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

Lewis Bornmann, the New Jersey detective who had worked with Arthur Koehler to trace the ladder wood, was checking the attic of the house where Hauptmann lived to see if there was yet more ransom money squirreled away. Bornmann found no more money—but he discovered what was probably the most damning evidence of all against Bruno Richard Hauptmann.

The attic flooring was incomplete, leaving sections of the beams, or joists, exposed. The partial flooring consisted of thirteen wooden planks nailed to the joists. Bornmann saw that one of the planks was shorter than the others. Looking more closely, he saw that about eight feet of the shorter plank had been sawed off, leaving a residue of sawdust and exposing four nail holes on the joists.

Arrangements were made to bring Koehler from Wisconsin to the Bronx to compare a section of the ladder made from “used” wood (containing old nail holes) with the shortened plank in the attic. Using a magnifying glass, Koehler determined that the grains in the ladder section and the plank were the same—meaning they had once been part of the same board.

Then came the real moment of truth. Koehler placed the ladder section on the joists and saw that the old nail holes on the ladder and those on the joists lined up exactly. When he pushed nails through the holes of the ladder section, they slid perfectly into the joists.

We can only imagine the joy felt by Koehler, the man who loved wood, and Detective Bornmann. The journey from a South Carolina sawmill to a Bronx lumberyard had ended, at long last, in the attic of the man accused of one of the most sensational crimes of the twentieth century.

New York Police Commissioner John F. O’Ryan said the arrest of Hauptmann was the culmination of great cooperation among the New York Police Department, the Jersey troopers and the Department of Justice. New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia said he was pleased that his city’s police were “cooperating so fully with other agencies.”148

In reality, the two and a half years between the kidnapping and the arrest of Bruno Hauptmann had been marked by occasional jealousy and deliberate withholding of information between the police in New York and their counterparts in New Jersey. There had been the mistreatment of Violet Sharpe, the Morrow household maid who had been driven to suicide. And Hoover had been lurking on the sidelines, hoping to swing the spotlight onto his FBI.

New York prosecutors were ready to bring Hauptmann to trial for extortion.

No, don’t bother, New Jersey prosecutors said in effect. We want to get this guy for kidnapping and murder and send him to the electric chair.

But that might not be as easy as the evidence suggested. Yes, there seemed to be plenty of evidence to prove that Hauptmann was the kidnapper. But it might not be possible to prove that he had intended to kill the baby. Maybe he had dropped the infant accidentally.

If kidnapping had been a felony in New Jersey at the time, prosecutors would have been home free. That is, if they could prove that the baby died—accidentally or not—during the commission of a felony, then the kidnapper would be guilty of murder. But incredibly, given that the most famous kidnapping in American history had occurred in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, kidnapping in the Garden State was still a misdemeanor.******* And an unintentional death that occurred during the commission of a misdemeanor would only have been manslaughter. In other words, prison for the kidnapper but not the electric chair.

Hauptmann might have spent the rest of his life behind bars had he been convicted of manslaughter in New Jersey, then convicted of extortion in New York State, and then convicted of entering the United States illegally as a stowaway. But that was not deemed enough.

Fortunately for prosecutors, larceny and common-law burglary (breaking into another’s house at night with intent to commit a felony) were felonies in New Jersey at the time. So maybe prosecutors could show that Hauptmann committed a burglary, then committed larceny when he stole…the baby’s clothes?

The rationale might have seemed a bit odd, but prosecutors were willing to thread any needles, jump through any hoops, to nail Hauptmann for murder. And while they didn’t say so, they surely knew that the good people of the Garden State and their representatives on a grand jury wouldn’t mind fancy semantics as long as the killer of the Lindbergh baby paid the ultimate penalty.********

The Hunterdon County prosecutor, Anthony Hauck, decided that he and the people in his office had enough to do without tackling the Lindbergh case. So he gave the mission to the New Jersey attorney general, a little dynamo of a man named David Wilentz.

As the American public absorbed the stunning news of the arrest of the suspected kidnapper of the Lindbergh infant, then followed the day-to-day procedures required to bring him before the bar of justice in New Jersey, Hoover was keeping track of sightings of Pretty Boy Floyd, whom he stubbornly blamed for the Union Station Massacre in Kansas City.

Hoover’s prayers were answered in October 1934 when Floyd and his accomplice Adam Richetti were tracked into Ohio. On October 20, they traded shots with police near Wellsville. Floyd escaped, but Richetti was captured.

Two days later, Floyd stopped at a farm near East Liverpool, Ohio, to ask for something to eat. A farmhand notified the police, who swarmed onto the farm with federal agents, led by Melvin Purvis. While fleeing across a field, Floyd was cut down by machine gun and pistol fire.

Some accounts, including one in the New York Times, said that as he lay dying, with presumably nothing to lose in this world or the next, Floyd denied any role in the Kansas City carnage. Other accounts say Floyd was more ambiguous, refusing to say anything about the train station shooting but muttering his contempt for the law as he breathed his last.

A headline in the next day’s New York Times declared,