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- [00:00]
Poppy Damon
You survived the Miami weekend, nailed the speech, and maxed out your credit card in the name of friendship. Now you've got one hangover, four pastel dresses, and zero reasons to wear them again. Sell them on, Depop. Just snap a few photos and we'll take care of the rest. And you at least get some of your dignity money back. Someone on Depop wants what you've got. Start selling now, Depop, where taste recognizes taste.
- [00:30]
Joe Nocera
Before we get started, just to let you know, if you want to binge this whole series today and without ads, you should become a paid subscriber to the Free Press. Our paid subscribers can listen to all six episodes right now with no ads and will gain all the other benefits of a paid free press subscription. That's access to our journalism, podcasts, community features, and event perks. Subscribe today and save yourself waiting for the next episode.
- [01:03]
Kurt Perhech
My name is Kurt Perhech. I am an attorney, and I'm here to talk to you today about the Lindbergh kidnapping case.
- [01:10]
Joe Nocera
Kurt is a lawyer based in New Jersey. As we heard last episode, he's now fighting his own legal battle over this case. And like so many people we met making this podcast, it began with an obsession that took hold when he was barely a teenager.
- [01:27]
Kurt Perhech
When I was 13 or 14, I read a book called Kidnap. I became extremely fascinated by a lot of twists and turns in it, especially on the legal front. It's the first case in US Jurisprudence history to involve a wood expert.
- [01:43]
Joe Nocera
Kurt comes at this, where I come at it fundamentally, whether or not you think Bruno did it, his trial was deeply unfair. And all the Lindbergh conspiracies start right here, because this is where the thought first arises. Did Hauptman really do it?
- [02:02]
Kurt Perhech
As I read the trial transcript and the appellate transcript, the defense attorney just did an awful job on so many levels, and it just made me think, I can do this. I can do better than this. And this seems to me like it's a travesty of justice.
- [02:16]
Joe Nocera
How Kurt hopes to undo that travesty is a subject we'll return to later. Right now, my producer, Poppy Damon, and I, with the help of some actors and our team of experts, are going to take you back to January 1935 and recreate the trial of Bruno Hauptmann as best we can. If the kidnapping was the crime of the century, then the trial was certainly the trial of the century. The only thing comparable in my lifetime was the O.J. simpson trial, and at the center of it was a German immigrant carpenter who would insist on the stand, just as he would insist as he sat in the electric chair. I want to tell the people of America that I am absolutely innocent of the crime and murder. Was he telling the truth? I'm Joe Nocera, and for the free press, this is the Lindbergh conspiracies. Episode 4 the Trial of the Century. Bruno Hauptman's trial lasted five weeks. It began right after New Year's, January 2, 1935, in Flemington, New Jersey, the county seat. The temperature was often below freezing, yet every night there was a line of shivering people hoping to get in the courthouse for the next day's session. Needless to say, Poppy and I visited Flemington. Standing outside that courthouse, the first thing that hits you is how small it is.
- [03:54]
Poppy Damon
You know, for a period of time, this was the center of it all. We can see all the power cables up. I mean, they've installed phone lines in this town just to make it possible that reporters could run out and file as they did back in the day.
- [04:06]
Joe Nocera
Jim Davidson grew up in Flemington, and he wrote a book about what the town was like during the trial. He called it when the circus comes to town.
- [04:16]
Jim Davidson
You have to keep in mind Flemington had probably 2,500 to 3,000 people in the town. In the first week. There were 50,000 people there. I talked to a woman from Jersey City that drove all the way out to see where the baby was found and the line. She had to wait four miles to get to the spot on that road
- [04:40]
Poppy Damon
where we were just on.
- [04:42]
Jim Davidson
In Flemington, the traffic was backed up 20 miles to Somerville to come through town.
- [04:50]
Joe Nocera
The big hotel in town, the Union Hotel, was a block from the courthouse. The jury was sequestered on the third floor. The press took over the rest of it. At dinner, jurors sat in the dining room, shielded only by a white sheet. They could hear everything the rowdy reporters were saying about Hoffman and the trial. It really wasn't much of a sequester. One local diner served dishes called Bruno gravy Lindbergh steak and gal goulash for Betty Gough, the nursemaid. People were hawking little bundles of blonde hair as Charlie's hair. Mariah Fredericks is the author of the Lindbergh Nanny.
- [05:34]
Poppy Damon
Little wooden ladders as souvenirs.
- [05:40]
Jim Davidson
I think I read complete newspaper coverage of 40 different newspapers and just found out. Crazy tidbits here and there. A friend of mine told me his father was a news boy there and would get 25 cents every time he could hook up a hooker with a john. And there Were tons of prostitutes running around Flemington. That is in no books.
- [06:10]
Joe Nocera
HL Mencken, the most influential American critic of his day, called it the biggest story since the Resurrection. And right in the middle of all this frenzy, a man's life was going to be decided. Here's Poppy, my producer.
- [06:29]
Poppy Damon
So on one side you have the prosecutor, David Willlentz. He's 39 years old. He's a New Jersey attorney general. He's very ambitious, he's organized, he's brilliant in front of a jury. He, he had, however, Joe, never tried a criminal case.
- [06:43]
Joe Nocera
Here's Patrick Bambarak, you'll remember. He's the great grand nephew of New Jersey governor Harold Hoffman. David Wilentz's side of the equation as the attorney General, the prosecutor of this criminal, this evil Bruno Hauptman, ultimately, or whoever this would be that they'd catch. That was the ultimate upside, you know, because you have the opportunity then to be the person who is the one who catches the bad guy and sends him to justice. On the other side, Edward J. Reilly, large, boisterous, always in a pinstripe suit with a white carnation. He boasted that he had represented over 2000 defendants and obtained acquittals for most of them. Even if that were true, which it probably wasn't, he was well past his prime. At 52 years old, he was a serious alcoholic. The night before the trial, Reilly was passed out from all his carousing at a New Year's Eve party. He had been hired, it later emerged, by the Hearst newspapers, which had purchased the rights to Anna Houtman's story and therefore had a direct financial interest in a dramatic, sensational trial. As Anthony Scudutto put it, it was
- [08:02]
Edward J. Reilly
spectacle more than trial. Low camp theater masquerading as justice.
- [08:11]
Joe Nocera
January 3, 1935. The jury's been chosen. The trial opens. Ann Lindbergh takes the stand on the trial's first day. She's quiet, dignified and heartbreaking.
- [08:25]
Courtroom Witness
What else did the child wear that evening?
- [08:27]
Poppy Damon
As bedclothes, he had diapers fastened to the small shirt, to the second shirt, and on top of that he had a sleeping suit, a wool sleeping suit.
- [08:37]
Courtroom Witness
Did you buy that sleeping suit yourself?
- [08:40]
Poppy Damon
I did.
- [08:41]
Courtroom Witness
I show you what purports to be a sleeping suit number two, Dr. Denton, and ask you whether or not you recognize that sleeping suit.
- [08:49]
Poppy Damon
I do.
- [08:50]
Courtroom Witness
What sleeping suit is that, Mrs. Lindbergh?
- [08:53]
Poppy Damon
It is the sleeping suit that was put on my child the night of March 1st.
- [08:57]
Joe Nocera
She identifies her son's sleeping garments when she gets off the Stand. She leaves the courtroom and never returns. Lindbergh, during the trial, is seen as a tragic and sympathetic figure. Thomas Daugherty is the author of Little Lindy Is Kidnapped. Anne, even more so. Ann does not break down and sob on the stand, which is actually, in some ways makes it more heartbreaking because the people in the gallery cry for her. And so she's very stoic and very dignified, as is Lindbergh. The next day, Charles Lindbergh is on the stand and what he says matters enormously. Not because of what he saw, but because of what he heard. And also, of course, because of who he was. He's asked about the voice he heard in the cemetery. He's asked since that time, have you heard the same voice? Yes, I have, he replies. Whose voice was it, Colonel, that you heard saying, hey, Doctor? And he says, that was Hauptman's voice. Think about what that identification actually rests on. Lindbergh was sitting in a car at night some distance from a dark cemetery. What he heard was a two second shout, hey, Doctor. He heard it once, more than two years before the trial. Yet in that courtroom, with all eyes on the most famous man in America, he has no doubt, and it's devastating. Defense counsel Riley Cross examines Lindbergh, tossing out the names of possible alternate suspects. Betty Gough, Violet Sharp, even Condon. Then, inexplicably, he asks a question that practically seals his client's doom.
- [10:52]
Edward J. Reilly
Do you believe that the defendant is guilty? I do.
- [10:58]
Joe Nocera
A first year law student would know never to ask that question. Hauptman audibly groans. January 8th. A man named Amandis Hakhmuth takes the stand. He's 87 years old, small, frail. He lives on the road leading to the Lindbergh estate. He testifies that on the morning of March 1, 1932, the day of the kidnapping, he saw a man in a green car drive towards the Lindbergh home with a ladder in the back. The man, he says, glared at him.
- [11:34]
Courtroom Witness
The man you saw looking out of that automobile, glaring at you, is he in this room?
- [11:39]
Joe Nocera
Yes. He points to Haltman. But for Wilentz, pointing isn't enough. He asks the old man to walk across the courtroom and physically touch the defendant. Hochmuth puts his hand on Haltman's knee. At that precise moment, a power failure sends the courtroom into semi darkness and defense attorney Riley quips, it's the Lord's
- [12:03]
Edward J. Reilly
wrath over a lying witness.
- [12:05]
Joe Nocera
It's a great line, and it may have been closer to the truth than anyone realized. Jim Davison drove poppy past Hawkmuth's house.
- [12:14]
Jim Davidson
Amandus Hawkmuth lived right in this house right here. And he was the one who was blind. He was 87. And he saw Bruno Hartman come from Hopewell, turn around and get stuck in his ditch. And initially he said, now this is March 1st, when it's raining outside. He said he was sitting on the front porch of his house here and saw this. Now, who would sit on a cold winter day on the front porch? But that didn't jive with what the state police said. So they said that by the time he got to the trial, he said, well, I was feeding my chickens at five o' clock at night when this car went by.
- [12:56]
Joe Nocera
And here's what the trial record actually shows. Hawkmuth had originally told police he'd seen nothing suspicious the day of the kidnapping. Nothing. He changed his account entirely before testifying. This was not an anomaly. This was a pattern. January 9th, Dr. John Condon, the one and only Jaffsy, takes the stand. He is, of course, one of the central characters in the Lindbergh kidnapping saga. The man who negotiated with the kidnapper directly, who sat with Cemetery John in the dark and who handed over $50,000 in ransom. He identifies Houtman.
- [13:39]
Poppy Damon
So the thing is, in September 1934, when he was brought to a police lineup, he had spent half an hour examining the men and couldn't make a positive identification at all. He didn't pick Haltman.
- [13:51]
Joe Nocera
It's kind of unbelievable. There were 13 people in the lineup. He was allowed to go up to each one of them to talk to them, to touch their hands to see if they have certain marks that he supposedly said Hopman had. And then he asked Hopman to speak. And it turned out Hopman had a high pitched voice. And Condon had always said that Cemetery John had a husky voice. Then the cops would ask him over and over and over, isn't it him? Isn't it him? Isn't it him? And he said he would just basically say, I can't make an identification, which is kind of incredible. And so the rumor has always been that basically they told him if he didn't identify Houtman, he would be indicted himself.
- [14:35]
Poppy Damon
And maybe that's why he picked him on the stand.
- [14:38]
Joe Nocera
I would suspect that might be the case. It wasn't just Condon and Hakhmuth, Ludovic Kennedy and Anthony Scudutto who both dissected the trial for their books. Each went through the FBI files, the New York police files, the Bronx D A files, and each came to the same conclusion. Witnesses who had initially given descriptions that did not match Houtman or who had initially reported seeing nothing. By the time of the trial, they'd changed their stories completely. The guy never had a chance.
- [15:12]
Poppy Damon
We gotta talk about the gold certificates. The gold certificates were found at Houtman's house. And they're the main, you know, follow the money and it leads to Bruner, Houtman, and it's pretty hard to get away from.
- [15:23]
Joe Nocera
January 11th, a federal agent takes the stand to present what, on the surface is the most straightforward piece of evidence in the whole case. In Hopman's garage, investigators found $14,600 in ransom money. Gold certificates. Remember how the Treasury Department insisted that the serial numbers be recorded before the handover? They were hidden behind a board and wrapped in a carefully constructed wooden structure. This, the prosecution argued this was the smoking gun. You can debate handwriting and wood grain and everything else, but you can't debate whether $14,600 in marked bills were hidden in a man's garage, because they were. Or can you?
- [16:12]
Poppy Damon
So the thing is, Joe Haltmann's explanation was consistent from the moment of his arrest to the moment of his execution. He says the money had been left with him by his business partner, the German named Isidor Fish. And Fish had handed him a shoebox when he departed for Germany in December 1933. And Houtman had put it on a shelf in his kitchen closet. He hadn't looked inside it. He didn't know what was in it. But when Fish died of tuberculosis In Germany in March 1934, Houtman discovered what the box contained. And considering that Fish had owed him $7,500, he kept some of it and he spent the rest. And by the time the police discovered it, he had hidden it in different locations. So that's in the garage and in the canister, the oil canister.
- [16:57]
Joe Nocera
Jim Davidson gave us his assessment of this explanation.
- [17:01]
Jim Davidson
One of the theories is that Isadore Fish was involved in this. He got the money and then he found the money, had the serial numbers recorded, and it was hot money. So what did he do is he unloaded the money and Hartman ended up with it. Although I don't think Haltman bought the money. I think his story that on his going away party that they had for Fish, Fish came in with this suitcase and a box and said, hold these for when I come back. And he put them up on the top shelf of a closet in the kitchen, which was up high, and it sat there for two Years until Fish died in Germany. And he had owed Haltman $7,000 that Haltman had let him. So when his roof leaks and he gets his box down and he opens it, he sees this money. He did what any red blooded American would do. He hid it and didn't tell his wife.
- [18:03]
Joe Nocera
The prosecution attacked the Fish story relentlessly. Relatives of Fish actually came all the way from Germany to testify that he'd been nearly destitute. Not a man who could have had ransom money to distribute. A cashier testified that Haltman had spent ransom bills before Fish even left for Germany. And most damaging of all, when Anna Hoffman took the Standard, she admitted she had never seen a shoebox on the kitchen shelf. But there was something the jury never heard, something the prosecution knew it did not put before them or tell the defense. Wolantz built Hauptman's motive around his supposed financial desperation, which then led him to hatch the plan for the kidnapping.
- [18:55]
Poppy Damon
So, Joe, he puts a Treasury Department accountant on the stand and he tries to build this image of Haltman as broke. A man who gambled and lost everything in the crash of 1929. He was desperate for this ransom money, and even when he had, it had continued stock speculation. And by March 1932, prior to the kidnapping, was effectively penniless.
- [19:18]
Joe Nocera
But the FBI conducted its own financial investigation. Their accountant had found something entirely different. According to Kennedy, citing FBI records, Hopman's total stock market losses from 1929 to the date of the kidnapping in March 1932 were $363.65. Not thousands. Not ruin. $363.65.
- [19:49]
Poppy Damon
So this is where it's a bit dodgy, because the FBI agents who'd found that out had been prepared to testify. And in Kennedy's book, he says, you know, that they had told the prosecution, we're going to tell the truth. And because that's not what the prosecution wanted, they didn't bring them forward to testify in front of the jury.
- [20:07]
Joe Nocera
And of course, Riley for the defense didn't call him either, because, you know, who knows why? But anyway, think about this. The entire motive, the engine of this case, the answer to the question, why would this man do this? Rested on a financial picture that the prosecution's own government colleagues had found to be false. I mean, a man who loses $363 in the crash is not a desperate man. He's not a man at the end of his rope, and he's not a man who needs to kidnap a baby.
- [20:40]
Poppy Damon
Yeah. And irrespective of whether you think he did it? It's just such a dirty trick. And shows the lengths they're willing to go to in order to convict him and execute him.
- [20:49]
Joe Nocera
Here's something else, Bobby. The jury also didn't know that the initial FBI reports had concluded that the kidnapping required at least two people. Evidence that quietly contradicted the prosecution's lone wolf theory.
- [21:04]
Poppy Damon
Yes, and all the investigators were working on that theory until they got Houtman. And after that, it just became a goal to convict him and execute him. And all of that stuff went out the window.
- [21:16]
Joe Nocera
There's one more thing about the gold certificates that rarely gets discussed. Before Hoffman's arrest, large amounts of ransom money had been appearing in circulation. Spent on the Lexington Avenue subway line at stores in the Bronx, in the German neighborhood of Yorkville. It could have been Hoffman for sure. Or not. Before Hoffman ever spent a single bill, someone deposited nearly $3,000 of the ransom money at a Manhattan bank under the name of J.J. faulkner, a name that matched no one connected to Hoffman. That money was never traced back to anyone. The person was never identified. Before Hoffman's execution, Governor Hoffman received a letter from someone claiming to be Faulkner and saying the wrong man had been convicted. That lead was never seriously pursued.
- [22:13]
Poppy Damon
And Remember, Joe, roughly $35,000 of the original ransom was never found at all.
- [22:20]
Joe Nocera
January 11th to January 16th. Five full days devoted to handwriting testimony. Eight experts for the prosecution, one for the defense. And from the moment the first expert took the stand, the jury was looking at the blow up photographs of letters and words, comparing loops and curves and backward ends, and being told that only one person in the world could have written those 14 ransom notes. Bruno Richard Hauptman. The handwriting evidence was presented as Science in 1935. It was treated as something close to settled fact. But the story behind these samples, how they were collected, what the prosecution did with them and what was suppressed, is one of the most troubling aspects of the entire trial.
- [23:12]
Poppy Damon
Okay, so this is how Haltman's handwriting samples were actually obtained. On the night of his arrest, he was taken to the Greenwich street police station in Manhattan. And there, over a number of hours, he was made to write out the contents of the ransom notes. And he was made to do this repeatedly. And by many accounts of officers and so forth of different historical record. He was instructed not just to copy the words, but to reproduce the specific misspellings that appeared in the notes. So for Auer, he had it as O U E R. Money is spelled M O N Y. Note was spelled not bored for boat I mean it's clearly not as first language English speaker. And according to the FBI agent Leon Truro, Haltmann was told to make his writing look as much like the writing in the ransom notes as possible. So any testimony that came from what he produced at that time is obviously very dodgy, very dubious and was done presumably under threat from violent officers.
- [24:12]
Joe Nocera
Poppy, that was an excellent explanation. But I think there's another way of saying this, which is to say the handwriting analysis was total bs. Those coached dictated samples produced under duress in the middle of the night with police instructing him to mimic the very quirks they were supposed to prove his guilt with a sample submitted to the jury as state's evidence. 18 months later. It gets worse. The prosecution's own top handwriting analysts, according to Kennedy and Skidutto, had once again initially concluded that Hoffman did not write the ransom notes. Just like the other witnesses, they changed their conclusions before the trial and the defense. Riley had retained multiple handwriting experts of his own. Several, after examining the notes against Hopman's known writings, declined to testify. Two others were retained and prepared to appear. Inexplicably, they were never called. One expert, John Trendley, did take the stand for the defense and he testified that despite the spelling similarities he did not believe Hauptman had written the notes. He was largely ignored. The other experts who could have supported this view sat silently in the gallery, unused. Instead, Reilly seemed to try and make the time he had with this expert all a moment to point out the large budget the prosecution had at its disposal.
- [25:49]
Edward J. Reilly
I submit his experience of 387 cases covering a period of 49 years. And the court will recall we didn't have the opportunity to send all over the world and examine into the records of the $150,000 case prepared by the state of New Jersey. And the experts brought in here, they brought men in here that we did not know five minutes before they took the stand they were going to be called. I ask that the court strike from the record the remarks of counsel. I think they are highly prejudicial about the state's $150,000 case and its experts. I will strike out the $150,000 case.
- [26:26]
Courtroom Witness
The jury will of course disregard that.
- [26:29]
Edward J. Reilly
As a result of your study, are you in a position to render an opinion as to whether or not Hauptman wrote the ransom notes? In my opinion, he did not.
- [26:39]
Joe Nocera
What no one in the courtroom told the jury was how these samples had been produced. What no one said was that the handwriting itself had been dictated to Hauptman by the cops. There's something else worth understanding about handwriting analysis as a science. Unlike DNA, unlike fingerprints, it has never been subjected to rigorous statistical validation. There is no established error rate. There is no peer reviewed standard for what constitutes a match. In 2016, eight decades after the trial, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology issued a report finding that many forensic disciplines, including handwriting analysis, lack sufficient scientific foundation to be considered reliable evidence. A court today would scrutinize this testimony far more carefully than Doug Trenchard did in 1935. A court today, in fact, might not admit it as evidence at all.
- [27:48]
Poppy Damon
So, talking of pseudoscience, the next kind of scientific evidence that is presented is all about the wood expert. And you know how much we love ladder and wood experts in this podcast. Joe.
- [28:00]
Joe Nocera
January 23rd. This is the moment the prosecutors has been building towards. Arthur Koehler, a wood expert takes the stand. Kohler was the first forensic wood scientist ever to testify at a murder trial. He spent years examining the kidnap ladder. He traced the wood grain through mills, through shipments, through lumber yards. He had concluded that the wood from the ladder was purchased from a yard in the Bronx near Hauptman's house. But the kicker was the now famous rail 16. He told the jury that one rail of the ladder, rail 16, had not been purchased from any lumber yard. It had come from somewhere much closer to home. It had been cut, Kohler said, from a board in the attic floor of Hoffman's building.
- [28:55]
Poppy Damon
So Koehler gets on the stand and he claims that the growth rings in rail 16 showed an exact match of curvature, number and width with the attic floorboard. And he calculated the chances of this exact set of circumstances occurring twice. As in the chances of it just being random was 1 in 10, quadrillion.
- [29:15]
Joe Nocera
Poppy and I went to Houtman's house in the Bronx with ex cop Greg Algren and Renell Delmart. This is where his garage. He built the garage with the permission of the owner. He didn't own this house. He rented the top floor. There were two other families living in the house. The landlord, the Rauch family. Mrs. Rauch and her son live beneath him. Those windows are his bedroom. The prosecution called it the single most powerful piece of evidence in the entire case. Several jurors after the verdict said Rail 16 was what convinced them.
- [29:52]
Poppy Damon
And also, Jo, it gets even more dodgy because this floorboard that's, you know, used as a one in a quadrillion chance match had been discovered by a Lt. Louis Bonman of the New Jersey State police. But at the time he found it, the attic had already been searched 19 times by 37 police officers from New York and New Jersey and the FBI, and none of them had noticed a missing floorboard.
- [30:19]
Joe Nocera
Believe it or not, Bornman had moved into Hopman's apartment after the arrest, with the defense team locked out. And then, alone in the attic, he made his miraculous discovery. When the physical evidence was scrutinized, I mean really scrutinized, the problems multiplied fast. The floorboard in the attic had 7 knots. Rail 16 had 3. Rail 16 was actually 116 of an inch thicker than the attic board, making a precise match between the two essentially impossible. New Jersey Governor Harold Hoffman looked at it, and he openly stated that this evidence was false.
- [31:03]
Poppy Damon
And, Joe, now we get to talk about the four nail holes.
- [31:07]
Joe Nocera
Here's the story of the nail holes. The four nail holes in rail 16, according to Kohler, were what made the match irrefutable. They lined up perfectly with holes in the attic beams.
- [31:19]
Edward J. Reilly
I made the investigation on October 9,
- [31:22]
Courtroom Witness
1933, the first time having taken off this section. What did you find?
- [31:27]
Edward J. Reilly
I found that the nail holes in it corresponded exactly with the four nail holes in the joists in that attic.
- [31:33]
Joe Nocera
And the grain of the wood in
- [31:34]
Edward J. Reilly
that rail corresponded exactly with the grain
- [31:37]
Joe Nocera
of the wood of the board next to it. But a fingerprint expert testified that when he examined Rail 16 for fingerprints on March 13, 1932, two weeks after the kidnapping, there was only one nail hole. Governor Hoffman later produced a photograph of Rail 16 from March 2, before the investigation had even properly begun, in which there were no, no holes at all. Ludovic Kennedy made one more argument, a logical one, a carpenter's argument. Hauptman was a professional. He kept lumber in his garage, and there was plenty there. If he needed wood for a ladder, why on earth would he climb into his attic, remove the linen from a closet, clamber up the stairs, push open a trap door while carrying a saw, a hammer and a chisel, and then start chopping up his landlord's floor?
- [32:35]
Poppy Damon
I guess the idea, though, Joe, if you were trying to prosecute Haltman, was that he didn't have a lot of money and wood was expensive. And that's why he broke into his landlord's attic to steal a floorboard.
- [32:45]
Joe Nocera
Oh, come on, Poppy. January 24th. The prosecution rests. The state has buried Houtman under a mountain of eyewitness identification, handwriting analysis, wood, science and ransom money. The defense's opening statement contains one remarkable line. Defense attorney Lloyd Fisher, who's working with
- [33:08]
Edward J. Reilly
Riley tells the jury no case in all of history was as badly handled or as badly managed.
- [33:15]
Joe Nocera
He was talking about the prosecution's investigation. Of course, he may, without knowing it, have also been describing Hauptman's defense. January 28, Bruno Hauptman takes the stand. He's calm, correct, occasionally defiant.
- [33:35]
Edward J. Reilly
Hauptman, were you ever in Hopewell in your life?
- [33:38]
Joe Nocera
I never was.
- [33:39]
Edward J. Reilly
On the night of March 1, 1932, were you on the grounds of Colonel Lindbergh at Hopewell, New Jersey? I was not. On the night of March 1, 1932, did you enter the nursery of Colonel Lindbergh? I did not. And take from that nursery Charles Lindbergh Jr. I did not. Did you leave on the window seat of Colonel Lindbergh's nursery a note?
- [34:01]
Joe Nocera
Well, I wasn't there at all.
- [34:02]
Edward J. Reilly
You never saw baby Lindbergh in your life, did you? Never saw it.
- [34:07]
Joe Nocera
He denies everything. He explains the ransom money. It was left with him by his business partner. Is it a fish in a shoebox on a kitchen shelf? Then it's time for Wilentz to cross examine him. He is relentless. There's some archive footage illegally recorded at the time and played on newsreel. When you were arrested with this Lindbergh ransom money, you had a $20bill Lindbergh ransom money. Did they ask you what you got? Did I ask you? He did. Did you lie to him or did you tell him the truth? Did you lie to him or did you tell him the truth? I said nothing to him. You lied, didn't he? I said yes. In case you couldn't hear that, he acknowledges that he lied about where the $20 came from that he used to pay the gas attendant. It was devastating in front of the jury. It's one of those handful of moments that sealed Hopman's doom. The Disney plus Hulu HBO Max Bundle the best in entertainment in one bundle this month stream Disney and Pixar's blockbuster family favorite Hoppers on Disney plus. This is incredible. FX is critically acclaimed. The Bear season five on Hulu.
- [35:21]
Jim Davidson
Everything's either gonna be okay or not.
- [35:23]
Joe Nocera
In season three of the HBO original series House of the Dragon on HBO Max, you have power within New Cross. Get the Disney plus Hulu HBO Max bundle today. All of these and more streaming soon. Plan starting at 19.99amonth. Terms apply. Visit Disney/hulu max bundle.com for details. Whatever your thing, it could be anything.
- [35:41]
Edward J. Reilly
Canva helps you make that thing a thing.
- [35:44]
Joe Nocera
Canva is a simple online tool thing. It's a Way to design with our magic AI tool things you can social media your thing, generate images or videos of your thing, make decks or presentations to show your thing, whatever needs to
- [35:59]
Edward J. Reilly
be done for your thing.
- [36:00]
Joe Nocera
Canva can make it an even better and bigger thing.
- [36:03]
Edward J. Reilly
Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing.
- [36:08]
Poppy Damon
Jo, I want to talk about Anna Haltman's testimony because I'm a bit obsessed with her. I always picture when I'm thinking of the trial, her hauled up with this press person going to trial every day. Her husband's the most hated man in America. She's got a young kid who. And yet she tries to do her best on the stand, but she doesn't do him any favors.
- [36:29]
Joe Nocera
January 30th, Anna Haltman takes the stand. Under questioning, she admits she never saw a shoebox on the kitchen shelf.
- [36:39]
Courtroom Witness
Now, this broom closet we talked about, that you just showed to the jury was a closet in which you kept. It was in the kitchen, wasn't it?
- [36:48]
Poppy Damon
Yes.
- [36:49]
Courtroom Witness
And it was a closet to which you went every day, wasn't it?
- [36:52]
Poppy Damon
Yes.
- [36:53]
Courtroom Witness
Every day you went to that closet. And you never saw any shoebox on the top shelf, did you?
- [36:59]
Poppy Damon
I don't know what was on the top shelf.
- [37:01]
Courtroom Witness
You never saw a shoebox there, madam, did you?
- [37:04]
Poppy Damon
I didn't.
- [37:05]
Courtroom Witness
From November 1933 or December 1933, the months and the day that Mr. Fish was last at your home until September 1934, you never saw a strange shoebox on the top shelf of that closet, did you? I never had anything to do with the top shelf.
- [37:25]
Poppy Damon
I didn't use it for my. For myself.
- [37:29]
Joe Nocera
It was a serious blow to her husband's alibi that the money, the $14,000, had been sitting in the kitchen for two years. As a homemaker, she was his key witness to this version of events. And then there was this reporter. Jeanette Smits had lived with Anna for five months covering the trial. The following November, she published an article and True Detective Mysteries.
- [37:57]
Poppy Damon
That noon, over the lunch table, Mrs. Huffman seethed. She cried out, he was only supposed to get the money. When I started to question her, she closed her lips and refused to talk anymore. She never repeated that strange remark.
- [38:10]
Joe Nocera
Could he have told her he'd been promised a cut of the ransom without being involved in the kidnapping itself? Was this just the garbled frustration of a terrified wife? Or was it something more? Anna Haltman maintained his innocence until the day she died in 1994 at the age of 95. January 31, Riley Having promised to name the real kidnappers and produced compelling alibi witnesses, instead produces a parade of crooks, con men and what the trial record describes charitably as unreliable characters. Houtman himself, watching from the defense table, was heard to mutter. Where are they getting these witnesses?
- [38:56]
Edward J. Reilly
They're killing me.
- [38:59]
Joe Nocera
So here's what the jury in Flemington never knew. The jury didn't know that a witness named Hans Kloppenberg had wanted to testify that he'd been in the Haltman's apartment on the night Isidore Fish arrived carrying a shoebox. The prosecution threatened Kloppenberg with arrest if he took the stand. He did testify, but as he later put it, he was so frightened that he never mentioned the shoebox. The jury didn't know about the footprints found outside the nursery window on the night of the kidnapping. Police never measured them, never made casts. They would later establish that a plaster cast of Cemetery John shoeprint made during the ransom negotiations was too small to have been made by Haltman's foot. And here's a number that perhaps more than any other, captures what happened in the courtroom. 90,000. That is the number of pages of evidence that the state withheld from the defense. We know this because a retired California judge named Lisa Pearlman wrote a book about the case in 2020 and she went through the archive, all 90,000 pages. It included the testimony of three witnesses whose accounts directly contradicted the state's theory of the case. February 11th. Edward J. Reilly gives a five hour defense summation.
- [40:23]
Edward J. Reilly
They would have you in one breath believe that this man Hauptman was a mastermind, that he planned this himself, and the next minute they would have you believe that he was the worst fool in the world, that he was dumb, that he didn't know anything. He would wear gloves making a ladder so his fingerprints wouldn't be left behind. And he would sit an hour and a half talking to Condon with his face exposed. In one the careful mastermind and the
- [40:52]
Joe Nocera
other the perfect fool, he starts strongly casting suspicion on everyone except Hauptman himself.
- [40:59]
Edward J. Reilly
They had a chauffeur and a second chauffeur who was afterwards replaced. And now he is a watchman. They had five or six maids. They must have had gardeners. What do you know about the antecedents of those people? Nothing. How do we know who Betty Gough talked to when she got the message Tuesday afternoon from Mrs. Lindbergh?
- [41:23]
Jim Davidson
Come over.
- [41:23]
Edward J. Reilly
The baby is not well, but she never communicated with Haltman. So that I say nobody in God's world knew that baby was going to be there Tuesday Night. But this Gal girl. Ask yourselves the question from the evidence. Who besides Mrs. Lindbergh knew they were going to stay Tuesday night? And then you will come back the same as I did and say Betty Gal and I don't know how many others she may have told over at the morrow servants quarters. Now if ladies and gentlemen, nobody knew where the colonel was or when he would be home and with regularity the family always returned to Inglewood on Sunday night or Monday morning. How can we place that knowledge in Hauptman's possession? You can't.
- [42:16]
Joe Nocera
Then he breaks for lunch. When he returns four drinks later to give the rest of his summation, he wanders aimlessly until he finally sits down. To the relief of everyone in the room, including his own co counsel.
- [42:31]
Edward J. Reilly
I believe this man is absolutely innocent of murder. In closing, I wish to say to you that I appreciate the care and consideration that you have given us and the patience that you have given to this case. And may I just extend to the distinguished jurist on the bench at this time my thanks for his courtesy and to all the lawyers connected with the case. And I feel sure in closing even Colonel Lindbergh wouldn't expect you and doesn't expect you to do anything but your duty under the law and under the evidence. May I say to him in passing that he has my profound respect and I feel sorry for him and his deep grief. And I'm quite sure that all of you agree with me. His lovely son is now within the gates of heaven.
- [43:21]
Joe Nocera
February 12th. David Wilentz gives his five hour reply. It is crisp, organized and devastating. He finishes with a call for the death penalty.
- [43:33]
Courtroom Witness
What does life imprisonment mean? Nothing. Maybe in 15 years he will walk the streets again. We have proven it overwhelmingly, conclusively, positively. Now jurors, there is no excuse. You would never forgive yourself if you didn't do it. You wouldn't be happy. You wouldn't feel right. Honestly, you wouldn't. You convict this man of murder in the first degree. The grand jury of the county of Hunterton had the courage to do it. The state of New Jersey has the courage. They stand here unafraid and ask for the death penalty. Why? Because they know they are right.
- [44:13]
Joe Nocera
But he also does something in closing that the judge should never have permitted and that Riley should have objected to.
- [44:20]
Courtroom Witness
Public enemy number one of the world. That's what we are dealing with. You are not dealing with a fellow who doesn't know what he is doing. Take a look at him as he sits there. Look at him as he walks out into this room. Panther like gloating. Feeling good, Certainly. He stilled this little child's breath right into insensibility. Right in that room. Whether it drew another breath or not doesn't make any difference. That child never could make an outcry. The smudges on the bed sheet cry out. Evidence of the fact that Betty Gough testified to the fact that the child didn't cry out when it was disturbed. Yanked. How not just taken up. The pins are still left in the bed sheets. Yanked. And its head hit up against that board. Must have been hit. He couldn't do it any other way. Certainly it must have hit up against that board. Still no outcry. Why? There was no cry left in the child. Did he use the chisel to crush the skull at the time or to knock it into insensibility? Is that a fair inference? What else was the chisel there for? To knock that child into insensibility right there in that room. Counsel wants to know why it didn't cry out. There is the answer for you.
- [45:39]
Joe Nocera
He introduces a brand new theory, never argued during the trial, that Houtman killed the baby with the chisel. No motive given, no evidence supplied. Just an image planted in the jury's mind at the moment when the defense no longer has an opportunity to. To respond. It made my blood boil when I read about this. This is not what's supposed to happen in a court of law. The final summation, the final speech. You're only supposed to use the evidence that's been brought up in the trial. You're never supposed to bring up new evidence, new theory, new anything, and get away with it. But he did.
- [46:17]
Poppy Damon
Yeah. I think this is a really big deal because up until that point, there was the theory that the baby had fallen accidentally from the ladder. But by making it seem like it was possible that he intentionally killed the child, it made him a total monster. That would probably have left the jury thinking he deserved to be found guilty and deserved the death penalty.
- [46:39]
Joe Nocera
February 13, 1935. The judge gives the jury their instructions. It is completely biased against Houtman.
- [46:48]
Poppy Damon
I actually do think they got one of the right people, but they did want to get this trial over and done with. They did want a particular verdict. We can see that, you know, right there in the trial transcripts.
- [47:01]
Joe Nocera
Candace Fleming. The fact that Lindbergh sat there every single day in the front row so
- [47:07]
Poppy Damon
that everyone remembered that the great Colonel Lindbergh's this was his child certainly didn't help.
- [47:14]
Joe Nocera
The jury was also undoubtedly affected by the media coverage throughout the trial. The newspapers wrote about Hauptman as if he was already convicted. Headlines like Evidence Dooms Hauptman Case Closed. Proof piles up against suspect and Slayer's stony stare chills courtroom. It only takes them 12 hours of deliberation to find him guilty of murder in the first degree. Houtman is sentenced to die.
- [47:45]
Jim Davidson
I have a friend of mine whose grandfather was on the jury. He is adamant that Bruno Hartmann was guilty. Totally adamant. And no matter what other book I give him to read, it doesn't matter. But I think the view has changed depending on what decade you're looking at. Like in 1935, after the trial, everybody in the country, with the exception of Germans living in the Bronx, thought Bruno Haltmann was guilty. There was absolutely no dissension that.
- [48:19]
Joe Nocera
Almost 90 years later, the physical evidence from that trial, the ransom envelopes, the ladder, the notes, everything sits locked in a state police archive in New Jersey. Never tested with modern DNA technology, never subjected to the forensic tools that in case after case have overturned convictions that once seemed airtight. There's that lawsuit right now trying to change that. And the man behind it is the same lawyer, Kurt, perhaps we heard at the start of this episode the kid from New Jersey who read a book when he was 13 years old and never quite got over it.
- [48:57]
Kurt Perhech
I think when we reflect back and if we think of the old adage that history is written by the winners, it's largely true. And I think that when we reflect back on history and take a look deeper at different topics, our history is super ugly. It's super nasty. This happened during the Great Depression and the case happened at the height of the rise of anti German feeling with. With the rise of Hitler in Germany going on. And it happened to the greatest hero in America, somebody who was on top of the world. And it's weird how the public likes to take down national heroes or people who are on top of the world at different times in history. What we've learned later in life about Charles Lindbergh is really ugly, messy stuff. And yet the generation that grew up with him idolizing and worshiping the guy, they never got to know that. So to me, solving this mystery would help shine a light on other things in American history to look back on ourselves. Did we get it right? Why should we jump to conclusions and instantly point and blame? The second they caught Houtman, this case was done.
- [50:14]
Joe Nocera
But if Houtman did not kidnap the Lindbergh baby, who did? Next episode, we dig into the alternate theories.