New Jersey v. Hauptmann (Cont'd)

The Hearst Press was reported still holding open its offer of $75,000 for a confession. Attorney General David T. Wilentz announced a party for newspapermen "win, lose or draw." And 20,000 citizens of towns in the neighborhood of Flemington were preparing a carnival invasion of Flemington as the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for murdering Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. approached its final phase last week.

Following Hauptmann's 172 hours on the stand, Defense Counsel Edward J. Reilly began to set up the string of witnesses which, he had brashly promised, would clear his client. But as fast as he set them up, the State bowled them down. When Counsel Reilly's "50" witnesses turned out to be a bare dozen, he loudly cried "intimidation!" Prosecution officials replied that when they put their investigators on the trail of some characters scheduled to appear for Counsel Reilly, the would-be witnesses discreetly chose to "walk out" on the defense.

No. 1 "expert witness" for Hauptmann was John M. Trendley, 67, of East St. Louis, Ill. Expert Trendley said that his opinion as a handwriting expert had been used in 400 cases. Stressing the dissimilarities between Hauptmann's handwriting and the 14 ransom notes, rather than the similarities which had been pointed out by the State's eight experts, Mr. Trendley declared positively that Hauptmann did not write the notes. On crossexamination, Expert Trendley admitted that his "400 cases" included a number of "curbstone opinions" which he had later reversed. It was revealed later that his vocation between trials was icing banana cars in East St. Louis railroad yards.

Elvert Carlstrom. a young Swede, appeared with a Hauptmann alibi for the fatal night of March 11, 1932. He said he had gone from Dunellen, N. J., where he was employed as a caretaker, to The Bronx to see a girl named "Esther." He went to Christian Fredericksen's bakery-restaurant, which he used to patronize when he lived nearby, with a man named "Larsen." In the restaurant, he distinctly remembered seeing Hauptmann sitting at a table. When the State began questioning him, Carlstrom could not recall "Esther's" last name or "Larsen's" first.

Louis Kiss, a Hungarian silk painter by trade, but a bootlegger on the side, recalled getting lost in The Bronx on March 1, 1932, wandering into the Fredericksen restaurant, seeing Hauptmann with a dog. A big, ragged man named Luther Harding swore he saw two men in a car with a ladder near the Lindbergh home on the afternoon of March 1, that neither was Hauptmann. He had turned his information over to the police next day, he said. When asked to pick out the officer he had talked to, Harding picked the wrong one. It was then revealed that he was a thrice-convicted felon.

Tallest tale of all came from a ferret-faced New York City employe named Peter H. Sommer. Under direct examination, he glibly recalled seeing Isidor Fisch, Hauptmann's dead partner, on a New Jersey-Manhattan ferry boat late on the night of the crime. When the ferry docked, he saw Fisch help a woman strongly resembling Violet Sharpe, the Morrow maid who later committed suicide, with a baby in a sleeping suit onto a trolley car. Protesting that Attorney General Wilentz was "trying to puzzle me up," Sommer completely botched his original tale when cross-examined. His yarn sagged still further when, disclosing that he had also appeared in the Hall-Mills case, the State branded him a "professional witness."

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