The Kidnap Years: David Stout (best inspirational books TXT) 📖

white-faced as Koehler explained how he had matched some boards in the ladder—those that had been used before, as shown by nail holes—with the boards in Hauptmann’s attic and how the nail holes perfectly matched the holes in the attic joists.

The witness said the chisel found on the ground near the Lindberghs’ home was from Hauptmann’s own tools—and was the only tool missing from the set.

Just as damningly, he testified that an examination of Hauptmann’s hand plane (a carpentry tool used to smooth edges on wood and to shave boards down to near-exact size) showed that it had been used to shave a board on the ladder.

“Have you the plane and will you give us a demonstration?” Wilentz asked.167

“Yes,” Koehler said. “I employ a very simple method that I learned as a youngster. I used to put a piece of paper over a coin and rub a pencil back and forth over the paper and get an impression of the coin on the paper.”

He explained that he could get the same kind of impression by putting a piece of paper on a board that had been planed, thus revealing the marks left by that particular tool.

Then Koehler asked the judge if he could set up a vise on his bench to demonstrate. The judge gave permission, whereupon Koehler used Hauptmann’s plane to shave the side of a board, put a piece of paper on the planed surface, and rubbed it with a pencil—and obtained an impression that matched the hand plane marks on a section of the kidnapper’s ladder.

The defense had tried early on to discredit Koehler’s testimony, questioning at the start whether there was even such a thing as “a wood expert,” as lawyer Frederick Pope put it. But clearly there was. His name was Arthur Koehler, and he proved to be unshakable on cross-examination. He had the science on his side. Not only that, but he was the son of a carpenter and was an accomplished carpenter himself.

Shrewdly, Wilentz had managed to place sixty-year-old Liscom Case on the jury. Case could appreciate and understand Koehler’s testimony better than his fellow jurors, as he was a retired carpenter.

Taking the stand in his own defense, Hauptmann said that on the night of the kidnapping, he and his wife were drinking coffee in the Bronx bakery where she worked and where he often picked her up to take her home. And the night the ransom was paid, he said, he and his wife were entertaining friends.

But the defense was unable to produce witnesses who could testify with absolute certainty that Hauptmann was where he claimed to have been on those nights.

On cross-examination, Wilentz ripped into the defendant, forcing him to acknowledge his record of burglary and robbery in Germany, his escape from jail in his native country, and his illegal entry into the United States. The prosecutor brought up a particularly ugly crime from the defendant’s past, when Hauptmann and another man robbed two women who were wheeling baby carriages.

“Everybody wheels baby carriages!” Hauptmann replied, heatedly and illogically.168

“‘Everybody wheels baby carriages,’” Wilentz repeated scathingly. “And you and this man held up these two women wheeling baby carriages, didn’t you?”

The defense objected, and the judge ruled that the fact of the defendant’s conviction in Germany had been well established. But Hauptmann’s temper display and his odd response—“Everybody wheels baby carriages!”—had surely discredited him in the eyes of the jurors.

As for the big stash of money found where Hauptmann lived (money that he had claimed must have been left there by his deceased friend and business associate Isidor Fisch), the defendant claimed it was his habit to squirrel away money rather than deposit it all in banks. But this explanation didn’t quite square with his claims, never substantiated, that he was sophisticated enough to have made money with good investments.

Wilentz’s cross-examination went on for many hours. The prosecutor got the defendant to acknowledge contradictions, even outright lies, contained in his earlier testimony during a hearing to have him extradited from New York to New Jersey. And Wilentz induced the defendant to sputter and display hostility several times.

But in the end, it may have been a few indisputable facts that doomed Bruno Hauptmann. Money from the Lindbergh ransom had been found on his premises and in his pockets. John Condon’s address and phone number were written on a closet door in his apartment. And the ladder used to build the wood had been traced to him, thanks to the solid science and endless persistence of Arthur Koehler, the man who loved trees.

We can be fairly certain that Dr. Dudley Shoenfeld, a pioneer in what would come to be called criminal profiling, followed the trial. Surely, he took some satisfaction in reading that the defendant had behaved as he had predicted: arrogant and seemingly confident, at least at first, that he could talk his way out of anything, no matter how ludicrous he sounded, no matter how much the truth was against him.

“The lowest and vilest type of man,” Wilentz branded Hauptmann during the prosecution’s closing statement on Wednesday, February 13, 1935. “An animal” and “a cold-blooded child murderer” who deserved to be put to death.169

Wilentz added a late element to his case: the hypothesis that Hauptmann had struck the baby on the head with his chisel as he lay in the crib, thereby stunning him into silence as he was being spirited through the window. Perhaps the prosecutor was trying to extinguish any lingering doubt among the jurors that a kidnapper could have climbed into the nursery and taken the baby without causing him to cry out. Or was he trying to excise any sympathy the jurors might have felt if they thought Hauptmann had killed the child accidentally?

Shortly before noon, the jury began deliberating.

In a quaint small-town custom, a 125-year-old bell in the courthouse was rung to signal the community that a jury had reached a verdict. The bell tolled at 11:28 p.m. the night of February 13, 1935. The