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Wendel. At this point the proceedings dipped into pure fantasy. Fortnight ago members of New Jersey's Court of Pardons mysteriously received copies of a 25-page "confession" to the Lindbergh kidnapping signed by one Paul H. Wendel, a 50-year-old Trenton lawyer who was disbarred in 1920 after conviction of perjury, later voluntarily spent three weeks under observation in an insane asylum, was charged in 1931 with embezzlement and fraud but escaped trial. Attorney General Wilentz got a copy of the confession, learned that Wendel was being held under guard in a State colony for mental defectives at New Lisbon, N. J., had him ordered turned over to Mercer County (Trenton) authorities. By some mistake Wendel was committed to Mercer County jail, not on the 1931 charges, as planned, but on a charge of having murdered Charles Lindbergh Jr., the crime for which Hauptmann was to be executed three days later. In jail Wendel flatly repudiated his confession, said it had been wrung from him after a week's torture by three men who had kidnapped him in Brooklyn in mid-February. From Brooklyn, said he, he had been taken to the home of Detective Ellis Parker, then removed to the mental colony. There Detective Parker had persuaded him to sign a new 25-page confession, urging that he would make a million dollars out of it, promising that Governor Hoffman would help him escape punishment.
When this amazing news broke, Governor Hoffman vehemently announced that he had known nothing about the Wendel confession. Day before Hauptmann's scheduled execution he fought vainly, in a long, closed session, to persuade the Court of Pardons to commute the prisoner's sentence. Next day, declaring the Wendel confession "incredible," Justice Thomas W. Trenchard refused to stay the execution pending its investigation. Meantime the Mercer County Grand Jury headed by one Allyne Freeman, longtime Republican office-seeker and supposed good friend of Governor Hoffman, was weighing the charge of murder against Wendel. At 8 p. m., 20 minutes before Hauptmann was to be led to the electric chair, Foreman Freeman asked the prison warden by telephone to delay the execution until the jury had made up its mind. The warden, a Hoffman appointee, announced a postponement of at least 48 hours.
Princeton Protest. Next day Governor Hoffman cautiously admitted that he had known about the Wendel matter for some time. While New York and New Jersey police and U. S. Department of Justice agents moved to investigate Wendel's story that he had been kidnapped and tortured, public outrage boiled over. "IMPEACH HOFFMAN," screamed the Trenton Evening Times in a front-page editorial. "It is up to every citizen," roared this Independent sheet, "to demand Hoffman's impeachment and the jailing of all the political mobsters who are obstructing justice and defaming the name of the State."
That the feeling against Governor Hoffman was not exclusively political was further proved when Princeton's President