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

escape is taken from the New York Times, though it is not clear if the dispatch, written in Chicago, was by a regular Times correspondent or a freelance stringer.

**Sawyer would spend nearly twenty years in Leavenworth and Alcatraz. His wife divorced him. He was paroled in 1955 and soon died of cancer.

***Yet the anecdote was too good to be abandoned. When Edward Bremer died in 1965 at the age of sixty-seven, some versions of his obituary reported that he had helped investigators by recalling the church chimes.

****On this occasion, Hoover was, it could be argued, being treated unfairly. After all, the FBI had not even been given the power to make arrests until 1934. And Hoover was supposed to be an administrator, not a gumshoe street cop with handcuffs at the ready.

*****The exchange between Senator McKellar and Hoover was recounted in Burrough, Public Enemies.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

IN THE WORLD’S SPOTLIGHT

Flemington, New Jersey

Wednesday, January 2, 1935

The spotlights of the nation and the world were trained on the quiet little borough of Flemington in Hunterdon County. It was there, in the century-old county courthouse, that Bruno Richard Hauptmann went on trial for the murder of the Lindbergh baby. Reporters, photographers, and movie-newsreel crews from around the globe were there to chronicle what will always rank as one of the most sensational criminal trials in American history.

Nowadays, many months might elapse between the arrest of a suspect in an infamous crime and the beginning of the trial. But Hauptmann was brought before the bar of justice just three and a half months after he gave the service station attendant the gold note that brought about his arrest.

Charles A. Lindbergh was there as jury selection began, sitting in front of the railing that separates the audience from those involved in the trial proceedings. The New York Times noted that he was only several seats away from the defendant. Astoundingly, Lindbergh was able to enter the courtroom while carrying a pistol in a shoulder holster, the weapon clearly visible when he leaned forward to talk to prosecutors. (The Times explained matter-of-factly that the colonel had carried a weapon for several years, since receiving death threats.)

With remarkable speed, eight men and four women were selected for the jury. Testimony began on January 3, after opening statements by the prosecutor, state attorney general David Wilentz, and the chief defense lawyer, Edward J. Reilly, who asserted that the crime was conceived and carried out entirely within the Lindbergh home—though not by anyone in the Lindbergh family. Was he trying to take advantage of the suicide of Violet Sharpe, who had come under suspicion early on?

Bizarrely, he said the defense would show that a gang of five people carried the baby from the house and that the ladder found at the scene had nothing to do with the crime. Nor, he insisted, did his client, whose connection with the ladder had seemingly been established, have anything to do with the crime.

“I have an awful lot of questions to ask Colonel Lindbergh, an awful lot of things I want answers to,” the defense lawyer asserted cryptically in a radio interview. “An awful lot of questions.”157

David Wilentz’s position was far less mysterious. He said the state would show that Hauptmann used the ladder he had made to burglarize the Lindbergh home and that he took the baby and fell off his ladder on the way down, a plunge that killed the baby, whose corpse Hauptmann concealed a short distance away.*

Wilentz was disdainful of the defense notion that several people were involved. The crime was a one-man job, he said, and that one man was Bruno Hauptmann, who should be convicted and sent to the electric chair.

Charles and Anne Lindbergh testified early on, with the colonel recalling the wood-clattering noise he and his wife heard the night of the kidnapping, how he remarked to his wife, “What is that?” He recalled how they dismissed the sound as possibly coming from a falling orange crate in the kitchen—or from the wind outside. The colonel spoke in a clear, seemingly unemotional voice, not betraying whether he reflected on the fact that the clattering noise might have coincided with the end of his firstborn’s life.

Lindbergh recalled how, upon learning that the baby was not in his nursery, he picked up a phone, half expecting that that the phone line had been cut by whoever took the baby. But it hadn’t been, so he called local police. Then he grabbed a rifle he kept in the house and went outside, walking on the road in front of the house for perhaps a hundred yards but seeing nothing.

“It was extremely dark that night,” Lindbergh recalled. He said the ladder was discovered by the Hopewell police chief, Charles Williamson, one of the first lawmen to reach the scene, who shined his flashlight on the ground near the nursery window.

Before long, Lindbergh said, the grounds outside his home were swarming not only with lawmen of several jurisdictions but with members of the press, who were “absolutely out of control” as they tromped all over the grass.

His wife, though composed, was more soft-spoken. She kept her self-control even as she described taking a walk outside the house hours before the kidnapping. Knowing that nurse Betty Gow was with the baby, Mrs. Lindbergh recalled tossing a pebble against the nursery window to get the nurse’s attention, “and then she held the baby up to the window to let him see me.”158

She even maintained her calm in what must have been one of the most painful moments for her, when she identified the sleeping suit the infant had worn the night he vanished.

The defense lawyer, Edward Reilly, had the good sense not to cross-examine a grieving mother, who uttered a quiet “thank you” as she was told she could step down.

Reilly was rougher on Lindbergh himself. Was the colonel really certain that the voice he heard in St. Raymond’s Cemetery the night he went there with John Condon was that of Bruno Hauptmann?

Yes,