauptmann did not shrink before Wilentz’s obvious posturing for the crowd. “Lying, when you swear to God that you will tell the truth. Telling lies doesn’t mean anything,” the Attorney General said with disgust, milking the scene.
“Stop that!” the defendant shouted.
The day also contained more damaging evidence. There were peculiarities in Hauptmann’s handwriting that matched those in the ransom notes—hyphenating “New York,” reversing the “g” and “h” in words such as “Wright” and “light.” And then there was Hauptmann’s small ledger book with its sketch of a ladder similar to the one left at the Lindbergh house.
Lindbergh Page 47
