The Kidnap Years: by David Stout (popular books of all time TXT) 📗

used to make the bottom two side rails. He recognized that the grooves, virtually invisible to the naked eye, had been made by an eight-bladed machine planer in a lumber mill. Moreover, Koehler was able to determine that one blade was slightly out of kilter with the others. He also found marks on the edges of the pieces of wood, marks that told him the side cutter was a six-bladed machine. Koehler thought the “eight-blade, six-blade” arrangement was unusual. Finally, he detected a defect in one blade of the side cutter.

Thus, Koehler could eliminate those mills that did not have certain types of planers. Last and most important, Koehler was able to determine from the intervals between the tiny marks on the wood and his familiarity with the speed of wood planers that the wood had been fed through the machines at a rate of 230 feet a minute. Koehler knew this speed was consistent with industrial wood planers used in the South.

So Koehler studied the Southern Lumberman’s Directory, which told him that there were 1,598 machine-planing lumber mills between New York State and Alabama.

Visiting all the mills was not feasible—even if he managed to visit two mills a day working seven days a week, it would take him more than two years—so Koehler mailed requests to the mills for wood samples without mentioning that his query was in connection with the Lindbergh kidnapping.

Koehler learned that there were just two manufacturers of machine planers in the Eastern United States. He visited both, conferring with men who were intimately familiar with the devices. They told him that markings on the particular piece of wood from the ladder indicated that the machine that planed it had been fitted with a drive pulley of an unusual size. This was an invaluable fact.

Koehler learned that only twenty-five lumber mills using the kind of machinery that had cut the ladder pieces were operating in the region where Carolina pine grew. With his knowledge that the machine he was looking for left telltale marks from a blade that was defective and another that was out of kilter and that one of the machines had been fitted with an unusual drive pulley, Koehler was zeroing in on his target. He was also able to rule out those mills that did not produce one-by-four-inch boards like those used to build the ladder.

Eventually, Koehler received a wood sample that seemed promising. It was from the Dorn Company in McCormick, South Carolina. The sample had been processed in a machine with the eight-blade, six-blade setup. But the Dorn sample had no sign of the blade defects that had so intrigued Koehler. Still, he was not discouraged, reasoning that the blades had been sharpened or replaced.

Koehler contacted the company again, this time requesting samples of wood more than two years old. The company sent the wood Koehler had asked for, but the markings on the wood were not what Koehler had expected. He knew he’d have to journey some nine hundred miles from Madison, Wisconsin, to McCormick, South Carolina.

There, in that tiny, sleepy town on the edge of the Georgia border, he interviewed J. J. Dorn, the owner of the mill. Dorn recalled that a few years earlier, a factory-installed pulley had caused the wood to be fed into the planer too fast, so in September 1929, he’d bought a replacement pulley of a different size at a hardware store. The hardware store pulley was used off and on, depending on the particular job.

Koehler asked the mill owner to process a sample of wood with the hardware store pulley. Voilà! The wood came out with markings exactly like those on the ladder used in the kidnapping. “The Sherlock Holmes of the Forest Service,” as he would one day be called, knew he had found the right lumber mill.

“I sniffed with gratitude the odor of pine sawdust, machine grease, and sweaty overalls,” Koehler recalled.

But where had the mill sent the one-by-four-inch boards used in the ladder? Koehler knew he could rule out lumber processed before September 1929, when the hardware store pulley was installed, and he needn’t bother with lumber sent out after March 1, 1932, the day of the kidnapping. Still, the Dorn mill had shipped a fair amount of lumber in the two and a half years that Koehler needed to focus on.

Koehler and Lewis Bornmann, the New Jersey State Police detective who had assisted him in the search around the Lindbergh property, set about tracking lumber shipped from the Dorn mill to yards in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. More than forty carloads of wood had been sent to twenty-five different lumberyards in those states from September 1929 to March 1932.

Eighteen carloads had been shipped to places within twenty-five miles of Hopewell, New Jersey—but all had been unloaded at fenced-in factory sites where there were no retail sales. Thus, those sites could be ruled out.

One by one, Koehler and Bornmann visited the other yards. Weeks went by, then months. Finally, on Wednesday, November 29, 1933, they arrived at the National Millwork and Lumber Company on White Plains Road in the Bronx. There, the foreman confirmed that a shipment of pine from the Dorn mill had been received on December 1, 1931, three months to the day before the kidnapping.

But the entire shipment had been sold, the foreman said. There was no wood left for Koehler to examine. And the company did business on a cash-only basis, so it was virtually impossible to find the buyers.

Koehler was crestfallen.

Then the foreman recalled that a portion of the December 1, 1931, shipment had been used to build a storage shed right on the National Millwork and Lumber Company property. At Koehler’s request, a section of a one-by-four-inch board was cut from the shed. With a magnifying glass, Koehler saw that the markings on the board matched those on the wood from the ladder.

We can only imagine the emotions Arthur Koehler felt that Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving.** His science had