Stolen Away

“Yes, but my point is, in the same courtroom as the Hauptmann trial, one of the same prosecutors, and the same judge, convicted Curtis—why? Because, they said, he’d dealt with six persons who had kidnapped the Lindbergh baby; that by not letting the state troopers in on his actions, Curtis had prevented the apprehension of the kidnappers.”

“So the Garden State is having it both ways: a kidnap gang, to convict Curtis; a lone-wolf kidnapper, to convict Hauptmann.”

“Exactly. And it doesn’t wash with me. There’s more, there’s so much more….” He went riffling through the papers: he began rattling off the injustices.

A copy of a physical examination by Dr. Thurston H. Dexter on September 25, 1934, a few days after Hauptmann’s arrest, showed that the prisoner had been “subjected recently to a severe beating, all or mostly with blunt instruments.”

Work records at the Majestic Apartments, where Hauptmann claimed he was working during the period of the kidnapping, had been tampered with and in some cases stolen or suppressed.

A statement from fingerprint expert Erasmus Hudson, who found five-hundred-some prints on the kidnap ladder, none of them Hauptmann’s, and said that Inspector Welch had asked him if it were possible to fake a fingerprint. (Hudson had said no, much to Welch’s obvious disappointment.)

Judge Trenchard denying Hauptmann’s request for a lie-detector test.

And there was new evidence, too: handwriting expert Samuel Small demonstrated that Hauptmann wrote in the Palmer-Zaner system and not the vertical roundhand system of the ransom notes. In his affidavit, Small wrote: “It isn’t a question of if Hauptmarm wrote those letters. It is a question whether he could have written them. I tell you that if you went to the prison and said to Hauptmann, ‘I will let you free if you can write a single sentence the way it is written in the ransom letters,’ Hauptmann would have to stay in prison the rest of his life.”

Of course, I knew—like just about any cop who’d been in and around the court system in major criminal cases—that handwriting experts, like alienists, were typical, “expert” testimony. Both sides had theirs. Bought and paid.

“You realize, don’t you,” Hoffman said, “that the state spent more money on its handwriting experts alone than was spent on the entire Hauptmann defense.”

“Even with Hearst footing part of the bill?”

“Even then. It cost over a million dollars to put Hauptmann on death row…but right now I don’t have a single dollar of state funds available to try to get him off death row.”

“Excuse me?” I didn’t like the sound of this.

“Mr. Heller, I staked the investigators I mentioned on my own—on small sums that barely covered their expenses, out of my own meager resources.”

“Governor, no offense—but the terms we discussed on the phone, those aren’t negotiable.”

“I’m not the one paying your fee, Mr. Heller.”

“You’re not?”

“No. I mentioned an old friend of yours…just a moment.” The intercom on his desk was buzzing. A garbled voice spoke to the governor, and he said, “Fine. Send her in.” He looked up at me with his ready smile; he put out his cigar. “The party who recommended you is paying for your services.”

The door opened behind me and a small handsome woman in a black dress and a black fur and a black hat with a black veil entered; jewelry glittered amidst the somber apparel. Perpetually in mourning for who knows what, Evalyn Walsh McLean entered the room, and reentered my life.

“Governor,” she said, smiling sadly, extending him her black-gloved hand; he rose behind the desk and took it, briefly. She turned to me. Behind the veil her eyes seemed tragic and delighted. “Nathan. It’s wonderful to see you.”

“Likewise, Mrs. McLean,” I said, taking her hand briefly. I gave her my chair and got myself a new one. I was suddenly nervous.

“Mrs. McLean has never lost her interest in the Lindbergh case,” the governor said.

“The official solution of this case,” she said, regally, “is not satisfactory. There are loose ends to be gathered up. And I felt Nathan Heller was just the man to do the gathering.”

She looked older, of course, but fine; her figure remained slender, busty, her face gaining character with the years without losing beauty.

“Mrs. McLean has rented the Hauptmann apartment,” Hoffman said. “So you can have a look around there. We’ve already had a criminologist in, and a wood expert, to have a look in the attic.”

The prosecution’s star witness was a wood expert named Koehler—who’d been about to testify the day I was at the trial, but got stalled by the defense.

“It struck me as ridiculous,” Evalyn said, “that a man who supposedly was so brilliant, so clever a master criminal that he could engineer the kidnapping of the century all alone, would also be so stupid as to fashion a single rail of the kidnap ladder from a floorboard in his own attic.”

“Actually,” I said, “what’s really ridiculous is the notion he’d need the lumber. Hauptmann was a carpenter. He had something of a workshop in his garage, didn’t he? There must’ve been scrap lumber all over hell.”

“And a lumberyard nearby,” Hoffman added, nodding.

“In any event, he wouldn’t have left the ladder behind,” I said. “Not a carpenter who fashioned it himself— particularly if one rail were a board from his own house. That evidence was as planted as the tree it came from.”

“So said our criminologist and a wood technician from the WPA,” Hoffman said, rather proudly. “The ladder rail