Stolen Away

“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—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.