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

about two blocks, he was pulled over by plainclothes detectives. Without showing any nervousness or changing facial expression, he demanded to know why he’d been stopped.

Without answering, the detectives patted him down for weapons—there were none—and searched Hauptmann’s pockets, finding a twenty-dollar gold note.

“Where’d you get this?” a detective asked.

Hauptmann replied that he’d been saving gold notes for years, thinking them protection against runaway inflation, which he’d experienced in his native Germany.

“What do you know about the Lindbergh kidnapping?”

“I? I know nothing at all about the Lindbergh kidnapping, gentlemen. I am a decent man. I live near here with my wife and child. I am a carpenter, gentlemen.”

Hauptmann was taken back to his apartment, where investigators discovered the pair of shoes that had been bought recently at a store in Fordham. It was quickly determined that the twenty-dollar note found on his person was from the ransom money.

Hauptmann was taken to the Greenwich Street police station in Lower Manhattan. There, he underwent hours of relentless interrogation of the kind that would become unthinkable decades later when the Supreme Court decreed that a suspect had the right to keep his mouth shut and demand a lawyer. Hauptmann’s wife was also questioned, although it is not clear what, if anything, her answers contributed. At the time and for the rest of her life, she insisted that her husband was innocent.

Investigators learned that Hauptmann hadn’t worked for months, yet neighbors said he and his wife, who had quit her job as a waitress, seemed to live quite comfortably. Hauptmann said he had done well as an investor. Indeed, investigators learned that he had $24,000 or $25,000 in a brokerage account. But as details of his background emerged—Hauptmann had served prison time in Germany for robbery and theft before escaping and making his way to the United States illegally as a stowaway on a ship—investigators didn’t believe he could have prospered on Wall Street, where so many sophisticated Americans had come to ruin.

Having noticed that Hauptmann had glanced uneasily out his apartment window toward his garage, investigators searched the structure—and found $13,500 in cash from the Lindbergh ransom. Hauptmann had a ready explanation: a friend and fellow German, Isidor Fisch, had given it to him. Hauptmann said he and Fisch had been partners in a fur-trading venture and that Fisch had entrusted him with the money before going back to Germany where, unfortunately, he died.

The money found in Hauptmann’s garage had been wrapped in newspapers. Some of it was crammed into an old oil can, some of it secreted under the floorboards, and some of it concealed in the walls of the garage. Hauptmann offered no good explanation for these unorthodox business practices, yet he seemed unfazed when confronted by the absurdities in his story. In fact, he was behaving just as Dr. Dudley Shoenfeld, the psychiatrist and early criminal profiler, had predicted the kidnapper would if he were ever captured.

Well into the night of Wednesday, September 19, investigators dug and poked around Hauptmann’s garage, toiling under the glare of spotlights. Incongruously, baby clothes for the Hauptmanns’ infant son still hung on a clothesline, flapping softly in the breeze.

In the apartment, investigators found more of the ransom money in a shoe box in a closet. They also found a telephone number, scribbled on a closet door. It was the number of John Condon, who had acted as a liaison between Lindbergh and the kidnapper.

Inevitably, the commotion around the house and garage drew the attention of neighbors and soon of reporters, who picked up rumors that the New York police had a prisoner of great importance. So after wanting to keep the arrest secret for as long as possible, on Thursday, September 20, the authorities announced Hauptmann’s capture.

Journalists were allowed to view him in the police station and noted that the “sullen and defiant” suspect had fought for the kaiser during the Great War. Police officers posed Hauptmann for the benefit of news photographers, with and without his hat, as the cameramen requested.

Oddly enough, John Condon was not absolutely sure that he recognized Hauptmann from the nighttime cemetery encounters. But other witnesses were more certain.

After Hauptmann’s image was on the front page, a Manhattan storekeeper came forward to say he recognized Hauptmann as the man who had paid for a purchase with a ten-dollar gold certificate, later confirmed to be from the ransom, on March 1, 1933.

By early October, Hauptmann had been transferred to a jail in the Bronx, the borough where on April 2, 1932, the crime of extortion had taken place—i.e., the transfer of money from Condon to the mysterious man in St. Raymond’s Cemetery. On October 3, 1934, at the request of investigators, a cashier at a movie theater in Lower Manhattan sat in a Bronx courtroom as Hauptmann made an appearance.

Yes, she said without hesitation. That was the man who bought a ticket to see a gangster movie (Broadway Through a Keyhole) on November 26, 1933. There was no doubt about the date: the very next day, Detective James Finn had visited her and revealed that the five-dollar Federal Reserve note the man had given her was from the Lindbergh ransom. The bill had been folded in eight parts so as to fit in a watch pocket, and the man hadn’t so much handed her the bill as tossed it at her, rather rudely and arrogantly. (Finn recalled his conversation with Dr. Shoenfeld months before when the psychiatrist had predicted that the kidnapper would carry some of the ransom bills as trophies.)

The foreman and cashier at the Cross, Austin & Ireland lumberyard in the Bronx identified Hauptmann as the man who had intended to use a ten-dollar gold certificate to pay for a piece of plywood the previous February, then rushed out for no good reason.******

It also became known that Hauptmann had worked for a time at National Millwork and Lumber Company, the Bronx lumberyard where, it seemed all but certain, the kidnapper had obtained much of the wood used to