Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (43 page)

Meanwhile, at the trial, a wood technologist Arthur Koehler, of the U.S. Forestry Service, testified that the wood used for the ladder could be traced to a lumberyard in the northeast Bronx, where Hauptmann had worked. The ladder was linked to Hauptmann in four ways: the place where the wood was purchased; an incomplete sketch of a ladder and a dowel pin in one of his private notebooks; the distinctive tool marks made by Hauptmann’s chisel and plane; and a section of the ladder that matched the floor planks in Hauptmann’s attic. As he listened to the expert’s testimony, Hauptmann, noted a journalist, looked as if the life had been sucked out of him. “His muscular frame sagged in his chair between his guards, and his pale face was whiter than ever.”
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Hauptmann went back to his cell to scan photocopies of his bank
and brokerage accounts. Even though four people, who claimed to have been eyewitnesses to the exchange of money and ransom notes, had identified him during the first week of testimony, Hauptmann believed he could prove his innocence by accounting for the money in his possession at the time of the arrest. He attributed his assets of $44,500 to stock investments and to his investments with his business partner, Isidor Fisch. He had already testified that Fisch, shortly before his departure for Germany and subsequent death, had left a package with Hauptmann for safekeeping. Hauptmann had put it on the shelf of his broom closet.
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But it had since been proven that Fisch died homeless and penniless. Between 1932 and 1933, Fisch had made few deposits in his bank, none for more than $700. The Internal Revenue Service had evidence that Hauptmann had only $303.90 at the time of the crime, and that, though his total assets amounted to less than $5000 before April 2—the day of the ransom exchange—he had spent $15,000 in the subsequent two and a half years.
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Frustrated by Reilly’s inconsistent and halfhearted efforts, Hauptmann took the stand in his own defense on January 24, three weeks into the trial.
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Reilly tried to portray Hauptmann as a steady wage-earner and family man, living modestly, saving money, and enjoying the small pleasures of camping, playing cards, and making music with his friends. Dressed like a gentleman, in a gray suit, a light-blue shirt, and a dark blue tie, Hauptmann answered Reilly’s questions in halting English. Together they established Hauptmann’s alibis for the night of the kidnapping and the time of the ransom exchange, and reconstructed his relationship with Isidor Fisch. When Wilentz took over, he shot rapid-fire questions at the witness, attempting to expose the inconsistencies in his testimony.
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Hauptmann leaned forward, with a level stare, and responded in tempo to Wilentz’s fire. Yet despite his effort at self-control, Hauptmann, unaware of his own inconsistencies, permitted Wilentz to establish a pattern of criminality, secrecy, hoarding money, and telling lies. Realizing that he was losing the game, but determined to maintain
the battle of wills, Hauptmann taunted Wilentz with smiles, sometimes laughing aloud at the prosecutor’s attempts to entrap him. On the second day, though, Wilentz began to break him down.

“This is funny to you, isn’t it?” asked Wilentz. “… You think you’re a big shot, don’t you? … Yes. You are the man who has the willpower … Willpower is everything with you, isn’t it?”

“No. Should I cry?” countered Hauptmann. “… I know I am innocent.”

But when Wilentz accused him of lying in the face of God, Hauptmann pointed a finger at Wilentz and shouted, “Stop that! … Stop that!”
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No one could have fabricated a better story: the heroic Lindbergh couple, sweethearts of the world, victims of a brilliant and satanic mind bent on their destruction. That very day, millions read Hauptmann’s testimony. The recording and the transmission of thousands of words a day was seen as a journalistic feat, meeting the demand of a voracious public. The
Times
called Hauptmann’s self-defense nothing less than thrilling, a real-life masterpiece surpassing the best in fiction.
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Meanwhile, Judge Trenchard struggled to keep the crowds under control. More than a hundred “witnesses” were subpoenaed daily. Often, they turned out to be friends of the defense attorneys. No longer would the summonses be honored, the judge said. Using the prerogatives of New Jersey law, patterned on the British, Trenchard anguished over every nuance and detail, angering some and gleaming the admiration of others. Ford Maddox Ford, hired by the
New York Times
for his observations, noted that every one of the judge’s statements “strikes you as the only thing that could be possibly said—by justice that is at once supremely impartial and benevolent … The whole assembly has an air of a family gathering.”
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Anna Hauptmann gathered her strength to help her husband. She had moved with her baby to a friend’s house in Flemington so that she could see him every day. As direct as her husband was evasive, as trusting as he was cautious, Anna declared his innocence with a shrill wail that seemed the very stuff of tragedy. But Anna’s love for him took an
ironic twist when she finally testified on his behalf. After establishing herself as a careful housewife, she could not explain why she hadn’t seen on her closet shelf, for a year and a half, the box filled with thousands of dollars in gold notes. Try as she might to wash her husband clean, she succeeded only in tainting his testimony.
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Determined to get away from home, Anne disguised herself in bangs and dark brown glasses and went to dine with Margot Loines in the city. Margot was an oasis; along with her sister Con, Margot was among the few in whom Anne could confide. She shared with her the thoughts and impressions, even the contents of the cherished notebook in which she daily recorded snippets of prose and poetry to console and inspire herself.

Most often, she quoted the
Duino Elegies
of Rainer Maria Rilke, which captured her feelings of abandonment and spiritual alienation. One needn’t go farther than the first lines of Rilke’s
First Elegy
to see why Anne heard her voice in his words:

If only she could learn to understand the voices of man, God, and nature, she might know what she needed to do, she told Margot.

On February 9, five weeks into the trial, Anne sneaked into the courtroom through the back door to avoid the camera and the crowds. It was her mother’s turn to testify, and she had promised to be there. It was, she wrote, far worse than the day she testified. She had more time to think and feel and observe the ugly haggling over detail. “How incredible,” she wrote, “that my baby had any connection with this!”
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To Anne, the courthouse was little more than a child’s toy stage set, the kind she had played with as a girl.

Three days later, the testimony completed, the lawyers vied for the jury’s trust. Banging his fists and pointing his fingers, Reilly summarized the case for the defense much as he had laid it out at the beginning:
the unconfirmed character of the servants; the lost evidence at the scene of the crime; the mishandling of the ladder by police and press; the dog that never barked; the possible substitution of the attic plank; the money Hauptmann received from Fisch; and Hauptmann’s alibis for the night of the kidnapping and the time of the ransom exchange. Reilly warned the jury, “Judge not lest you be judged.”
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The next day, Wilentz summarized the case for the prosecution. Talking to the jury as if they were his living room guests, Wilentz cited the established evidence:
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Lindbergh’s gold certificates in the joists of Hauptmann’s garage; the tracing of the ladder’s wood to Hauptmann’s attic and lumberyard; the fieldglasses; the maps; the sketches; the ransom note stationery; the IRS records that documented Hauptmann’s finances before and after the crime; the implausibility of Fisch’s role; the failure to incriminate the Lindbergh or Morrow servants. Exhausted, Wilentz made a personal and emotional plea for justice. Calling Hauptmann “un-American,” and emphasizing his “animal quality,” Wilentz demanded a conviction without mercy. “I know how difficult it is to believe that one person committed this crime,” he said, “[but] that is not important, because if fifty people did it, if Hauptmann was one of them, that would be all there was to it … All the evidence leads to Hauptmann, only to Hauptmann.”
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Judge Trenchard addressed the jurors with concluding remarks as trenchant as if the weight of civilized society hung on their decision. He pleaded with them to question all the evidence, to leave no facet unexamined, and to remember that the defendant was presumed innocent unless he was proved otherwise, beyond a reasonable doubt:

He reminded them that the charge was “murder committed in the course of a burglary,” and although it was a charge of the first degree, the court could recommend a sentence of mercy: life imprisonment at hard labor.

Anne wrote in her diary, “Judge Trenchard’s summation is cool, dignified, wise, and infinitely removed from petty human suffering and yet relevant, just, and true to life.”
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As the jury deliberated, Anne, Charles, Con, and Betty, along with Harold Nicolson and Aubrey Morgan, sat down to dinner in the Morrow dining room. The wireless radio blasting from the pantry and the drawing room was so loud that jazz and jokes resounded through the house. Charles punctuated the dinner conversation with wild sneezes, the only ungoverned gesture in an otherwise remarkable show of manners and restraint. With dinner over and no verdict yet announced, they retired to the drawing room, noticeably upset. Betty, who conducted the evening as if she were a young teacher just out of Smith, insisted that they hold “a family council” about the “proper illustration” for Nicolson’s book. Obediently, everyone complied, grateful for the diversion to get them through the evening.

It was past eleven when the jury, after ten hours of deliberation, reached a verdict. The crowds at the courthouse roared as the official radio announcement was made: Hauptmann was guilty—condemned to death, without mercy.

“A-tishoo! A-tishoo! from Lindbergh,” Nicolson wrote home. “They were all sitting round—Con with embroidery, Anne looking very white and still.”

Before she slept, Anne noted in her diary that it had been as bad as the first night at Hopewell.
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The howl of the crowds echoed the howl of the wind that whipped around their house the night the baby was taken. Again, man and nature seemed to confirm the evil that killed her child.

Hauptmann, it was observed, was “a broken man.” For the first time, he lost control, “sobbing wildly” alone in his cell.
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Anne, too, felt broken—like “a broken pot.”
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