By all accounts, the 1935 trial in Flemington, N.J., of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the murder of celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh’s infant son merits its frequent citation by many as “the trial of the century”. Although Hauptmann was executed in 1936, controversy has surrounded the trial and conviction ever since.
My friend and law school classmate, Noah Griffin, organized a re-enactment held on May 20 at the Marin County Superior Court in San Rafael, California, along with retired California Judge Lise Pearlman, who published a 554-page book on the case, The Lindbergh Kidnapping Suspect No. 1, The Man Who Got Away. and the Criminal Law and Justice Center of University of California Berkeley School of Law.
While I played a small role in the trial's re-enactment, Noah, who is an historian, popular singer, and impresario, and and who was press secretary to former San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan, made the event happen, and another friend and classmate, Peter Buchsbaum, a retired judge of the New Jersey Superior Court, filled the role of prosecutor.
Peter, who sat as a judge in the same court before which Hauptmann was tried, once litigated a civil case in the historic courtroom where the trial occurred. That courtroom, he recalls, had a chair labelled, “This chair was sat in by Bruno Richard Hauptmann.”
“It was spooky sitting right in front of that seat,” Peter remembers, “and now here I am all these years later doing this mock trial. I didn’t come away from today convinced that Hauptmann was innocent, but I do think it is worth looking into.”
Those present—observers, law students, and participants, who included many public defenders, prosecutors, and court staff, including bailiffs provided by the local Sheriff’s Office—voted, 38-5, in favor of a new trial for Hauptmann. A similar vote followed a re-enactment of the Hauptmann case in 1986 in San Francisco that Noah put together after meeting Hauptmann’s widow, Anna Hauptmann. She testified in that retrial, as she did at her husband’s original trial.
Peter played the role of N.J. Attorney General David T. Wilentz, who founded a leading New Jersey firm but proudly asserted in his closing argument, “I have never prosecuted a murder case in my life.” I appeared as a “wood expert” witness from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service. He had testified as to the strength of the wooden ladder which Hauptmann allegedly used to carry out the kidnapping of Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., from the second-floor nursery in the family home in Hopewell, N.J.
It’s strange to deliver testimony that has now been deemed totally unreliable in our age of DNA evidence, and also that just about all of this witness’s testimony regarding the ladder was shown to be based on sloppy investigation and failure to establish chain of custody.
In her book, Judge Pearlman argues that Hauptmann was innocent. Charles Lindbergh, like many prominent Americans in the 1920’s and 1930’s, was a passionate advocate of eugenics. There had been rumors that the baby had serious medical problems. Judge Pearlman suggests it may well have been that the infant was physically imperfect with an abnormally big head and other defects and that Lindbergh’s fervent eugenicism could have led to his seeking dangerous medical experiments on his son. She concludes that the kidnapping could have been a failed effort to cover up all of this.
Retired Marin County Superior Court Judge Lynn O’Malley Taylor filled the role of the trial judge, and others played parts including prosecutors, witnesses, defenders, Lindbergh, and Hauptmann: all were reading actual testimony. Major additions to the written trial transcript were provided in the analysis given by Marin Deputy Public Defender Patricia Castilla. Appearing as a current-day lawyer, she pointed out what now appear to be hordes of clear errors that undermine the state’s case against Hauptmann.
She stressed in her interpolated comments during the trial reading how a witness who had been declared legally blind said he saw Hauptmann’s car driven away from the Lindbergh house with the suspect at the wheel. Further, pictures shot in 20-month-old Charles Lindbergh Jr.’s nursery right after he was taken captive did not show muddy footprints on a suitcase under the window Hauptmann allegedly used to escape, yet those footprints somehow materialized on the suitcase at the trial.
More ignored evidence concerned the ladder as to which Arthur Koehler, the Forest Service expert whom I played, testified. Police said Hauptmann reached the second-story window going up the ladder and then used it to escape with the baby; when it was tested, it was shown as unable to hold the weight of the 175-pound suspect and 30-pound baby.
Other witnesses confirmed that Hauptmann was picking up his wife at the bakery where she worked in the Bronx, New York City, when the crime ostensibly occurred far away in central New Jersey. A medical examination of the body, found more than two months after the kidnapping, revealed that the baby didn’t die, as the police and prosecutor contended, the night he disappeared: it even suggested that the corpse might have been mutilated in a medical experiment.
Two New Jersey governors first accepted the validity of the verdict. N.J. Governor Harold G. Hoffman (no relation), who refused to call off the execution, later wrote a series of articles in favor of reopening the case. Gov. Christine Todd Whitman also would not reopen the case but fifteen years after she left office, she also said that the obvious errors made it important to review the case far more deeply than had occurred originally.
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