Comments from Sir Ludovic Kennedy

The Unjust Trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann

by Sir Ludovic Kennedy

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Not for another two-and-half years, in September 1934, did a breakthrough come. Some of the marked ransom bills were found circulating in the Bronx, one of which was traced to Richard Hauptmann, who lived there with his wife and baby son, Manfred. Although there was not a scrap of evidence to connect Hauptmann with the kidnapping or murder of the Lindbergh baby, police, press and people all over the country jumped to conclusions. 'Lindbergh kidnapper jailed,' said the front-page banner headline of the New York Daily News… "Latterly Hauptmann had joined up with a business partner, Isidor Fisch. Hauptmann did not know that Fisch was a crook who had persuaded many of their German immigrant friends to invest in a nonexistent pie company. According to his friend Henry Uhlig, he was also in the habit of buying 'hot' money at discount from other crooks... "Hauptmann forgot about the box until five months later, when it became dislodged from where he had put it and split open, revealing $14,000 in marked Lindbergh ransom money. He did not tell Anna of his find because she, more honest than he, would have insisted he inform Fisch's family. So - and this was his fatal mistake - he hid it in cavities in his garage and, as Fisch owed him about $7,000, helped himself to smaller bills for use as petty cash. This was Hauptmann's story, discreditable but believable, yet which Schwarzkopf and Wilentz chose not to believe. Having deluded themselves into thinking Hauptmann was both kidnapper and murderer, they had to find evidence to get him extradited to New Jersey. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Lucida Sans"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; color:#000040;background:white;mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold"> <img border="0" src="authorization.jpg" width="800" height="300"> <span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Lucida Sans"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; color:#000040;background:white;mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold"> <span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Times New Roman; mso-bidi-font-family: Times New Roman; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; background-position: 0% 50%"> "But there was no evidence he had ever been to New Jersey. A confession would have helped, and they beat him up to obtain one, but he had nothing to confess. So they set about inventing evidence. A dirt-poor hillbilly and congenital liar named Millard Whited, who lived near Hopewell, had been asked by police on the day after the kidnapping if he had seen anybody suspicious in the vicinity. He said he hadn't. Now one of Schwarzkopf's men paid a visit, mentioned a $150 fee, $35 a day expenses and a share of the reward money, if only he would think again. He did think again, was taken to the Bronx and shown a photograph of Hauptmann, whom he then identified as a man he had seen twice coming out of the bushes near Hopewell two and a half years before. "More falsities followed. Two handwriting experts had at first said that Hauptmann didn't write the ransom notes, then that he might have done, then after discovery of the money in his garage, and leaned on heavily by Schwarzkopf, that he definitely did. Handwriting experts for the defence strenuously contested this. "But the most shameful piece of evidence came from Lindbergh. In the District Attorney's office in the Bronx he had listened to Hauptmann shouting in different voices 'Hey, Doc!' or 'Hey, Doctor!' and initally said he couldn't swear if that was the voice he had heard in the cemetery. Then Schwarzkopf leaned on him, too, told him there was no doubt Hauptmann was one of the gang [note that, "gang"]; and in court Lindbergh stated categorically that the voice which had uttered two words in the cemetery more than two years earlier was Hauptmann's - a claim the New York Law Journal rightly found incredible. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Times New Roman; mso-bidi-font-family: Times New Roman; background-color: white; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; background-position: 0%"> <img border="0" src="nightshirt.jpg" align="right" width="480" height="554"> <span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Times New Roman; mso-bidi-font-family: Times New Roman; color: #000040; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; background-position: 0%"> "From that moment Hauptmann was doomed. There was no end to the lies. A taxi driver who had delivered a ransom note to Dr. Condon and who had stated he would never be able to identify the man who gave it to him, now unequivocally declared it was Hauptmann. Dr. Condon, warned by the police that, if he did not testify that it was to Hauptmann that he handed the ransom money, he would be indicted as an accessory, obligingly did so. And the police got an 87-year-old, half-blind Prussian war veteran to say that he had seen Hauptmann near Hopewell driving a car with a ladder in it on the day of the kidnapping, although he had never mentioned it to his daughter and son-in-law, a retired policeman, with whom he was staying. "Yet the most ludicrous piece of fabricated evidence came from a detective and wood expert who, in order to connect Hauptmann directly to the kidnapping, said that one of the rails of the kidnap ladder had come from Hauptmann landlord's attic flooring. The court was solemnly asked to believe that, while Hauptmann might have fashioned the rest of the ladder from the timber he kept in his garage or obtained from the timber yard a block away, he had climbed up the cleats of the linen cupboard to force open the trapdoor to the attic, there to chop up a piece of planking that didn't belong to him, and include it in the ladder. "That such a preposterous suggestion should have been made at all was less evidence of guilt than of a climate in which people had become so mesmerised they were prepared to believe almost anything. In fact, there was no need for any of these lies, for Hauptmann had a perfect alibi on the day of the kidnapping. He was working as a carpenter at an apartment block in Manhattan. Both Wilentz and the Bronx DA admitted to being shown the timesheets and payroll records confirming this and then, seeing the whole case against Hauptmann beginning to slide from under them, ordered these records to be handed for safe keeping to the New York City police. From that day to this they have never been seen again." <a name="National Review, Sept 6, 1985 v37 p51(2)."> National Review, Sept 6, 1985 v37 p51(2)  </a>                                                                                  Title:  <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140258124/qid=1081497538/sr=11-1/ref=sr_11_1/002-0689743-2851257">The Airman and the Carpenter.</a>_(book reviews)    Author:  Jeffrey Hart                                                                                                                                                             The Airman and the Carpenter WAS IT THE 1932 kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in Hopewell, New Jersey, that made holding a child for ransom a trademark crime of the 1930s? Maybe so. My own parents, as I look back on the period, seem to have been obsessively concerned with the possibility of a kidnapping. When a nursemaid unexpectedly wheeled my carriage around the block, and I was "missing' for a few minutes, the roof fell in on the nursemaid. When I reported, a few years later, that a man with an Irish setter had chatted with third-graders in the schoolyard, the roof fell in again, and the schoolyard looked like a police convention. All of this might indeed have flowed from the Lindbergh kidnapping. But there may be more to it than that. Why were the 1930s the great age of child movie stars--Shirley, Freddie, Mickey, Dickie, and all the rest? Tender Is the Night reflects to some historical point on that question. Or, perhaps, kidnapping, along with bank robbery, appealed to Depression-conditioned have-nots as a way of striking directly at wealth. At any rate, for those born, like Ludovic Kennedy, around 1930 the Hauptmann trial remains a distant but compelling memory. Five years old at the time, I remember Gabriel Heatter's excited radio reports from the trial scene in Trenton, broadcasts that elevated Heatter to stardom, paving the way for him to become one of the great radio voices of World War II ("And the sky over England is not in Hitler's hands tonight'). By the time of the trial just about everyone believed Hauptmann was guilty. The jury convicted him, and he went expeditiously to the chair. But was he guilty? The answer seems to be almost certainly not. The problems here are of the greatest interest, psychologically and historically. The Hauptmann case is not one of those boring ideological matters in which the Left struggles to show that some convicted killer or Soviet spy was framed. The Hauptmann case is not ideological but mythic in its meaning, involving a man who, since his 1927 flight to Paris, had been a colossal public hero, the supreme individual, who was in fact a genuinely admirable person, and up against him an immigrant carpenter perceived as a man of the masses who had struck from the social depths at the god and his offspring. Hero and villain were easy to identify. What is more, behind the trial loomed the figure of Hitler: Hauptmann was known as Richard to his wife and all of his friends, but the prosecutors and the press used the more German-sounding "Bruno.' Almost a decade ago, the investigative reporter Anthony Scaduto published a book on the case called Scapegoat in which he argued strongly for Hauptmann's innocence. The book attracted some attention but did not force a serious reassessment of the famous case. Because Ludovic Kennedy's book is less anti-establishment in its tone it may well succeed in doing that, and certainly deserves to. The most damaging evidence against Hauptmann was his possession of the Lindbergh ransom money: He was apprehended when he tried to pass one of the bills. His own account of how he came into possession of the money invited skepticism. It had been given to him for safekeeping, he maintained, by a shadowy character named Isidor Fisch, who, by the time of the trial, had died in Germany. Hauptmann had been involved in business transactions with Fisch, who, in turn, almost certainly had criminal contacts. But, apart from that, the state's case against Hauptmann goes up in smoke. The state police, as is evident from photographs of the pertinent time sheets, tampered with evidence that showed Hauptmann to have been on the job as a carpenter many miles from Hopewell on the day of the kidnapping. The authorities came up with a local deadbeat and notorious liar who testified that he had seen Hauptmann in Hopewell; the witness had been bribed. Handwriting evidence was faked by the police. A newspaper reporter, in search of a big scoop, himself wrote an incriminating phone number on the wall of Hauptmann's Bronx property. The claim that the lumber for the ladder used in the kidnapping came from a board at the Hauptmann property was entirely bogus, and the ladder itself could hardly have been the artifact of a professional carpenter. All accounts of the trial agree that Hauptmann was sent to the chair by the testimony of Colonel Lindbergh himself, whose very presence in the courtroom was overwhelming. Lindbergh claimed that he had heard a voice speak three words from a block away in the cemetery when the ransom money was passed, and he affirmed that the voice was Hauptmann's. Ludovic Kennedy does not go into the subsequent extensive legal discussion of the evidentiary value of that testimony, but the virtually unanimous opinion of scholars is that it should have been thrown out. In my own judgment, Lindbergh--whose honesty cannot be questioned--had been persuaded that Hauptmann was the killer, was determined that he would not escape punishment, and believed sincerely in his impossible voice identification. The governor of New Jersey, though full of doubts about Hauptmann's guilt, did not have the legal power to set aside the verdict or the sentence, and Hauptmann himself went to his death affirming his innocence. My belief is that the kidnapping was the work of a gang of some sort. It is possible that this group had something to do with Isidor Fisch, but we probably will never know. Everyone-- the Lindbergh family, the New Jersey politicians, and the state police--wanted a solution to the outrageous murder of the hero's son, and the likelihood is that, to use Scaduto's language, they found a "scapegoat.' For much of the trial Hauptmann seems to have regarded the case against him as so flimsy that he could not take it seriously. Hauptmann's widow, Anna, and his son Manfred are living and would like to see him vindicated. Lindbergh's widow, Anne, who cooperated with Mr. Kennedy, is open-minded about the case. Please visit :  <IMG SRC="Bullet1.gif" width="13" height="13">  <a href="http://www.lindberghkidnappinghoax.com/board"> Lindbergh Kidnapping Hoax  Forum</a> <IMG SRC="Bullet1.gif" width="13" height="13"> Ronelle Delmont's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAdm57FE5JzRGLGak12jv8Q">  Lindbergh Kidnapping Hoax  You Tube Channel</a>  ronelle@LindberghKidnappingHoax.com <IMG SRC="Bullet1.gif" width="13" height="13"> <a href="http://lindberghkidnap.proboards.com/">Michael Melsky's  Lindbergh Kidnapping Discussion Board</a> © Copyright Lindbergh Kidnapping Hoax 1998 - 2020  <script type='text/javascript' src='https://count.carrierzone.com/app/count_server/count.js'></script> <script type='text/javascript'> </script>  </body> </html>