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For more than a day Hauptmann was sequestered in a downtown police station while an airtight case was built against him. When newshawks smelled a story, police officials let the most sensational development in the nation's greatest criminal case burst over every front page.
Because of the publicity police were loath to "rubber-hose" Prisoner Hauptmann's story out of him. But the gentler method of keeping him awake, nagging him with questions for 48 hours brought small results. The stolid, 35-year-old Teuton soon closed his mouth tight. His shocked wife Anna, who apparently knew nothing of her husband's finances, got him a lawyer, but Hauptmann refused to see him. Then she got him another.
Bruno Richard Hauptmann was born at Kamenz, Germany, served as a machine-gunner in a Saxon regiment during the War. In 1919 he was sentenced to five years imprisonment for theft. Released in 1923, he was again arrested for theft, escaped while waiting trial. That same year he arrived in the U. S. as a stowaway on a German liner. Deported, he stowed away again on another ship later in the year. He managed to get ashore, find work as a carpenter in New Jersey and New York. He married in 1925. His Bronx neighbors knew him only for thrift and taciturnity. After 1932, when his wife went abroad for the summer, he was never regularly employed, yet always seemed to have ample funds. He told neighbors he was trading in furs, making money on Wall Street.
Before he turned silent, Hauptmann told police an incredible tale about how the Lindbergh ransom came into his possession. He thought the money was "old letters left by a friend." After the friend, one Isadore Fisch, died in Leipzig last March Hauptmann discovered the money, and appropriated it.
The question which was still puzzling police last week was whether or not the most widely sought criminal in U. S. history had had an accomplice. The Department of Justice was inclined to think the Lindbergh kidnapping was a one-man job. But a "mystery woman" was said to be sought as well as a "mystery man" whom Col. Lindbergh had seen with a handkerchief over his face near The Bronx cemetery the night the ransom was passed. Also implicated was the brokerage house with which Hauptmann was said to have a $25,000 account.
Meantime, in California, Col. & Mrs. Lindbergh shrank from further contact with the crime which had taken their firstborn, said they were "not much interested" in the case. Reluctantly Col. Lindbergh agreed to return to New York this week to be present as the plaintiff when the extortion case of People v. Hauptmann goes to the Grand Jury.