12

CIRCUS MAXIMUS

“The newspaper idea of not surrounding oneself with

mystery was to tell them everything they wanted to know.

I had no intention of doing this.”

—C.A.L.

“OYEZ! OYEZ! OYEZ! OYEZ!” SANG OUT THE COURT crier at 10:10 o’clock on the Wednesday morning of January 2, 1935.

Microphones and cameras were banned from the courtroom so long as the trial was in session, but a telegraph pole at the slushy corner of Main and Court streets in the center of Flemington, New Jersey, radiated a dense network of wires in every direction, connecting the entire world to the proceedings in the snow-covered, century-old courthouse.

Up the seven stone steps from Main Street and past the four thick Doric columns, practically every square inch of the two-and-one-half-story, white neo-colonial building was requisitioned for purposes of communication. The Associated Press had installed four teletypes, each capable of sending an astonishing 3,600 words an hour. Western Union had installed 132 wires, enough to transmit three million words a day. The Postal Telegraph and Cable Company had fifty operators manning thirty-six wires, providing a capability of one million words a day.

Direct broadcasting of the court proceedings may have been prohibited, but many of the nation’s leading news commentators came to Flemington to deliver their nightly reports of the day’s events in court. Gabriel Heatter, for one, also intended to issue live reports every day during the noon recess. The leading stations in New York City hired famous attorneys and legal scholars to deliver commentary.

Newspapers assembled teams to cover the trial from every angle. The New York Mirror, for example, sent its editor in chief and lead columnist, Arthur Brisbane, for commentary, Damon Runyon for reportage, and the nation’s most powerful columnist and popular radio commentator, Walter Winchell, for his staccato personal impressions. The New York Evening Journal, another Hearst paper, had two young “sob sisters” vying for scoops, Dorothy Kilgallen and Sheilah Graham. Both played second fiddle to Hearst’s star reporter, Adela Rogers St. Johns, who showed up every day in a different Hattie Carnegie outfit paid for out of her expense account. The Herald Tribune placed no limitations on the length of the pieces Joseph Alsop submitted. For the duration of the trial, many of the nation’s most famous authors could be seen in town, reporting on what everyone agreed was “The Trial of the Century.” With but a touch of irony, H. L. Mencken went even farther, calling the trial the biggest story “since the Resurrection.”

“His Honor Justice Trenchard,” announced the court crier; and the seventy-one-year-old Thomas W. Trenchard of Trenton entered the courtroom. Ordinarily the thirty-by-forty-five-foot room—with its high ceiling, large windows, and electric lights suspended from the ceiling—gave a capacious feeling. But some five hundred people were sardined into space meant to accommodate a third that number. Trenchard, with his gray hair and mustache, was known to most of those present for never having had one of his decisions in a murder trial reversed.

At nine o’clock that morning, several dozen members of the public had been permitted up the narrow winding stairs and into the courtroom. Some were sent to seats in the upstairs gallery—supported by four white pillars—on a first-come, first-serve basis. After a few minutes, the courthouse doors were closed and admission was by ticket only—red for journalists and photographers, white for officials and members of the bar, yellow for telegraphers, who were allowed into the top-story wire room but not the courtroom itself. The county sheriff himself signed every one of the 150 press tickets, each of which had a number that corresponded to a place at one of the unpainted benches and tables behind a low chestnut balustrade or off to the side. No typewriters were allowed in the court, so most reporters scribbled in notebooks. One reporter estimated that a million words a day would spew out of that small room, not counting the court transcripts, which would be released to the press as fast as they could be reproduced.

Shortly before ten o’clock that morning the supporting players had taken their places. The prosecution lawyers entered first, seating themselves around a table in front of the balustrade close to the jury box. The short and lean Attorney General, David T. Wilentz, not yet forty but already a star in the state of New Jersey, led them in. The son of Latvian Jews, he had come to America when he was four, at which time his father established a cigar factory in Perth Amboy. David did not attend college but read law at New YorkLaw School. A smooth talker, he became a leading attorney in his hometown. Active in Democratic politics in Middlesex County, he attracted the attention of the party bosses. After helping elect A. Harry Moore governor of New Jersey, he was named Attorney General. A devotee of the racetrack, Wilentz—with his snazzy suits, turned-down hat brims, and ever-present cigar—was a press favorite, always good for a dramatic photograph and a ready quote. His son Robert later held that his father was personally against the death penalty and probably would not have prosecuted Hauptmann himself had he not been completely convinced of his guilt.

Colleagues just as sure surrounded him: his chief assistant, Anthony Hauck, Jr., the district attorney of Hunterdon County, who had prosecuted John Hughes Curtis; Joseph Lanigan, who worked out of the state attorney general’s office; and George K. Large, a former judge and Flemington attorney.

Close behind them entered the attorneys for the defense. The voluminous and florid chief attorney, Edward J. Reilly, and his assistant Frederick Pope wore dark-gray morning coats and gray striped trousers. The rest of their team—Egbert Rosecrans of Blairstown and C. Lloyd Fisher, who had defended John Curtis—wore business suits.

Seconds after Judge Trenchard had mounted the U-shaped bench and settled into his high-backed chair, a murmur spread through the courtroom. Bruno Richard Hauptmann entered, wearing a grayish-brown, double-breasted suit, a handkerchief in his breast pocket. He was not handcuffed. Pale but neatly groomed, he walked slowly to his chair near the middle of the row just inside the rail. After a brief word with his counsel, Hauptmann looked up to find a thousand eyes staring at him.

Before the audience could ponder his blank expression, their attention was drawn to the most anticipated entrance of the morning. Although the rumor was that he would appear only to testify, Charles Lindbergh—in a gray suit without a vest—strode into the courtroom, walking between the attorneys’ desks and the rail, right past Hauptmann. Without making any eye contact with him, he sat four chairs away. Whenever Lindbergh leaned forward to confer with the state’s attorneys, some could see that he was carrying a pistol in a shoulder holster. Sun streamed through the dozen large windows of the courtroom. Outside in the January cold, hundreds filled Main Street, many pressing their noses against the windows of the courthouse.

The once quiet town, which served as the marketplace for the surrounding chicken farmers, had become nothing less than an amusement park devoted to the Hauptmann trial. The press dominated the social activity, turning a salon at the back of the four-story, red-brick Union Hotel into “Nellie’s Tap Room,” their private saloon, at which they drank, swapped stories, and discussed every detail of the case. Tourists swarmed about the New Jersey town, and vendors hawked autographed pictures of the Lindberghs—with forged signatures—along with courthouse bookends and replicas of the kidnap ladder, with green ribbons, to be worn around the neck. One entrepreneurial towhead snipped his own curls and sold packages of them at five dollars each as the Lindbergh Baby’s locks. Over the ensuing weeks, the level of tastelessness would only increase.

Normally the sidewalks of Flemington rolled up at sundown, and the proprietors of the Union Hotel served fifty meals a day. Now they kept their dining room open from seven o’clock in the morning until midnight, offering such specialties as Lamb Chops Jafsie, Baked Beans Wilentz, and, for dessert, ice cream sundaes called “Lindys,” to as many as a thousand people. Even the Women’s Council of the Methodist Church learned to turn tidy profits, serving as many as one hundred lunches every weekday to the overflow of attorneys and writers. With the arrival of the trial, the Mayor of Flemington proudly announced, not a single townsman was on relief, as any local could find a job as a waitress or messenger boy.

Lindbergh’s businesslike demeanor that first morning made it clear that he had no intention of interacting with the press or public. In fact, he and Schwarzkopf, who had driven with him, had parked the car on Main Street and walked openly through the crowd into the courthouse with great solemnity. For Lindbergh, more than Hauptmann’s fate rested in the balance that month; he was judging America.

“For several weeks it will be necessary for me to devote most of my time to the trial at Flemington,” he wrote in a memorandum to himself. “After it is completed,” he added, “I feel that it may be advisable to take my family away from the New York area for an indefinite period. Under the circumstances which now exist I doubt that it is possible for us to live near New York in reasonable safety or peace. The combination of our present-day press and the uncontrolled crime situation necessitates our leading such a guarded and restricted life that among other reasons I feel is detrimental for my son to grow up under its environment.” Lindbergh hoped time might improve living conditions for him and his family; but, he added, “until it does I must find a home where my family can live in safety and under conditions which better permit constructive thought and action.” The pandemonium aside, Lindbergh hoped the citizens of Flemington could conduct a fair trial. Without that, he feared, the case would never die.

With rapt attention, Lindbergh leaned forward in his chair and rested his chin on his hand, as Judge Trenchard ordered the Sheriff to begin jury selection. The names of local citizens were written on pieces of paper and placed in a glass-and-wooden box, from which the Sheriff pulled one name at a time. Each person was sworn in, then seated in what visiting English author Ford Madox Ford described as “a common kitchen chair.” Then the lawyers tested the integrity of each by asking about the influence of the press, specifically the most notorious member of its corps, who had already served as “Bruno” Hauptmann’s judge and hangman. Time and again the defense asked potential jurors, “Have you read the Winchell column in The Daily Mirror? Or heard his broadcast? And from what you have heard, have you formed any opinion?” Nobody familiar with Winchell’s position claimed to have been influenced by it.

Six men and four women, most in their thirties and forties, were selected. They were a cross-section of the town—a machinist, an insurance salesman, a worker at a CCC camp, a railroad worker, two farmers, a widow, a stenographer, and two housewives.

Judge Trenchard had intended to adjourn that day at four o’clock, but the old clock suspended on the front of the gallery had stopped ten minutes before the hour. It was almost another hour before he realized what had happened. Then Trenchard ordered four constables to escort the jurors to the Union Hotel, where they would be quartered on the fourth floor for the duration of the trial. He remanded Hauptmann back across the “Bridge of Sighs” to his cell.

On the town’s streets one could literally hear the clacking of typewriters, as journalists filed their reports for their morning papers. As novelist Kathleen Norris noted in an article for The New York Times, “The big story is on its way to every corner of the world. In Africa, in China, in Soviet Russia and Fascist Italy they will be reading what American justice has done here today…. history is to be written in these next few weeks, never to be obliterated from our records.”

The second-day crowd in Flemington was even larger than the first, with hundreds queuing up in the predawn cold for admission tickets. The mob hoped for a glimpse of Lindbergh. When they broke ranks to rush his arriving car, Lindbergh and Schwarzkopf drove to the rear of the jail and entered the courthouse through the back.

Before noon a retired carpenter and an unemployed bookkeeper had joined the jury. The only interruption in the procedure occurred during voir dire, when Anne Morrow Lindbergh, long sequestered from the public, entered the courtroom.

Wearing a black silk suit, a shell-pink blouse, a simple black satin beret, and a blue fox fur, the diminutive figure briskly entered the room from behind the bench with Mrs. Norman Schwarzkopf. As they found their seats in the second row of chairs, behind their husbands, the audience audibly whispered her name. Many actually stood to get a better look. Judge Trenchard had to tap his gavel and raise his hand to bring the spectators back to their seats. Charles watched her until he realized she was perfectly composed, then returned his gaze to the jury selection.

Once the twelfth juror was chosen, the judge dismissed the dozens of others in the pool, leaving a block of vacant seats in the courtroom. When the Sheriff opened the doors to fill them, hundreds flooded past him—filling the aisles, standing against the back walls, hanging over the balcony.

Judge Trenchard turned to the jury, admonishing the eight men and four women to refrain from reading newspapers, listening to the radio, and attending public assemblages of any type, “more particularly where public addresses of one kind or another are to be made.” With that, he ordered the case to commence.

Attorney General Wilentz’s opening statement explained the New Jersey law that stated that the death of anyone during the commission of a burglary is considered murder in the first degree. “Now, on the first day of March 1932,” Wilentz asserted, “the State will prove to you that a very distinguished citizen of this country” was a resident of Hunterdon County and that his son—“a happy, normal, jovial, delightful little tot”—was killed by “the gentleman in the custody of the sheriff’s guards right in the rear of the distinguished members of the Bar who make up the defense counsel.”

For the next forty-five minutes, Wilentz detailed the crime as he believed Hauptmann had committed it. “He came there with his ladder, placed it against that house. He broke into and entered at night the Lindbergh home with the intent to steal the child and its clothing. And he did. Not only with the intent, but he actually committed a battery upon the child and did steal it and did steal its clothing…. Then as he went out that window and down that ladder of his, the ladder broke. He had more weight going down than he had when he was coming up. And down he went with this child. In the commission of that burglary that child was instantaneously killed when it received that first blow. It received a horrible fracture, the dimensions of which, when you hear about it will convince you that death was instantaneous.” Wilentz proceeded to describe Hauptmann’s subsequent flight with his “dead package,” the hasty burial after removing the baby’s sleeping suit, the Lindberghs’ shocking discovery that their child had been taken, the ransom notes, the role of Dr. Condon, the meetings at Woodlawn Cemetery and St. Raymond’s, where the ransom money was exchanged for false instructions to the missing child. He told of Lindbergh, Dr. Condon, and Colonel Breckinridge getting into a plane and how “Lindy, who could find a speck at the end of the earth, couldn’t find his child because Hauptmann had murdered it.” He described Lindbergh’s having to return empty-handed “to the home of sorrow.” He graphically described the accidental discovery of the baby’s corpse in the woods off a New Jersey backroad. As he did, Lindbergh showed no emotion, fixing his gaze on Wilentz. His pallid wife lowered her head, casting her eyes down. By the time she looked up, she had blanched further.

By then, Wilentz was describing Hauptmann’s capture. He explained how the defendant had spent the ransom money and how he had lied about how much he had hidden in his house and garage; how he had written Dr. Condon’s address and telephone inside his child’s closet; how the government had traced the wood of the ladder to the very lumberyard at which Hauptmann had purchased his own lumber. Not only that, Wilentz said, “he has got this ladder right around his neck; he took part of that attic of his and built the ladder with it—and we will prove that to you beyond any doubt.”

Wilentz concluded his opening remarks insisting that Hauptmann had “committed this crime, he had planned it for months, because he wanted money—money—money—lots of money he wanted, and he got it.” He said Hauptmann wanted that money so that he could “live a life of luxury and ease so he would not have to work.” Indeed, Wilentz noted, he quit his job the very day he collected the $50,000 … and in “the midst of the worst depression of this land, in May 1932, he spends four hundred dollars for a radio,” thousands of dollars more in the stock market. After assuring the jury that the State would prove all these “facts” to them, Wilentz demanded the ultimate penalty for murder in the first degree. Hauptmann sat through most of the formal accusation with his arms across his chest, watching Wilentz as he paced before the jury. When Wilentz finished, a few spectators applauded.

Edward Reilly rose to move for a mistrial “on the grounds that the impassioned appeal of the attorney general was not a proper opening. It was a summation intended to inflame the minds of this jury against this defendant before the trial starts.” Judge Trenchard denied the motion, though he cautioned the jury to “keep their minds open until the last word has been said in this courtroom.”

With a few minutes until the lunch break, Wilentz called his first witness, a civil engineer and surveyor who described the precise location of the Lindbergh house and property. The Lindberghs lunched with the Schwarzkopfs at the nearby home of prosecuting attorney George Large.

An hour into the afternoon session, Wilentz called Anne Lindbergh to the stand. She nervously sat in the witness chair even before being sworn in. She stepped down to take her oath then returned to the wooden chair. While her testimony was not crucial to the case, the State knew that the presence of the baby’s young mother would be powerful. She was able to identify her son’s sleeping garment, the undershirt Betty Gow had sewn, which had been found on the corpse in the woods, and the baby’s thumbguard. She detailed her last day with her son, including how she had stood beneath his window, thus explaining the set of woman’s footprints found in the mud. With great composure, she looked at a photograph of her child, smiling slightly as she identified it. Then she told of the frantic search through the house for the baby that night. Anne’s voice was faint but firm, commanding the attention of everybody in the room—including Hauptmann, who almost never took his eyes off her. Charles took obvious pride in his wife’s “perfect self-control” during her forty minutes on the stand.

Edward Reilly approached the bench, only to say, “that the grief of Mrs. Lindbergh requires no cross-examination.”

At 3:30, Wilentz called his next witness. In a gray suit and gray shirt and tie, Charles Lindbergh’s tall, lanky frame practically seemed too big for the witness chair. He was no longer armed. Wilentz walked him through the first days of the crime, up until receiving the second ransom note, which arrived through the mail. It being the close of an already impactful day, Wilentz kept his star witness from dropping any bombshells.

Gathering from the reaction in court that the media would be swaying public sentiment against his client during the next few hours, Defense Attorney Reilly went to Trenton, where he spoke over Station WNEW. He told the public that he was preparing a powerful defense, one which would establish that Hauptmann had nothing to do with the crime and that the kidnapping had been planned and executed by a gang. Knowing that Lindbergh would be moving public opinion even more the next day, Reilly asserted that he had “an awful lot of questions to ask Colonel Lindbergh, an awful lot of things I want answers to. An awful lot of questions.”

The next morning, Lindbergh returned to the stand, where, prompted by David Wilentz’s questions, he continued his narration. When he reached the night of April 2, 1932, at St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx, he spoke of seeing Dr. Condon cross Whittemore Avenue and hearing “very clearly a voice coming from the cemetery, to the best of my belief calling Dr. Condon.” Lindbergh said he heard, “in a foreign accent, ‘Hey, Doctor!’” Wilentz quickly moved Lindbergh through the rest of his testimony—another fifty questions—before bringing him back to the night of April second. Then he asked, “… since that time, have you heard the same voice?”

“Yes, I have,” Lindbergh replied.

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

Lindbergh turned from the Attorney General and, for the first time, looked directly at the defendant. “That was Hauptmann’s voice,” he declaimed loudly and clearly. The accused stared right back at him, with a stone-cold expression. A hush fell over the courtroom, then an audible communal gasp. A few more questions followed about Lindbergh’s hearing the voice a second time in District Attorney Foley’s office in the Bronx and about viewing his son’s corpse in the Trenton morgue.

Colonel Breckinridge was present for his client’s testimony and later told his stepson, Oren Root, “The minute Lindbergh ‘pointed his finger’ at Hauptmann, the trial was over. ‘Jesus Christ’ himself said he was convinced this was the man who killed his son. Who was anybody to doubt him or deny him justice?” Another month of testimony remained.

In the next hour before lunch, Edward Reilly tried to regain some ground. Instead of challenging Lindbergh’s testimony, however, he attempted only to plant doubts. He asked about the Lindbergh and Morrow servants and some of their mysterious demises, about Betty Gow’s relationship with “Red” Johnson, about the failure of Wahgoosh the dog to bark, about any hostility from neighbors in the Sourland Mountains, about the possibility that the kidnapper abducted the baby and exited through the front door of the house. None of it seemed to matter. At one point, Reilly tried to impugn the fallibility of the police; and when Lindbergh replied, “I think we have very good police,” many in the court broke into laughter and applause.

At another point, Reilly tried to set a trap for Lindbergh but fell into it himself. Reilly asked the witness if he had not, in fact, believed that John Curtis had been in contact with the gang that had kidnapped his child. The court interrupted, pointing out to Reilly that he was assuming that the people with whom Lindbergh was negotiating had possession of the child. Prosecutor Wilentz said that he did not object to the witness answering the question so long as Lindbergh was asked his present belief. Reilly accepted the condition, and the jury was allowed to hear Lindbergh state that he currently believed that the defendant was guilty of the kidnapping. Lindbergh’s opinion was no doubt as prejudicial as it was immaterial.

Furthermore, Reilly never attacked the part of Lindbergh’s testimony which was as vulnerable as it had been damaging. He did not ask one question about the three syllables—“Hey, Doctor”—Lindbergh claimed to have heard. In fact, Lindbergh had testified before the grand jury that the voice he had heard had uttered two syllables—“Hey, Doc”; and Wilentz had said in his opening that Lindbergh had heard the phrase twice, not once, as Lindbergh now testified. Even overlooking these variances, Reilly did not raise the issue of Lindbergh’s reliability, his ability to recall three distant syllables over three years.

President Roosevelt delivered his State of the Union Address that day, but The New York Times relegated it to its far left-hand column, making room for a four-column headline on the right: COL. LINDBERGH NAMES HAUPTMANN AS KIDNAPPER AND TAKER OF RANSOM; COOL IN 3-HOUR CROSS-EXAMINATION. In a letter to her mother-in-law, Anne Lindbergh passed along the observation of one reporter: “I think Reilly withstood the cross-examination very well.”

The Lindberghs spent the weekend at Next Day Hill, but it was impossible to keep the subject of the trial out of the house. The topic filled the papers and the airwaves; and the Lindberghs were hosting Betty Gow, who had returned from Scotland for the sole purpose of testifying, knowing her absence would only fuel further speculation as to her involvement in the crime. Although Lindbergh had scrupulously avoided discussing the case, except in court, on Sunday he granted a special interview to Lauren “Deak” Lyman of The New York Times, a reporter he liked and trusted, expressing his wish that the trial be conducted as fairly as possible. The article contained no quotes from Lindbergh, but it stated that he did not view the case as the battle the press had been depicting. Lyman said Lindbergh wanted “to bring out the truth regardless of whether it should create doubt or conviction of the defendant’s guilt, and regardless of whether the facts were brought out by the defense or the prosecution.” Toward that end, Lindbergh said he deliberately avoided ever looking at the jury for fear of prejudicing them.

More than sixty thousand tourists descended upon Flemington that Sunday. Many drove to the narrow Mount Rose Highway, where the baby’s body had been discovered. More than five thousand people visited the courthouse, and local peace officers admitted groups of two hundred at a time into the courtroom, allowing them to sit in the jury box, the witness stand, and the judge’s chair. The most awesome sight on the tour, however, was of the connecting building. The light that glowed through one of its windows came from the bulb that hung over Hauptmann’s prison cot.

The featured witness during the trial’s second week was Betty Gow. In three hours of testimony, the thirty-year-old nurse corroborated the Lindberghs’ accounts of the events of March 1, 1932. She identified the undershirt she had made for the baby, establishing that the kidnapper had committed a burglary by breaking and entering and stealing these articles of clothing. Betty Gow’s further identification of the baby’s sleeping suit suggested that the kidnapper and the ransom collector were one and the same person.

Edward Reilly tried both to implicate and imprecate Betty, failing in each attempt. He asked about her relationship with “Red” Johnson, which she described as an innocent friendship with an innocent man. When Reilly tried to discredit her because the State was paying $650 for her testimony, Betty explained that she was being paid only for her passage between America and Scotland and compensation for lost wages. “Mr. Reilly got very short change out of Betty,” Kathleen Norris added in her column in the Times that day. Upon leaving the stand, Miss Gow collapsed in an anteroom of the courthouse.

The next day, two witnesses identified Hauptmann. The first was Amandus Hochmuth, an eighty-six-year-old man who lived near the Lindbergh property and claimed to have seen a man in a green car with a ladder turn toward the Lindbergh estate on the morning of March 1, 1932. When asked if he could identify the man in the car that day, Hochmuth pointed a trembling finger at Hauptmann. Suddenly the lights in the courtroom went out, and Reilly thundered, “It’s the Lord’s wrath over a lying witness.” The crowd laughed, but Trenchard brought order to the court. Wilentz re-posed his question, and this time, the old man trudged from the witness chair to Hauptmann and touched his knee. Hauptmann only shook his head, then turned to his wife and said, “Der Alte ist verrückt!” (“The old man is crazy.”)

He may have been, and then some. The bespectacled octogenarian apparently had cataracts. But during cross-examination, Reilly questioned the witness’s sanity, not his vision. The spry old man came across as credible, thus placing Hauptmann in the vicinity of the Lindberghs’ estate on the day of the crime.

The second identification came from Joseph Perrone, the Bronx taxicab driver, who had delivered the letter directing Dr. Condon to his first meeting with “Cemetery John.” When the prosecution asked if that man was present in the court, Perrone walked over to Hauptmann, slapped his shoulder, and said loudly to the jury, “That is the man.” Hauptmann stared at him, then snarled, “You’re a liar.”

Six hundred people packed into the courtroom the following morning, anticipating a dramatic day of testimony. Jafsie was taking the stand. A natural ham, the corpulent Dr. John F. Condon strutted slowly to the witness chair and proved incapable of responding to the plainest question without gilding his answer. When asked, for example, where he had lived his seventy-four years, Condon replied: “In the most beautiful borough in the world.”

For five hours, David Wilentz had to prod Condon through his bombast, trying to get the witness to limit his responses. Edward Reilly, no stranger to grandiloquence himself, encouraged him to blather, hoping to trip him up in his own testimony. With great fervor Condon described advertising to be the go-between, hearing from the kidnapper, meeting Lindbergh, and his subsequent encounters with “John” at the two cemeteries. Although he had a few moments of confusion—as when he mistestified about the first time he had seen the unusual hole-punched signature—nobody got the better of Jafsie, whose appearance on the stand included extravagant hand gestures and re-enacted dialogue, complete with an imitation of “Cemetery John”’s German accent. At day’s end, three moments from the performance lingered in everybody’s memory, the three occasions when Wilentz asked Condon to identify John.

“John,” Condon bellowed each time in stentorian tones, articulating each syllable as he stared into the sleepless eyes of the defendant, “is Bruno Richard Hauptmann!” Hauptmann sat with his arms and legs crossed and stared right back. Lindbergh leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, fixing his eyes on the witness. After court that afternoon, the defense attorneys suggested to the press that Condon’s few fumbled answers indicated that he was both unreliable and possibly an accomplice to the crime. But the general consensus was that Condon had been a powerful witness.

Over the next week, the trial settled into the presentation of evidence. Even though the expert testimony occasionally lapsed into scientific jargon, the Lindbergh trial maintained its primacy in the media. The New York Times ran nearly complete transcripts of each day’s sessions. Wilentz noticed that the jury seemed to be able to tolerate only two hours at a time of scholarly explication. He goaded his witnesses into making their points as quickly as possible. He broke the monotony by interrupting the experts with other witnesses.

His choreography proved effective. Looking at large charts placed on a rack near the jury box and at eleven-by-fourteen-inch photostats that were passed among them, the jurors were able to understand Albert Osborn’s explanation of the remarkable similarities between Hauptmann’s handwriting samples and the handwriting in the ransom notes. He pointed out similar misspellings—“haus” for “house,” “note” for “not,” “anyding” for “anything,” “gut” for “good,” and “boad” for “boat,” for example, as well as similar Germanic formations of certain letters. Even more incriminating were “inventions” in forming certain letters—such as the inverted capital “N”s and “y”s that looked like “j”s. There were literally dozens of matches.

Reilly spoke to the press every day. Although the prosecution had another week of witnesses, the defense attorney felt impelled to present his upcoming strategy, issuing the questions he would be asking Hauptmann, including those about his friendship with Isidor Fisch, whom Reilly insisted was the man Jafsie had met in the cemeteries. In realizing that he might be biting off more than he could chew, he hastened to add, “our purpose is not to try to solve the crime or to prove who did it, but to prove that Hauptmann is not guilty.” In Trenton, Reilly posed a panel of eight handwriting experts for pictures, a team that he said would affirm that Richard Hauptmann could not have written the ransom notes.

The picture was seen around the world—almost everywhere except the top floor of the Union Hotel in Flemington, where the twelve jurors were sequestered. According to the constables, the jurors were not allowed to see any newspapers, because after clipping all the articles pertaining to the Hauptmann case, little remained. Besides the Hauptmann trial, the big news that week was a jailbreak at San Quentin resulting in the death of the warden, a bank heist in Ottawa, Illinois, in which a bank officer and sheriff were killed, and the killing of two notorious murderers and kidnappers, “Ma” Barker and her son.

The Lindberghs rested that weekend at Next Day Hill. Anne was not much company, as the trial dragged her into a deep depression. While Charles, with Nordic sangfroid, could show up for the trial every day and observe it with objectivity, Anne could not. Many days she walked around the estate’s fenced grounds and sat on a tree stump to cry. Many nights she whimpered herself to sleep. She had frequent nightmares, not just about her firstborn, but about her father and Elisabeth as well. She often awoke in tears.

Although Anne seemed to be suffering an emotional setback, she would later realize that she had entered a painful but salutary period. The trial had churned up feelings of remorse, self-pity, and nostalgia, which proved to be normal, healthy stages of grief.

Charles, on the other hand, remained rigid in his refusal to acknowledge his pain. Anne would come to believe that such stoicism was “courageous” but that it was only a halfway house on the long road to recovery. “It is a shield, permissible for a short time only,” she would write years later, clearly thinking of him. “In the end one has to discard shields and remain open and vulnerable. Otherwise, scar tissue will seal off the wound and no growth will follow. To grow, to be reborn, one must remain vulnerable—open to love but also hideously open to the possibility of more suffering.”

Writing during this dismal period saved Anne’s sanity. “If I could write out moods which could be admitted to no one, they became more manageable, as though neatly stacked on a high shelf,” she would recall several decades later. “Brought to the aseptic light of the diary’s white page, the giant toadstools withered.” It was a turning point in her growth as an artist, her self-confidence increasing as she found her literary voice.

Entering the third week of the trial, the prosecution persisted in what they considered a case of “identifications.” They would continue to place Hauptmann at every twist in the kidnapping story. As a surprise witness, Wilentz called Hildegarde Alexander to the stand. Swathed in fur, this twenty-six-year-old model and evening-gown saleswoman cut a glamorous figure. She testified that one evening in March 1932, in the Fordham Station of the New York Central Railroad in the Bronx, she had seen Dr. Condon, whom she knew slightly. Curiously, she added, she noticed another man in that Bronx station that night “watching him very significantly.” That man was Hauptmann, whom she subsequently recognized in a photograph after he had been arrested. There was little way of refuting her recollection.

Reilly fared just as poorly trying to impugn the handwriting experts that followed—two that day, two more the day after. As another four followed, two of the defense’s handwriting experts announced that they were walking off the case. Reilly explained to the press that he had been unable to pay them; but each of them was quoted the next day as saying his analysis would not have been favorable to the defense.

The trial continued to take its toll on Richard Hauptmann. Guard reports revealed that he was pacing more and crying in his cell. After the appearance of the men who discovered the baby’s corpse and the doctors who examined the body, Hauptmann’s case took another turn for the worse. Edward Reilly announced in court that he did not intend to claim that the body was other than that of Colonel Lindbergh’s child. Members of his own team felt he should not have allowed any Achilles heel in the case to go unattacked. Lloyd Fisher, for one, leapt to his feet and said, “You are conceding this man to the electric chair!” As he stormed out of the room, the defendant said to his attorney, “You are killing me.”

Hauptmann was furious. After two dozen witnesses testified that day, he finally blew his top. Special Agent Thomas Sisk had described Hauptmann’s capture and how his furtive glances out the window of his house led to the discovery of the ransom money in his garage. The normally sphinxlike defendant scowled, shaking his head from side to side. Then Sisk talked about the jug containing water, which he had unearthed inside the garage. He said he found no money in the jug, but that the next day, when questioning Hauptmann, the defendant “admitted that he had that money in there three weeks before he was arrested.” That provided a neat explanation for the dampness of the money when it was discovered; but Hauptmann had consistently maintained that the money had got wet from the leak in his closet, where he claimed it had sat for years.

“Mister, Mister, you stop lying,” he shouted, springing toward the stand, brandishing his finger. Guards restrained him, but he lurched forward and cried, “You are telling a story.” For the second time in all the hours court had been in session, Lindbergh looked at Hauptmann. Even before Judge Trenchard had restored order, Lindbergh was looking back at the witness stand.

Hauptmann’s contempt was contagious. The next morning, the prosecution called Ella Achenbach, a former neighbor of the Hauptmanns, to the stand. She testified that a day or two after the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Hauptmanns had called on her, saying they had just returned from a trip. Anna Hauptmann shrieked from her chair at the defense table, “Mrs. Achenbach, you are lying!”

Attorney General Wilentz seized the situation, objecting “to these demonstrations, whether they are staged or otherwise.” A legal tussle ensued as the defense objected to Wilentz’s implication. When Judge Trenchard restored order, Mrs. Achenbach went on to reveal that Mrs. Hauptmann had also told her that Richard had recently sprained his ankle and that she had even seen her neighbor limp. “Lies, lies—all lies,” Mrs. Hauptmann muttered throughout the testimony.

The week ended with even more incriminating evidence. The jury saw the board from Hauptmann’s closet with Dr. Condon’s telephone number written on it; and they heard the stenographer of Bronx District Attorney Foley read the testimony of Hauptmann in which he admitted that the handwriting was his and that he had written the information down because he had been interested in the case. “Everybody is against us now,” Anna Hauptmann told the press after court had recessed. “Nobody has a good word to say. They lie—lie—lie.”

A cold snap struck the East the fourth week in January, and with it came some of the most chilling testimony in the Hauptmann trial. Unfortunately for the accused, his lead attorney’s faith in him seemed to dwindle along with most of the public’s. Either through insufficient preparation or a simple desire to get to the next phase of the trial, Reilly let whole chunks of testimony go unchallenged:

The first witness that Monday was an agent of the Intelligence Unit of the Treasury Department of the United States government. He had computed Hauptmann’s finances between the dates of the ransom payment and his apprehension. Transaction by transaction, he showed how during that time, the unemployed Hauptmann’s assets had increased by $44,486. Reilly asked nothing about Hauptmann’s possible earnings from freelance carpentry or from his business dealings with Isidor Fisch, to say nothing of cash he might have kept in the house before April 2, 1932.

The timekeeper for the Reliance Property Management Company took the stand with records from 1932. He attested that Richard Hauptmann did not start working for the company until March twenty-first, that he did not show up for work the day the ransom was paid, and that he worked for the company only one day more after it had been paid. Reilly asked nothing of other company records that showed Hauptmann had worked for the company as early as March first, or about possible tampering of the books. He made no attempt to test the character of the witness, called a liar by many in the years since his testimony.

A theater cashier identified Hauptmann as the man who gave her a strangely folded five-dollar bill on November 26, 1933—which happened to be Hauptmann’s birthday, a night he insisted he celebrated with his wife and friends. Reilly asked the cashier nothing about her original statement to the police, in which she said the man who passed the money was an “American.”

The next day saw two more people identify Hauptmann in and around Hopewell. Then Hauptmann’s landlord testified that after the arrest, he noticed that part of a board was missing from the attic floor above his tenant’s apartment. This heralded the arrival of the prosecution’s eighty-seventh and final witness.

“It’s a long story,” asserted Arthur Koehler, who took the stand on Wednesday and whose testimony would spill over to the next day. “We want the long story, let’s have it,” Wilentz said. Technical though Koehler’s testimony was, the jury, gallery, and even the prisoner sat spellbound. Lindbergh, with his infinite faith in scientific scrutiny, was riveted. The middle-aged man detailed the eighteen months he spent deconstructing the “kidnap ladder,” narrowing down the forty thousand mills and yards in the country in which wood was dressed and sold to the National Millwork and Lumber Company in the Bronx. Thus, more than a year before the police had apprehended Richard Hauptmann, Arthur Koehler had found himself standing in the very yard where Hauptmann used to buy his wood.

After Hauptmann was captured, Koehler was able to examine his tools as well as lumber used in building his attic floor. As a result of his study, Koehler swore that one of the uprights in the ladder had originally been part of a plank in the flooring of Hauptmann’s attic, fitting right down to the nail-holes. The rest of the lumber in the attic, he maintained, also came from the very yard at which his search had ended. Furthermore, a study of the tools found in Hauptmann’s garage revealed that the plank from the attic had been planed down by one of his tools.

Hammering a final nail into Hauptmann’s coffin, Koehler said that a three-quarter-inch chisel was used in making the recesses for the rungs of the ladder, and that upon inspecting the Hauptmann toolchest he found no such tool, one that would be standard equipment in an ordinary carpenter’s kit. That was the exact tool found at the Lindbergh house. Hauptmann returned to his cell with his head bowed and eyes cast down.

The trial in Flemington had become the hottest ticket in the world. Sheriff Curtis declared that he had five thousand applications for seats from all over the country and from a dozen foreign nations. “The trial should have been held in Madison Square Garden,” he said. The general public could not help noticing the number of famous faces increasing every day. On this last full day of the prosecution’s case, Flemington’s largest crowd in weeks was rewarded for waiting in a blizzard by getting glimpses of Mrs. James Farley, wife of the Postmaster General, author Ford Madox Ford, and actress Lynn Fontanne, sporting a leopard-skin coat.

Temperatures dropped into single digits that night, producing four-foot snowdrifts throughout the state of New Jersey. Charles took Anne for a walk in the storm, and she felt exhilarated by the touch of his hand, pulling her up the hill. The next morning, making his customary drive from Englewood to Flemington, he got stuck between drifts. State troopers came to his rescue, allowing him to abandon his car, as they drove him to the courthouse. Even arriving a half-hour late, he had not missed much. Judge Trenchard was similarly delayed; and the first few minutes of business that morning were given to some final observations of Arthur Koehler under direct examination. In the end, Koehler’s testimony had been so dumbfounding in its precision that there was little for the defense to challenge. As Ford Madox Ford observed in a column for The New York Times, Koehler “was like the instrument of a blind and atrociously menacing destiny. You shuddered at the thought of what might happen to you if such a mind and such an inconceivable industry should get to work upon your own remote past—a man who searched 1,900 factories for the traces of the scratches of your plane on a piece of wood. It was fantastic and horrifying.”

Defense attorney Fred Pope at least got Koehler to agree that the ladder had been poorly constructed, from which he hoped the jury would infer it was hardly the work of a professional carpenter. After a few more questions from each side, the State rested.

Egbert Rosecrans for the defense moved for a verdict of acquittal. He held that no evidence had shown that the crime was even committed in the county in which court was convened (the corpus delicti having been discovered in Mercer County), that the State had failed to show proper intent to commit a felony (“Stealing clothes of the child, the sleeping garments?”), and that there was a paucity of evidence placing his client at the scene of the crime. Trying not to deliver his summation, Wilentz addressed every one of Rosecrans’s points, insisting that “there is not only sufficient evidence but overwhelming evidence … which requires this defendant to answer.” He argued statutory definitions, maintaining that “murder … which shall be committed in perpetrating or attempting to perpetrate any … burglary … [or] robbery … shall be murder in the first degree.” The Court concurred.

That afternoon, Lloyd Fisher took center stage for half an hour, presenting the defense’s opening argument. Everybody in town suspected that this was to be the most startling day of the trial. Rows of observers stood shoulder-to-shoulder, right up to the edge of the Judge’s bench. Fisher promised the capacity crowd that the defense would provide alibis for Richard Hauptmann on three significant nights in the case—March 1, 1932, April 2, 1932, and April 26, 1932, the night the theater cashier swore he gave her a five-dollar-note that turned out to be ransom money. He also promised handwriting experts of their own—not as many as the prosecution, he said, because of lack of funds—and further compromising information on Isidor Fisch. Fisher maintained that the ladder had been so manhandled since the crime that it had been rendered a worthless piece of evidence and that many of the prosecution’s most important witnesses were impeachable.

Then, at 3:09, Edward Reilly boomed, “Bruno Richard Hauptmann, take the stand!”

Guards on either side stood with him, then allowed the man in the brownish-gray sack suit to step forward. For all his sleeplessness, there was spring in his walk, an animal magnetism about his muscular body and chiseled face. He spoke in a low, often guttural voice. Reilly coaxed the thirty-five-year-old witness to speak up as he limned his background. After describing being wounded and gassed during the war, serving time in prison, and illegally entering the country, Hauptmann’s counsel interrupted him in order to bring forth two other witnesses. The owner of the bakery at which Anna Hauptmann worked and his wife were sworn in to testify that they recalled Hauptmann’s presence in their shop on the night of March 1, 1932. They proved to be of little help to the defendant, as Wilentz’s cross-examination reduced their recollections to vague suppositions.

Hauptmann resumed his testimony, laying the groundwork for his alibis. He discussed his employment in 1932, but he offered a scanty account of his time on March 1, 1932, other than the morning. He stumbled over the date on which he started work at the Majestic Apartments, having to be corrected by his attorney.

The next day—Friday, January 25, 1935—should have seen Hauptmann’s best testimony. Six hours were given to his batting answers to his attorney’s lobbed questions, so that he could account for himself under oath. But he made two grave errors. One was over the misspelling of the word “signature,” which had appeared in the ransom notes. Reilly got Hauptmann to tell the jury that the police had directed him to misspell the word when they asked him to write it. In truth, the police had never asked Hauptmann to write that word. Even worse, when Reilly asked him to spell it on the stand, he got it wrong. The second mistake came toward the end of his direct-examination when Hauptmann described how the police had roughed him up—a “couple of knocks … in the ribs, when I refused to write.” That he had been beaten was never challenged; but Hauptmann had previously asserted that he was “glad” to give writing samples, for they would clear him.

The day ended with thirty minutes of cross-examination by Wilentz, who wasted no time hurling questions at Hauptmann about his illegal entry into the United States, the extradition hearings in the Bronx at which he admitted telling the truth only “to a certain extent,” his criminal record in Germany, his business dealings with Fisch, his hiding the ransom money and a pistol in his garage. Then the Attorney General confronted Hauptmann with one of his old notebooks which contained the word “boat”—spelled “boad.”

Reporters noticed more than once that Hauptmann used his handkerchief to pat his face and wipe his hands, and that whenever he heard the word “baby,” his hands fluttered and his lips trembled. “What Bruno needs,” commented Jack Benny, after visiting the courtroom, “is a second act.”

By this time, most of Flemington was convinced of Hauptmann’s guilt. At Nellie’s Tap, the press sang their version of the Schnitzelbank song, each new verse spilling onto the streets, where locals took up the chorus:

Is das nicht ein singnature?

Ja, das ist ein singnature!

Is das nicht peculiar?

Ja, ist damn peculiar!

Singnature?

Peculiar!

Is das nicht ein ransom note?

Ja, das ist ein ransom note!

Is das nicht ein Nelly boad?

Ja, das ist ein Nelly boad!

Ransom note?

Nelly boad!

After one day in Flemington, Edna Ferber became disgusted with herself for joining the fashionable crowd, talking about how “divine” and “wonderful” it all was. She admitted that it was thrilling theater. But she left town so sickened by what she had seen, she wrote that “it made you want to resign as member of the human race and cable Hitler saying, Well Butch, you win.”

“There is a steadily deepening tension and a steadily increasing horror in the Flemington courthouse as the most unfortunate man in the world makes his fight for his life,” wrote novelist Kathleen Norris for The New York Times that evening. “For no matter what may be proved against him, nor how intense the detestation in which the American people may hold him, there is no doubt that Bruno Richard Hauptmann is unfortunate—pitiful. Menace gathers like a storm-cloud over him, the central figure of a living drama that will be known throughout all our history as the great kidnapping trial …” In an adjacent column, Alexander Woollcott dropped all pretense of neutrality. While commenting on the number of “lonely and itching women who find him so physically attractive as to be above all suspicion,” he believed: “The most recurrent imbecility is the little notion cherished by those who say that, whereas they suppose Hauptmann was naughty enough to take the ransom money, they still doubt if he had anything to do with the kidnapping.” He said that if both Dr. Condon and Colonel Lindbergh have been willing to swear that Hauptmann was the man they recognized from the cemetery, then it was certainly Hauptmann.

The SRO crowd on Monday caught the best show of all—when Wilentz subjected Hauptmann to five hours of intense interrogation. At several points, Hauptmann’s waxen face came to life, his jaw jutting and his eyes blazing. His monotone erupted into sarcastic laughs and angry shouts. But Hauptmann maintained his control, never breaking down and confessing as the prosecution hoped and the audience expected. At times, he appeared to enjoy the sparring, occasionally smiling when Wilentz failed to land a blow. But he did have to concede a number of damaging points.

The jury heard Hauptmann admit to several untruths and to withholding information. He confessed that he had lied to the police upon his arrest when he told them that the twenty-dollar gold certificate in his wallet was part of his innocent hedge against inflation. Then he asked the jury to believe that the $15,000 the police found had belonged to his friend Fisch. He admitted that he had lied when he told the police that the first cache of ransom money they found in his garage was all that he had, only to have the police discover another $840. He admitted that he had lied in the Bronx court about having met Fisch in the Bronx in May 1932, and now asked the jury to believe that he had met him through a friend in March or April of that year. He admitted that upon Fisch’s death he had withheld from Fisch’s family the fact that he had left a bundle of money behind.

When confronted with the piece of wood from his closet with Jafsie’s address and telephone number written on it—pencil markings he had admitted in the Bronx County Court were his—Hauptmann now said he had not written them. Wilentz tried to get Hauptmann to explain his contradictory answers, but he kept evading them. At last he explained that he had been “quite excited” when first presented with the evidence (which some have long held was falsified, possibly by a journalist playing a prank) and so wrongly admitted that the writing was his. Now he went so far as to say that the handwriting did look like his but that he could not remember “putting them numbers on” and that he was “positively sure I wouldn’t write anything in the inside of a closet.”

Fed up with Hauptmann’s obduracy, Wilentz said, “You are having a lot of fun with me, aren’t you?” Hauptmann said no, but Wilentz pointed out that every few minutes the defendant smiled at him. Then, interjecting some theories he had acquired from the State psychiatrist, who had drawn a psychological profile of the criminal, Wilentz said, “You think you are a big shot, don’t you?”

“No,” Hauptmann replied. “Should I cry?”

“No, certainly you shouldn’t. You think you are bigger than everybody, don’t you?”

“No, but I know I am innocent.”

Although he was seated and further shackled by his imperfect English, Hauptmann did not shrink before Wilentz’s obvious posturing for the crowd. “Lying, when you swear to God that you will tell the truth. Telling lies doesn’t mean anything,” the Attorney General said with disgust, milking the scene.

“Stop that!” the defendant shouted.

The day also contained more damaging evidence. There were peculiarities in Hauptmann’s handwriting that matched those in the ransom notes—hyphenating “New York,” reversing the “g” and “h” in words such as “Wright” and “light.” And then there was Hauptmann’s small ledger book with its sketch of a ladder similar to the one left at the Lindbergh house.

And there was more. Some of Hauptmann’s explanations of his financial affairs seemed so outlandish that they prompted bursts of laughter from the spectators. By the end of the day, the defense told the press that it intended to use both the laughter and Wilentz’s improper questions as points on which they would appeal if Hauptmann were convicted. Judge Trenchard announced that he would thenceforth disallow people to stand in the courtroom, thus limiting the number of spectators.

The next day, the State caught the defendant in another lie. While Hauptmann had earlier testified that he and Isidor Fisch had begun their partnership speculating in the stock market in 1932, staked by Fisch, Wilentz produced two letters Hauptmann wrote Fisch’s brother, which described their partnership beginning in 1933, with Hauptmann contributing most of the cash. The rest of the day was devoted to Hauptmann’s “sudden wealth” in the spring of 1932. He had to admit that he had lied to Fisch’s brother about $5,500, which he said had come from a private bank account. During his seventeen and a half hours on the stand, eleven under cross-examination, Hauptmann’s memory failed him too many times. “Hauptmann made a good witness,” Wilentz told the press upon the conclusion of his cross-examination, “considering the fact that he has told so many different stories and has had to admit both damaging truths and untruth.”

Hauptmann’s wife, who had already invoked considerable public sympathy, followed him on the stand. But her plight would ultimately work against him. “How long should a woman stick to a man, anyway?” wrote Kathleen Norris, marveling at the faith of Anna Hauptmann. By the time the “thin, fuzzy-headed woman, plain, long-nosed, [and] pale,” testified, the world had already heard her husband admit that he concealed most of his financial affairs from her, “that he deceived his wife even when she was working hard to help him save.”

In two hours of testimony, Anna Schoeffler Hauptmann supported her husband’s three alibis—accounting for him on the nights of the kidnapping, the ransom payment, and the money being passed at the movie theater. She also refuted Mrs. Achenbach, denying that she had told her that she and Richard had just returned from a trip during which he had sprained his ankle. Under cross-examination, a polite Wilentz challenged her never having seen the box of money that was allegedly resting on the top shelf of her broom closet. Then he reminded her of her testimony in the hearing in the Bronx just a few months earlier in which she claimed that she could not remember whether her husband had been with her on the night of March 1, 1932. During the next short recess, Mrs. Hauptmann walked toward her husband, who wagged his finger at her, saying, “Cut out that don’t remember stuff.”

The next several days of trial saw a ragtag assortment of defense witnesses, who harmed the defendant more than they helped. Elvert Carlstrom claimed to have seen Hauptmann in Fredericksen’s Bakery on the night of March 1, 1932; but in rebuttal the prosecution presented a witness who asserted that Carlstrom had been with him that night, in Dunellen, New Jersey. August von Henke said he met Hauptmann that night as well; though he turned out to be a shady character who had changed his name twice and who ran a speakeasy. Louis Kiss said he was also in Fredericksen’s that night and claimed to have seen Hauptmann; he remembered because he was supposed to deliver two pints of rum he had just made that night and got lost. He was later refuted as well, as the friend purchasing the rum testified that the delivery occurred more than a week later. The gallery became amused at the popularity of Fredericksen’s Bakery—busier, one lawyer derided, than Grand Central Station.

So impeachable were many of the other defense witnesses, it was often difficult to keep track of who was on trial. Reilly brought forth an ex-convict, a “professional witness,” a mental patient, and several others whose testimonies were easily challenged. While on the stand to testify that he had seen a group of people at St. Raymond’s the night the ransom money was paid, a cab driver with theatrical aspirations broke into an impersonation of Will Rogers. Back in his cell, Hauptmann asked Lloyd Fisher, “Where are they getting these witnesses from? They’re really hurting me.”

A few did help Hauptmann’s case. Two people credibly supported his alibi for the night of his birthday in 1933. And Dr. Erastus Mead Hudson, a physician who made a hobby of fingerprinting, testified that he had shown the New Jersey State Police his new method of silver-nitrate fingerprinting, which allowed him to lift more than five hundred usable prints from the kidnap ladder. None of them was Hauptmann’s. And though the defense’s team of handwriting analysts had shrunk to one, John M. Trendley acquitted himself well, suggesting that Hauptmann’s handwriting resembled that of many Germans for whom English was a second language.

The defense knew it would not be enough to refute charges against the accused, that it would have to introduce alternatives scenarios. Reilly did everything he could to suggest the guilt of Isidor Fisch. Unfortunately, at least a dozen defense witnesses who might have helped make that case ignored their subpoenas, failing to show up at the last minute. Most of those who still put faith in the defense’s “Fisch story” were quieted by several prosecution rebuttal witnesses, including Isidor Fisch’s sister, who testified that he had died with only 1500 marks—$500—to his name.

As the trial concluded its fifth week, the proceedings appeared in newsreels one night at most of the first-run theaters in New York City. Audiences saw both Lindberghs and Dr. Condon as well as Hauptmann and Wilentz during one of their testy exchanges. The films were the product of Fox Movietone News, who along with Universal, Paramount, Hearst Metrotone, and Pathé, had housed a large motion-picture camera in a muffled box in the gallery, its lens fixed on the witness stand. They had also rigged a microphone halfway up one of the courtroom windows, about thirty-five feet from the witness stand.

Although it seemed unlikely that the attorneys, the judge, and the police had no knowledge of the setup—indeed, a state trooper was stationed right next to the camera to make sure it could not be heard—all officials denied sanctioning the filming. While the few minutes of film presented to the public were sympathetic toward the prosecution, the Attorney General blew the whistle on further exhibition of the newsreels. The judge ordered the equipment removed from the court for the rest of the trial and indicated that there would be no legal action taken provided none of the twelve thousand feet of film was exhibited again so long as the case was being tried. As a result of motion pictures’ ability to sway emotions in the Lindbergh case—both in the performances they encouraged within the courtroom and in the reactions they could manipulate outside the courtroom—cameras were banned from virtually every trial in America for the next sixty years.

When the defense took a final stab at implicating Morrow and Lindbergh servants in the crime, Lindbergh informed the prosecution that he wished to retake the stand in their defense. Wilentz felt further testimony on the subject was unnecessary, especially as he had what he considered a more dramatic final witness. On Saturday, February 9, 1935, he called Elizabeth Morrow to the stand. There was little information Anne’s mother could supply; but her presence in court provided a gracious finale to the pageant. Anne accompanied her to court and found the day more harrowing than when she had testified, for this time she allowed herself to observe the surrounding hysteria. With Betty Morrow’s appearance, Wilentz had only to mention “the late Senator” to remind the jury how New Jersey’s first family had suffered.

The trial took its toll on the Lindberghs. Anne was as distraught as ever, but Charles would not allow her to express as much in his presence. Having to put on her best face for her husband as well as the public rendered her “completely frustrated,” boxed in and climbing walls. She rambled about the grounds depressed, miserable except for the time she spent with Jon. She but pecked at her book. Only to her diary, she felt, could she express her feelings. “I must not talk. I must not cry…. I must not dream,” she wrote on January 20, 1935. “I must control my mind—I must control my body—I must control my emotions—I must finish the book—I must put up an appearance, at least, of calm for C.” At night, she shrank into a corner of their bed, “trying not to cry … not to wake C., trying not to toss or turn, trying to be like a stone, heavy and still and rigid, except for my tears.” Other diary entries from that year were even more morose, so dark that Charles later urged her to burn them. Persuaded that their immolation would help eradicate her pain, she did.

Meantime, Charles continued to focus completely on the case, still bottling all his anguish. Although he thought he never revealed as much, he was as grief-stricken as his wife. Having been his family’s emotional pillar since adolescence, he nonetheless needed somebody to lean on and felt unable to express such human frailty. His sorrow and self-pity surfaced in the form of anger. Because Anne was closest to him, it was inevitable that she would become the ultimate victim of his distress.

Early in the morning of Monday, February eleventh, Charles snapped. Before leaving for the start of summations in court, he lost his temper and dumped years of frustration on his wife. He told Anne she had been living too much within herself and was controlled by her feelings. He showed no mercy for her fragile state of mind; in fact, he chastised her for not using her mind, for neglecting work on her book. He called her a “failure,” then left for Flemington. For one of the few times in her life, Anne found solace from her mother.

“Talk to Mother, and strength pouring into me,” is all Anne would impart to her diary that day. But Betty Morrow’s diary is more revealing. “Anne came into my room with tears in her eyes,” she wrote before citing her husband’s verbal abuse. “Oh! Mother,” Anne continued, “Elisabeth helped me so much with Charles.” For the first time Mrs. Morrow saw that “Charles isn’t capable of understanding her—the beauty of her soul and mind,” and that for years she had been forced to become two people, the person she was and the person Charles wanted her to be. “He loves her,” Mrs. Morrow realized, “but he wants to reform her—make her over into his own practical scientific mold. Poor Charles! What a condemnation of him!” Betty Morrow realized she must support Anne now more than she ever had. But she felt hampered, knowing she could not quarrel with her son-in-law—“no matter how stupid he is.”

Charles spent his thirtieth day in the Flemington courthouse, listening to the first round of summations. Anthony Hauck delivered a forty-five-minute “opening” of the State’s closing argument, ultimately reminding the jurors: “… we are not required to have a picture of this man coming down the ladder with the Lindbergh baby. But we have shown you conclusively, overwhelmingly, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Bruno Richard Hauptmann is guilty of the murder of Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr.”

Edward Reilly, in his old-fashioned black coat and striped trousers, began his summation by raising a Bible and quoting St. Matthew: “Judge not,” he said, “lest ye be judged.” Then in a deliberate (and slightly patronizing) manner, his hands often clasped behind his back, the New York lawyer asked the jury to rely on “horse-sense” and “motherly intuition,” not the testimony of hired “technicians and experts.” He wondered aloud how one man alone could have pulled off such a crime. Toward that end, he suggested a conspiracy, one which might have included any number of people, starting with the “disloyal” servants of the Morrows and Lindberghs. He implicated Violet Sharpe and Olly Whateley and Betty Gow. Then he suggested the complicity of Isidor Fisch, “Red” Johnson, and Dr. Condon. He moved on to accuse the police of doctoring and planting evidence—the attic board that fit too conveniently with the ladder rail, the board from Hauptmann’s closet with Dr. Condon’s address, the payroll record that indicated that Hauptmann did not work the day of the ransom payment. He stacked his handwriting and wood experts alongside the prosecution’s. He finally got around to challenging Charles Lindbergh himself, asserting:

Colonel, I say to you it is impossible that you, having lived for years in airplanes, with the hum of the motor in your ears for years, with the noise of the motor and the change of climatic conditions that you have lived under since you made your wonderful flight, to say with any degree of stability that you can ever remember the voice of a man two and a half or three years afterwards, a voice you never heard before …

“I feel sure in closing,” Reilly said, “even Colonel Lindbergh wouldn’t expect you and doesn’t expect you to do anything but your duty under the law and under the evidence.”

The next day, Attorney General Wilentz delivered a summation that United Press reporter Sidney Whipple said “made up in vituperation what it may have lacked in logical argument.” Over four and one-half hours, he pleaded with the jury to throw the book at Hauptmann, because since his apprehension, nothing “has come to the surface or light that has indicated anything but the guilt of this defendant … and no one else. Every avenue of evidence, every little thoroughfare that we traveled along, every one leads to the same door.”

Then he pelted Hauptmann with insults—calling him “a fellow that had ice water in his veins, not blood,” an “egomaniac who thought he was omnipotent,” a “secretive fellow … that wouldn’t tell anybody anything,” the “filthiest and vilest snake that ever crept through the grass,” an “animal … lower than the lowest form in the animal kingdom, Public Enemy Number One of this world.”

In response to the defense’s suggestions of police improprieties, the Attorney General asked Colonel Schwarzkopf to stand up. “Does he look like a crook?” Wilentz asked. “Does he deserve that sort of treatment for this burglar, this murderer, and convict?” Whipped up by his own frenzy, he even launched into a description of the killing of the baby that he had not mentioned before, one at complete variance with the murder he described six weeks earlier in his opening argument. Wilentz had originally stated that the baby died when the ladder broke. Now he suggested the baby was killed prior to that—“What else was the chisel there for? To knock that child into insensibility right there in that room.”

Wilentz spent most of the day effectively recapitulating the evidence. He said that a parade of living witnesses had come to testify against Hauptmann, while the defense conveniently blamed people who were dead. To accept their argument, Wilentz argued, one had to accept a “grave conspiracy.” Late in the day, he played his trump card: “Colonel Lindbergh’s identification of his voice,” Wilentz said plainly, “—if it is good enough for Colonel Lindbergh under oath, if Colonel Lindbergh says to you, ‘That is the man who murdered my child,’ men and women, that is good enough.”

The next morning, Judge Trenchard delivered a seventy-minute charge to the jury. Lindbergh lunched in town at attorney George Large’s house with Colonels Breckinridge and Schwarzkopf, then drove home to Englewood. Fortunately, the tension was lessened by another visit from Harold Nicolson.

After spending two months in England, Nicolson returned to Englewood that very morning to continue his research on Dwight Morrow. He spent the afternoon sipping sherry with Betty Morrow, Aubrey Morgan, and Anne Lindbergh. Shortly after Charles returned from Flemington, dinner was served. They turned on two radios as they sat, one in the pantry, the other in the drawing room. “Thus there were jazz and jokes while we had dinner and one ear strained the whole time for the announcer from the courthouse,” Nicolson would later write his wife. After dinner, Nicolson withdrew to the library, the Morrows and Lindberghs to another room.

Close to seven thousand people gathered around the Hunterdon County Courthouse, completely blocking Flemington’s Main Street. At 10:27, an assistant to the Sheriff was sent up the courthouse stairs to the belfry, where he tolled the bell. The crowd shouted for several minutes in anticipation of the verdict—chanting “Kill Hauptmann! Kill Hauptmann!”

At 10:31, Hauptmann was ushered in from his cell, manacled to a state trooper and accompanied by five other policemen. The jurors entered, none of them looking his way. It was not until 10:45 that Judge Trenchard returned to the bench, asking the jury, then the defendant, to rise. “Mr. Foreman, what say you?” the judge asked. “Do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty?” The foreman replied that they found him “guilty of murder in the first degree.”

Messenger boys bolted toward the door, but Judge Trenchard forbade anybody from leaving until the business of the court was done. The jury was polled, and at the court’s suggestion, Attorney General Wilentz moved for immediate sentencing. Looking at the convicted man through his hornrimmed glasses, Trenchard pronounced that he “suffer death at the time and place, and in the manner provided by law.” At 10:50, the condemned man was led out of the courtroom, his face “white as a death mask, his eyes sunken,” observed one reporter. Anna Hauptmann sat looking at the floor, not lifting her head until her husband had left the room—at which time she began to cry. A few minutes later, Hauptmann fell facedown on his cot and sobbed uncontrollably. By then word had reached the street, shouted from a second-story window by a messenger boy. The crowd roared.

Betty Morrow poked her head into the library at Next Day Hill to tell Harold Nicolson, “Hauptmann has been condemned to death without mercy.” By the time he joined the others around the radio in the drawing room, he could hear what Anne remembered as “the howling mob” over the radio. They sat in silence, listening to the newscaster declare, “You have now heard the verdict in the most famous trial in all history. Bruno Hauptmann now stands guilty of one of the foulest …” Anne at last spoke up and said, “Turn that off, Charles, turn that off.”

They all went to the pantry for ginger beer. Charles perched himself upon a countertop and began to speak to Nicolson about the trial. “There is no doubt at all that Hauptmann did the thing,” he said. “My one dread all these years has been that they would get hold of someone as a victim about whom I wasn’t sure. I am sure about this—quite sure.” Then he analyzed the case, point by point. “He pretended to address his remarks to me only,” Nicolson observed. “But I could see that he was really trying to ease the agonised tension through which Betty and Anne had passed. It was very well done. It made one feel that here was no personal desire for vengeance or justification; here was the solemn process of law inexorably and impersonally punishing a culprit.” They all went to bed, Charles commenting on his way out, “That was a lynching crowd.”

“The long trial at Flemington, the charge of the judge and the verdict of the jury established a crime,” wrote The New York Times the next day in its lead editorial, “but did not clear away a mystery.” Indeed, the newspaper suggested, part of the public fascination with the case was the daily hope that “either the evidence of the police or the admissions of Hauptmann would show precisely who the kidnapper was and what were his preparations and methods of operation.” Because of that lack of tangible proof, debate about the case has never stopped.

Because apparently nobody witnessed the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, some questions can never be answered with absolute certainty. Nobody will ever know who removed the baby from his crib. Even if Hauptmann’s guilt were a certainty, one will never know whether or not he acted alone, whether or not Fisch or others (what about the Italian-speaking voice in the background of one of the phone calls to Condon?) were involved, whether or not it was Hauptmann who climbed the ladder (or even used the ladder at all), whether or not the baby was killed accidentally or intentionally. But the weakness of the defense’s case and the strength of the prosecution’s left little room for a juror to vote other than he did. Even on the first ballot, they were unanimous as to Hauptmann’s guilt, disagreeing only about the penalty. Over another four ballots, the seven-to-five vote for the death penalty reached unanimity. As Ethel Stockton, the last of the jurors to die, said more than fifty years after the fact, “The evidence submitted to the jury was overwhelming …”

The power of Lindbergh’s testimony was undeniable. If he had expressed even the slightest uncertainty, the jury might have had reasonable doubts of their own. He had none. To the end of his life, on the rare occasions when he discussed the trial—either with family or a few intimate friends—he never wavered in his conviction.

In the sixty years since “The Lindbergh Case,” countless theories suggesting Hauptmann’s innocence have surfaced. There is room for such hypotheses because there was never any evidence placing Hauptmann on the Lindbergh property, either outside on the ladder or inside the baby’s bedroom. But even if several witnesses had been coerced or had convinced themselves that Hauptmann was guilty and worth perjuring themselves for, even if evidence had been faked or tampered with, even if law-enforcement agencies had botched their work, even if all the expert testimony from both sides nullifed each other, even if Richard Hauptmann had been a more sympathetic witness, more at ease with the English language and less a target for a hostile press corps, even if the Court had been biased against him—there remained a veritable mountain of undisputed evidence against him, a man so chronically secretive that his own wife declared she did not even know his first name was Bruno until the tabloids smeared it across their front pages.

“Few today deny that the trial was unfair,” wrote attorney and law professor Alan M. Dershowitz in 1988, “—not only by current standards, but by the far less rigorous standards of the 1930s. But many who acknowledge the trial’s unfairness insist that Hauptmann was plainly guilty.” Six points in the case allowed Lindbergh to sleep at night secure in the feeling that the sole offender had been brought to justice. Not only did five handwriting experts state there was no doubt that Hauptmann had written the ransom notes, but it appeared as much to the layman’s eye. There was no disputing that Arthur Koehler’s detective work had brought him to Hauptmann’s lumberyard in the Bronx more than a year before the carpenter had become a suspect. Hauptmann was never able to explain satisfactorily why Dr. Condon’s address and telephone number were written in his closet. Hauptmann had been throwing around great sums of Lindbergh ransom money at a time when he was barely earning a living. All of Hauptmann’s alibis appeared flimsy. And finally, Condon, the taxidriver Perrone, and Lindbergh himself all identified Hauptmann’s voice, which Lindbergh maintained was “a very strange voice,” and “unmistakable.”

In his closing remarks, Reilly had tried to put the fear of God into the jury. “Hang this man and cover up our sins,” he had said. “Hang him and ten years from now, after he is dead, have somebody on their deathbed just about to meet their Maker, turn over and say, ‘I want to make a confession, I was part of the Lindbergh gang,’ and then where is our conscience, where are our feelings when we have sent an innocent man to his death, and we think about the real culprit—he must be somewhere in the world. There must be two or three of them still alive, because no one man could do this.” And yet, the next sixty years brought forth not a single confession, not a shred of evidence or testimony connecting anybody but Bruno Richard Hauptmann to the crime.

“The trial is over. We must start our life again, try to build it securely—C. and Jon and I,” Anne wrote on Valentine Day, 1935. “I must start again, without Elisabeth, with my eyes open, without confusion or fooling myself, honestly and patiently, keeping clear what matters. Charles and a home and Jon—and work.”

A “MOST ASTOUNDING LETTER” from Smith College the next week, offering Anne an honorary Master of Arts degree, lifted her spirits. She was reluctant to accept, thinking Smith ought to reward “people who have done things in their own rights, on their own responsibilities—women who have held a career by themselves.” But her proud husband insisted she accept it.

With resolve that had eluded her for months, Anne returned to her writing. Ever since her article in National Geographic, publishers had been inviting her to submit books to them. One was Harcourt, Brace, with whom Harold Nicolson had been working. At the end of April 1935, she met with Alfred Harcourt and explained that she felt the time had come for a professional editor to read her first full-length manuscript, North to the Orient. Charles copy-edited each page before Anne sent it off. A few days later, Harcourttelephoned to say, “I would take it if it were written by Jane Smith. It’s a good story, it’s moving, it’s well constructed, and parts of it border on poetry.” His acceptance was one of the most satisfying moments in her life. When Charles learned the news that evening, he “beamed with pride” … and subsequently placed an advance order for nine hundred copies.

The manuscript required minimal editing and was scheduled for publication that summer. Advance word was so positive that rumors spread that the book must have been ghost-written. Fifteen thousand copies were in the bookstores on publication day, August fifteenth. Within four months, Harcourt, Brace had 185,000 copies of the book in print, making it the number-one nonfiction bestseller of 1935. Its success encouraged her to reread her diaries of the trip to Greenland, Europe, and Africa and to make notes for a second book.

The spring and summer of 1935 proved at least as productive for Charles, and as rewarding. He returned to his laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute and his medical experiments with Dr. Carrel. Out of the public eye, Lindbergh had designed in late 1934 a pump “by which a pulsatile circulation of nutrient fluid, properly oxygenated, could be maintained through an organ.” Using Lindbergh’s machine, Dr. Carrel performed surgeries that showed that circulation, even in such vital organs as the kidneys, could be interrupted for as long as two hours without causing permanent damage. However, despite rigorous standards and conditions, bacterial infection still invaded the apparatus and the organs.

In the spring of 1935, Lindbergh perfected his invention, designing a new type of organ chamber. It was an intricate modern sculpture of glass—bulbs and tubes that vaguely resembled a saxophone fused on top of a wine bottle. On April 5, 1935—using the Lindbergh Pump—a whole organ was successfully cultivated in vitro for the first time. Dr. Carrel bled an etherized cat to death, removed its thyroid gland, and placed it in the organ chamber. It was perfused for eighteen days, permitting for the first time an entire organ to live outside of the body. The idea dating at least as far back as 1812—when French physiologist Le Gallois wrote of “artificially circulating a fluid through an organ”—had, thanks to the Lindbergh Pump, at last been realized.

Over the next two months, Carrel and Lindbergh performed more than two dozen experiments with the pump. They tested spleens, ovaries, kidneys, and hearts. In almost all instances, they succeeded in keeping them fully viable and free of infection. This work brought two new medical facts to light: cultivated organs remain alive; and their structure and functions vary according to the composition of the perfusing liquids.

“A new era has opened,” Carrel declared. “Physiology and medicine have acquired … a powerful tool for the investigation of the intricate relations between organs and blood … Now anatomy is capable of apprehending bodily structures in the fulness of their reality, of understanding how the organs form the organism, and how the organism grows, ages, heals its wounds, resists disease and adapts itself with marvelous ease to changing environment.” The ramifications of these experiments were endless, extending into the worlds of pathology, physiology, and anatomy. Organs affected with malignant tumors, for example, could be studied while being kept alive although separated from the human body. The effects of different perfusing solutions could be evaluated. Faulty organs might be removed from the body and repaired, to be replanted. Perhaps a similar pump could keep an entire body alive while organs from another body—perhaps even artificial organs—could be implanted!

“Not one of the 22 great medical scientists who are members of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in Manhattan has a reputation with the man-in-the-street equal to that of a minor volunteer worker at the Institute named Charles Augustus Lindbergh,” wrote Time in the late summer of 1935. “Lindbergh is considered … exclusively as a flyer,” Dr. Carrel said in the article, “… but he is much more than that. He is a great savant. Men who achieve such things are capable of accomplishments in all domains.” These new accomplishments, of course, drew even more publicity, giving the media a new angle on the nation’s top-drawing headliner. Reporters staked out the Rockefeller Institute as well as Next Day Hill; and it became nearly impossible for Lindbergh to walk the streets anywhere in between.

Lindbergh was sorry the public had been made aware of his only refuge, but he was pleased that Dr. Carrel was at last receiving what Lindbergh considered his due. Later in the year, Carrel published an American edition of Man, the Unknown, a subjective discourse on the human body and soul, full of scientific fact and metaphysical opinions. For the first time, the public at large got a sense of the controversial thoughts long kept confined to the select few who came in contact with him. No doubt because of his close association with Lindbergh, the book became an immediate success that year alongside Anne’s. By the following year, his book had bumped North to the Orient off the top of the charts, becoming the nonfiction bestseller of 1936.

Having decided to put New Jersey behind him, Lindbergh spent much of the summer in the air, trying to find his bearings and a new place to settle. Poulticing their bruised marriage, he took Anne twice to Little Falls, which was not much different from when he lived there, except for the sign on the water tower that bragged, “Charles A. Lindbergh’s home town welcomes you.” He took Anne around his farm and house, which sat abandoned on what had become public parkland. He introduced her to old friends, neighbors, and relatives, including his half-sister Eva, with whom he had not spoken in years. It was a cautious meeting, devoid of bitterness. A visit with Charles’s mother in Detroit elicited a flood of memories, though he saw no reason ever to live there. They also went to Long Island several times, where Lindbergh momentarily considered Harry Guggenheim’s offer to sell some of his land at Port Washington.

That August, while the Lindberghs were in North Haven, Henry Breckinridge’s office wired that Will Rogers had been killed, along with pilot Wiley Post, when their seaplane crashed on takeoff from a lagoon near Point Barrow, Alaska. Charles was on the telephone all day—“suddenly electrified into steely usefulness,” noted Anne. For the next three days, he pulled every string necessary to transport Rogers’s body from Alaska to Los Angeles for burial at Forest Lawn—all according to the widow’s wishes. “OF ALL THE LOVING KINDNESS SHOWN MOTHER THE WONDERFUL THING YOU DID HAS BEEN HER GREATEST COMFORT,” wired Rogers’s son Bill. The press could not resist mentioning Lindbergh in all the obituaries, linking the nation’s two greatest folk heroes.

Lindbergh remained part of the nation’s daily conversation even when he was not generating the news, as stories related to the trial continued to consume the public. Hauptmann’s fractured defense team began the appeals process; an exhausted Edward Reilly was taken to a hospital in a strait-jacket, suffering from a “breakdown”; Jafsie took to the vaudeville circuit; and Mrs. Hauptmann went on the stump, giving speeches to raise money for her husband’s defense, for which she hired Lloyd Fisher. His appeal contested 193 points in the original trial. The Flemington jury announced that they were writing a book, each juror contributing a chapter; Hauptmann wrote a brief autobiography, but the prison in Flemington would not allow him to release it while the Appeals Court was considering his case. Lloyd Fisher’s investigators claimed to have found a child on Long Island who was “the Lindbergh Baby.”

On October 9, 1935, the New Jersey Court of Errors and Appeals unanimously upheld the lower court’s first-degree murder conviction, thus adding to the controversy about the fate of Richard Hauptmann. The arguments raged all the way into the office of Governor Harold G. Hoffman. A detective named Ellis Parker aroused the thirty-nine-year-old governor’s interest enough to get him to call upon Hauptmann. While getting no answers about the crime, the secret meeting did raise enough new questions for Hoffman to investigate further. Word of the meeting leaked, and the New York Daily News announced, “LINDBERGH CASE REOPENED.” In early December the Daily Mirror began publishing installments of “HAUPTMANN’S OWN STORY!” While Hauptmann’s attorneys prepared their brief for the New Jersey Court of Pardons, Hauptmann wrote a personal letter to Hoffman, pleading his innocence and his willingness to take either a lie detector test or a truth serum. (The handwriting in both this and subsequent Hauptmann letters for mercy displayed similarities to the Lindbergh ransom notes.) Judge Trenchard set the date for Hauptmann’s execution—January 17, 1936.

Supporters for Hauptmann rallied—some opposed to the death penalty in general, others believing Hauptmann received an unfair trial. (“There are millions of people all over the world waiting for you to come forward and save this man that you condemned with your erring words,” an anonymous resident of Port Chester, New York, wrote Charles Lindbergh. “Well Lindy,” wrote another anonymous New Yorker, “… here is hoping when you and your China-faced wife go up in a plane you will both come down in flames.”) Lindbergh became a target for a whole new set of irrational assailants. He received scores of letters that threatened the life of his second son. According to Lindbergh’s count, Post Office authorities arrested fourteen people in connection with them.

Even though Next Day Hill was fenced and a night watchman had been hired to make rounds, Lindbergh heard a shout from outside one night, while he was sitting in an upstairs bedroom. He opened the window and looked down upon the pasty face of a babbling mental patient, whom the police came to arrest. Another night, the Lindberghs were returning from Manhattan to Englewood when a car tried to force them into an alley. Lindbergh quickly braked, then sharply turned left, while the other car shot ahead. Local and state police assisted the Lindberghs in these offenses as much as they could, he later wrote, “but alarming incidents still occurred.”

Jon was attending The Little School in Englewood (the innovative nursery school Elisabeth Morrow Morgan had started and on whose board Charles sat). One morning, a teacher called Anne to tell her a “suspicious-looking truck,” covered with canvas, was parked outside the schoolyard. When the children were called in from recess, the truck left. State troopers found the truck a few miles away—full of newspaper photographers, who had snapped pictures of Jon Lindbergh through slits in the canvas. “No arrests were made,” Lindbergh noted, “because no clear violation of the law existed, and the press was so powerful politically that police authorities had to proceed cautiously. The arrest of a photographer or reporter invariably brought claims that freedom of the press was being suppressed.”

Then one day late that fall, while one of Jon’s teachers was driving him home from school, another car full of men sped up, forcing them into the curb. The terrified teacher clutched Jon, who began to cry. A man jumped out of the car and rushed toward them, thrusting a camera in the boy’s face. It was not the first such incident. Lindbergh kept his son from returning to school and hired a retired detective with a sawed-off shotgun to shadow the boy.

That latest incursion by the media, Charles wrote his mother, was “trivial in comparison to the whole situation.” There were no laws to protect him from the American press; and fighting back would only enhance his family’s visibility, making them even more vulnerable to the ongoing kidnapping threats. On top of that, he felt a number of New Jersey officials had taken to using the Hauptmann case for political gain—specifically Governor Hoffman, who seemed to be considering clemency for Hauptmann and was eager to remove Colonel Schwarzkopf from his post. Lindbergh could no longer concentrate on his work; and leaving his family behind while he was on business trips had become unthinkable. “Between the politician, the tabloid press, and the criminal,” he wrote his mother in mid-December, “a condition exists which is intolerable for us.”

Lindbergh secretly prepared to move his family away. On December seventh, Charles told Anne to ready herself and Jon to live abroad for the entire winter, if not longer—on twenty-four-hours’ notice. Over the next fortnight he quietly obtained passports in Washington and completed travel plans to England, because he believed “the English have greater regard for law and order in their own land than the people of any other nation in the world.” Dr. Carrel gave him a letter of introduction to an eminent surgeon there, who could open doors to England’s medical community. Aubrey Morgan sailed ahead on a fast boat, so that he could meet them when they arrived and take them to his home in Wales. And on December nineteenth, Lindbergh placed a call to Deak Lyman in the city room at The New York Times. He invited the reporter to Englewood, to discuss a matter too confidential for the telephone.

At Next Day Hill, Lindbergh revealed that he was taking his family to England because of the threats against their lives. He had no intention of changing his citizenship, he asserted, merely his residence. Lyman recognized the gravity of this story and asked why Lindbergh had not called any number of other respectable journalists. Lindbergh explained that he wanted the story to be “as dignified and accurate as possible” and that the Times had given him the most cooperation during the difficult past few years. He offered Lyman this exclusive, complete with details of his flight from America, on the condition that the Times hold the story until the Lindberghs’ ship was twenty-four hours at sea. The reporter agreed.

On Saturday, December 21, 1935, Lindbergh called Lyman to say his ship was sailing at midnight. Later that evening, when the reporter was sure the paper had been put to bed, he revealed his scoop to the city editor. The editor wanted to run the story immediately, but Lyman got him to accept the terms to which he had agreed with Lindbergh.

At 10:30 P.M. that Saturday night, Charles, Anne, and Jon said good-bye to Grandma Bee, Constance Morrow, and the staff at Next Day Hill and got into the chauffeured limousine. Accompanied only by Anne’s new secretary, Margaret Bartlett “Monte” Millar, they rode in silence to a mostly deserted dock at West Twentieth Street in Manhattan, their ghostly faces flashing in and out of the dark under the streetlamps. Not even the crew of the American Importer knew the identity of its only passengers as the Lindberghs marched in absolute silence up the gangplank and down the corridors of the forward deck to their rooms.

Monte Millar shook hands with the Lindberghs and left them to settle into their home for the next ten days. As she disembarked, she could not help thinking, “There was something holy about it all …” Not for several more hours, during which Anne lay awake listening to the noise of other ships, did the American Importer set sail.

Deak Lyman remained in the city room until he learned that the ship had departed. He returned the next day to write his story. The only man who could explain why the nation’s hero felt compelled to leave his homeland, Lyman wrote that the threats against Lindbergh since his flight to Paris had severely escalated over the years. His story omitted only the specifics of the Lindberghs’ “flight” plan. Lyman’s pages were handled with the utmost secrecy, bypassing copyboys as they went directly to the paper’s most trustworthy typesetter. It was later reported that no outgoing telephone calls from the Times had been permitted while the story was going to press.

The Lindberghs had enjoyed their first day at sea—sitting on the sunny deck and taking their meals in their cabin—when the Monday issue of The New York Times hit the streets.

LINDBERGH FAMILY SAILS FOR ENGLAND

TO SEEK A SAFE, SECLUDED RESIDENCE;

THREATS ON SON’S LIFE FORCE DECISION

read the front-page, four-column headline that crowned Deak Lyman’s description of the Lindberghs’ passage. “The letters are coming once more, the demands for money, the threats of kidnapping and murder,” concluded the eloquent 1,750-word article, which would win Lyman the Pulitzer Prize; “and so the man who eight years ago was hailed as an international hero and a good-will ambassador between the peoples of the world is taking his wife and son to establish, if he can, a secure haven for them in a foreign land.”