Stolen Away

From my seat I could see the defense table pretty well, and the person who commanded the most attention was the chief defense attorney, Edward J. Reilly. Decked out in a black cutaway coat with a white carnation in its buttonhole, gray striped trousers and spats, the massive, fleshy attorney cut an unintentionally comic figure; in his mind he was Adolphe Menjou, but in reality he was W. C. Fields, right down to the thinning sandy hair and alcohol-ruddy complexion. His round, thick-lensed, black-rimmed glasses gave him a further vaudeville touch.

In the papers, Reilly was reported as having two nicknames: the “Bull of Brooklyn,” in reference to his younger days, when he was one of New York’s most successful trial attorneys; and, more recently, “Death House” Reilly, because that was where clients of his charged with murder had been consistently ending up lately. Fifty-two (looking twenty years older), Reilly was well past his prime, and I wondered how the defendant got stuck with him.

Directly behind Reilly sat his client. Bruno Richard Hauptmann was surprisingly nondescript, a skinny, wide-shouldered man in a gray-brown suit that looked big for him. His eyes were light blue, and blank; he seemed to rarely blink, rarely to move, sitting erect and staring, not so much morose as indifferent. His hair was blond, his cheekbones high and wide, his cheeks sunken, his face an oval, his features rather handsome, and decidedly Teutonic.

The other defense lawyers (and it was only later that I learned their names) included stocky young C. Lloyd Fisher, who had (unsuccessfully) defended Commodore Curtis in this very courtroom; bespectacled, shrimpy Frederick Pope; and beak-nosed, slouchy Egbert Rosecrans. Dapper Prosecutor Wilentz and his businesslike associates were a sharper-looking bunch by far.

Bells echoing in the tower above rang the hour—ten o’clock—and the white-haired court crier announced, “Oyez, oyez, oyez! All manner of persons having business with this court on this eighth day of January in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Nine Hundred and Thirty-five, let them draw nigh, give their attention and be heard.”

The judge—Justice Thomas Whitaker Trenchard—emerged from a door behind his dais, black robes flowing; his dark hair gone mostly white, his small mustache too, he had a dignified but just vaguely unkempt demeanor, like a harried country doctor.

Soon a parade of witnesses began, police witnesses initially, and it wasn’t particularly riveting stuff. Elsa Maxwell and her minks chatted amongst themselves, and occasionally the judge would sternly remind the courtroom to mind its manners.

Wilentz was smooth as a polished stone, but Reilly—who was trying to make the New Jersey police look like buffoons, which shouldn’t have been that tough—was a ham actor, bouncing his voice off the rafters.

The red-flannel-faced defender did score a few points: he got a fingerprint man to admit never having even heard of the Bertillon system, and got across the ludicrously shoddy police work of the initial investigation by getting two cops to say each thought the other was going to take a plaster cast of the footprint beneath the child’s window.

Then Wilentz got away from the police witnesses and put a frail, bearded, eighty-seven-year-old codger named Amandus Hochmuth on the stand. Hochmuth, who lived on the corner of Mercer County Highway and Featherbed Lane, claimed he’d seen Hauptmann driving a “dirty green” car on the morning of March 1, 1932. He remembered this because Hauptmann had “glared” at him.

“And the man you saw looking out of that automobile, glaring at you,” Wilentz said, “is he in this room?”

“Yes!”

“Where is he?”

“Alongside that trooper there,” Hochmuth said, and as he pointed a wavering finger at Hauptmann, the courtroom lights went out.

“It’s the Lord’s wrath over a lying witness!” Reilly shouted in the near-darkness.

The courtroom exploded in laughter. Slim didn’t smile next to me, and I didn’t either, because Reilly’s style bored me; and Judge Trenchard rapped his gavel and threatened the gallery again.

The lights came up within a couple minutes, and Wilentz directed Hochmuth to step down and identify the man he’d seen, and, slow, wobbly, the witness did so, pointing a trembling finger at Hauptmann, and then actually placing a hand on Hauptmann’s knee, fearfully, as if he might get burned.

The defendant shook his head three times and with a bitter smile said to the woman behind him (his wife Anna, I wondered?): “Der Alte ist verruckt.”

Next to me, Slim said softly, “What was that?”

I whispered back: “He said, ‘The old man is crazy.’”

Then florid defender Reilly had a crack at the old man, and did get him to confess his eyes weren’t perfect, but otherwise couldn’t budge the old boy.