Lynched in court
Phillip Knightley Scapegoat: The Truth About the Lindbergh Kidnapping Anthony Scaduto (Secker and Warburg 26.50)
On 3 April 1936, guards at Trenton State Prison, New Jersey, strapped Bruno Richard Hauptmann into the electric chair and covered his face with a mask to hide the contortions of death. The exeCutioner, Robert Elliott, turned a wheel. There was a sudden creaking of straps and several wisps of smoke. A reporter, one of seventy witnesses, shouted, 'It's terrible' and turned away. Seconds later, Hauptmann was pronounced dead, executed for the kidnapping and murder, four years earlier, of Charles, the two-year-old child of Colonel Lindbergh, America's national hero.
Hauptmann's execution was the climax to an almost psychic-religious cleansing that American society inflicted on itself as punishment for the Lindbergh tragedy. As Adele St Johns, reporter for the Hearst press, wrote after Hauptmann had been sentenced, 'The jury didn't only say Put To Death. What they really said was Keep Your Hands Off Our Children. Leave Our Children ALONE. Keep The Bloody Hands of Crime Off Our Babies. This is what we Jell you now. You Can Never Get Away With It. We will always send you to Die in the Chair if you touch our children.'
These are sentiments which many parents would support, although in less hysterical terms, even today. But what the author of this engrossing book argues is that so great became America's desire to punish someone for the Lindbergh affair that in the end it was not particularly concerned whether that someone could be proven guilty; that Hauptmann became the fall guy, the scapegoat, and that everyone from the police to the State Attorney-General joined the rush to send him to the chair on perjured and suppressed evidence.
These are serious charges but Mr Scaduto has convinced me that most of them are true and that, on the evidence presented at his trial, Hauptmann was, at the most, guilty of extortion, and more than likely not guilty of anything except a pathetic and misplaced trust in the working of America's legal system and its ability to get at the truth.
Charles Lindbergh Jnr was taken from his nursery on the second floor of the Lindbergh house on the night of 1 March 1932. A misspelt note left on the window-sill demanded S50,000 ransom. From the moment the story broke—`Little Lindy Kidnapped'—the American public, stimulated by the wilder sections of the press, went into a long paroxysm of excitement and, occasionally, hysteria. Everyone wanted to help (a feeling which explains why later it was so easy to convict Hauptmann) and there was a rush of volunteers to be the go-between in the negotiations with the kidnappers. One, Dr J. F. Condon, had two meetings with a man he called 'John' and paid over the 850,000 on Lindbergh's behalf only to discover that the baby was not where John said it would be.
Then on 12 May, nearly six weeks after the kidnapping, a truck driver found a small naked corpse in the woods not far from the Lindbergh house. It had a fractured skull. Colonel Lindbergh quickly and positively identified it as his son. The police inquiry now became one of murder and, as the months passed with no progress, they became desperate. Their best hope was a list of serial numbers of every note paid as the ransom money, including the distinctive 'gold notes' bearing gold seals. But it was not until September, 1934 that the list pro-. duced a real lead. A filling-station attendant jotted down the licence plate number of a car driven by a man who had tendered a 810 gold note in payment for petrol. The car belonged to Hauptmann, a German immigrant carpenter, married, with a year-old son. He had had a series of convictions in Germany, before stowing away to the United States, for burglary and highway robbery. The New Jersey State police arrested him on 19 September, and his trial for the murder of Charles A. Lindbergh Jnr began on 2 January 1935.
Everything was stacked against Hauptmann. The police, who had been smarting under criticism that they had got nowhere in the two and a half years since the kidnapping, were convinced that Hauptmann was guilty, and had no compunction in suppressing any evidence that suggested otherwise. They destroyed his alibi for the day of the kidnapping-that he was at work—by withholding and tampering with his employer's timesheets; they withheld from Hauptmann's defence team his ledger book which would have supported his story that his business partner, by then dead, had given him the gold notes; and they almost certainly faked the main item of physical evidence: a piece of wood from the ladder used to reach the nursery window matched the space left by a piece sawn from Hauptmann's attic floor, (As Hauptmann said after his convic tion : he was a carpenter, he had all the wood he would have needed in his garage, or could have bought it at a timber yard; would a 'master criminal,' as the prosecution called him, have sawn up his own floorboard to make the ladder?)
This excessive police zeal infected witnesses. Dr Condon, who had paid the ransom to 'John,' but had not seen his face, at first was adamant Hauptmann's voice was nothing like John's. But then he changed his evidence and swore that they were identical. Witnesses who testified to having seen Hauptmann near the Lindbergh house around the time of the kidnapping, turned out to include one man who had changed his original story (that he had seen no one) because the police promised him part of the reward, and another who was nearly blind and could not even identify a vase of flowers at ten feet. They joined a long line of 'expert' witnesses who, as the author writes, 'believed that they were acting justly, morally---with God on their side—in twisting truth to make more perfect the case against the man they believed was guilty.' The adversary system mitigated against Hauptmann in court because the prosecutor, David Wilentz, was an up-and-coming attorney-general with political ambitions whose career would be greatly helped by a conviction. The defence was led by Edward J. Reilly, once a leading criminal lawyer hat by then a drunkard, hired and paid in advance by William Randolph Hearst, who believed Hauptmann guilty, in return for exclusive material from Mrs Hauptmann. (She had no option: the police had seized ail Hauptmann's money and assets.) The author skilfully establishes all the basic unfairness of a cross-examination where the witnesses are weak and bew ered, like Hauptmann and his wife, and the lawyer is so overpowering and self-confident, like Wilentz, that he can demand yes or no answers. 'You can't explain,' Mrs Haupt" mann said later. 'They murdered Richard in the electric chair because the court wouldn t let us explain.' All the while, those railroading Hauatmann expected that their manoeuvres would finally be justified when Hauptmann, realising that the electric chair was just down the corridor, would break and confess to save his life. Hauptmann defeated them. Despite. very tempting offers from both Wilentz and the State Governor to commute the death sentence if he would confess Hauptmair. insisted on his innocence until the end, an° went bravely and with dignity to his death: This left a lot of Americans feeling cheated and some feeling guilty. Could Hauptmann after all have been innocent ? This was an unbearable prospect. A midwestern Judge,: speaking for many, wrote, 'Is it not mdc" better that this man, who, after all, is an alien, should die, even if there were sortie doubt as to his guilt or innocence, than that
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there should be a reflection cast
American courts ?' The author is conviaceu that this is what happened, and most readers of this disturbing book will agree with bull'
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