Hauptmann to Chair

Bruno Richard Hauptmann, manacled between two guards, managed to walk from the Flemington courtroom after the death sentence had been passed on him last week. But as he was being led into his cell his knees gave way. The steelyeyed, German ex-convict crumpled, fell on his face. The guards dragged him to his cot. As he lay there, he broke down for the first time since his indictment last October for willfully killing the Lindbergh baby. "Oh, my God," he sobbed, "I feel awful!"

The crowd outside the jail felt fine. Several thousand folk, hysterical as lynchers, held carnival. The bars of the Union Hotel were running full blast. A butcher boy had his pocket picked. From time to time a tipsy woman would yell: "Kill Hauptmann! Electrocute him!"

At 10:30 p.m. the false verdict (see p. 48) caused little surprise. Fifteen minutes later when the actual death sentence was announced the crowd seemed to be of two minds: some screamed joyfully for blood while others hissed and stoned out several courthouse windows. But the world at large, as heard through its Press and Personages, was satisfied that justice had been done.

Reflecting the popularity of the penalty, the plebeian New York Daily News observed: "Here's a shift in public opinion that interests us. Before the verdict and while the lawyers and judge were summing up, most people felt that life imprisonment for Hauptmann would be sufficient, because of the circumstantial nature of the evidence. Now . . . most people seem satisfied. The feeling apparently is that Hauptmann was a thoroughly bad egg from the beginning and had better be put out of the way."

"One accepts the jury's opinion," agreed the Buffalo Courier & Express. "The nail holes were not mistaken!" exulted the Pittsburgh Press. The Philadelphia Inquirer boomed: "Justice well deserved has come to the man Hauptmann!" To various journals the verdict was: "logical" (Boston Transcript), "healthy" (Knoxville Journal), "salutary" (Albany News), "memorable" (Minneapolis Daily Sun), "in accord with law and fact'' (Detroit Free Press).

Missing Key. In the general scramble to second the jury's findings, few heads remained cool enough to reflect that this great murder mystery still remained pretty much of a mystery. "Unless future events supply the gaps in the tragic story," pointed out the Baltimore Sun, "there will remain a feeling that the real key to the mystery is missing. In other words, what preceded the entrance of Hauptmann into the Lindbergh house? By what conspiracy of chance or confederacy was he able to accomplish his purpose so easily? When Hauptmann has paid the extreme penalty for this crime, the final possibility for new light on the mystery will probably have ended."

That thought had also occurred to Senator William Edgar Borah whose first Government job was as a criminal prosecutor. Convinced that the crime was "only partly cleared up," he told Washington newshawks: "I have always believed that this crime was consummated through someone in the house cooperating with someone outside the house. ... I have strong convictions about the matter."

Crowds might scream with excitement and bitter old ladies might clap vengefully when they heard the verdict but there were still plenty of people left who shared Senator Borah's doubts. Night before the decision, such a good guesser as Walter Winchell had predicted acquittal in his broadcast. Newspaper interviews of men-in-the-street by no means resulted in unanimous opinions as to Hauptmann's full guilt. For plain people, for taxi-drivers, truckmen, "no-collar" workers the case still had its "ifs" and "buts," regardless of the verdict and the Press's self-righteous applause.

Defense Plans. "If I had anything to confess," stolidly maintained Hauptmann, "I would have confessed it long ago and saved my family worry." That neither Hauptmann nor anybody else had cleared away the many remaining blind spots of the case now became his lawyers' soundest talking point.

With more hope than accuracy, Anna Hauptmann cabled her husband's 66-year-old mother in Germany: "Don't worry. Decision only temporary. Annie."

Mother Hauptmann, who heard the verdict while buying the day's vegetables in the Kamenz market, tottered home where she was met by reporters. "Ach!" she groaned, "we are only poor louts. They can do what they want with us. Lindbergh is rich. It is true that Richard gave me a lot of trouble. But I will never believe he is a murderer. President Roosevelt--he will help an old mother. I shall write him immediately and beg him to pardon my son."

But even if Franklin Roosevelt wanted to save Hauptmann's life, he could legally do nothing to overrule a State conviction. Hauptmann's fate now lay with the New Jersey Court of Errors & Appeals.

During the 32-day trial, Lawyer Edward J. Reilly had taken innumerable exceptions to testimony allowed in the record over his protest. On any or all of these he might base an appeal. But it was far more likely that the means he would employ to try to rescue his hapless client from the electric chair would be the 14 exceptions he took to Justice Thomas W. Trenchard's charge to the jury. "In all my experience," blustered Lawyer Reilly, "I never heard a charge that demanded conviction as much as did this charge." Lawyer Reilly also publicly besought a $25,000 defense fund. But with the courtroom fireworks over, he listlessly talked of delaying action for an appeal until Attorney General Wilentz returned from Florida. This so shocked Associate Defense Counsel C. Lloyd Fisher that he persuaded Hauptmann to sign an order designating him to handle the appeal.

Death House. Since the Court of Errors & Appeals does not sit until May 21, there was little chance of Hauptmann's electrocution during the week of March 18, as ordered by Justice Trenchard. But to the State Penitentiary at Trenton late last week went Bruno Richard Hauptmann. He was given death house cell No. 9. There he will probably remain for months to come.

If all appeals fail the last official with whom Hauptmann will come in contact is wiry old Robert Elliott, executioner for New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Executioner Elliott draws no distinction between those whom he is called upon to electrocute. In 1926 he branched out of his electrical business officially to rid society of its worst enemies, after John Hilbert, his predecessor, committed suicide. He will not tell how many people he has sent to death at $150-and-traveling-expenses per job. He does not close a switch, but spins a wheel which sends 2,000 volts sizzling through the electrodes. Not long ago in Pennsylvania, Executioner Elliott dispatched four men in 28 min., his record.

"It doesn't make any difference to me who's sitting in the chair," said Robert Elliott last week when reporters found him reading about the Dionne quintuplets in his Long Island suburban home. "I pay no attention to 'em. Half the time I don't know who they are. ... I never see 'em--I'm careful not to--until they step up to the chair, and as soon as the job is finished I beat it.

"I'm sorry, very sorry for Hauptmann's mother. Wives--well, I know one who got married again two days after her husband's electrocution. Children--they'll forget it. Friends and relatives--they'll have nothing to do with it. The person himself is guilty of murder. But the mother--well, darn it she can't see he's anything but the kid she raised."

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