Stolen Away

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.”

I laughed.

“Because of reactions similar to yours, from myself, an aide and a criminologist present,” Hoffman said, “Mr. Hochmuth realized he’d guessed wrong. So he tried again-and identified that eighteen-inch-tall silver cup, filled with flowers, as a woman’s hat.”

“He never did get it right?”

“His third try was closest: a bowl of fruit.”

“Well, law of averages. At least it didn’t glare at him.”

He sorted some more. “And now we come to Millard Whited, a Sourlands hillbilly who claimed he saw Hauptmann prowling near the Lindbergh estate. Mr. Whited, it seems, is on the one hand impoverished, and on the other, a liar; so say his neighbors, at any rate.”

“Wasn’t it Whited’s testimony that got Hauptmann extradited from New York to here?”

Hoffman nodded. “Whited was brought to the Bronx courthouse to make an eyewitness identification, which he did. But I have in my possession…” He patted the stack of documents before him. “…statements Whited gave the State Police within two months of the crime that he hadn’t seen any suspicious persons in the vicinity of the Lindbergh estate. So I invited Mr. Whited-at my expense-for a visit.”

“Did he think your loving cup was a hat?”

“No. But he did admit he’d received a one-hundred-fifty-dollar fee, thirty-five dollars’ expenses per diem and a promise of a share of the reward money. Particularly interesting, considering on the witness stand at Flemington, he denied receiving anything but dinner money.”

“That thirty-five bucks per diem jibes with what I got paid for coming out.” Apparently I wasn’t important enough to get a fee, though.

“The other eyewitnesses are similarly suspect. The cab driver, Perrone, it turns out positively identified several other suspects as ‘John,’ before Hauptmann’s arrest. The traveling salesman, Rossiter, who claimed he saw Hauptmann changing a tire near Princeton, three days before the kidnapping, is a known embezzler and thief. The movie-theater cashier, Mrs. Barr, sold tickets to over fifteen hundred people on the night of November twenty-sixth, 1933, but could pick Hauptmann out, a year later, as a man who gave her a folded five-dollar bill that turned out to be one of the ransom bills. Never mind that November twenty-sixth is Hauptmann’s birthday, and that on that night he and his wife and friends were at home celebrating.”

“Quite an array, these witnesses.”

“Yes, but we mustn’t forget the celebrity. The man who made a positive eyewitness identification of Hauptmann based upon two words he heard spoken a block away-four years before.”

Charles A. Lindbergh.

“And then of course,” he continued, flicking cigar ash into a silver ashtray, “there’s Jafsie. That wonderful American-who when I reopened this investigation, and announced that I wanted to question him, promptly left on an extended vacation to Panama.”

I had to laugh. “Is he still gone?”

“Actually, he’s supposed to have returned today. And he is one of the people I want you to go around and question.”

“All right, but only because you’re paying me. Last I heard, old Jafsie was hitting the vaudeville circuit, with a Lindbergh lecture.”

“Well,” Hoffman said, “I can tell you one thing he didn’t lecture about: the period when he was the chief suspect in the case. I have an affidavit declaring that after Condon initially failed to identify Hauptmann as John at the Greenwich Street Police Station in the Bronx…and he was adamant about not identifying Hauptmann, there…Jafsie was intimidated and threatened by the police.”

“I’d be surprised if he wasn’t.”

“That was New York. Two Jersey state troopers have indicated to me that Condon was threatened by Schwarzkopf and his bullyboy Welch with an indictment for obstructing justice…which is what they got Commodore Curtis on, you may recall…if the old boy didn’t recant and identify Hauptmann as ‘Cemetery John.’”

“No wonder Jafsie changed his tune.”

“He was quoted by a trooper as saying, ‘I would not like to be indicted in New Jersey, for they would choke you for a cherry in New Jersey.’”

I laughed at that. “One of Jafsie’s few intentionally humorous remarks,” I said. “Sure, I’ll talk to him. Who else do you want me to see?”

“Well, among others, check in with Gaston Means.”

“Means! Isn’t he in Leavenworth?”

“That’s his official federal residence. Right now he’s under observation at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C. For what he himself refers to as ‘high brain blood pressure.’ At the same time, he’s been bombarding my office with confessions; claims he’s the one who engineered the kidnapping.”

I sighed. “It’s a waste of time, but I’ll talk to him.”

“I know. But these hoaxers all seem to have some element of truth, or near-truth, in their stories.”

“That’s how a good con is mounted, Governor. So let me guess the next name on your list: Commodore John Hughes Curtis.”

“Not necessarily next, but yes, do check in with him. You do realize, Mr. Heller, that the State of New Jersey convicted Curtis on an obstructing-justice charge, on the assumption he’d had contact with the actual kidnap gang?”

“He got off with a fine and a suspended sentence, didn’t he?”

“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.”