Questions Linger 50 Years After the Lindbergh Verdict

Fifty years ago, on the night of Feb. 13, 1935, the 125-year-old bell in the Hunterdon County Courthouse tolled at 10:28--the signal, then as now, to the townsfolk of rural Flemington, N.J., that a jury had reached a verdict.

When the jurors, eight men and four women, filed into the courtroom a few minutes later, Supreme Court Justice Thomas W. Trenchard motioned to them and to the defendant, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, to stand. For the first time in the 32-day trial, Hauptmann, his face ashen, was manacled to two guards.

“Mr. foreman, what say you?” the clerk asked. “Do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty?”

“Guilty. We find the defendant, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, guilty of murder in the first degree,” the foreman, Charles Walton, replied.

The time was 10:45

Then the court clerk asked:

“Members of the jury. You have heard the verdict that you find the defendant, Bruno Hauptmann, guilty of murder in the first degree, and so say you all?”

“We do,” they replied in chorus and then were polled individually at the defense’s request.

The jury made no recommendation for mercy, and Trenchard, under New Jersey law, had no alternative to imposing the death sentence for the murder of 19-month-old Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., who had been kidnaped on March 1, 1932, from his nursery in Hopewell, N.J. Trenchard did so immediately, and Hauptmann died 14 months later, on April 3, 1936, in the electric chair.

Hauptmann’s wife, Anna, showing no emotion, was there as the verdict was announced. After Hauptmann had been escorted back to his cell, Mrs. Hauptmann, who had been staring at the floor, sobbed. The Flemington chief of police escorted her from the room.

Hauptmann Reportedly Cried

Hauptmann was reported to have cried uncontrollably on his cot.

Col. Charles A. Lindbergh, who had attended the trial each day and who had heard Trenchard’s charge to the jury that morning, was not present. He had gone to the Englewood home of his wife’s parents.

It had been a long and unusual day.

The jury had deliberated for 11 hours and 24 minutes after receiving Trenchard’s charge, which took more than an hour. During the deliberations, the courtroom was cleared of spectators. Newsmen wandered around the room all afternoon and evening, chatting with lawyers and court attendants, playing cards, checkers and other games. Messengers brought in food.

The case against Hauptmann was largely circumstantial--some of the $50,000 in ransom money had been found in his possession, seven handwriting experts had testified that the writing on 14 ransom notes was his and the state said that he had made the ladder used in the kidnaping at the home that the Lindberghs, seeking privacy, had built recently in the Sourland Mountains.

Case Shocked Nation

The ladder broke, the state said, under the combined weight of the kidnaper and the baby, the child fell to the ground and died of a fractured skull.

The kidnaping of the Lindbergh baby, first son of the national hero who in 1927 made a solo flight across the Atlantic, shocked the nation and the world. It was long called “the crime of the century.”

Controversy haunted the case from the beginning, fueled in part by a statement by then-Gov. Harold G. Hoffman that “I share with hundreds of thousands of our people the doubt as to the value of the evidence that placed Hauptmann in the Lindbergh nursery . . . . I do doubt that this crime could have been committed by one man.”

The controversy got new life a few years ago with the publication of a book, “Scapegoat,” which questioned whether Hauptmann was the killer and whether the body found in a shallow grave two months after the kidnaping was really that of the Lindbergh child.

Arrested in Bronx

Two men who claimed to be the grown Lindbergh child and Hauptmann’s 85-year-old widow have sued the state of New Jersey. She alleged that evidence was supressed and asked $100 million in damages and an order declaring her husband innocent.

U.S. District Judge Frederick B. Lacey dismissed final issues in the case last April, saying that there was little evidence to support her charge.

Hauptmann, a 35-year-old carpenter living in the Bronx, in New York City, was arrested there on Sept. 15, 1934, after an intensive search by federal and state law enforcement agencies that had been directed by President Herbert Hoover “to make the kidnaping and murder a live and never-to-be-forgotten case, never to be relaxed until the criminals are implacably brought to justice.”

Hauptmann had bought five gallons of gasoline and handed the station attendant a $10 gold certificate that turned out to be one of the ransom bills. The kidnaper had been paid $50,000 in ransom, $35,000 of it in gold certificates, after leaving this note--scrawled in pencil and full of misspellings--on the windowsill of the nursery:

“Dear Sir

“Have 50000$ redy 25000$ in 20$ bills 15000$ in 10$ bills and 10000$ in 5$ bills After 2-4 days we will inform you where to deliver the mony. We warn you for making anyding public or for notify the police The child is in gut care.”

Lindbergh sat in a car nearby when the money was handed over on the night of April 2, 1932, to a man behind a hedge in a Bronx cemetery by Dr. John F. Condon, a 72-year-old educator, who had established contact with the kidnaper through a series of advertisements in the Bronx Home News and the New York American. He had received in the mail the baby’s sleeping suit, sent as proof that he was dealing with the kidnaper. He was then designated by Lindbergh as intermediary, and he became famous as “Jafsie,” from his initials J.F.C.

The kidnaper gave Condon a note that said:

“The boy is on the Boad Nelly--you will find the Boad between Horseneck Beach and Gay Head near Elizabeth Island.”

Presumably, this was in the vicinity of Martha’s Vineyard. Lindbergh searched there and in waters off South Jersey and the Virginia Capes. On May 12, when he returned from another futile search off Norfolk, Va., he was told that his child’s body had been found that day in a shallow grave a few miles from the Lindbergh home.

The gold certificates were important in solving the case. The federal government distributed throughout the country 250,000 circulars bearing the serial numbers of the money. Then, on April 5, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt set a May 1 deadline for conversion of all gold certificates. The gold notes were now “hot.” Whenever a bank received a gold note with a serial number of the ransom money, authorities were notified. Pins placed on a locator map in the New Jersey State Police headquarters bunched in the Bronx.

The attendant at the service station at which Hauptmann bought the gasoline had written the car’s license number on the bill. Hauptmann was arrested and, in his garage, police officers found $14,000 of the ransom money.

Reilly said that “circumstantial evidence is no evidence” and that Hauptmann could not be convicted in New Jersey because he was in possession of Lindbergh money in New York, but “that’s what they have tried to build here--a perfect case of attempted extortion.”

Of Koehler’s testimony, Reilly said:

“I don’t know who cooked up this idea of trying to make this ladder and this board agree, but I don’t think this jury is going to stand for that kind of evidence. This case is too perfect from the prosecution’s viewpoint . . . . There isn’t a man in the world with brains enough to plan this kidnaping alone and not with a gang. That mastermind wouldn’t be a carpenter--and then sit down and make the foolish mistake of ripping a board out of the attic, and leaving the other half of it there, to make the side of a ladder.”

Crime Called Inside Job

Those remarks by Reilly were incidental to his main point--that the kidnaping was an inside job in which servants of the Lindberghs and of Mrs. Lindbergh’s family in Englewood were involved.

“Col. Lindbergh was stabbed in the back by the disloyalty of those who worked for him,” Reilly said.

He mentioned, among others, Violet Sharp, a housemaid in the Morrow home, who committed suicide during the investigation; Betty Gow, the baby’s nurse, who discovered the baby missing, and Oliver Whateley, the Lindberghs’ butler, who had since died. Reilly said that the Lindberghs’ dog never barked and “who controlled that dog’s movements that night? The butler.”

Charge to the Jury

The next day it was the turn of the 39-year-old Wilentz. (Now 89, he is one of the few principals in the case still living.) Wilentz asked that “no mercy” be shown Hauptmann, whom he called “Public Enemy No. 1 of the world,” “a cold-blooded child murderer” and “a man with ice water in his veins.”

Hauptmann’s face reddened when Wilentz shouted: “He’s cold, yes, but he’ll be thawed out when he hears the switch!”

Trenchard waited until the next morning, the final day of the trial, to deliver his charge to the jury. He noted that the case was based on circumstantial evidence and said that “the crime of murder is not one which is always committed in the presence of witnesses and, if not so committed, it must be established by circumstantial evidence or not at all.”

He told the jurors that, if they were not satisfied by the evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt,” Hauptmann should be acquitted.

The Lindbergh case will interest researchers for years to come. The state police files on the case were opened to the public in 1981 by order of then-Gov. Brendan T. Byrne, who said nevertheless that “the jury decision was a sound one and justice was done.” Available for inspection are 90,000 documents and nine crates of evidence.

Case ‘Open Forever’

Col. Clinton L. Pagano, state police superintendent, said that the case will remain “open forever” despite the recent court decisions. There were about 2,000 visitors to the research room at state police headquarters in the first two years that the files were open, and Pagano wants to set up a museum for permanent use.

A guard, who with Pagano controls access to the files, said that in his opinion most of the visitors “seem to feel when they arrive at the doorway that Hauptmann was innocent” but, by the time they depart, “their feelings tend to turn around.”

Money in Broom Closet

Pagano said that the art of investigation is “now light years ahead of what it was in the ‘30s,” but the evidence “still stands up with what the first people found.”

Hauptmann testified that the money had been given to him by Isidor Fisch, a friend and fur dealer, the night before Fisch departed for Germany, where he had since died. Hauptmann said that he had put the money in a box in the broom closet in his home.

“Months later, I damaged the box when I was taking a broom out of the closet,” he said. “I saw money . . . gold certificates. I brought it down to the garage and hid it.”

The state’s handwriting experts noted that many words on the ransom notes were misspelled the same way: for example, “singature,” which was on the original note and on subsequent ones.

The chief testimony concerning the ladder was given by Arthur Koehler, a wood technologist at the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory at Madison, Wis.

In looking for certain marks made by planing knives, similar to those on a rail of the ladder, Koehler canvassed 1,598 planing mills from New York to Alabama, starting in May, 1932. He found only one, in McCormick, S.C., with markings spaced like those on the ladder rail. He traced 45 carloads of lumber from the mill to 25 firms and found in the Bronx in November, 1933--10 months before Hauptmann’s arrest--lumber with matching marks.

Board Linked to Attic

Hauptmann, it was disclosed later, had bought $10 worth of lumber there in 1931. Koehler testified that this ladder rail had come from a floorboard in Hauptmann’s attic. He had laid the board on a joist in the attic, he said, and four nail holes in the attic matched those in the joist.

These points were argued on both sides in two days of summations before the case went to the jury--first by County Prosecutor Anthony M. Hauck, then by chief defense counsel Edward J. Reilly and, finally, by Atty. Gen. David T. Wilentz.

Hauck reviewed Koehler’s testimony and said:

“We showed you by photographs that these holes were in the ladder when the ladder was found. The photographs were taken March 8, 1932, long before the time Bruno Richard Hauptmann was arrested, long before anyone knew about his attic.”

More Money Found

He cited the similarity in wording and the misspellings in the ransom notes and said, “We have shown you that the paper on Note No. 1 left on the window sill was the identical sheet of paper that had been torn apart and one piece used to write the original note, and the second piece used to write the second note.”

As for the ransom money, Hauck said that police kept finding more after Hauptmann repeatedly denied that there was any more.

“We brought a witness into this courtroom who proved to you that Bruno Richard Hauptmann passed one of these bills at a theater long before Fisch ever left this country,” Hauck said.

Hauck spoke for 45 minutes, and Reilly took the rest of the day. Reilly, who usually wore a white carnation in his lapel, appeared this day in formal court attire, a black morning coat and striped trousers. He spoke without notes, sometimes in a booming voice, sometimes with reverence, especially when referring to Lindbergh, of whom he said in closing:

Lindbergh’s Testimony

“May I say to him, in passing, that he has my profound respect and I feel sorry for him in his deep grief and, I am quite sure that all of you agree with me, his lovely son is now within the gates of heaven.”

Of Lindbergh’s testimony that he recognized Hauptmann’s voice as that of the man who said, “Hey, Doctor,” and again “Hey, Doctor, over here,” the night that Condon paid the ransom in the cemetery, Reilly said:

“I don’t challenge the colonel’s veracity or his truthfulness . . . . I can understand any father, torn by grief, a terrific grief, a silent grief . . . (who) sees before him a man charged with the crime can unconsciously and subconsciously make a mistake of judgment. And that, Col. Lindbergh, I think you have done in this case.”