23
Had Harold Hoffman arranged for the secret meeting in a less impetuous fashion and gone to see the prisoner alone, the political hurricane that was to follow might have been avoided. He did neither. The governor was by legislation a member of the court of pardons, the jury of last resort should all Hauptmann’s appeals be rejected, as appeared would be the situation. There was a precedent for individual court members’ visiting condemned men, but not in the dead of night, timing that gave the impression of secrecy, or under circumstances that might be considered capricious.
According to Hoffman, the opportunity to see Hauptmann arose on October 16, 1935.1 “My recollection is that there had been a last minute cancellation of an evening engagement,” he stated.
I know that it was not until after dinner on that evening that I thought of visiting Hauptmann that night.
From my suite in the Hotel Hildebrecht I called Colonel Kimberling. “Mark,” I said, “I’m coming down to see that fellow. Will tonight be O.K.?” Mark Kimberling answered in the affirmative.
I had been given to understand that Hauptmann could not express himself very well in English, and I thought I might need an interpreter. And of course I figured I might need a stenographer, particularly if he wanted to make a confession. My first thought therefore had been of Mrs. Bading. She was an expert stenographer, spoke German fluently and could be depended upon to maintain the confidence that I thought essential to my plan.
Mrs. Bading was Anna Bading, Ellis Parker’s longtime secretary and sometime investigator, on whom a local chapter of the Eastern Star organization had conferred the honor of Worthy Matron. When she received the governor’s call on the night of October 16, saying to meet him within the hour at Mark Kimberling’s residence adjoining the state prison, she had been in Mount Holly, New Jersey at another Eastern Star function. Stopping only long enough to grab a steno pad and several sharp pencils, Mrs. Bading reached Kimberling’s residence still in her party garb: an evening gown and silk slippers. Told she was to accompany Kimberling and Hoffman to death row to an interview with Bruno Richard Hauptmann, she protested, “‘Governor, I simply can’t go in there dressed like this.’” Mark Kimberling gave her one of his overcoats, which she put on.
Kimberling drove Bading and the governor around to the Third Street gate of the prison, where he had posted Deputy Warden George Selby, a World War I lieutenant colonel who had served overseas with Hoffman’s 114th Infantry Regiment. Once through the gate, they turned to the right and followed a prison guard to the death house. As the door opened, the guard’s flashlight picked up the muslin-covered electric chair.
Bading took a seat on a small bench near the white-shrouded chair and waited, should she be needed inside to take dictation and translate. On Kimberling’s order the iron door separating the death chamber and death row was opened. He ushered Governor Hoffman through. A quick turn to the right, and they were standing before the bars of cell 9. “‘Richard,’” Kimberling said softly to the occupant, “‘the Governor to see you.’”
A guard unlocked and opened the metal door. Harold Hoffman entered. The door was shut and locked behind him, with Kimberling saying from outside, “‘Call me, Governor, if you want me.’” Then he walked down the corridor and joined the guard.
The most hated man in the world wore a blue-gray shirt open at the neck and dark prison trousers. The governor told him to sit down on his cot, and he did. A pitcher and basin rested on a stand nearby. There was a table in the cell that was covered with papers and books—a Bible, several works of philosophy and astronomy, and the transcripts of the trial. Also on the table was a photograph of the prisoner’s wife and young son, Manfried. Fifteen feet away, on the other side of the cell’s wall, stood the electric chair.
A New Jersey governor could temporarily stay an execution but did not have the power to commute a death sentence. The only power that could do that at this stage was New Jersey’s court of appeals, of which the governor was the president.
“I sat down beside him,” Harold Hoffman explained, “I said something, just what I don’t recall, designed to put him at ease; but I did not then, or at any time during my visit, promise him aid or make any expression of sympathy or belief in his statement to me.”
Jafsie Condon and John Hughes Curtiss had each used an ersatz German accent in relating to the media what their respective Johns had said to them during ransom negotiations. When later writing of his visit to Bruno Richard Hauptmann on death row, Governor Hoffman utilized the same technique.
“‘Governor, vy does your state do to me all this?’” he reported that the condemned man asked him in cell 9. “‘Vy do they vant my life for something somebody else have done?’”
Replied the governor, “‘Well, you have been found guilty. The courts—’”
“‘Lies! Lies!’” Hauptmann pointed to one of the trial records. “‘All lies. Vould I kill a baby? I am a man. Vould I built that ladder? I am a carpenter.’”
Hauptmann’s most “earnest plea” had been to take a lie detector test. “‘Vy vont they use on me that? And on Doctor Condon also use it? They haf too some kind of drug, I haf heard. Vy don’t they use on me that drug? And on Doctor Condon use it too?’”
Harold Hoffman was now certain that Hauptmann hadn’t thawed, that he would not be confessing. “Here was no cringing criminal pitifully begging for mercy,” the governor wrote, “but a man making a vehement claim of innocence, bitter in his denunciation of the police and of the prosecution and their methods.” And bitter, too, in his excoriation of his former chief counsel, Death House Reilly.
“‘Could a man do for dollars vat Reilly haf done to me?’” Hauptmann asked. “‘Only once, for about five minutes, did I haf a chance to explain my case to him, really. Sometimes he came to see me, not often, for a few minutes. How could I then talk to him?’”
Hauptmann’s complaints against the police began with his footprints, which apparently didn’t match the one found under the nursery window or the one found at the graveyard where the ransom was paid.
“Vy do they take from me all my shoes? When I was arrested they took from me, among many things, my shoes. Vot for I could not imagine, but now I have found out. Because they have a footprint—a footprint of a man, who according to the prosecutor, climbed the ladder to get the unfortunate child.… Vy did they not produce at the trial the impression of which they cast a model? Vy? They cannot say that my foot has become larger or smaller—
“So too the footprint which was found at the graveyard from where Doctor Condon swore that he gave to John fifty thousand dollars. Also here my shoe certainly did not fit. Vy did they not produce here the plaster model that they made?”
Following his meeting with Cemetery John, Jafsie Condon also made a phonograph recording of the conversation, which was widely reported in the press but was not entered in evidence by the prosecution and which the state police in one instance denied existed. “‘Does any one think that these footprints and this record have been held back out of pity for me? Oh no. For me, not pity!’”
As for fingerprints,
“Is it not true that in every case when a person is arrested they take his fingerprints? So they did vith me [at the NYPD station house in Greenwich Village]. A few days after, two New Jersey state police came to me in a Bronx prison and vanted further prints. I told them these had already been taken. These men replied the ones they took haf not been clear enough, so they take firmly about six sets. Then one or two days later they come again with the statement that still there are several spots not plain enough. So they took more—and also the sides of my hands, which they did not take before, and then especially the joints of the fingers and the hollow parts of my hand.… Then at the trial, when my counsel asks about fingerprints the prosecutor say simply, ‘There are no fingerprints.’ If that is so, no fingerprints on the ladder, on the letters, on the window sill, in the room, vy they want so many times my fingerprints? I can only think they have fingerprints, but they are not like mine, so they say they haf none.…
“But they invent another story. They say I haf worked vith gloves. Is this not a worthless lie? Because since in that room they found no other fingerprints—not of the parents, or the child’s nurse or the other servants—can’t this statement be possible? It is even said that Mrs. Lindbergh and the nurse Betty together pulled down the window which was stuck, but there are no fingerprints found on the window frame. Do the parents, then, ven they go to the room to take joy in their child, and all the servants, also wear gloves?”
Hauptmann focused on Dr. Erastus Mead Hudson, whose silver nitrate processing of the ladder had developed many usable latent prints. “‘But, there were nowhere any of mine. The jury would not believe this expert because he would not say anything to convict me.’”
Governor Hoffman subsequently learned that not only had fingerprints been recovered by Dr. Hudson, but photographs had been taken of them, the negatives of which had been held in the possession of the state police. J. Edgar Hoover would inform the governor that the New Jersey State Police never sent copies of the photographs to the DI’s fingerprint identification center, the most extensive and authoritative file of this sort in the land.
Regarding the prosecution’s attempt to link the chisel found near the ladder the night of the kidnapping to the tool kit discovered in Hauptmann’s garage two and a half years later, Hauptmann said this:
“Among my carpenter’s tools they found a chisel which looks in part like the one found at the Lindbergh place near the ladder. That my chisel is ground differently, is a different size, and has quite a different handle, made no difference. They simply said, ‘No, this is Hauptmann’s chisel,’ and the jury believed them. They do not believe when I say that my chisel set is an entirely different one from the one they found. For my set was a Stanley set, one fourth inch to one and one half inch. They must haf taken out some sizes and put among them others like the ones they found, except the three-quarter inch chisel. For the one they found is a Bucks Brothers chisel.”
The governor would discover that the factory that manufactured the chisel found at the Lindbergh estate had estimated the instrument had been made thirty years before. He would also become convinced that the chisel was not Hauptmann’s and that documents had been altered in order to give the appearance that it was.
An accusation had been made that the prosecution withheld Hauptmann’s correspondence with Isador Fisch, the man who the defendant still insisted gave him the shoe box containing some fourteen thousand dollars in ransom money. “‘So all of these letters—I think six or seven—I have saved and put in a large envelope in my desk from which the police took them.’” Hauptmann had risen from the cot and picked out a volume of the Flemington transcript.
“But when we ask for these letters at the trial I receive the answer, ‘Ve haf none.’ God in heavens! All the letters were together. One of the letters I never could get clear, for it said that shortly before Isador died he called for me and seemed to want to say something about me. But he was too weak or did not vant to. So he took to his grave that vich would be of great help to me now.…
“Vye did Vilentz say that he did not have these letters, when my letters answering them were there? No, those letters did not fit the state viewpoint, so they had to disappear. But they took precautions and had the Fisch family and the nurse [who attended Isador at his death] come to America. They surely expected that I would insist more on these letters and say what vas in them. But ven I could recall only in parts the contents and the jury vould not haf believed me, I was obliged to say nothing. For if I told vat I had remembered, vould not the Fisch family, who vere paid for coming here, haf said the opposite upon the suggestion of the prosecutor?
“For vat else was the family brought here? So Pincus Fisch [i.e., Isador’s brother] vas not called to the stand, and so, too, the nurse vas not called. Thus all direct evidence vich might haf freed me disappeared.”
Harold Hoffman would soon gain possession of copies of the letters referred to by Hauptmann, including a pencil draft of Pincus Fisch’s correspondence, which corroborated that Isador, on his deathbed, kept calling for Hauptmann and “wanting to tell us something” about him.
Harold Hoffman had been skeptical that Isador Fisch would have left some fourteen thousand dollars of ransom money in Hauptmann’s custody and that Hauptmann wouldn’t have ascertained until after Fisch’s death in Leipzig that the package contained currency. The condemned man addressed the subject in a protracted recounting of his relationship with Isador, which ended with the question, “‘Could I haf known dot the money vas the Lindbergh baby money? No! How could any sensible person think dot?’”
Harold Hoffman had considered himself a sensible man and seemed to find credence in the prisoner’s accounting, as well as in his denial of having told Walter Lyle that he had about a hundred gold notes left. “‘For vas it not testified at the trial, and truly so, dot to the gasoline station man I haf said, vhen I gave him the bill, “I have a hundred more like dot”? Vould I say dot if I knew dese bills maybe could take my life some day?’”
Hauptmann had talked rapidly and without excitement about the circumstances of his arrest. He admitted he had lied about the additional money in the garage, not because it was ransom money, which he didn’t know, but because he feared he would get into trouble if they knew he had so many gold certificates on hand. “‘Besides,’” he added, “‘near the money I haf hidden also a pistol vich I know I am not suppose to have.’”
He had told of a beating he received in a New York City police station:
“I vas handcuffed in the chair and the police give me such a terrible licking dot I fall downvard to the floor. Dey showed me a hammer and den dey put out the lights and started to beat me on the shoulders, the back of the head, and the arm. Den, too, dey kicked my legs vith the feet and kept yelling, ‘Vhere is the money? Vhere is the baby? Ve’ll knock your brains out!’”
The governor subsequently obtained a copy of the oral and physical examination Dr. Thurston H. Dexter made of Hauptmann in the presence of James M. Fawcett and Louis L. Lefkowitz, the assistant medical examiner. It was dated September 25, several days after the alleged third degree. After detailing bruises, lumps, swellings, and discolorations, Dr. Dexter concluded that Hauptmann, “‘had been subjected recently to a severe beating, all or mostly with blunt instruments. The injuries resulting from this are general and include the head, back, chest, abdomen, and thighs.’”
The ladder had come up, along with the so-called wood expert.
“Listen, Vilentz says I am smart criminal. He says on dese hands I must haf vorn gloves, because dere are not fingerprints. He says on dese feet I must haf vorn bags, because dere are no footprints. If I was a smart criminal, if I vould do all dose things, vy vould I got in my own house and take up half one board to use for one piece of the ladder—something dot always would be evidence against me?”
Governor Hoffman found logic in Hauptmann’s argument and would later come across information that made him gravely distrust the wood expert’s findings. There was a matter of location, the fact that Hauptmann and Jafsie Condon, who lived within a few miles of one another, were both regular visitors to City Island, a local recreational area. Condon, according to Hauptmann, had a real estate office there. To get to it, he had to pass the Dixon Boat House, where Bruno kept his canoe. Condon continued to pass the boathouse throughout the summers of 1932, 1933, and 1934, a time when he and the police were hunting for John.
“How could anybody believe dot vhen Doctor Condon vas looking as he says all over the country for ‘John,’ who he now says is me, vidout coming face to face vith me. Condon says dot he could identify ‘John’ vhen ‘John’ vas valking along a street and he vas on the top of a bus, yet on City Island, nearly every day he vould not see me and pick me out as ‘John.’
“If I vas the kidnapper and I got the money from Condon, vould not I know, too, dot the Doctor vas in City Island many, many times? And vould not I have stayed away from City Island because I vould haf been afraid of being identified by Condon?
“The man who vas talking vith Doctor Condon at Voodlawn Cemetery vas said by him to veigh between 155 to 160 pounds: for did not the Doctor say he could tell, and he felt the arms of ‘John’? But my veight at about that time vas 175 pounds—it shows so on my automobile license.”
Hauptmann had appeared confused by Jafsie’s activities, including the visit paid him by the aging educator when he was being held at the Hunterdon County jail pending his trial.
“Doctor Condon vas vith me on a bench in the cell and vas asking me if haf any athletic training. I said yes. Den he asked me if I haf von any prizes, and I told him sixteen or seventeen in Germany for running and jumping. Den it looked like he was going to cry. He took a piece of paper and marked it in four parts and said he divided the case in four parts. Von part he said vas the baby, and in another part he made a little house vith a bench. He called me ‘John’ many times. He pointed to the first square and said, ‘Dot is the baby—dot come first.’ Den he pointed to the second space and said, ‘Dot is the man I spoke vith—the go-between.’ I asked him vhat was a go-between and he explained.…
“He said if I know anything I should confess, because there vas no connection between the money and the kidnapping and I vould clear myself and himself. He said the police were treating him roughly. But he never said I am the fellow—and vhen he left he asked could he come see me again, and I said ‘yes.’”
Bruno swore to the governor that he had never written Dr. Condon’s phone number in his closet and suggested that perhaps a policeman or reporter had put it there. He also objected to the jury’s having believed Cecile Barr rather than the defense witnesses who testified he was home celebrating his birthday at the time she said he bought a movie ticket with ransom money in Greenwich Village.
“Den dere is the old man, Hochmuth, eighty years old and more, who says he sees me go by his house at Hopewell in a green car vith very red face and eyes like a ghost looking out of the automobile vindow. Dis man can hardly see. He admits on the vitness stand dot the police haf him in the jail at Flemington looking at me in the cell for over half an hour, but he says he could not see me—only a figure—and further dot he untruthfully said he live in New York vhen he really lived in New Jersey so he could get money for relief. Yet my vitnesses are not believed—the five people who saw me in the New York bakery vith Annie at the time dot the crime was committed.…”
Harold Hoffman would obtain New York City Public Welfare documents showing that at the approximate time in 1932 Hochmuth said he saw Hauptmann in the area of the Lindbergh estate, Hochmuth was “partly blind” and had “failing eyesight due to cataracts.”
The governor had been anxious to end the interview, but Hauptmann was reluctant to let him.
“Vy don’t the police keep on looking for the man Faulkner who deposit nearly $3000 of the Colonel’s money? …
“Vy is it just von—me—dey vant to get for the death of the poor child? … Vy do dey believe the fairy tale about the support from the child’s sleeping garment [thumb guard] by the nurse Betty Gow and the housekeeper a month after the crime, right vhere it vould haf been seen so many times by hundreds of people? … Vye do they try to prove I haf had and spent $50,000 vhen only maybe $15,000 has been found?”
The governor ended the interview and called for Mark Kimberling, who came down the corridor and unlocked the door of cell 9. “‘Vot harm could I do anybody behind dese bars?’” asked Hauptmann. “‘Vhen dey kill me dey kill an innocent man. But I know—dey think vhen I die, the case will die. Dey think it vill be like a book I close.’”
The governor stepped into the corridor and heard the cage key click in the lock behind him. Within a few steps he was at the steel door to the death chamber, and he looked back at the pale face behind the bars of cell 9. “‘Good night, Governor—and thank you for coming.’”
Harold Hoffman said goodnight back, entered the electrocution chamber, and told a waiting Mrs. Bading, “Come along, Anna—it’s over.”
The governor returned to his rooms at the Hotel Hildebrecht and wrote far into the night and early morning, recounting what Hauptmann had said. He had very few answers to the questions posed by the prisoner and in many instances wasn’t sure to what the German was referring. “An atrocious crime had been committed,” he stated. “Justice, to my mind, was not to be found merely in the execution of a single convicted criminal.
“There had been a crime that must never recur; a case that must never be repeated; a challenge that must, in the interest of society, be effectively met.
“My duty it seemed, was clear.”2
The next day, October 17, Governor Harold Hoffman had a copy of the eleven-volume trial transcript sent to him; then he traveled to New York City for a busy day of appointments. Early in the evening he talked with a member of the May 1932 Bronx County grand jury and got a firsthand account of possible evidence tampering by police and elected officials.
After the baby had been found in the woods, the Bronx grand jury had conducted an investigation into the death and surrounding circumstances, including the participation of a local resident many police officials looked on with grave suspicions, John F. (“Jafsie”) Condon. When called before the panel, Jafsie had spent a goodly portion of his time at a blackboard, drawing symbols such as Indian “high” signs and secret Italian Trigamba and simultaneously lecturing his listeners on them. The juror the governor spoke with saw no relevance in this and had said to Condon, “What we are interested in, Doctor, is a description of the man to whom you paid the $50,000.00.”
“I am not sure,” Jafsie had snapped back. “His hat was pulled down and his coat collar was turned over his face.”
The juror now told Governor Hoffman that later in the inquiry Condon had given a partial description. “I remember him [i.e., Condon] saying that his eyes were ‘separated a little from the bridge of his nose, such as a Chinese or Japanese, and they were almond shaped and bluish gray in color.’”3
The juror-informant further related that subsequent to Hauptmann’s conviction in Flemington, he’d gone back to the Bronx district attorney and asked to read the record. It was given to him, but he could find no reference to the Chinese-eyes description. The informant allowed that in the excitement of the examination, Condon’s remark might have gone unrecorded.
Two days later, on October 19, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who had been in jail thirteen months, was granted a stay of execution so his attorney could appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Governor Harold Hoffman received a surprise phone call from Washington, D.C., which served as a tacit reminder that there were political benefits of a national dimension for himself and the Republican party should he prove that the condemned man was innocent. On the line was Charles Curtis, the vice-president of the United States under Herbert Hoover and still a rallying point for a small, influential group of GOP national leaders. Curtis and Hoffman had known each other slightly when the governor served in the House of Representatives. Then as now Harold Hoffman was flattered to be singled out by the former vice-president.
Curtis, in his unsolicited call, asked if the governor had been looking into the Hauptmann case. Hoffman took on a noncommittal stance and said he hadn’t been especially interested.
“I mentioned, I think, that Hauptmann had been convicted and the conviction sustained by the Court of Errors and Appeals, but that the matter would shortly be before the Court of Pardons, of which I was a member.
“‘I think,’ said Mr. Curtis, ‘that there are a lot of funny things about that case.’ He went on to tell me some of the doubts he entertained and he expressed the opinion that, as governor, I should go carefully into the matter before Hauptmann’s final appeal for life was made. ‘I’ve read a lot of the testimony,’ he added, ‘and it doesn’t seem to me that he was adequately represented—or that he got a very fair deal.’ He closed with a request that I ‘see Mrs. McLean.’”4
Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean, the gadfly Washington, D.C., hostess who had given Gaston B. Means a hundred and four thousand dollars with which to secure the return of the Lindbergh baby, wasn’t satisfied with the Hauptmann trial. One of the things she did about this was hire her own private detective to pursue the truth. Another had occurred at a dinner party for some forty or fifty people at her elegant Washington home, Friendship.
After dinner, eight or ten of the older, more important men were standing in one corner of the room. I asked them if they were fully satisfied over Bruno’s conviction. Some said they thought he was “in on it,” but they one and all agreed that it could not have been a one man job.
I told them I was very worried about it, and if and when the supreme court turned down the appeal I planned to go see Governor Hoffman and tell him everything I had picked up.
They all laughed at me and said: “Why Evalyn, you are crazy. Governor Hoffman is too smart a politician to touch this with a ten foot pole. He knows only too well it would ruin him if he did.”
I grabbed the phone for Charlie Curtis and asked him to get in touch with the governor to learn when I could go up and see him at the end of the week. Charlie called back and said the governor would be down the next day to see me at eleven o’clock.
At eleven the next morning a taxicab drew up at Friendship and I went downstairs to meet a quiet, smiling, dignified man with a very determined face.
I told him everything I knew about the case. He remained perfectly quiet, listening. He thought for a few minutes and then said: “Well, all this fits in with what I have up in New Jersey.” And then he looked at me and said, “You know, Mrs. McLean, if I go on with this thing it will quite likely ruin me politically.”5
In later writing of the meeting with Mrs. McLean, Harold Hoffman included the fact that Charles Lindbergh had been her houseguest during the trial of Gaston B. Means. He also revealed that “she told many interesting things in a spirit of confidence that I may not violate. These things may some day be a part of Mrs. McLean’s story.” The governor returned to New Jersey with, as he put it, “new information to check.”6
Two men and their secrets approached one another: Charles Augustus Lindbergh, the calm, precise, ultimate planner, and the hyperactive, impulsive Harold Giles Hoffman. The governor had interviewed Bruno Richard Hauptmann and come away believing that the doomed prisoner was not implicated in the death and probably had no part in the extortion plot. He was already suspicious of the legal proceedings that had tried Hauptmann and found him guilty. There were witnesses he believed had perjured themselves, physical evidence he suspected had been tampered with. Added to this was new information, some from Mrs. McLean, and far more devastating statements from members of the Morrow household staff.
Action must be taken—that was the nature of Harold Hoffman. Which action and for what reason, he wasn’t sure. Reassessing the Lindbergh case would be sticky business and dangerous. The Lindbergh-Morrow clan was as well connected and powerful a family as existed. Lindy himself was manipulative. Vengeful. A head-on confrontation must be avoided. But could it?
For Charles Lindbergh a probe of the facts would open old, painful wounds of the child’s death. It might also expose a plot he had concocted to obscure the truth regarding that demise—assuming there was such a plot and the truth had been altered. Would the obdurate, self-assured Lone Eagle tolerate another investigation into the case and, possibly, into his involvement? Did he still have the power to stop such a challenge if he chose? Lindbergh at this juncture appeared to have no warning that this was about to happen—or that his antagonist, Harold Hoffman, was every bit as compulsive and flawed as the Lone Eagle.