Stolen Away

“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 traced shipments of this lumber to thirty cities. If they sell this wood in Koehler’s neighborhood in Koehler’s town, does that make Koehler the kidnapper?”

“I wonder where he was March first, 1932,” I said. “But you’re right: once the cops get a suspect, the evidence can be made to fit.”

“And if they have evidence that does not fit,” he said, “this evidence, it disappears. When I was arrested, they took among many things, my shoes. What for I at first could not imagine; but then I think: they have a footprint!”

“They do,” I said. “‘Cemetery John’ left one at St. Raymond’s.”

“Then why did they not produce the plaster model that was made?” With bitter sarcasm, he said, “Perhaps they hold this damning evidence back, out of pity for me.”

Reilly should have demanded that plaster cast be produced; but then Reilly should have done a lot of things.

“Did you know they took my fingerprints not once, but again and again? Also the sides of my hands, the hollow parts of the hands. Then at the trial, when my counsel asks about fingerprints, Wilentz says, ‘There are no fingerprints.’”

“There were plenty on the ladder,” I said. “That’s what they were checking against.”

“And found not mine! In the nursery there were no fingerprints at all. Not of the parents, not of the child’s nurse or the other servants. They say I wear gloves. Did the parents, then, when they go to the room to take joy in their child, and all the servants, also wear gloves?”

“It does sound like somebody wiped the room down.” Somebody in the house. Somebody after the fact.

“They found a chisel near the ladder. They compare it to my carpenter’s tools. My tools are a Stanley set; the one they found is a Bucks Brothers chisel. They told the jury, ‘This is Hauptmann’s chisel,’ and the jury believed them.”

“But they didn’t believe your eyewitnesses, did they?”

“My eyewitnesses were good, but then Reilly hired more witnesses, bad witnesses! They were killing me! Crazy people from asylums, people with criminal records…and Wilentz makes of them fools. Because of that, the good people, the witnesses who tell the truth for me, they are not believed. The five people who saw me in New York in the bakery with Annie at the time of the crime, good people, are made out to look like liars. One of these, Manley, an old gentleman, arose from a sickbed and he swore that on the night of March first, 1932, he saw me at nine o’clock in his bakery.”

I snorted a laugh. “Yet old ‘Cataracts’ Hochmuth and that movie cashier and the taxi driver, questionable eyewitnesses at best, were believed.”

“Why, Nate? Why?”

“Well…you mentioned witnesses with criminal records. You do have a criminal record yourself, Dick.”

“Yes, in Germany—after the war. Never in America.” He placed a hand on his chest, fingers splayed. “I come home from the war in rags, sick with hunger. So, too, I find my mother and my brothers and sisters starving. I did steal an overcoat and I stole food. I was just a boy. These things are wrong, yes, but many times by many people were they done in my country after that war. And I have never once injured a human being.”