Hauptmann's Trial Mocks System of Justice

Good morning. It’s February 13. And on this date in 1935, the “Trial of the Century” ended with the conviction of Bruno Richard Hauptmann on charges of kidnapping and killing the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The media landscape then lacked Twitter, television news, blogs, and BlackBerrys – but Americans had no trouble following this shocking case.

The jury’s verdict in the Hauptmann trial, and the defendant’s death sentence, were trumpeted by radio broadcasters and newsboys hawking afternoon papers. The New York Times’ headline of the case was spread in two decks across its front page. H.L. Mencken called the trial the “greatest story since the Resurrection.” Some 700 reporters and celebrities descended on Flemington, N.J., for the 32-day trial, among them Walter Winchell, Arthur Brisbane, and Damon Runyon. Jack Benny, was there, too, and remarked after the withering cross-examination of Hauptmann, “What Bruno needs is a second act.”

He didn’t get one -- Hauptmann was executed the following year.

Bruno Richard Hauptmann was more than a pariah. “Baby killer!” bystanders shouted as Hauptmann was transported from the jail to the courtroom. New Jersey Attorney General David Wilentz described him to the jury as, “public enemy number one of this world” and “the lowest animal in the animal kingdom.” Few Americans disagreed.

One of them, though, was Hauptmann’s wife Anna, who spent 60 years trying in vain to clear her husband’s name, and who went to her grave in 1994 still proclaiming his innocence and still recoiling from the insults hurled her way at the trial in Flemington. Another person who doubted Hauptmann’s guilt – or, more accurately, doubted he was the mastermind – was New Jersey Gov. Harold Hoffman, the lone vote for clemency among the state’s Board of Pardons.

The case against Hauptmann had been circumstantial. No one saw him in little Charlie Lindbergh’s nursery, his fingerprints were not found there, no accomplice ever fingered him, no one could even connect him with the family at all. Certainly, Richard Hauptmann, as he was called by his family and friends, never confessed to the crime.

But neither could Hauptmann ever satisfactorily explain how thousands of dollars of the Lindbergh ransom money was found in his possession. Hauptmann claimed that a friend named Isadore Fisch had left it in his belongings before sailing to Germany, where he died. No part of this story could be verified and his alibi witness, his wife, was not believed by the jury.

In time, other monsters, not excluding Adolf Hitler, would take Hauptmann’s place in the public imagination. Other “trials of the century” would flood the airwaves and intrigue journalists and their public. Time, too, brought revisionists. Several books, and a couple of movies, would champion Hauptmann’s innocence. Other authors would reaffirm his guilt.

If key factual questions of the past are not always knowable, however, lessons are to be gleaned nonetheless.

Even now, more evidence damns Richard Hauptmann than exonerates him. Yet, that trial was a circus. The authorities were probably framing a guilty man, but the shoddy police work, ethnic animus, and perjured testimony present in this case tainted that conviction, and they remind us in our time the Framers’ concept about being innocent until proven guilty is not a legal nicety. It is a bedrock principle of democracy on which our freedoms rest.