Stolen Away

“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.

“With my dying breath I would have said I have never seen that number before! Besides, if I have commit this crime, would I have marked down in my own home this number?”

“Well, I was there when Condon received calls from the supposed kidnappers.”

“But in my Bronx house I have no telephone!”

“What?”

“I must go some distance to find telephone to use. What good would to me be a number written inside this closet, very small and very dark, where I would have to get inside to see the number?”

“Wasn’t it an unlisted number?”

“No! They have tried to make people think that this was a secret number. But it is not so. The number was in all the books. It was much later that Dr. Condon changed to a private number. I am certain the numbers on the closet wainscoting have been made either by police or by reporters who try to write like me.”

Thinking back over what I’d read this afternoon, I’d come across an interesting point: the state’s high-paid handwriting experts at the trial were never called upon to identify the closet handwriting as Hauptmann’s.

“I’ve heard a rumor that a specific reporter did that,” I told him. “I intend to try to run that down.”

“Good!” Hauptmann said, and I thought he was answering me at first, but he apparently wasn’t. He was looking past me and up, and standing, as he moved to the cell’s barred doors.

A guard with a long pole was up on the catwalk of the cellblock tier above, trying to lift a skylight window and allow the bird to flutter free.

Hauptmann came back and sat down, looking relieved. “It’s not free, but he’s trying. Someone is trying. That’s important. Where were we?”

“You mentioned the police had access to your apartment, because your wife and son moved out. Is that your reading of so-called rail sixteen, the piece of the ladder that’s supposed to come from your attic?”

He smiled mirthlessly, shook his head. “In the first place, this ‘rail sixteen’ have in it some large knots which alone would prevent a carpenter from making a ladder of it. Only it is not a ladder-it is a bad wooden rack. Its construction shows that it did not come from the hand of a carpenter, not even a poor one. Wilentz, he say I am not a good carpenter. I have worked for myself and as a foreman. You ask people about whether I am a good carpenter.”

“You think the wood was from your attic?”

He shrugged. “If so, they take it, not me.”

The kidnap ladder had been dismantled and reassembled time and again, for various tests.

“Wilentz says I am smart criminal,” Hauptmann said, with a faint sneer. “He says on these hands I must have worn gloves, because there are no fingerprints. On these feet I must have worn bags, because there were no footprints. If I was such a smart criminal, if I would do all those things, why would I go in my own house, and take up half of one board in my attic to use for one piece of this ‘ladder’-something that would always be evidence against me?

“If I wanted to make a ladder, could I not get from around my yard and around my garage all the scrap wood I need? Besides, only about one block from my house is a lumberyard. Listen, I am a carpenter-would I buy wood for five rails only and not know I need wood for six?”

“This wood expert, Koehler,” I said, “claims he tracked the wood the other rails were made of to that neighborhood lumberyard of yours.”

Hauptmann waved a hand gently in the air, as if trying to rub out a stain there. “Koehler himself says he have