GRIME: Evidence

CRIME

In 1911, Charles Augustus Lindbergh of Little Falls, Minn, was in Congress. Like many of his colleagues, he sometimes took his 9-year-old son and namesake on the floor of the House. There he usually entrusted the yellow-haired youngster to his favorite doorkeeper, Sam Foley. The War came and Pacifist Representative Lindbergh was retired to private life and Sam Foley returned to his home in New York’s Bronx to study law.

Last week Son Lindbergh and Doorkeeper Foley met again under very different circumstances. Col. Lindbergh arrived at a side entrance to the new Bronx County Court House, was whisked upstairs by private elevator to the large office of District Attorney Samuel John Foley. Disguised in a brown cap and smoked glasses, the nation’s No. 1 hero sat among a half-dozen detectives while another young man was brought in. He was unshaven, collarless, haggard Bruno Richard Hauptmann, indicted for extortion, suspected of kidnapping and murder. He was posed this way and that, made to walk, talk, sit, stand. Occasionally the man with dark glasses shifted his position for a better view, but Prisoner Hauptmann took no notice of his presence, had not given him more than a glance when led out of the room ten minutes later.

Thus did Charles Augustus Lindbergh come face to face with the man who, according to police of two states and the Federal Government, abducted and probably murdered his first-born son on the windy night of March 1, 1932. Had he identified Hauptmann, asked excited newshawks, as the lookout in the Bronx cemetery the night the ransom money was passed? “I would be a fool to tell you,” snapped District Attorney Foley.

Fifteen minutes later, in a court room in the same building, Prisoner Hauptmann was arraigned on the extortion charge. His lawyer vainly protested when bail was set at $100,000.

District Attorney Foley believed that he had ample evidence to convict Bruno Hauptmann on the New York indictment of extortion. Handwriting experts positively identified the ransom notes to “Jafsie” Condon as Hauptmann’s work. In Hauptmann’s garage $13,750 of the ransom money had been found. In Hauptmann’s home was discovered notepaper identical with that used in the ransom notes. A loose board taken from a closet in Hauptmann’s apartment was found to have “Jafsie” Condon’s street address and telephone number scribbled on it. And burrowing into the garage walls, detectives uncovered another $840 of the Lindbergh money. District Attorney Foley was now able to account for all except $329 of the $50,000 Col. Lindbergh had spent in a vain effort to get his baby back:

Hauptmann’s brokerage balance…………….. $ 886

Mrs. Hauptmann’s brokerage balance……….. 5,017

Joint savings bank balance………………………… 2,578

Two mortgages ……………………………………………7,000

Ransom banknotes found ……………………………..14,590

Alleged loans to Isidor Fisch………………………….. 7,500

Ransom money circulated……………………………..5,100

Stockmarket loss…………………………………………… 7,000

$49,671

Murder— It would be a strange jury, thought Prosecutor Foley, which would not convict on these facts. But an extortion verdict with a possible sentence of 20 years in Sing Sing was only the secondary motive behind the District Attorney’s elaborately constructed case. His main idea war to keep Bruno Richard Hauptmann in penal storage until New Jersey could gather evidence, extradite and indict for murder.

The campaign to electrocute Bruno Hauptmann at the State Prison in Trenton by the spring of 1935 went relentlessly on. In the earth below the Hauptmann garage New York police found a barrel of nails such as those used in the kidnap ladder. In Washington the Department of Justice thought it was on the trail of a prime clue when it found that Hauptmann’s footprints corresponded with footprints left in the mud beside the Lindbergh home the night of the abduction. John Edgar Hoover, chief of the Division of Investigation, continued to steal thunder from his brother. Steamboat Inspector Dickerson Naylor Hoover, whose Mono Castle investigation was shoved off front pages by the Lindbergh case. Investigator Hoover declared he was looking for a woman and a “stoop-shouldered man” who might have been accomplices.

While all this was going on, Prisoner Hauptmann managed to steal a pewter spoon from his food tray, flatten its bowl, grind it razor-sharp, make a hooked scalpel of its handle. His jailers thought the taciturn German had planned to cut his throat or wrists one night, bleed to death, close the case in his own fashion.