Stolen Away

“So you have knowledge of this case not just anyone have.”

“Well, that is right. You have a good memory.”

He nodded toward the trial transcripts. “I have time for reading. I know much about every witness who spoke for, and against me. I have ask about you. You were in some things involved that the newspapers wrote up. In Chicago.”

“Don’t believe everything you read in the papers.”

“That is good advice, Nate. Do you think Chicago gangsters do this to me?”

That caught me off guard. “Dick—stranger things have happened.”

He smiled. “Strange things happen to me, often.” The sound of the bird fluttering caught his attention. “Excuse,” he said, and rose, and went to the bars and looked out and up. “They do nothing,” he said disgustedly, sitting back down.

“I’d like to hear your side of this, Dick. That’s why I’m here.”

Hauptmann sighed. “Why am I here? That is the question I ask myself. Why does the state do to me this? Why do they want my life for something somebody else have done?”

“The court found you guilty…”

“Lies! Lies!” Fire lit the blue-gray eyes, though the face remained strangely placid. “All lies. Would I kill a baby?” He nodded to his son’s picture; the kid looked to be about three years old. “I am a man! A father. And, I am union carpenter. Would I build that ladder?” He laughed; it echoed hollowly in the cell.

“I’ll tell you this much, Dick,” I said. “You were badly represented. That Reilly…”

“Reilly! Could a man do for one million dollars what Reilly have done to me for who-knows-why? Only once, for about five minutes, did he even speak to me about my case.”

“Dick, Reilly wasn’t your lawyer—he was Hearst’s lawyer.” And maybe Al Capone’s.

He began shaking his head emphatically, no. “I did not want to take that Hearst deal—give them ‘exclusive’ on Annie and me. But how could I not? I have no money. The state pay forty thousand dollars to these handwriting men they bring.”

“What about the handwriting? Those ransom notes do have some similarities to yours…”

“Mr. Heller—Nate—I think if you have been a man who was picked up with some of the Lindbergh money…even though that money might have passed through ten hands before it came to you…I think that these men would prove, from all your writings, that you were the one who have written the ransom letters.”

I nodded; he was right—handwriting experts were shit. “But Dick—some of the misspellings and such, in what you wrote, were like some things that turned up in the notes. I saw those notes, Dick— words like ‘boad’ with a ‘d’ and ‘singnature’…”

“They tell me to write exactly as they dictate to me,” he said, quietly indignant. “This include writing words spelled as I was made to spell them.”

Typical.

“This was right after your arrest?”

“Yes. I did not know at the time why specimens of my writing they wanted. If I have any idea, then I would not have let them dictate to me, so to write down mistakes.”

“You write English pretty good, do you?”

He shrugged. “Of course I make mistakes in writing. I am immigrant. Still, not such blunders as were dictated to me. Then they took out of my writings those things which looked like the ransom notes. In the note, in the whole damn note left in baby’s room, they found only one little word—‘is’—that they can say look like mine.”

“Did you do these specimens of your own free will?”

“At first. But then I get tired. I can hardly keep my eyes open—but they wake me up, hit me in the ribs, say, ‘You’d better write, it’s bad for you if you don’t! You write, you write…’” His eyes were glazed.

This was more than believable. This was standard operating procedure for cops coast to coast.

“But why did you admit,” I said, having come across this tidbit in the material I examined this afternoon, “that the handwriting in your closet was yours?”

This was the infamous “Jafsie” phone number written on the wainscoting inside a closet in the Hauptmann apartment.

“That is one of the things they have done to me!” He shook his head in stunned frustration. “A few days after my arrest, my Annie and Manfred—my child, my boy, my little Bubi—could stand it no longer. The baby could no longer sleep because of all the police and reporters and people who were there. So Annie and Bubi go to stay with relatives. Now I can see it was the wrong thing to do.”

“Because that gave the cops free access to your apartment.”

“This is right. Some days after I am arrested, when everything seems so mixed up in my mind, the police appear with a board on which is some writing. They say the board is from a closet in my home.”

“Was it?”

“It seem so. They say is this your writing, I say it must be, because it is my custom as a carpenter to write down things on wood. But then they tell me it is Dr. Condon’s phone number! Dear God! If I that number had written and knew what it was, would I have so easy told the police?”

“Maybe not,” I said, with gentle sarcasm.