New Jersey v. Hauptmann (Cont'd)
With painful concentration, two uneducated carpenters in the little courthouse at Flemington, N. J. last week watched and listened to a brawny scientist from the Wisconsin woods. From the witness stand Arthur Koehler, head of the Federal Forest Products Laboratory at Madison, was delivering a three-hour illustrated lecture on wood. Carpenter Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the German stowaway accused of kidnapping and killing Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., paid close attention because his life was at stake. Carpenter Liscom Case, Juror No.11, listened and looked carefully because he knew that the other jurors would respect his judgment on a vital aspect of the case when the time came to weigh Hauptmann's fate.
It took 15 days for the State of New Jersey to get the ladder found not far from the Lindbergh home on the windy night of March 1, 1932 admitted as evidence. Defense fought tooth-&-nail for its exclusion on the grounds that it had been tampered with, that it had never been connected with the defendant. Once the ladder was admitted, the prosecution's most impressive expert to date resoundingly attributed its manufacture to Defendant Hauptmann in no less than five different ways:
1) Witness Koehler fastened a vise to one end of Justice Trenchard's bench, clamped a piece of wood in it and skimmed off a shaving with the plane found in Hauptmann's garage. With a piece of paper and a pencil he made a rubbing of the planed surface as a child reproduces the design of a coin. He then made a similar rubbing of a planed surface on the ladder, showed the jury that the striations on both rubbings were identical.
2) A saw like Hauptmann's, declared the Government wood expert, had "signed" its teeth marks into the lumber in the ladder.
3) Another "signature" had been made, said he, by a chisel similar to the one which was found with the ladder. A chisel of the same size was used to mortise the rungs into the uprights. Furthermore, the chisel was of the same make as another of Hauptmann's chisels, and filled the one vacancy in his tool chest.
4) Xylotomist Koehler said that he had searched for a year and a half for the mill and lumber yard which had supplied the pine for most of the rungs in the ladder. The mill was finally located in South Carolina. The lumber yard was found in The Bronx, the very lumber yard where Hauptmann had bought wood.
5) One upright was made, Mr. Koehler was positive, from a missing plank in Hauptmann's attic floor. Old nail holes in the upright fitted perfectly into place over the attic floor joists. Its growth rings matched an adjoining floor plank.
Defense Counsel Edward J. Reilly's nimblest cross-examination failed to shake this implacably precise witness.
Three Dates. The State detonated its last great testimonial charge with Witness Koehler. But in the week preceding his appearance it had arduously laid another mine under the defense with a string of witnesses which tied Hauptmann to the crime on three crucial dates.