CRIME: New Jersey v. Hauptmann

Last week in the little old court house at Flemington, N. J., Col. Charles Augustus Lindbergh sat in the same row, four places away from Bruno Richard Hauptmann when that stolid German ex-convict went on trial for killing the flyer’s first-born son and namesake. At the conclusion of the first week of a life & death contest it could not be said that honors between prosecution and defense were even, for the prosecution had produced a half-dozen damaging surprises and the defense had not had its innings. But in the matter of the four women and eight men picked to judge the guilt or innocence of the young Bronx carpenter both sides appeared to be satisfied.

Jury. Since both prosecution and defense seemed to want the same kind of jurors, it took less than two days to choose a dozen citizens of Hunterdon County out of 65 who were questioned. Of those picked none had more than a modest education or modest means. Their average age was 44. All save one were married. All save two had children in the family.

State Opens. All twelve jurors had sworn that they had formed no prejudgment on the 20th Century’s most fantastic murder case. One amazing prospective juror was found who confessed that he had never heard of the Hauptmann-Lindbergh affair, indeed did not even know for what case he had been called. He was challenged by the defense for “terrible lack of intelligence,” excused.

But if Bruno Hauptmann’s twelve chosen peers were even moderately intelligent newspaper readers, they must have been entirely familiar with Attorney General David. T. Wilentz’s preamble as he opened for the State of New Jersey. He traced the old ‘ story from the night of March 1, 1932, when Baby Lindbergh was snatched from his crib, to May 12, 1932, when his body was found. Old, too, was the story of Hauptmann’s arrest in The Bronx, of his possession of $13,750 worth of the ransom money, of the attempt to identify him with the ladder found on the Lindbergh premises the night of the crime. For months newspapers had trumpeted the fact that lumber in the ladder came from a Bronx lumber yard where Hauptmann had once worked.

Suddenly Prosecutor Wilentz electrified the courtroom with news that was to many indeed new: “Hauptmann . . . has got this ladder right around his neck. . . . One rung of that ladder, one side of that ladder comes right from his attic, put on there with his tools, and we will prove it to you! . . . We demand the penalty of murder in the first degree!”

Mother. First witness on the stand was a former county engineer to give the lay of the land at the Lindberghs’ Hopewell home. Witness No. 2 was sombre little Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the dead child’s mother. In a quiet, well-modulated voice Mrs. Lindbergh testified to her activities on fatal March 1, 1932. From her 40 minutes on the stand. Prosecutor Wilentz quarried three new foundation stones for the prosecution’s case.

First stone:

Q.—Did you leave the premises at all that day?

A.—I left for a short walk in the afternoon, after Miss Betty Gow had arrived from Englewood to take care of the baby. . . . After I returned from my walk I walked around from the driveway under his window and tried to look for him. I attracted the attention of Miss Betty Gow by throwing a pebble up to the window, and she then held the baby up to the window to let him see me.

Second stone:

Q.—Do you recall your walking on the wooden walk, or did you get off of it?

A.—I walked from the driveway along by the side of the house where it was quite muddy. . . .

Q.—You say you did walk in the mud there?

A.—Yes.

Third stone:

Q.—Now you have told us about the sleeping suit, and if I may be defensively leading for a minute, did the child have any thumb protectors on? . . .

A.—Yes, he had. It is a wire thumb guard which had a piece of tape through the sides of it and was fastened around the wrist of the sleeping suit on the outside.

The prosecution placed the following value on these three bits of testimony from Mrs. Lindbergh:

By exhibiting the baby at the window, Nurse Gow and Mrs. Lindbergh paraded the fact to any kidnapper lurking in the neighborhood that the child was in the house, at the same time giving the snatcher a good notion of the nursery’s location. The prosecution plans to bring witnesses to the stand who will swear they saw Hauptmann lurking in the neighborhood.

Mrs. Lindbergh’s footprints in the mud explain the mysterious “woman’s” tracks which led investigators at first to believe the snatcher had a female accomplice. The State now contends that Hauptmann did the job alone.

The fact that the baby’s thumb guard was tied outside the night dress indicates that the snatcher would have to remove the thumb guard to remove the sleeping garment. The thumb guard was found some 3,000 ft. from the Lindbergh house. Therefore, contends the State, the child was probably killed when the ladder broke, its corpse stripped shortly after the kidnapper left the house. The sleeping suit was used as an earnest of good faith by the writer of the ransom notes, which the State’s handwriting experts will attribute to Hauptmann.

Father. Col. Lindbergh was the State’s third witness. When he took the witness chair, reporters’ eyes popped wide with amazement to see that the aviator was wearing a revolver in a shoulder holster under his loose-fitting coat. Oldtime newshawks recalled that the flyer had been carrying a gun for five years, ever since cranks began sending him threatening letters.

He, too, did much to bolster Prosecutor Wilentz’s case. At about 9:10 or 9:15 on the night of the snatching, Col. Lindbergh recalled, he had heard a noise which might have come from the kitchen and remarked to his wife: ”What is that?”

Q.—Was it the sort of noise that would come from the falling of a ladder?

A.—Yes, it was, if the ladder was outside.

Resuming the stand next day, Col. Lindbergh continued the tale of his ordeal up to the time of the ransom payment. And here Attorney General Wilentz considered that he had scored the biggest point of the trial’s first week.

Q. — On the night of April 2, 1932 when you were in the vicinity of St. Raymond’s Cemetery and prior to delivering the money to Dr. Condon and you heard a voice hollering, “Hey, Doctor,” in some foreign voice .’.. . since that time have you heard the same voice?

A. — Yes, I have.

The Attorney General, looking hard at the jury, continued.

Q. — Whose voice was it, Colonel, that you heard in the vicinity of St. Ray mond’s Cemetery that night, saying “Hey, Doctor”?

A. — That was Hauptmann’s voice.

Defense. Fleshy Defense Counsel Edward J. Reilly gallantly refused to cross-examine Mrs. Lindbergh, but he did not spare her husband, whom he grilled for three solid hours after Attorney General Wilentz got through with him.

Night before, in another of his series of broadcasts about his side of the case, Counsel Reilly had declared: “The defense will establish that Hauptmann had nothing to do with the crime and that it was conceived in the Lindbergh home itself, but not by any member of the family. We will show that the kidnapping was planned and executed by a gang of five persons. . . . Furthermore, the defense will prove that the child was carried from its nursery down the stairs of the house and out of a door of the house, rather than down the ladder. … I have an awful lot of questions to ask Col. Lindbergh, an awful lot of things I want answers to.”

Thereupon, Counsel Reilly began a long enveloping movement in which he turned up every conceivable suspect of the crime except his client. He pointed the finger of suspicion at the Lindberghs’ butler and cook, the Ollie Whatelys, at Nurse Gow and her summertime boy friend “Red” Johnson, at the Detroit Purple Gang, at Violet Sharpe, the Morrows’ maid who killed herself, and most vigorously at “Jafsie” Condon.

Nurse. Betty Gow took the stand after Col. Lindbergh. As a prosecution witness the 30-year-old Scotswoman added little but tears to Attorney General Wilentz’s case. With Counsel Reilly, however, she was pert, not teary. Quizzed about “Red” Johnson, onetime sailor on Thomas Lament’s yacht with whom Nurse Gow had been friendly the summer before the kidnapping, she admitted that she had gone to a New Jersey roadhouse with him. The most valuable bit of testimony for the defense ferreted out of Nurse Gow by Counsel Reilly was that on the day of the kidnapping she told Johnson and the servants in the Morrow household at Englewood that she was going to Hopewell.

Miss Gow collapsed when she left the witness stand after cross examination, but Counsel Reilly was feeling better than he had felt all week. Basing his case on the theory that the crime “was conceived in the Lindbergh home itself,” he had scored a point in demonstrating that the household servants of the Colonel’s mother-in-law knew of the Lindbergh family’s movements immediately before the crime. Having narrowed the guilty crew down to “four people in a roadhouse,” Counsel Reilly had already dramatically told reporters that he would reveal their identity this week.