Stolen Away

I nodded. “You mean, Hauptmann’s defense counsel stipulating that the corpse found at Mt. Rose was Charles Lindbergh, Jr.”

It had gotten a lot of play in the press. Wilentz had been questioning the woman in charge of St. Michael’s Orphanage, located less than a mile from where the little corpse had been found; Wilentz wanted to dispute the notion that the body in the woods might have been one of the orphanage’s charges.

But Reilly interrupted the proceedings almost immediately, saying, “We have never made any claim that this was other than Colonel Lindbergh’s child.”

Even the prosecution was stunned by this preposterous bungle. There was no logical reason for Reilly to have handed Wilentz the corpus delicti on a silver platter like that. Reportedly, co-counsel Fisher—long Hauptmann’s most staunch supporter—had stood up, shouted to Reilly, “You’re conceding our client to the electric chair,” and bolted out.

“Who the hell hired Reilly, anyway?” I asked.

“Hearst.” The Governor said this with a quiet, ironic smile.

“Hearst! Good God, the Hearst papers crucified Hauptmann! Hearst is an old Lindbergh crony, for Christ’s sake…”

“Well,” Hoffman said, with a small shrug, playing devil’s advocate, “Reilly was, at one time, a top trial attorney. You know, he got a lot of the big prohibition gangsters off, in his day.”

I sat up. “Oh, really. Like who?”

Hoffman shrugged. “One of his more notorious clients, I suppose, was Frankie Yale.”

Until his demise in 1927, Frankie Yale had been Al Capone’s man on the East Coat. Capone had, in ’27, bumped Yale and replaced him with one Paul Ricca.

Could Reilly have been in Capone’s pocket? Had the red-nosed shyster thrown the case?

“You know, Mr. Heller,” Hoffman said, “there are those in this state who believe I’ve gotten into this thing for my own glory, my own gain…considering the fact that I’m receiving death threats, that my home and my wife and three little girls are under twenty-four-hour guard accordingly, and that the press is demanding my impeachment, I doubt I’ve made a ‘good political move,’ in ‘siding with’ Hauptmann.”

“What are you after, Governor?”

His cheerful mask collapsed. “Look—all I’m after is the truth. The people of this state are entitled to it, and Hauptmann has a right to live if he didn’t murder the Lindbergh baby. This was a shocking crime—and, in the interest of society, it must be completely solved.”

“You’ve let this thing get to you, Governor. You’ve let it touch you. That’s dangerous.”

With a thumb over his shoulder, he gestured at the state flag. “Mr. Heller, as Governor of this state, I have a duty to perform.”

“No politician ever got rich doing his duty.”

He flinched at that; it was barely perceptible, but it was there. He said, “I haven’t expressed an opinion on the guilt or innocence of Hauptmann. But I share, with hundreds of thousands of people, doubts about the value of the evidence that placed him in the Lindbergh nursery the night of the crime.”

“I’m not all that familiar with the evidence.”

“Well, I’m going to make you familiar with it. But you are familiar with the role that passion and prejudice played in convicting a man that the newspapers had already convicted.” He patted the folders on his desk. “I doubt the truthfulness, and the competency, of some of the state’s chief witnesses. And I doubt that this crime could have been committed by any one man. Schwarzkopf and the rest, maybe even Charles Lindbergh himself, want this one man’s death so that the books can be closed, and the pretense can be made that another great crime has been successfully solved.”

I merely nodded.

He smiled, embarrassed, suddenly. “I guess I’m too much of a politician to resist climbing up on a soapbox— even when I’m sitting down. Let me fill you in on these ‘witnesses.’…”

Turning to his folders and documents and some notes, Hoffman went down the motley group one by one.

“Let’s start with the remarkable Mr. Amandus Hochmuth,” Hoffman said, and I of course recognized that as the name of the Sourlands geezer who claimed Hauptmann had “glared” at him from a car the day of the kidnapping. “First of all, Hochmuth waited until two months after Hauptmann’s arrest to come forward. Second of all, a friendly state trooper sent me a report of an interview conducted with Hochmuth shortly after the kidnapping, when Hochmuth said he’d seen nobody suspicious in the vicinity. Here….”

“What’s this?” I asked, as the governor handed across a document.

“A photostat of Hochmuth’s 1932 welfare report,” Hoffman said. “Look at the line on ‘health status.’”

“Tartly blind,’” I read. “‘Failing eyesight due to cataracts.’ He puts the eye in eyewitness, all right.” The photostat revealed him also to be Client #14106 in the Division of Old Age Security, Department of Welfare, New York City. “This thing gives his address as the Bronx!”

“A false address,” Hoffman said matter-of-factly, “so he could collect public funds from New York, while living in New Jersey.”

“Well, times are hard.”

“I invited Mr. Hochmuth up to my office, not long ago and, because it was at my expense I’m sure, he accommodated me. He sat where you’re sitting, Mr. Heller.” Hoffman pointed to the filing cabinet with the silver cup brimming with flowers. “I asked him to identify that.”

“Did he?”

“Certainly. He identified it as a picture—a picture of a woman.”