The Statehouse in Trenton, on this cold, rainy March morning (and on any other), was an ungainly affair squatting on a stretch of landscape between State Street and the Delaware River. The three-and-a-half-story wedding-cake structure seemed designed to confirm the rest of the nation’s suspicions that New Jersey was innately second-rate; entry was via a ponderous two-tier porch supported by midget granite columns.
I stalked the main corridor, shaking rain off my hat, my trenchcoat leaving a damp trail. As I walked I glanced at the stern faded portraits of early New Jersey patriots and statesmen, and got dirty looks in return. I moved through the cramped rotunda, festively decorated by musty, faded regimental flags from the Civil War, and found my way to the upper two floors, a gloomy maze where bureaucrats wandered aimlessly.
Somehow I managed to find the executive offices, where a male secretary took my coat and hat and showed me in to see Governor Hoffman.
The governor was on the phone, but he smiled broadly and gestured me to an overstuffed chair opposite his massive mahogany desk, which was stacked with documents and manila folders. He was a stocky, cheerful-looking man of perhaps forty, with a round, handsome face; his blue suit and blue-and-gray tie looked crisp and neat, and so did he.
Hoffman was the youngest governor in the states, and had been sworn into office the day the Hauptmann trial began; a career politician, he was a Republican who won in a year of Democratic landslide.
“I’m glad you’ve arrived safely,” he was saying, not to me, smiling at the phone. “Come right over. Yes, he’s just arrived.”
The office was a sumptuous, dark-wood chamber with an enormous Oriental carpet, and a fireplace in which flames were quietly licking logs. A big, warm room, slightly cooled by formal, forbidding oil portraits of unknown past Jersey dignitaries, it nonetheless had the unlived-in, transitory feeling of the elective official’s office. The huge, yellow globe near the desk seemed never to have been spun; the leather-bound books shelved behind the governor seemed never to have been cracked open; the flags-American at left, state at right-slumped on poles, never to be unfurled. The wooden filing cabinet, about ten feet away, seemed there only to provide a resting place for a silver loving cup of flowers.
“That was an old friend of yours,” the governor said with a smile, as he hung up, offering no further explanation. He stood and extended his hand, and I stood and extended mine; our grips were suitably masculine and firm. We sat back down.
“I’m delighted you’ve come, Mr. Heller,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “You’re just the man for this job.”
“What job is that, exactly?”
He twitched a smile, eyes twinkling; there was an endearing pixielike quality about him, a streak of unexpected mischief.
Then his expression turned solemn. “Mr. Heller, I’ve employed several other private detectives, and we’ve come up with a good deal of evidence…unfortunately, none of it compelling enough to get Richard Hauptmann a new trial. Nor am I in a position to grant him a pardon, or commute his sentence to a prison term.”
“Oh?”
He shook his head. “I’m only one member of the Court of Pardons. In New Jersey the governor has no authority to commute a capital sentence. And I can’t issue another reprieve unless you come up with something so startling that my Democratic Attorney General can’t ignore it.”
“Wilentz, you mean.”
“That’s right. We’re old school pals, Dave and me. You met him, didn’t you?”
“Briefly. I saw him in action at the trial. I was only there one day, but it was an eyeful. Slick operator.”
He nodded, reaching for a humidor on his desk. “He is, at that. Care for a cigar?”
“No thanks.”
He lit his up; a big fine fat Havana. “Funny thing is, Dave is anti-capital punishment. Me, I have no compunction about showing a murderer the door to hell.”
Yes, I was back in the Lindbergh Case, aboard the Melodrama Express.
“Why,” I asked, “does the State of New Jersey need private investigators?”
“I’m surprised you’d ask that, Mr. Heller, considering that once upon a time you had considerable contact with our State Police, specifically Colonel Norman Schwarzkopf.”
I shrugged, nodded.
He narrowed his eyes, staring at me forcefully. “You see, I went to the death house, Mr. Heller, to see Bruno Richard Hauptmann…I’d heard he wished an ‘audience’ with me, and, rather on the sly, I granted him one, thinking, I admit, that I might hear a confession. Instead, I heard a quietly indignant man, a man of considerable dignity and intelligence, who raised a good number of questions that I had to agree needed answering.”
“Ah,” I said, smiling, suddenly making a connection. “So you went to the head of the State Police to find out the answers to those questions.”
“Precisely. And our mutual friend Colonel Schwarzkopf ignored my executive order to reopen the investigation, sending me monthly, token notes to the effect that there were no new developments. When I granted Hauptmann the thirty-day reprieve, I began hiring my own investigators, and essentially ‘fired’ Schwarzkopf from the Lindbergh case. There is, as you might imagine, no love lost between us.”
“Was Hauptmann himself the reason you got involved in this?” I asked, knowing the governor had been accused of playing politics. “Was he that convincing a jailhouse lawyer?”
“He was convincing, all right. But there were other factors. I believe you’ve met New Jersey’s answer to Sherlock Holmes-Ellis Parker?”
I nodded. “At Lindbergh’s estate, in the early days.”
“Parker’s been conducting his own investigation,” Hoffman said, “although I haven’t been privy to any results as yet. He’s one of the people I want you to look up, in fact; he’s playing his cards a little too close to his vest, for my money.”
“The old boy’s a showboat,” I said. “But don’t be fooled by the hick veneer.”
“Oh, I’m not. And I take his opinion quite seriously. He thinks Hauptmann is innocent, or at least no more than a minor figure, who is taking the fall for the real kidnappers.”
“Have you considered the possibility that the ‘Cemetery John’ extortion group may never have had the child?”
He nodded vigorously, exhaling smoke, gesturing with the cigar. “Yes, and consider this, Mr. Heller-Ellis Parker insists that the baby found in that shallow grave in the Sourlands woods was not Charles Lindbergh, Jr.”
“Well, I understand Slim Lindbergh’s identification of the body was pretty perfunctory.”
“Perfunctory! Are you aware that the body was examined, in the morgue, by…let me find it.” He shuffled through some of the many documents and folders on his desk; quickly centered on the correct one and read, with rather a triumphant flourish, “The child’s own pediatrician, Dr. Phillip Van Ingen, examined the remains. The undertaker reported Dr. Van Ingen as saying, and this is a quote: ‘If you were to lay ten million dollars on a table and tell me it was mine, if I could say positively that this was the Colonel’s son, I couldn’t honestly identify this skeleton.’”
“Skeleton? I knew the body was decayed, but I understood the facial features were intact….”
“Haven’t you ever seen what the ‘body’ looked like?”
I shook my head, no.
He plucked a glossy photo from a folder. “They couldn’t even verify the sex,” he said, and handed the photo to me.
“Jesus,” I said.
It was just a tiny black pile of bones; you could make out a skull, more or less, and a rib or two; the left leg was missing.
My mouth felt suddenly dry. “I heard that the child was identified by its toes overlapping in some distinctive way…”
“Well, there’s only one foot there to check at all,” Hoffman said. “But Dr. Van Ingen’s examination of the child, on February eighteenth, ten days before the kidnapping, reported both its little toes were turned in, overlapping the next toe. The corpse, what there was of it, had overlapping toes as well-but it was the large toe, overlapping the second toe.”
“It’s hard to tell even that,” 1 said, and handed the damn photo back to him.
“One fact is indisputable-the physician at the mortuary measured the body and found it to be thirty-three and one-third inches long. Van Ingen’s measurement on February eighteenth was twenty-nine inches.”
“Some of that could be attributed to growth of bones after death,” I said, thinking it through. “But hell-not four and a half inches…”
“Of course this all points up one of the major blunders of the trial,” Hoffman said.
I nodded. “You mean, Hauptmann’s defense counsel stipulating that the corpse found at Mt. Rose was Charles Lindbergh, Jr.”
It had gotten a lot of play in the press. Wilentz had been questioning the woman in charge of St. Michael’s Orphanage, located less than a mile from where the little corpse had been found; Wilentz wanted to dispute the notion that the body in the woods might have been one of the orphanage’s charges.
But Reilly interrupted the proceedings almost immediately, saying, “We have never made any claim that this was other than Colonel Lindbergh’s child.”
Even the prosecution was stunned by this preposterous bungle. There was no logical reason for Reilly to have handed Wilentz the corpus delicti on a silver platter like that. Reportedly, co-counsel Fisher-long Hauptmann’s most staunch supporter-had stood up, shouted to Reilly, “You’re conceding our client to the electric chair,” and bolted out.
“Who the hell hired Reilly, anyway?” I asked.
“Hearst.” The Governor said this with a quiet, ironic smile.
“Hearst! Good God, the Hearst papers crucified Hauptmann! Hearst is an old Lindbergh crony, for Christ’s sake…”
“Well,” Hoffman said, with a small shrug, playing devil’s advocate, “Reilly was, at one time, a top trial attorney. You know, he got a lot of the big prohibition gangsters off, in his day.”
I sat up. “Oh, really. Like who?”
Hoffman shrugged. “One of his more notorious clients, I suppose, was Frankie Yale.”
Until his demise in 1927, Frankie Yale had been Al Capone’s man on the East Coat. Capone had, in ’27, bumped Yale and replaced him with one Paul Ricca.
Could Reilly have been in Capone’s pocket? Had the red-nosed shyster thrown the case?
“You know, Mr. Heller,” Hoffman said, “there are those in this state who believe I’ve gotten into this thing for my own glory, my own gain…considering the fact that I’m receiving death threats, that my home and my wife and three little girls are under twenty-four-hour guard accordingly, and that the press is demanding my impeachment, I doubt I’ve made a ‘good political move,’ in ‘siding with’ Hauptmann.”
“What are you after, Governor?”
His cheerful mask collapsed. “Look-all I’m after is the truth. The people of this state are entitled to it, and Hauptmann has a right to live if he didn’t murder the Lindbergh baby. This was a shocking crime-and, in the interest of society, it must be completely solved.”
“You’ve let this thing get to you, Governor. You’ve let it touch you. That’s dangerous.”
With a thumb over his shoulder, he gestured at the state flag. “Mr. Heller, as Governor of this state, I have a duty to perform.”
“No politician ever got rich doing his duty.”
He flinched at that; it was barely perceptible, but it was there. He said, “I haven’t expressed an opinion on the guilt or innocence of Hauptmann. But I share, with hundreds of thousands of people, doubts about the value of the evidence that placed him in the Lindbergh nursery the night of the crime.”
“I’m not all that familiar with the evidence.”
“Well, I’m going to make you familiar with it. But you are familiar with the role that passion and prejudice played in convicting a man that the newspapers had already convicted.” He patted the folders on his desk. “I doubt the truthfulness, and the competency, of some of the state’s chief witnesses. And I doubt that this crime could have been committed by any one man. Schwarzkopf and the rest, maybe even Charles Lindbergh himself, want this one man’s death so that the books can be closed, and the pretense can be made that another great crime has been successfully solved.”
I merely nodded.
He smiled, embarrassed, suddenly. “I guess I’m too much of a politician to resist climbing up on a soapbox-even when I’m sitting down. Let me fill you in on these ‘witnesses.’…”
Turning to his folders and documents and some notes, Hoffman went down the motley group one by one.
“Let’s start with the remarkable Mr. Amandus Hochmuth,” Hoffman said, and I of course recognized that as the name of the Sourlands geezer who claimed Hauptmann had “glared” at him from a car the day of the kidnapping. “First of all, Hochmuth waited until two months after Hauptmann’s arrest to come forward. Second of all, a friendly state trooper sent me a report of an interview conducted with Hochmuth shortly after the kidnapping, when Hochmuth said he’d seen nobody suspicious in the vicinity. Here….”
“What’s this?” I asked, as the governor handed across a document.
“A photostat of Hochmuth’s 1932 welfare report,” Hoffman said. “Look at the line on ‘health status.’”
“Tartly blind,’” I read. “‘Failing eyesight due to cataracts.’ He puts the eye in eyewitness, all right.” The photostat revealed him also to be Client #14106 in the Division of Old Age Security, Department of Welfare, New York City. “This thing gives his address as the Bronx!”
“A false address,” Hoffman said matter-of-factly, “so he could collect public funds from New York, while living in New Jersey.”
“Well, times are hard.”
“I invited Mr. Hochmuth up to my office, not long ago and, because it was at my expense I’m sure, he accommodated me. He sat where you’re sitting, Mr. Heller.” Hoffman pointed to the filing cabinet with the silver cup brimming with flowers. “I asked him to identify that.”
“Did he?”
“Certainly. He identified it as a picture-a picture of a woman.”
I laughed.
“Because of reactions similar to yours, from myself, an aide and a criminologist present,” Hoffman said, “Mr. Hochmuth realized he’d guessed wrong. So he tried again-and identified that eighteen-inch-tall silver cup, filled with flowers, as a woman’s hat.”
“He never did get it right?”
“His third try was closest: a bowl of fruit.”
“Well, law of averages. At least it didn’t glare at him.”
He sorted some more. “And now we come to Millard Whited, a Sourlands hillbilly who claimed he saw Hauptmann prowling near the Lindbergh estate. Mr. Whited, it seems, is on the one hand impoverished, and on the other, a liar; so say his neighbors, at any rate.”
“Wasn’t it Whited’s testimony that got Hauptmann extradited from New York to here?”
Hoffman nodded. “Whited was brought to the Bronx courthouse to make an eyewitness identification, which he did. But I have in my possession…” He patted the stack of documents before him. “…statements Whited gave the State Police within two months of the crime that he hadn’t seen any suspicious persons in the vicinity of the Lindbergh estate. So I invited Mr. Whited-at my expense-for a visit.”
“Did he think your loving cup was a hat?”
“No. But he did admit he’d received a one-hundred-fifty-dollar fee, thirty-five dollars’ expenses per diem and a promise of a share of the reward money. Particularly interesting, considering on the witness stand at Flemington, he denied receiving anything but dinner money.”
“That thirty-five bucks per diem jibes with what I got paid for coming out.” Apparently I wasn’t important enough to get a fee, though.
“The other eyewitnesses are similarly suspect. The cab driver, Perrone, it turns out positively identified several other suspects as ‘John,’ before Hauptmann’s arrest. The traveling salesman, Rossiter, who claimed he saw Hauptmann changing a tire near Princeton, three days before the kidnapping, is a known embezzler and thief. The movie-theater cashier, Mrs. Barr, sold tickets to over fifteen hundred people on the night of November twenty-sixth, 1933, but could pick Hauptmann out, a year later, as a man who gave her a folded five-dollar bill that turned out to be one of the ransom bills. Never mind that November twenty-sixth is Hauptmann’s birthday, and that on that night he and his wife and friends were at home celebrating.”
“Quite an array, these witnesses.”
“Yes, but we mustn’t forget the celebrity. The man who made a positive eyewitness identification of Hauptmann based upon two words he heard spoken a block away-four years before.”
Charles A. Lindbergh.
“And then of course,” he continued, flicking cigar ash into a silver ashtray, “there’s Jafsie. That wonderful American-who when I reopened this investigation, and announced that I wanted to question him, promptly left on an extended vacation to Panama.”
I had to laugh. “Is he still gone?”
“Actually, he’s supposed to have returned today. And he is one of the people I want you to go around and question.”
“All right, but only because you’re paying me. Last I heard, old Jafsie was hitting the vaudeville circuit, with a Lindbergh lecture.”
“Well,” Hoffman said, “I can tell you one thing he didn’t lecture about: the period when he was the chief suspect in the case. I have an affidavit declaring that after Condon initially failed to identify Hauptmann as John at the Greenwich Street Police Station in the Bronx…and he was adamant about not identifying Hauptmann, there…Jafsie was intimidated and threatened by the police.”
“I’d be surprised if he wasn’t.”
“That was New York. Two Jersey state troopers have indicated to me that Condon was threatened by Schwarzkopf and his bullyboy Welch with an indictment for obstructing justice…which is what they got Commodore Curtis on, you may recall…if the old boy didn’t recant and identify Hauptmann as ‘Cemetery John.’”
“No wonder Jafsie changed his tune.”
“He was quoted by a trooper as saying, ‘I would not like to be indicted in New Jersey, for they would choke you for a cherry in New Jersey.’”
I laughed at that. “One of Jafsie’s few intentionally humorous remarks,” I said. “Sure, I’ll talk to him. Who else do you want me to see?”
“Well, among others, check in with Gaston Means.”
“Means! Isn’t he in Leavenworth?”
“That’s his official federal residence. Right now he’s under observation at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C. For what he himself refers to as ‘high brain blood pressure.’ At the same time, he’s been bombarding my office with confessions; claims he’s the one who engineered the kidnapping.”
I sighed. “It’s a waste of time, but I’ll talk to him.”
“I know. But these hoaxers all seem to have some element of truth, or near-truth, in their stories.”
“That’s how a good con is mounted, Governor. So let me guess the next name on your list: Commodore John Hughes Curtis.”
“Not necessarily next, but yes, do check in with him. You do realize, Mr. Heller, that the State of New Jersey convicted Curtis on an obstructing-justice charge, on the assumption he’d had contact with the actual kidnap gang?”
“He got off with a fine and a suspended sentence, didn’t he?”
“Yes, but my point is, in the same courtroom as the Hauptmann trial, one of the same prosecutors, and the same judge, convicted Curtis-why? Because, they said, he’d dealt with six persons who had kidnapped the Lindbergh baby; that by not letting the state troopers in on his actions, Curtis had prevented the apprehension of the kidnappers.”
“So the Garden State is having it both ways: a kidnap gang, to convict Curtis; a lone-wolf kidnapper, to convict Hauptmann.”
“Exactly. And it doesn’t wash with me. There’s more, there’s so much more….” He went riffling through the papers: he began rattling off the injustices.
A copy of a physical examination by Dr. Thurston H. Dexter on September 25, 1934, a few days after Hauptmann’s arrest, showed that the prisoner had been “subjected recently to a severe beating, all or mostly with blunt instruments.”
Work records at the Majestic Apartments, where Hauptmann claimed he was working during the period of the kidnapping, had been tampered with and in some cases stolen or suppressed.
A statement from fingerprint expert Erasmus Hudson, who found five-hundred-some prints on the kidnap ladder, none of them Hauptmann’s, and said that Inspector Welch had asked him if it were possible to fake a fingerprint. (Hudson had said no, much to Welch’s obvious disappointment.)
Judge Trenchard denying Hauptmann’s request for a lie-detector test.
And there was new evidence, too: handwriting expert Samuel Small demonstrated that Hauptmann wrote in the Palmer-Zaner system and not the vertical roundhand system of the ransom notes. In his affidavit, Small wrote: “It isn’t a question of if Hauptmarm wrote those letters. It is a question whether he could have written them. I tell you that if you went to the prison and said to Hauptmann, ‘I will let you free if you can write a single sentence the way it is written in the ransom letters,’ Hauptmann would have to stay in prison the rest of his life.”
Of course, I knew-like just about any cop who’d been in and around the court system in major criminal cases-that handwriting experts, like alienists, were typical, “expert” testimony. Both sides had theirs. Bought and paid.
“You realize, don’t you,” Hoffman said, “that the state spent more money on its handwriting experts alone than was spent on the entire Hauptmann defense.”
“Even with Hearst footing part of the bill?”
“Even then. It cost over a million dollars to put Hauptmann on death row…but right now I don’t have a single dollar of state funds available to try to get him off death row.”
“Excuse me?” I didn’t like the sound of this.
“Mr. Heller, I staked the investigators I mentioned on my own-on small sums that barely covered their expenses, out of my own meager resources.”
“Governor, no offense-but the terms we discussed on the phone, those aren’t negotiable.”
“I’m not the one paying your fee, Mr. Heller.”
“You’re not?”
“No. I mentioned an old friend of yours…just a moment.” The intercom on his desk was buzzing. A garbled voice spoke to the governor, and he said, “Fine. Send her in.” He looked up at me with his ready smile; he put out his cigar. “The party who recommended you is paying for your services.”
The door opened behind me and a small handsome woman in a black dress and a black fur and a black hat with a black veil entered; jewelry glittered amidst the somber apparel. Perpetually in mourning for who knows what, Evalyn Walsh McLean entered the room, and reentered my life.
“Governor,” she said, smiling sadly, extending him her black-gloved hand; he rose behind the desk and took it, briefly. She turned to me. Behind the veil her eyes seemed tragic and delighted. “Nathan. It’s wonderful to see you.”
“Likewise, Mrs. McLean,” I said, taking her hand briefly. I gave her my chair and got myself a new one. I was suddenly nervous.
“Mrs. McLean has never lost her interest in the Lindbergh case,” the governor said.
“The official solution of this case,” she said, regally, “is not satisfactory. There are loose ends to be gathered up. And I felt Nathan Heller was just the man to do the gathering.”
She looked older, of course, but fine; her figure remained slender, busty, her face gaining character with the years without losing beauty.
“Mrs. McLean has rented the Hauptmann apartment,” Hoffman said. “So you can have a look around there. We’ve already had a criminologist in, and a wood expert, to have a look in the attic.”
The prosecution’s star witness was a wood expert named Koehler-who’d been about to testify the day I was at the trial, but got stalled by the defense.
“It struck me as ridiculous,” Evalyn said, “that a man who supposedly was so brilliant, so clever a master criminal that he could engineer the kidnapping of the century all alone, would also be so stupid as to fashion a single rail of the kidnap ladder from a floorboard in his own attic.”
“Actually,” I said, “what’s really ridiculous is the notion he’d need the lumber. Hauptmann was a carpenter. He had something of a workshop in his garage, didn’t he? There must’ve been scrap lumber all over hell.”
“And a lumberyard nearby,” Hoffman added, nodding.
“In any event, he wouldn’t have left the ladder behind,” I said. “Not a carpenter who fashioned it himself-particularly if one rail were a board from his own house. That evidence was as planted as the tree it came from.”
“So said our criminologist and a wood technician from the WPA,” Hoffman said, rather proudly. “The ladder rail was a sixteenth of an inch thicker than the attic boards. Also, the nail holes weren’t deep enough to accommodate eightpenny nails that came from the attic floor.”
“That ladder,” Evalyn said bitterly, “was what Prosecutor Wilentz pledged to ‘hang around Hauptmann’s neck.’”
“And he did,” Hoffman said. “The question is, Mr. Heller, can you give us something as major as that ladder-only favorable, and not fabricated? Something that no one, no matter how biased, could deny?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t have very long, do I?”
“The end of the month.” He shrugged. “Fourteen days.”
“Hell,” I said, with blatantly phony optimism, “maybe Ellis Parker is right, and the kid’s still alive. Maybe I can track the boy down and sit him right there on your desk, and he can have an ice-cream cone while you phone his folks.”
Hoffman smiled at that, but sadly.
“We’ve tried everything,” Evalyn said, shaking her head, sighing. “I even hired the top defense attorney in the country, but it didn’t work out.”
“Who was that?” I asked.
“Why, Sam Leibowitz, of course,” she said. “But the approach Sam took was disastrous.”
Sam Leibowitz!
“How so?” I asked.
Hoffman sighed. “He was convinced Hauptmann was guilty. The few times he visited Hauptmann, he tried to badger a confession out of him. Felt if he could convince Hauptmann to name his accomplices, then Hauptmann’s life would be spared.”
“And how did Hauptmann react?”
“With his usual quiet indignation,” Hoffman said. “He did not crack-and Leibowitz was off the case as quickly as he came on.”
“Don’t you know,” I asked Evalyn, “who Leibowitz is?”
“Certainly,” she said stiffly, defensively. “He’s the best damn trial attorney in the country.” Then studying me, she melted and said, “Why, Nathan? What do you mean?”
I looked at Hoffman. “You told me about Reilly. Now I’ll tell you about Leibowitz: he’s a mob attorney, too. Anyway, he made his mark defending guys like ‘Mad Dog’ Coll and a certain well-known Chicago figure with a scarred face.”
“He defended Al Capone?” Evalyn asked breathlessly.
“Yes. On a triple murder charge. And got him off.”
“I’m sure Sam Leibowitz…” Hoffman began.
But I said: “I’ll tell you one thing about this case, which I learned many years ago-you can’t be sure about anything. Now. Where do I start?”
The governor shrugged. “Where I did, I guess. With Hauptmann. See for yourself. Talk to Hauptmann.”