Monday, Feb. 04, 1935

New Jersey v. Hauptmann (Cont'd)

With painful concentration, two uneducated carpenters in the little courthouse at Flemington, N. J. last week watched and listened to a brawny scientist from the Wisconsin woods. From the witness stand Arthur Koehler, head of the Federal Forest Products Laboratory at Madison, was delivering a three-hour illustrated lecture on wood. Carpenter Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the German stowaway accused of kidnapping and killing Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., paid close attention because his life was at stake. Carpenter Liscom Case, Juror No.11, listened and looked carefully because he knew that the other jurors would respect his judgment on a vital aspect of the case when the time came to weigh Hauptmann's fate.

It took 15 days for the State of New Jersey to get the ladder found not far from the Lindbergh home on the windy night of March 1, 1932 admitted as evidence. Defense fought tooth-&-nail for its exclusion on the grounds that it had been tampered with, that it had never been connected with the defendant. Once the ladder was admitted, the prosecution's most impressive expert to date resoundingly attributed its manufacture to Defendant Hauptmann in no less than five different ways:

1) Witness Koehler fastened a vise to one end of Justice Trenchard's bench, clamped a piece of wood in it and skimmed off a shaving with the plane found in Hauptmann's garage. With a piece of paper and a pencil he made a rubbing of the planed surface as a child reproduces the design of a coin. He then made a similar rubbing of a planed surface on the ladder, showed the jury that the striations on both rubbings were identical.

2) A saw like Hauptmann's, declared the Government wood expert, had "signed" its teeth marks into the lumber in the ladder.

3) Another "signature" had been made, said he, by a chisel similar to the one which was found with the ladder. A chisel of the same size was used to mortise the rungs into the uprights. Furthermore, the chisel was of the same make as another of Hauptmann's chisels, and filled the one vacancy in his tool chest.

4) Xylotomist Koehler said that he had searched for a year and a half for the mill and lumber yard which had supplied the pine for most of the rungs in the ladder. The mill was finally located in South Carolina. The lumber yard was found in The Bronx, the very lumber yard where Hauptmann had bought wood.

5) One upright was made, Mr. Koehler was positive, from a missing plank in Hauptmann's attic floor. Old nail holes in the upright fitted perfectly into place over the attic floor joists. Its growth rings matched an adjoining floor plank.

Defense Counsel Edward J. Reilly's nimblest cross-examination failed to shake this implacably precise witness.

Three Dates. The State detonated its last great testimonial charge with Witness Koehler. But in the week preceding his appearance it had arduously laid another mine under the defense with a string of witnesses which tied Hauptmann to the crime on three crucial dates.

March 1, 1932 was the date of the abduction. A farmer-neighbor of the Lindberghs', who said he knew everyone in the Sourland district by name or sight, swore that he had seen Hauptmann twice near the Lindbergh house in February 1932. An earnest young salesman indicated, Hauptmann as the man he had seen loitering beside a dark sedan outside Hopewell three nights before the kidnapping.

April 2, 1932 was the date of the ransom payment. The construction timekeeper at a West Side Manhattan apartment house testified from employment records that Hauptmann had worked for him a fortnight before April 2, but not on April 2, that he gave up his job two days later. Nov. 26, 1933 was the date on which a $5 ransom note was received by the cashier of a Greenwich Village cinema theatre. She was sure that the man who passed it was Hauptmann. If the jurors believed her, they had to dismiss Hauptmann's story that he had not "dipped into" the ransom money left by Isidor Fisch until after Fisch left for Germany in December 1933.

With the evidence of an accountant that Hauptmann had received $44,486 of "fresh money" after. April 1932, the State closed its case.

Defense Opens. Witness No. 1 for the defense was Defendant Hauptmann. Twiddling his thick fingers, he answered in a deep guttural voice the questions put him by his lawyer.

Hauptmann was shown the ladder. Had he built it? "Certainly not!" said the accused man. "I am a carpenter!" The-ladder, he scoffed, looked like a "moosic" instrument.

Christian Fredericksen, proprietor of a Bronx bakery-restaurant where Mrs. Hauptmann worked as waitress, said that Hauptmann called regularly for his wife on the two nights a week she worked late. March 1, 1932 was one of the nights Mrs. Hauptmann worked late, said Fredericksen, so her husband "must have been there." But he "couldn't swear to it."

Gambler's luck played right into the hands of Counsel Reilly on the Nov. 26, 1933 date, on which Hauptmann was supposed to have gone by himself to a cinema in Greenwich Village, 12 miles from his home in The Bronx. Winning with the short side of a 365-to-1 chance, defense counsel jovially revealed that Nov. 26 was Bruno Richard Hauptmann's birthday. He said he would have no trouble bringing the guests of the 1933 party to the stand. "

Tell the Truth!" "A good witness," beamed Defense Counsel Reilly after he had put the stolid German through nearly six hours of direct examination. Next day Attorney General David T. Wilentz had his first chance to display his wit and aggressiveness as a cross-examiner. He put on such a good show that over the week-end newspaper headlines were predicting nothing less than a complete breakdown and confession by the defendant. That did not occur, but the inquisitorial ferocity of Prosecutor Wilentz made Hauptmann squirm in his chair, hang his head, blush, stammer, contradict himself. Observers thought he either looked like a very embarrassed man or a very guilty one when the State prosecutor at one point roared: "Tell the Truth!"

Net result to the State of Hauptmann's cross-examination was that the defendant admitted writing "boad" in a notebook for boat, a misspelling which occurs in one of the ransom notes, and confessed to two German crimes: Holding up two women and breaking & entering the home of the Mayor of Rackwitz in 1919.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.