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

jurors found Hauptmann guilty of murder. They did not recommend mercy, so Hauptmann was immediately sentenced to death. Upon hearing the verdict and sentence, Hauptmann’s face went “ashen white” with terror, the Times observed.***170

By the night of his execution, Friday, April 3, 1936, Bruno Richard Hauptmann seemed to have accepted his fate. “I am glad that my life in a world which has not understood me has ended,” he said in a statement composed shortly before the execution. “I protest my innocence of the crime for which I was convicted. However, I die with no malice or hatred in my heart. The love of Christ has filled my soul and I am happy in Him.”171

He walked calmly into the death chamber at Trenton State Prison accompanied by two ministers, one of whom read from the Bible in German. His face was impassive as his arms and legs were strapped and the electrodes were fixed. The current rushed through his body, and he was pronounced dead a few minutes later.

*If Wilentz could prove that Hauptmann committed the felony of burglary, then the defendant would be guilty of murder, since the baby died during the commission of that felony.

**It is not clear from the trial testimony when Lindbergh might have heard the voice again by way of comparison. Perhaps it was during the hearing on Hauptmann’s extradition from New York City to New Jersey.

**I am indebted to Richard T. Cahill Jr., whose fine book Hauptmann’s Ladder: A Step-by-Step Analysis of the Lindbergh Kidnapping added to my understanding of the legal proceedings. I am also indebted to the bygone reporters, editors, printers, and pressmen of the New York Times who produced the magnificent coverage of the Hauptmann trial. Their work showed the Times at its best.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

HEIR TO A TIMBER EMPIRE

Tacoma, Washington

Friday, May 24, 1935

“You’re just like other kids.” That was the message that John Philip Weyerhaeuser Jr. tried daily to convey to his two daughters and two sons. He wanted them to be healthy, happy, normal children.

But most children of that time were not chauffeured to and from their exclusive private schools. They did not live, as the Weyerhaeuser family did, in a mansion that was on a par with those owned by people whose surnames were Rockefeller or Carnegie or Vanderbilt. Indeed, the Weyerhaeusers were royalty in the Pacific Northwest, fabulously wealthy because of the family patriarch, Friedrich Weyerhaeuser, a German immigrant with the drive and vision characteristic of the men who became industrial titans in America’s Gilded Age.

Friedrich came to the United States in 1852 at the age of seventeen. At first, he planned to make a living (and perhaps a fortune one day) brewing beer. But according to one story, perhaps apocryphal, he was afraid that a brewer might become his own best customer. So he worked on a railroad in Illinois and later at a sawmill where he soon rose to a managerial position.

But he was at heart an entrepreneur, not an executive. He moved to the Northwest and saw the future—and it was wood. He jumped at the chance to invest his savings in timberland—some nine hundred thousand acres of it, which he bought from the Great Northern Railway at a bargain price.

John Philip Weyerhaeuser Jr. was the grandson of Friedrich. He had just returned from Illinois, where he had buried his father, John Sr., who had died on May 16.

John Jr.’s son George Hunt Weyerhaeuser was destined to rule over what was becoming, and what is today, one of the greatest timber empires in the world. But in the spring of 1935, he was a nine-year-old schoolboy. On this Friday, May 24, he followed his usual routine: when the students at his private school were set free for lunch, he walked to the nearby girls’ school that his sister Ann, thirteen, attended. There, the family chauffeur generally drove both home for their midday meal. There were two other children, Philip, ten, and Elizabeth, who was just two.

But on this day, George’s class had been let out earlier than normal, so he got to his sister’s school with time to spare. Rather than wait for her, he began to walk home. On the way, he took a shortcut through some tennis courts, where he encountered a man who said he needed directions.

George was all set to be helpful, but the man didn’t really want directions. He wanted George. The man and several accomplices had been tracking the boy’s movements for weeks, waiting for their chance. When George took a shortcut alone, they had it.

The man grabbed George and carried him to a car parked across the street. George saw another man sitting in the front seat. Then he was put into the back seat and covered with a blanket. For the next hour or so, the nine-year-old endured the emotional agony common to kidnapping victims, a fear to freeze the heart of an adult, let alone a child. George was terrified, not knowing what would happen to him, when he would get to go home. Had he done something wrong that this should be happening to him?

The car stopped. The men removed the blanket, and George saw that they were by the side of a country road. He was given an envelope and a pencil. Write your name on the back, he was told. He did. Then he was pulled from the car, blindfolded, and picked up by one of the men. Soon, he heard the sound of rushing water close by, then the sound was louder and beneath him.

He’s wading across the stream, George thought. “Are you going to drown me?” he asked.

“No, kid, you’re worth more to us alive.”

On dry land again, George was set down, then led by the hand. He felt bushes and trees bumping him. We’re in the woods, he thought. After a long hike, they stopped. George’s blindfold was taken off. The first thing he saw was a hole in the ground. His captors chained his right wrist