All the News Unfit to Print

MOST OF THE OFFENSES IN THE PRECEDING PAGES, WHETHER pranks, misdemeanors, or felonies; whether motivated by squeamishness or egotism or fear of failure; whether they led to major repercussions or minor turbulence, were perpetrated by an individual reporter or a single news organization. There are few examples of journalists conspiring to tell a lie, and according to the verdict of a jury in Flemington, New Jersey, they did not do so in the case that will now be presented.

But that the press had made up its mind about the truth of this case before the truth was officially known is certain. That the press had ganged up on a poor German carpenter in the most unscrupulous of ways because it believed he was a liar is certain. That the press had no right to make a decision about whether the man was lying is certain. That the press acted unethically and even illegally in promoting the man’s guilt is even more certain.

His guilt was in fact established by a jury of his peers, and he was put to death for his crime. Recent forensic evidence indicates that the jury was correct. But although it is not the place of this volume to go into detail, there is also reason for doubt. Two respectable authors, British journalist Ludovic Kennedy and American author Noel Behn, both cited in the bibliography, published books in 1985 and 1994 that raise intelligent and nagging questions about the verdict. Other questions come from other sources and are equally perplexing.

Regardless, there is no doubt about the behavior of reporters. On this the gavel sounds conclusively. And if by some chance the recent forensic evidence had been either tainted or misinterpreted; if by some chance the jury was wrong—and among the evidence they considered in arriving at their decision was evidence that had been fabricated by journalists—then those same journalists are, in the court of empyreal justice, guilty of being accessories to state-sanctioned murder.

On March 1, 1932, Lindbergh’s twenty-month-old son, Charles Augustus Jr., was put to bed at the usual time, eight p.m., by his mother and his nanny, a very carefully vetted Scotswoman named Betty Gow. Half an hour later, Mrs. Lindbergh and her husband had dinner, then sat before the fire for a few minutes in their Hopewell, New Jersey, home, talking idly about a subject that neither of them later remembered. Afterward, they took turns bathing, Lindbergh first, Anne following him.

At about ten p.m., Gow, who was finishing up some chores in the kitchen, decided to go upstairs and have a look at the child. He was not there. She told Mrs. Lindbergh, who was still in the tub, but quickly got out and began to dry herself.

Gow went downstairs and asked Lindbergh about the baby. He assured her he hadn’t played a joke, and it was obvious by the shocked expression on his face that he was telling the truth. He ran upstairs, Gow trailing after, and into the baby’s room. The first thing he noticed was an empty crib. Next to the crib, the curtains fluttering toward it, was an open window; an envelope, which Lindbergh immediately assumed was a ransom note, had been placed on the sill.

He cautioned the two women not to touch the envelope. It is not clear whether he called the police or told the butler to do it. But moments later he ran outside and slowly circled the house. Beneath the baby’s room, he found a crude homemade ladder, just tall enough to reach the window.

Lindbergh was right. It was a ransom note, demanding fifty thousand dollars for the return of his son. Using the services of a man named Dr. Jafsie Condon as an intermediary, the money was paid to the kidnappers, but the deadline for the baby’s return passed and he was not handed over to his parents. Nor did it happen the next day or the next. Nor the next week or the week following. The Lindberghs waited anxiously, frantically, but their baby did not come back to them, and they heard nothing from the abductors.

Finally, two and a half months after Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. was snatched from his crib, his mutilated body was found in a wooded area about four miles from their home, his skull protruding from the ground. The cause of death: a severe blow to the head.

It was not first event to be named “the Crime of the Century” by the press, and there would be many afterward, but until the Kennedy assassination it wore the label as well as any. Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German carpenter, was arrested for the child’s murder in September 1934 when he tried to spend some of the ransom money.

There was other evidence against him. He was identified as the man to whom the ransom had been paid, although it had been paid at night and the recipient was not clearly visible, nor did he speak in such a way as to easily identify himself. And Hauptmann had been absent from work the day of the kidnapping. This was the core of the prosecution’s case—strong, but not conclusive.

There were also cases, although they would not be made until much later, by Kennedy and Behn, and they, too, were inconclusive, against Gow and one of Mrs. Lindbergh’s sisters. Other scenarios have it that a gang of organized criminals was behind the kidnapping, although if so their methods seem exceedingly amateurish, and that Hauptmann was somehow involved in the deed, but was joined by other culprits, including at least one person with strong connections to the Lindbergh household. None of these suppositions can be dismissed with certainty.

Regardless, Hauptmann’s trial was “the Trial of the Century.” He was “the Most Hated Man in the World.” The latter designation, like the others created by American journalists, was an indication that they had found Hauptmann guilty well before the Flemington jury had heard the first word of testimony in the case. Consider: Hauptmann was a German, and the Germans had been our foe in World War I. His features were coarse, his speech guttural. He had entered the United States illegally. He had a criminal background, having resorted to burglary for a time when he could not find work as a carpenter. There was, as far as anyone knew, more evidence against him than against anyone else. He was as perfectly cast for the role of villain as Lindbergh was for the role of hero.

And so, just as the police had decided to make the jury’s job as easy as possible by refusing to investigate anyone other than Hauptmann, the press decided to make things even easier. Tom Cassidy, a reporter for the New York Daily News, a paper that was rumored to keep cops on its payroll for just such occasions as this, was allowed to enter Hauptmann’s apartment when police first searched it. He was also allowed to slip away from the police to a corner of one of the rooms where he could not be observed and write Condon’s name, address, and phone number in pencil on one of the walls. When he finished, he smeared the information to make it appear that Hauptmann had tried to erase it. This “evidence” was entered into the case, even though Cassidy was overheard in a tavern one night bragging to several of his friends that he was the person responsible for it.

which claimed falsely that maps found in the Hauptmann apartment included those of the roads around Hopewell, that the chisel found on the lawn at Hopewell was the only one missing from a similar set in Hauptmann’s tool-chest, that a “canoeing” shoe of Hauptmann buried in his garage matched the footprint found beneath the nursery window at Hopewell, that the caliber of Hauptmann’s pistol fitted a hole in the baby’s head. But the New York Times was not far behind, with equally false stories that writing paper found in the Hauptmann apartment was the same as that used in the ransom notes, that ladder rungs found there were the same as those in the kidnap ladder . . . that Hauptmann had written to a man in a prison in Ohio saying he intended to kidnap the Lindbergh baby, that several people living near Hopewell had seen him there before.

It is a roster of reportorial malfeasances that should have taken a dozen news organizations a century to compile. That the Daily News, the Journal, and the Times were able to demolish so many rules of their profession so quickly demonstrates not only the depth of their bias but their disregard for the workings of the judicial system.

Reporters did not stop there, however. They not only played God with Hauptmann’s fate, they played prosecutor. The New York Journal, which cannot help but assume a major role in a book like this no matter what the year, no matter what the event, was one of twenty-four Hearst papers that had declared Hauptmann guilty before the judge made his first appearance behind the bench. The Journal’s star columnist, a woman named Adela Rogers St. Johns, was also the daughter of one of the nation’s foremost attorneys, and she took advantage of her dual role to pass notes to both prosecutor David Wilentz and defense lawyer Edward J. “Death House” Reilly during the trial. Reilly’s nickname was well earned. Before Hauptmann, he had represented some fifteen hundred people accused of homicide. One thousand four hundred ninety-four of them had been executed by the state.

Another member of the press who had declared Hauptmann guilty prior to the trial’s opening, and persisted in so declaring in article after article, was Walter Winchell, the most famous gossip columnist of the time. When Jafsie Condon finished testifying that he had handed the ransom money to Hauptmann, Winchell leaped from his chair and ran forward to shake his hand. When the verdict was announced, Winchell leaped again, shouting to the entire courtroom, “I said that in October. I predicted he’d be guilty. Oh, that’s another big one for me! Come on, fellas, put it in your stories. I was the first one to call it.” To which the United Press’s Robert Musel responded, “How do they let a fucking child like this in the room?”

But there were other children about, children behaving even more outrageously. Earlier in the trial, less famous journalists shouted at the defense counsel, shouted at Hauptmann, sometimes even shouted questions at him and berated him for not answering. They called him a liar and worse when he gave answers to questions that the attorneys had asked.

Sometimes Hauptmann hollered back at the reporters. Sometimes he shook his fist. Once or twice, bracing himself on the arms of his chair on the witness stand, he looked as if he might do some leaping of his own, flying at the press to do battle. The judge, who did not so much preside over the trial as enjoy his front row seat at the mayhem, was as likely to tell Hauptmann to behave as he was the journalists.

In 1962, NBC News presented an edition of its documentary series David Brinkley’s Journal that focused on the Lindbergh kidnapping. It was called “Trial of the Century: Press Coverage of the Hauptmann Trial . . . ‘It Was a Sickness.’”

To the surprise of no one who had followed the case, Hauptmann was found guilty. Newspapers all across the country gloated over the verdict. But when it was announced, and the final stories filed, the party was over for the press. Reporters packed their bags and notebooks, settled their tabs at Nellie’s tap room at Flemington’s Union Hotel, and headed back to their newsrooms. They had been brought together for an occasion that today would have resulted in the arrest of many of them, but which was for all a heart-thumpingly good time. It was hard to say good-bye to friends newly made in such a historic occasion, one in which they had found themselves, more than ever before, in the middle of an epic struggle between good and evil. In all likelihood, they landed on the side of truth. But they could not have done so in a more corrupt and disgraceful fashion.

As for Bruno Richard Hauptmann, he swore his innocence until his dying day, April 3, 1936, when he was put to death for the murder of Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. His body was cremated, and it is believed that his wife returned to Germany with the ashes. She never visited the United States again.