Bruno Richard Hauptmann Trial: 1935

At 52, Hauptmann's defense attorney, Edward J. Reilly, had tried hundreds of murder cases. A hard-drinking blusterer and one of New York's most successful trial lawyers, he had been hired to take the case by the New York Journal, a Hearst paper, which had made a deal with Mrs. Hauptmann: exclusive rights to her story if the Journal helped pay for the lawyer.

To explain how he came to have the ransom money, Hauptmann testified that he had invested in business with Isidor Fisch, who went home to Germany in December 1933, and died there of tuberculosis in March 1934. Fisch, said Hauptmann, left belongings with him—including a shoebox that Hauptmann stored on the top shelf of a kitchen broom closet.

When rain leaked into the closet, Hauptmann found the forgotten shoebox, opened it, and discovered $40,000 in gold certificates. In his garage, he divided the damp money into piles, wrapped it, and hid it. Because Fisch had owed him $7,500, Hauptmann began spending some. He felt it was his.

Reilly called Mrs. Hauptmann to corroborate the Fisch story. Crossexamining her, Wilentz proved that, while she hung her apron every day on a hook higher than the top shelf and kept her grocery coupons in a tin box on that shelf, she could not remember ever seeing a shoebox there. Later, rebuttal witnesses testified that Fisch could not have been at the scene of the crime, and that he had had no money for treatments when he was dying in Germany.

Reilly had boasted that he would introduce eight handwriting experts. He came up with one, whose authority was undermined in cross-examination. Then Reilly brought in a witness who claimed to have seen Fisch in Manhattan on the night of the crime with a woman who carried a 2-year-old blond child, and that the woman was Violet Sharpe, a maid in the Morrow home who had committed suicide after intensive interrogation (all servants in the Morrow and Lindbergh households had been questioned closely). That witness proved to be a professional who had testified for pay in dozens of trials.

Another Reilly defense witness claimed to have seen Fisch coming out of the cemetery where the ransom was passed. Prosecutor Wilentz made the witness admit he had previously been convicted of a crime and that he was with a woman on the night in question. Still another witness, who testified that he saw Fisch with a shoebox, admitted under cross-examination that he had been in and out of mental institutions five times.

Reilly talked freely with reporters. Radio listeners heard him promise that his client would be a free man within days. In one broadcast, he urged anyone with information to get in touch. During a lunch break, as Reilly sipped his third cocktail from a coffee cup, a stranger approached him and said he had information. After questioning him, Reilly, clearly frustrated by his own failure to produce a credible witness, yelled, "You've never been convicted of a crime? You've never been in a lunatic asylum? I can't use you!"

Reilly's troubles continued: To contradict the ladder testimony, he produced a general contractor as an expert on wood. After Wilentz attacked the witness' expertise, the judge allowed him to testify only as a "practical lumberman." Another carpenter said that the ladder rail had not been cut from the attic board, then admitted on cross-examination that he had never compared the grains of the two boards.

When the trial ended, no reliable witness had placed Hauptmann at the scene of the crime; nor had his fingerprints been found on the ladder, nor anywhere in the nursery, nor on the ransom notes. But the circumstantial evidence overwhelmed whatever doubts the jurors may have had: He had the ransom money; scientific experts said he had made the ladder—using wood from his attic for one rail; and other experts said he had written the ransom notes.