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

Lindbergh responded, recalling that the mysterious man in the cemetery called out to Condon “in a foreign accent, ‘Hey, doctor.’”**

The heart of Reilly’s cross-examination was the attempt to show that the household help at the Lindberghs’ home had not been properly vetted. “Thundering at the witness, Mr. Reilly demanded whether he had not made any effort ‘as a father’ to ‘find out the backgrounds of the people that were in the house the night your child was snatched away,’” the New York Times reported.

Lindbergh coolly replied that, of course, he had placed his “entire confidence” in the police, who offered suggestions on whom to hire.

“Well, Colonel, as a man of the world, you certainly must have known that some of the police are not infallible, did you not?”

“I think we have very good police,” Lindbergh replied.

The Times reporter made it clear who he thought had won the courtroom duel and where his own sympathies lay, observing how “the heavily built and red-faced defense counsel strikingly contrasted in figure with the tall, slim boyish-looking aviator” and how whenever Lindbergh “scored a neat rapier thrust against the lawyer’s bludgeon” the crowd of several hundred people “burst into laughter at the lawyer’s expense,” finally prompting the judge, Thomas W. Trenchard, to admonish the audience.159 (This was not the only instance in which the Times violated its standards of dispassionate objectivity. At another point in the trial, the newspaper noted that Hauptmann was dressed “as he had been every day in a suit, the color of which closely approximates the field gray of the German wartime uniform.”160

The second week of the trial brought more damaging testimony against Hauptmann. A Bronx cab driver identified the defendant as the man who paid him a dollar one night in March 1932 to deliver a message to John Condon, the eccentric Bronx educator who had insinuated himself into the ransom negotiations. “You’re a liar,” Hauptmann muttered at the cab driver.161

And Amandus Hochmuth, who was eighty-seven and lived in Hopewell, swore that he saw Hauptmann the day of the kidnapping driving by his home and in the direction of the Lindbergh estate with a ladder sticking out of the car. After Hochmuth identified him, Hauptmann turned to his wife, Anna, seated a short distance away and said in German, “The old man is crazy.”

If defense lawyers thought they could undermine John Condon, they were mistaken. Still vigorous at seventy-four, Condon was not unnerved at testifying before several hundred people in one of the most publicized trials in the nation’s history. On the contrary, he obviously relished it.

Prosecutor David Wilentz asked him to whom he talked on the night of March 12, 1932, in Van Cortlandt Park and to whom he gave the ransom money on the night of April 2, 1932.

“It was John,” the witness replied.

“And who is John?”

“John is Bruno Richard Hauptmann!” Condon boomed.162

The Times account had Condon remaining unshaken through cross-examination and even enjoying the back-and-forth with defense lawyer Reilly. That evening after court, Reilly insisted that Condon had been mistaken about his encounters with the man once dubbed “Cemetery John,” that the phantom-like figure was not Hauptmann but Hauptmann’s friend Isidor Fisch, who had returned to Germany, where he died. (Whatever Reilly asserted outside of court wasn’t supposed to matter if the jurors were heeding the judge’s instructions not to read or listen to news accounts of the trial.)

The prosecution produced eight handwriting experts to testify that there was no doubt at all that the ransom messages were written by Hauptmann. They based their conclusions on comparisons between the writing on the notes, handwriting samples that Hauptmann gave after he was arrested, and earlier specimens of the defendant’s penmanship, like those submitted with his application for a driver’s license.

On the twelfth day of the trial, FBI agent Thomas Sisk, whom Hoover had put in charge of the bureau’s contingent assigned to the case, testified on how Hauptmann, as he was questioned in his apartment, glanced furtively out the window toward his garage where the money was hidden. Suddenly, Hauptmann leaped from his chair and shouted, “Mister, mister, you stop lying!”163

The next day, Anna Hauptmann echoed her husband’s outburst as a former neighbor testified that a day or two after the kidnapping, Bruno Hauptmann was limping noticeably. Her testimony buttressed the state’s contention that Hauptmann had fallen from his ladder after taking the baby.

“You’re lying!” Anna Hauptmann shouted.164

The prosecution added to the growing mound of evidence against the defendant by introducing a closet door from Hauptmann’s apartment on which the address and phone number of John Condon had been written in pencil. An investigator testified that Hauptmann had offered a lame explanation for writing down the number, saying that he did so simply because he’d been following the case with interest. Yet with everything seeming to go against him, Hauptmann issued a statement through one of his lawyers. He expected to be acquitted, he said, because “the state has failed to prove its case.”165

“I have no fear of cross-examination,” he said. “I will tell the truth.” And after he was found not guilty, “I hope the world will forget all about me and that I will be allowed to live quietly with my family.”

But Wilentz was about to call his final—and most devastating—witness. He was Arthur Koehler, head of the U.S. Forest Service’s laboratory, who had traced the origins of the wood the kidnapper had used to fashion his ladder. Wilentz asked Koehler to relate how he had traced some of the wood to the lumber mill in South Carolina.

“It’s a long story,” the witness said.166

“Let’s hear it,” Wilentz said. “We want the long story.”

Wilentz had assumed that the jurors would find the “long story” an enthralling one. He was apparently correct, as the jurors leaned forward in their chairs as Koehler told of finding the South Carolina mill with its telltale machinery that left distinctive, if nearly invisible, marks on the finished lumber—marks that were photographed and shown enlarged in the courtroom.

Hauptmann listened