Stolen Away

He narrowed his eyes, staring at me forcefully. “You see, I went to the death house, Mr. Heller, to see Bruno Richard Hauptmann…I’d heard he wished an ‘audience’ with me, and, rather on the sly, I granted him one, thinking, I admit, that I might hear a confession. Instead, I heard a quietly indignant man, a man of considerable dignity and intelligence, who raised a good number of questions that I had to agree needed answering.”

“Ah,” I said, smiling, suddenly making a connection. “So you went to the head of the State Police to find out the answers to those questions.”

“Precisely. And our mutual friend Colonel Schwarzkopf ignored my executive order to reopen the investigation, sending me monthly, token notes to the effect that there were no new developments. When I granted Hauptmann the thirty-day reprieve, I began hiring my own investigators, and essentially ‘fired’ Schwarzkopf from the Lindbergh case. There is, as you might imagine, no love lost between us.”

“Was Hauptmann himself the reason you got involved in this?” I asked, knowing the governor had been accused of playing politics. “Was he that convincing a jailhouse lawyer?”

“He was convincing, all right. But there were other factors. I believe you’ve met New Jersey’s answer to Sherlock Holmes-Ellis Parker?”

I nodded. “At Lindbergh’s estate, in the early days.”

“Parker’s been conducting his own investigation,” Hoffman said, “although I haven’t been privy to any results as yet. He’s one of the people I want you to look up, in fact; he’s playing his cards a little too close to his vest, for my money.”

“The old boy’s a showboat,” I said. “But don’t be fooled by the hick veneer.”

“Oh, I’m not. And I take his opinion quite seriously. He thinks Hauptmann is innocent, or at least no more than a minor figure, who is taking the fall for the real kidnappers.”

“Have you considered the possibility that the ‘Cemetery John’ extortion group may never have had the child?”

He nodded vigorously, exhaling smoke, gesturing with the cigar. “Yes, and consider this, Mr. Heller-Ellis Parker insists that the baby found in that shallow grave in the Sourlands woods was not Charles Lindbergh, Jr.”

“Well, I understand Slim Lindbergh’s identification of the body was pretty perfunctory.”

“Perfunctory! Are you aware that the body was examined, in the morgue, by…let me find it.” He shuffled through some of the many documents and folders on his desk; quickly centered on the correct one and read, with rather a triumphant flourish, “The child’s own pediatrician, Dr. Phillip Van Ingen, examined the remains. The undertaker reported Dr. Van Ingen as saying, and this is a quote: ‘If you were to lay ten million dollars on a table and tell me it was mine, if I could say positively that this was the Colonel’s son, I couldn’t honestly identify this skeleton.’”

“Skeleton? I knew the body was decayed, but I understood the facial features were intact….”

“Haven’t you ever seen what the ‘body’ looked like?”

I shook my head, no.

He plucked a glossy photo from a folder. “They couldn’t even verify the sex,” he said, and handed the photo to me.

“Jesus,” I said.

It was just a tiny black pile of bones; you could make out a skull, more or less, and a rib or two; the left leg was missing.

My mouth felt suddenly dry. “I heard that the child was identified by its toes overlapping in some distinctive way…”

“Well, there’s only one foot there to check at all,” Hoffman said. “But Dr. Van Ingen’s examination of the child, on February eighteenth, ten days before the kidnapping, reported both its little toes were turned in, overlapping the next toe. The corpse, what there was of it, had overlapping toes as well-but it was the large toe, overlapping the second toe.”

“It’s hard to tell even that,” 1 said, and handed the damn photo back to him.

“One fact is indisputable-the physician at the mortuary measured the body and found it to be thirty-three and one-third inches long. Van Ingen’s measurement on February eighteenth was twenty-nine inches.”

“Some of that could be attributed to growth of bones after death,” I said, thinking it through. “But hell-not four and a half inches…”

“Of course this all points up one of the major blunders of the trial,” Hoffman said.

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-