The Crime Of The Century

2020-10-03 17:31:38 Written by Nimra Noor

The Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping Case

 

The child's body was face downward, wrapped with leaves and insects. It was little more than a skeleton, the shape of a form in a dark, murky heap of decaying vegetation. The left leg was missing from the knee down, as were the left hand and right arm. Most of its organs were gone, scavenged by the beast life dwelling in the wooded region. It had decomposed so entirely that it was not possible at first to determine whether it was a boy or a girl. The reason for death was a huge break in the skull. The small body had been left to the elements for two to three months. Less than twenty-four hours later, and an hour after it had been recognized as Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. by his nurse and dad, the body was cremated. Seventy-three stunning days of waiting had reached an end.

 

The Lindbergh case, the "Crime of the Century," is not so much about the kidnapped and murdered child as it is about America's hero, Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly the Atlantic lonely, in a small, unstable, one-engine aircraft, a feat so venerated that the plane maintains a leading position in the Air and Space Museum. It is the story of a nervous national hero caught in a wave of publicity then uncommon in American journalism, now expanded beyond print to include the powerful voice of radio. The case remains a rare crime because it included not only Lindbergh, the hero, but the accused, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German immigrant, convicted and executed, whose crime to this day, in the minds of many, remains an unanswered problem. Like many crimes sustained in our history, the victim becomes less important than the parties. Its immortality is not only in the unclear question about the accused killer but in the chequered careers of the victim's father and mother. The father, the "Lone Eagle," wastes the rest of his forty years as an appeaser, an isolationist, and an environmentalist. The mother, a novelist, and poet lives on as an afraid, private emotional. Lawfully the case is closed and, although it gave birth to "The Lindbergh Law," which first established the crime of kidnapping to be a federal crime, it remains in its fascination by its almost fictitious nature: A crime against a hero, unresolved, questionable, and in many ways puzzling. At the age of twenty-five, in 1927, Lindbergh was the first hero to fly the Atlantic Ocean solo. He was praised as a national hero and rewarded the rank of colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He then began on a career as a flying consultant. In 1929, he came together with the daughters of Dwight Morrow, then Ambassador to Mexico. While he looks like to have shyly dated both Elisabeth and Anne Morrow, he married the latter. In 1930 their first child, Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., was born. Lindbergh was inexperienced for the attention that accompanied his success. He and his wife were always chased by the press, and the more reclusive and opposed they became, the more intense became the scrutiny of them. Despite his father-in-law's guidance to accept the intrusions into his personal life, Lindbergh was determined to avoid the tabloid-type journalism —known at the time as "yellow journalism" —as well as the broad coverage that respectable newspapers of the day expended on his and Anne's every activity. To escape, he constructed a house on a 390-acre tract in a remote region of New Jersey, near the small town of Hopewell. He and Anne and their child resided at the Morrow estate in Englewood, New Jersey, staying weekends at their previously completed house in Hopewell. Normally, they would return to Englewood on Monday sunrises, but, on the last weekend of February, they agreed to stay over for another day or two, because the infant had a cold. On a cold rainy night, March 1, 1932, in the isolated rural region near Hopewell, New Jersey, Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., twenty months old, was kidnapped. Eventually between 8:00 p.m., when his nurse, Betty Gow, checked on the sleeping baby, and 10:00 p.m., when she once again checked on him before retiring for the night, "The Eaglet" (as the newspapers called him) had been eliminated from his crib. The only remembered incident that suggested that something had gone amiss was earlier, about 9:00 p.m., while the Lindberghs were sitting in the living room. Col. Lindbergh had listened to a sound that sounded as if an orange crate had fallen off a chair in the kitchen.

Investigation

Schwarzkopf and LindberghAt 10:25 p.m., Ollie Whately, the Lindbergh caretaker, named the Hopewell Police, and quickly thereafter Col. Lindbergh phoned the New Jersey State Police. In the cold nighttime, Lindbergh searched for signs of the kidnapper, taking his Springfield rifle. He could see nobody. A number of State Police officers were on the scene, when around midnight their chief, H. Norman Schwarzkopf, arrived to accept the command. The opinions of Col. H. Norman Schwarzkopf are mixed. He was an army officer in World War I. At the age of twenty-six, he was selected as the first head of the New Jersey State Police, which he planned and ran like a military body. The group was powerful in enforcement but weak in the inquiry. His "troops" had military grades and wore quasi-military uniforms. He was the dad of 1991 Desert Storm commander H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. While he was restricted from much of the planning to connect with the kidnappers, and while much of his guidance was over-ruled by Lindbergh and his lawyer, Henry Breckinridge, once the Eaglet's body was found in early May, he took charge of the inquiry. It was clear that he found it hard to work together with the New York City Police, the FBI, and other investigative units. Lindbergh expressed belief in him, especially during the fruitless months that followed the finding of the child's body, during which time the actions of the State Police were roundly condemned. The first of the state police to arrive investigated the outer area. They discovered footprints on the wet floor below the window but failed either to measure them or to make plaster shapes of them. There were two intense feelings, probably made by a ladder. Also, a carpenter's chisel was found near the ladder's opinions. Less than a hundred yards away, the ladder, in three categories, was discovered, the bottom section —the widest —was broken. Near a small dirt road, there were tire paths. By this time, Lindbergh's lawyer and friend, Henry C. Breckinridge, had come. The three colonels (Lindbergh, Breckinridge, and Schwarzkopf) moved into the nursery with other officials and Cpl. Frank Kelly, the crime scene and fingerprint man. On the windowsill was an envelope, sighted earlier by Lindbergh. It was cleaned for fingerprints, as were other areas in the room. Officer Schoeffel slit the envelope open with his penknife. He removed an available sheet of folded paper. It had been written with blue ink. The note was given to Lindbergh. It read...

"Dear Sir! Have 50000$ prepared with 2500$ in 20$ bills 1500$ in 10$ bills and 1000$ in 5$ bills? After 2-4 days we will instruct you where to send the Money. We advise you for making anything social or to informing the police the kid is in gut care. Reminder for all letters is signature and 3 holes."

 

At the lowest right-hand corner of the sheet of paper was a diagram of two interlocking orbits, each about an inch in diameter. The area where the orbits divided had been colored red. Three minor holes had been punched into the layout. Kelly discovered only a single unidentified stain on the envelope, nothing on the sheet of paper. Within a few hours, a number of journalists were at the Lindbergh estate, and by daylight, strange on-lookers were walking over the residence. Schwarzkopf set up a power post in Lindbergh's three-car garage. The butler and his wife were kept active providing coffee and sandwiches to the police and the reporters. Additional telephone lines were brought in, and the press eventually stabilized their headquarters in the small hotel in the town of Hopewell. Lindbergh accepted the charge. He and Breckinridge agreed that the best way of receiving the return of the baby was to do whatever the kidnappers wanted. Schwarzkopf, in fear of Lindbergh, had no option, even though he referred to that Lindbergh lawfully could not give freedom to the criminals. Within the following few days, thousands of pieces of mail were collected at Hopewell. Three state administrator officers served full time on sorting through the mail. Three theories were being formed: 

No.1

Lindbergh supposed that the kidnappers were professional. 

No.2

Because of the kidnappers' understanding of the house, the location of the nursery, and the reasonable ransom request, Schwarzkopf believed that the gang was local and inexperienced.

No.3

Lieutenant Keaton, Schwarzkopf's principal investigator, expected to pursue the chance that the kidnapping might have been, directly or indirectly, the work of domestic workers, since somehow the kidnappers had to have been instructed that the family was not returning to the Morrow estate, as was their policy. Keaton gingerly investigated the probability that Betty Gow, the nurse, was somehow involved. On March 4, a second ransom message was collected. It punished Lindbergh for involving the police and upped the ransom demand to $70,000. The identical symbol of interlocking circles was at the bottom of the statement. Guessing that this note might have been stopped by the police, a third letter was sent the second day to Breckinridge's office, to be distributed to Lindbergh. It nearly repeated the information comprised in the March 4th letter. At this point, a number of simultaneous stories take place. Not just will Lindbergh and his trusted companions take responsibility, but, beyond their influence, others will become involved. One week after the child was abducted, John F. Condon gave his services as a go-between. On the one hand, Condon is portrayed as a ham, a bizarre, a braggart, a self-promoter, and a windbag inflated with his own importance. On the other hand, he is an unselfish scout leader, devoted, passionate, a nationalist, and a guileless rube. His book, Jafsie Tells All, reads like a turn-of-the-century Frank Merriwell novel, with Condon casting himself as a prominent knight, dedicated to the service of his hero, Charles Lindbergh. The kidnappers approved his offer, Lindbergh accepted his offer, and negotiations were allowed. Condon placed an ad, as notified, in the New York American, notifying the kidnappers that the cash was available. He created a code name based on his initials "Jafsie," a condensation of J.F.C. On March 12, Condon collected written instructions, provided by a cab driver. Despite not having the money, Condon set off to confront with a kidnapper in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. The kidnapper had a Germanic tone and inquired for the money. Condon warned him that he didn't have it and that he couldn't provide it until he had recognized the baby. The man, who said Condon that his name was John and that he was Scandinavian, told that he could not allow Condon to see the baby "Number One will be mad" but that he would send Condon a "token," the baby's sleeping suit, by Monday sunrise. 

While Condon was beginning contact with the real kidnappers, various other spurious actions were underway. All four of these the one legitimate and the three bogus happened during a similar time duration. Who was John F. Condon, and how did he become involved? A retired physical instruction teacher, Condon was stunned by the crime against America's hero. He composed a letter to the Bronx Home News, offering $1,000 of his own cash to be added to the ransom pressure of $50,000, and offering to act as a go-between. It was published on March 8, 1932, edition, right one week after the abduction. The following day he obtained an answer to his letter, approving his actions, and informing him to place the message "Money is ready in the New York American." There was also a smaller envelope that was to be provided to Col. Lindbergh. Condon shortly called Lindbergh and read him the message that had been addressed to him, that is, Condon. He then asked Lindbergh if he should read the closed letter. Lindbergh said, "Kindly open it and read it to me." It read: 

"Dear Sir, Mr. Condon may act as a go-between. You may give him 70000$. make one packet the size will bee approximately (Here was a diagram of a box, seven by six by fourteen inches. Condon illustrated it to Lindbergh). The rest of the note read:

We have informed you already in what sort of bills. We instruct you not to put any trap in any way. If you or somebody else will inform the Police there will be a more delay After we have the cash in hand we will tell you where to find your boy You may have an aircraft ready it is about 150 miles away. But before warning you the odr. a delay of 8 hours will be between."

 

"Is that all?" Lindbergh raised a question. Condon added that there was some type of design at the right-hand lowest corner of the page, two interlocking orbits, with three small holes punched into the layout. Lindbergh became passionate and invited Condon to join him at Hopewell. After Condon's first meeting with "Cemetery John" in Woodlawn Cemetery, the child's sleeping suit was posted to Condon, as John had guaranteed. After a more discussion of advertisements by Condon and messages from John, a rendezvous for paying the ransom was arranged. Two packets of bills were made, both including gold certificates, that is, a currency that was still based on the gold standard. Gold certificates would be recalled by government edict a year later. The prescribed box comprised $50,000, and the next package comprised the additional $20,000 demanded by the kidnappers. The bills were not noted but the serial numbers had been documented. On the night of April 2, 1932, one day and one month since the Eaglet had been kidnaped, Lindbergh drove Condon to the appointed place. It was in another cemetery, St. Raymond's. Condon walked among the tombstones while Lindbergh, armed with a gun, stayed in the car. No one appeared to be around. As Condon returned to the car to tell Lindbergh that John was not there, a voice shouted, "Hey, Doctor!" Both Condon and Lindbergh had listened to the voice. The kidnapper cried again. "Here, Doctor. Over here! Over here!" Condon returned to the cemetery and saw a figure. He observed, lost him, then was startled when a crouched figure said, "Hello." It was John. After a conversation about the location of the baby, Condon returned to the car to bring the cash. He had assured John that there was only $50,000 and carried only the box back to the kidnapper. He provided the box to John, who gave him a note, saying Condon that it should not be unwrapped for six hours. He told Condon that the baby was all right and was living safely on a boat named Nelly. John disappeared into the graveyard, and Condon returned to the car and Lindbergh. They drove out.

About a mile from the graveyard, Condon assured Lindbergh that it would be all freedom to open the note. It gave the following instructions:

"The baby is on the Board Nelly. It is a small board 28 feet long. Two individuals are on the board. They are innocent. You will discover the Board between Horseneck Beach and gay Head near Elizabeth Island."

During the time of March 2 to May 12, when the baby's corpse was found, while Lindbergh, Breckinridge, and Condon were in touch with whoever had composed the original ransom note found in the nursery, the three different hoaxes were advancing.

Hoax One

The first hoax executed on Col. and Mrs. Lindbergh was the general belief that only methodical crime could be believable for such a slick abduction. The late 1920s and the early 1930s had become an era of gangland abductions. Because of this, a small-time smuggler by the name of Mickey Rosner gave his services to hunt for the baby, alleging that his relations would result in the return of the kid within a week. Lindbergh and Breckinridge, over the criticisms of Schwarzkopf and Keaton, accepted Rosner's request. He asked for, and obtained, $2,500 for expenses and delegated two of his assistants, also small-time criminals, Salvatore Spitale and Irving Bitz, to assist as his field touches with many units of the Mob. Over various months, Rosner was able to allege that achievement was just around the corner. Reinforcing Rosner's claim that negotiating with the Mob was the way to receive the baby, Al Capone, previously arrested for tax invasion, defended that he could find the gang that abducted the Eaglet if he were unrestricted for two weeks. Although Lindbergh said that he never planned to ask for Capone's release, he called the IRS agent who had created the case to put Capone away, Elmer Irey, head of the IRS Law Enforcement Division. Irey assured Lindbergh that it was unlikely that any fellow of any mob could be believed. Even though Capone's request was opposed, Rosner maintained his importance in the Lindbergh home until it occurred that communication had been made with the true kidnappers.

Hoax Two

The third day after the abduction, March 4, Gaston Bullock Means, an old FBI agent, fired by J. Edgar Hoover in 1924, and a swindler who had served time, called several important people in New York and Washington, announcing that the kidnappers had invited him to take part in the crime, but that he had rejected. Thus, he had special knowledge of the kidnappers and could discover the baby and compromise for his rescue. One of the people he called was Evalyn Walsh McLean, the former Mrs. of the publisher of the Washington Post.

Mrs. McLean, actually moved by the chance of helping the Lindberghs, summoned Means. He said to her that the head of the kidnapping gang, "The Fox," wished for one hundred thousand dollars and that he needed a Catholic priest to whom he could return the child after collecting the ransom. Mrs. McLean approved to put up the money and introduced the Rev. J. Francis Hurley, who decided to help. After more than a month of diversions to a number of areas, including South Carolina and Texas, along with the investment of the one hundred thousand dollars of ransom cash and an additional $3,500 in damages, Mrs. McLean became wary, demanded the recovery of her money. According to Means, he had given the ransom to a partner of the kidnapping gang, and could not repay it.

On June 13, 1932, Means was found guilty of larceny on two charges, and two days later given a fifteen-year prison sentence. A year later, Means' accomplice, a disbarred adviser, and car thief was found and tried for fraud along with Means for the additional $35,000 they had tried to swindle out of Mrs. McLean. They were each given two years, with Means' punishment tacked on to the fifteen years he was already serving.

Hoax Three:  

Curtis was a respectable boat builder in Norfolk, Virginia. He approached the local Episcopal priest, the Reverend H. Dobson-Peacock, who had understood the Morrow family when Dwight Morrow had been ambassador to Mexico. Curtis said that he had made contact with the chief of the kidnappers, and portrayed the partners of the gang. He also could maintain communication with the gang through a woman called Hilda. From April 18 to May 12, Curtis's weird story was made valid by his support from Rev. Dobson-Peacock and Admiral Guy Hamilton Burrage, the man who had sent Lindbergh back from France in triumph in 1927. Curtis led Lindbergh on a wild-goose chase along the mid-Atlantic coast, alleging that he was in continuous contact with the kidnappers and that he had really held the child in his arms. Once the child's corpse was found, Curtis' hoax became understandable. Under stress, he admitted on May 17 that it had all been a hoax, and declared that for the past seven or eight months, due to financial tensions, he "had been insane." He asked forgiveness humbly and was finally given a fine and a one-year suspended penalty for giving false data and restricting an investigation. Because Lindbergh and Breckinridge had suppressed Schwarzkopf and the other investigative agents during the attempt to obtain the child, little had been attained in over two months. With the finding of the child's corpse on May 12, a mere four miles from the Lindbergh property, the restrictions were gone. The difficulty was that there was very little to go on.

Post Martem

The physical information available, at the time, that William Allen stumbled into the timbers to relieve himself and found the corpse, comprising of a chisel, the ladder, and a number of statements from the kidnappers. No useful evidence, no fingerprints. The postmortem of Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. was to be carried out by the county doctor, Dr. Charles H. Mitchell, but he had serious arthritis, and the actual dissections were made by the county coroner, a funeral home director, Walter Swayze. The infant's pediatrician, Dr. Philip Van Ingen, was alarmed. An old physician, Mitchell, using the hands of a non-medically experienced mortician, Swayze, was about to carry out the postmortem on the most famous homicide victim of the century. Despite his suspicions, Van Ingen waited to observe. It was not until 1977 that Swayze disclosed that he did the actual procedures. The body was in a repelling, increased state of decay. The brain did not contain a shot, although there was a small hole at the base of the skull, made after death. They supposed that it was made by Insp. Walsh at the finding site, when he poked the weak head with a stick. Dr. Mitchell, following Swazye's gingerly inspection of the skull and found four fracture lines and a decomposed blood clot. He believed that the cause of death was a hit to the head. The baby could have been killed in his room since a baby's wrecked skull does not bleed, or he might have been dropped while the kidnapper was holding him down the ladder. The fontanelle, the soft area on top of the baby's skull that stays empty until the child is about a year old, was found to be one inch in diameter. The Eaglet was twenty months old. Virtually, the postmortem gave no clues, except enough evidence in the remains of the baby's clothing, the number of teeth, and his uniquely crossed little toes. There was no question that the body had been in the forests for several months, making the time of death very possibly around the time of the kidnapping. No photographs of the head, the blood clot, or the tiny round hole were made. Other than some ratios and a one-page report, typed by Swayze, there was zero else for Schwarzkopf and his detectives to use. Difficulty over the baby's length publicized in the widely circulated posters as 29 inches but scaled by Dr.Mitchell as 33 inches was one issue that gave credence to the impression that the baby was not Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. Revisionists seize on this difference. Those that are assured that it was the Eaglet point out that "2 feet, 9 inches" a misdescription on the wanted poster is 33 inches. If it is complained that the child was younger than the Lindbergh baby because of the fontanelle difference, then justification must be given for a one-year-old child who is hardly tall 33 inches. Finally, the ladder became an important item of proof. Schwarzkopf enrolled the aid of wood professionals, the most enterprising of whom was Arthur Koehler, of the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. He had written Lindbergh and enlisted his services. From slivers sent to him, he was prepared to determine that the ladder was created from pine from North Carolina, Douglas fir from the West, birch, and Ponderosa pine. Incredibly, Koehler was capable to trace some of the ladder lumber from a mill in South Carolina to a lumber seller in the Bronx. The ladder was both crudely and professionally created. Some of the joints and contacts showed the struggle of a carpenter, while the portions of wood that made up the ladder seemed to have been collected from different sources. Inspector Walsh, on loan to the New Jersey State Police from the Jersey City Police Department, agreed with Lieutenant Keaton and clung to the idea that the abduction must have been an inner job. The unusual situation of the kidnapper realizing both that the Lindberghs, opposite to their habit, were not returning to Englewood on Monday, and that the kidnappers understood exactly which room was the nursery, worried Walsh. Walsh was doubtful of Violet Sharpe, the twenty-eight-year-old maid at the Morrow property. She learned the change in the Lindberghs' strategies. She was irresponsible in the analysis of her actions on the night of March 1, 1932, and clearly worried and protective. She was incapable to recognize the man she had gone to a roadhouse with the night of the abduction and she could not give the names of the other couple who attended them. By June, Violet Sharpe had become so mad that Walsh and Schwarzkopf were sure they were on to something. They called that they would return to the Morrow estate for further investigation of Violet. Announcing that she couldn't stand it, she went upstairs and took cyanide, included in a silver-polishing compound, and was lifeless within minutes. Finally, the man that Violet had been with, as well as the other couple, came forth to confirm her story. She had been saying the truth, but could not confess to a "loose" attitude that might cost her her role at the Morrow property. She was committed to the butler, and this agreement could have been endangered if it had been made known that she had been picked up and taken to a roadhouse for drinks. Schwarzkopf was roundly condemned for driving an innocent citizen to her death. Walsh turned to the man who he assumed to be the most suspicious: John F. Condon, "Jafsie," the do-gooder. Many days after Violet Sharpe's suicide, Condon was carried in for inquiry. Despite hours of investigation, Condon gave as good as he learned, and was released. During July and August, Schwarzkopf and his men tapped Condon's telephone, unlocked his mail, dug gaps in his yard, and scraped the wallpaper of his study walls. During the next year and a half, undaunted by the fears hovering over him, Condon, studied thousands of mug shots, looking for "Cemetery John." A year after the abduction, in order to show his assistance, Lindbergh invited Condon and his daughter to dinner at the Morrow mansion. Shortly after that, Schwarzkopf and his men agreed that Condon was unusual, but not involved. The lone dissenter was Walsh, who then returned to his legal duties with the Jersey City Police Department. The first gold notes from the ransom money surfaced quickly after the delivery of the ransom on April 2, 1932. By that fall, a quarter of a million booklets documenting the serial numbers of the ransom bills had been distributed. The effort to get the country's financial house in order, President Roosevelt, soon after determining office, requested that all gold or gold certificates valued at more than one hundred dollars had to be turned in by May 1, 1933. Lieutenant Finn, who was maintaining a large map to indicate where the bills were turning up, hoped that the presidential order would make the gold bills from the ransom cache more noticeable.

On May 1, 1933, $2,980 of the ransom gold statements was turned in to the Federal Reserve Bank in New York City. The deposit slip for the swap of the cash was signed by J.J. Faulkner. No explanation of J.J. Faulkner or his location could be found by Finn and his friends. With the exception of one author's claim to have identified J.J. Faulkner, he remains an unsettling element of the case. From time to time, ransom bills turned up on a slow but regular purpose. Finally, on September 15, 1934, a gas station manager, Walter Lyle, had composed the license plate number on a ten-dollar gold coupon used to buy 98 cents worth of gas. He recalled the purchase and the driver of the car. When he was handed the gold certificate, he stared at it. "What's wrong?" asked the driver.

 "That's good money." He talked with a German accent. Lyle said that he hadn't seen a gold certificate in quite some period. The driver said, "No. I have just about one hundred left." As the car drove out, Lyle, believing that the bill might be counterfeit, composed the license plate number. The license plate was for a blue, 1930, four-door Dodge whose holder lived at 1279 East 222nd Street, the Bronx. The registration also suggested that the owner was German-born, thirty-five, and a carpenter. His name was Richard Hauptmann. Hauptmann had arrived in the United States illegally in 1923, then he was twenty-three years old. In Germany, he had performed in World War I at the age of seventeen, and quickly after the war, he was arrested for robbery, served part of his sentence, and fled. In one of his stealings, he had used a ladder. All evidence was that he was skilled at his duty. After coming to the United States, he wedded a German waitress, Anna Schoeffler, in 1925. They had a son in 1933, called Manfredi, after the famous German aviator, the "Red Baron." He played the mandolin, toured, and was well-liked by members of the German-American population in the Bronx. In late spring, 1932, Hauptmann discontinued being a carpenter and became an investor in stocks. The police staked out his flat and Hauptmann was arrested as he drove out. Lieutenant Keaton investigated Hauptmann's billfold and discovered a neatly folded twenty-dollar gold note. It was a Lindbergh bill. Returning to the Hauptmann apartment, the police noticed that he stared again and again towards the garage that his owner had enabled him to build. He was inquired if that was where he had hidden the ransom money. He told, "I have no money." Later, the garage was dismantled, board by board, and over $14,000 of the ransom money was found hidden between the wall joists. Hauptmann was investigated, probably beaten, and maintained that the money had been given to him by Isador Fisch, a business friend, before Fisch had emigrated for Germany in December 1933. Later, Insp. Lewis J. Bornmann of the New Jersey State Police found a lost rafter in Hauptmann's attic that conformed to one of the uprights of the kidnap ladder. Koehler confirmed that the missing length of lumber matched, even to nail gaps, the bottom area. Hauptmann was asked to provide copies of his writing. During this time, Lindbergh, in disguise, heard as Hauptmann recited the words of "Cemetery John." Over two years after he had first heard the voice in the graveyard say, "Hey, Doctor," Lindbergh observed Hauptmann's voice as the one he had heard.

 

At last

After being accused of extortion in New York a tool to hold Hauptmann in custody Hauptmann went before the big jury in New Jersey so that he could be indicted and then extradited. At the grand jury proceedings, Lindbergh confirmed to the voice. Attorney General David Wilentz, representing New Jersey, brought a number of police observers, as well as Osborn, the writing expert. An extradition hearing was then held in New York. Wilentz called many of the same observers, including a neighbor of Lindbergh, Millard Whited, who confirmed that he had seen Hauptmann near the Lindbergh property a few days before the abduction. Judge Hammer, presiding in the extradition hearing, ordered that Hauptmann would be extradited to New Jersey, specifically to the Hunterdon County seat, Flemington, New Jersey, where he would be tried for the abduction and homicide of Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. In a seven-car, two-motorcycle caravan, Hauptmann was taken from his New York jail cell to the Flemington prison, which was at the back of the courthouse. It was ten o'clock at night. The streets around the courthouse were teeming with people, and the region was lighted with flares. The trial, which the renowned acerbic reporter and critic H.L. Mencken called "the greatest story since the Resurrection," took place in the county seat, Flemington, New Jersey. It was clearly a circus, with hundreds of reporters and viewers swelling the small town to several times its community. The trial was led by the Attorney General of the State of New Jersey, David T. Wilentz, thirty-eight years old. Wilentz and his trial team completely outmatched Hauptmann's lawyers. Wilentz, who was trying his first criminal case as attorney general, was a dapper, cigar-smoking, hopeful little man who built a convincing circumstantial trial. He is nearly always snapped with a broad grin, a cigar, sometimes with a white fedora with a brim turned down in the manner of a New York dandy or the criminal Al Capone. Despite his smiling charm, his eleven hours of cross-examination of Hauptmann were quite savage, and his summation emotional, stunning, and remarkable. The New York Journal offered to provide Hauptmann with a well-known Brooklyn defense attorney, Edward J. Reilly. He was helped by a local Flemington attorney, well respectable but young in criminal defense, C. Lloyd Fisher. Attorney General of New Jersey, David T. WilentzIt is tempting to apply much of the responsibility for Hauptmann's conviction to Reilly. 

After twenty-nine court trials, 162 witnesses, and 381 displays, the case was provided to the jury at 11:21 a.m., Wednesday, February 13, 1935. Eleven and a half hours later the jurors returned, reportedly after five polls that began seven for guilty, five for acquittal, finally ending with a unanimous vote of guilty. Judge Trenchard declared the sentence of death, to be carried out the week of March 18, 1935. Because of the unavoidable appeal, he postponed the execution of the penalty to June. In his diary entry for February 14, 1935, Harold Nicolson illustrated the Lindberghs' response to the verdict and sentence.

"Suddenly Betty [Mrs. Morrow] ... looked very white. 'Hauptmann,' she told, 'has been condemned to death without mercy.' We went into the drawing-room. The wireless had been activated to the scene outside the courthouse. One could hear the nearly diabolic yelling of the crowd. 'You have now heard,' broke in the voice of the announcer, 'the verdict in the most famous trial in all history. Bruno Hauptmann now stands guilty of the foulest ...' Then we all went into the pantry. Charles stood there on the kitchen dresser. 'I don't know,' he said to me, ' whether you have followed this case very carefully. There is no suspicion at all that Hauptmann did the thing. I am sure about this very sure.' And then quite quietly, while we all sat round in the pantry, he went through the case point by point. It seemed to relieve all of them. He did it very quietly, very simply." Partly at the urging of Ellis Parker, a detective with the Burlington County, NJ police, and partly from his own sense of political opportunism Governor Harold G. Hoffman took up the cause of Hauptmann. Attorney General Wilentz was widely believed to be his principal opponent in the 1936 election. Hoffman met with Hauptmann, privately, in his jail cell. Within the limits of his permission which did not include forgiveness, he gave Hauptmann a stay of execution. There were calls for his impeachment, but Hoffman persisted in his lawsuit that he only wanted to see justice done. Finally, since the Board of Appeals, of which Hoffman was a member, opposed Hauptmann's appeal, the execution date was set for April 3, 1936. It was finished by Robert G. Elliott, the same executioner who had managed the electric chair in the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, nine years before. On December 22, 1935, during the appeal process, Lindbergh and his wife and young son sailed for England, where Harold Nicolson had given them a house in Kent. After the verdict, the Lindberghs were inundated with hate mail, including death threats against their second son, with frightening attempts by 1930's paparazzi to photograph young Jon Lindbergh. The "exile" collected mixed reviews in the press, some editorials sympathizing with their plight, others excoriating the Lindberghs for leaving their homeland.

Just before the execution, Ellis Parker, along with his son and many accomplices, abducted a famous lawyer, Paul Wendel, forced him to admit that he had abducted and killed the Lindbergh baby. Wilentz interviewed Wendel, found that he had been threatened by Parker and his partners, and ignored the entire "confession" as a hoax. Parker and his assistants were sentenced to prison for abduction.