Bruno Richard Hauptmann Trial: 1935

When the jury found Hauptmann guilty of murder in the first degree, the crowds in and outside the courtroom cheered vigorously. The sentence was death. Execution was set for the week of March 18. Over the next year, Hauptmann's attorneys (Anna Hauptmann had fired Reilly) gained postponements by filing appeals.

New Jersey's 40-year-old governor, Harold G. Hoffman, secretly visited Hauptmann in prison, declared that he was not convinced of Hauptmann's guilt, and that the crime could not have been committed alone. In mid-January 1936, when the state's Court of Pardons denied Hauptmann clemency, the governor granted him a 30-day reprieve. The Court of Pardons turned down a second petition for clemency. By law, the governor could not give a second reprieve. On April 3, 1936, at 8:44 P.M., Hauptmann was electrocuted.

For more than half a century, book after book has re-examined and critiqued the evidence and the testimony. More than one author has described the investigation of the kidnapping and murder as incompetent or has declared Hauptmann an innocent, framed man.

In 1982, 82-year-old Anna Hauptmann sued the State of New Jersey, various former police officials, the Hearst newspapers, and David T. Wilentz (himself by then 86) for $100 million in wrongful-death damages. She claimed that newly found documents proved misconduct by the prosecution and manufacture of evidence by government agents. In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court refused her request that the federal judge considering her case be disqualified, and in 1984 the judge dismissed her claims.

In 1985, 23,000 pages of Hauptmann-case police documents were discovered in the garage of the late Governor Hoffman. Along with 30,000 pages of FBI files not used in the trial, said Anna Hauptmann, they proved "a smorgasbord of fraud" against her husband. Again, she appealed to the Supreme Court; it let stand without comment the rulings that had dismissed her suit. In 1990, New Jersey's new governor, Jim Florio, declined her appeal for a meeting to clear Hauptmann's name.

In October 1991, Mrs. Hauptmann, now 92, called a news conference in Flemington to plead for the case to be reopened. "From the day he was arrested, he was framed, always framed," she said. Among her allegations was that the rail of the ladder taken from the attic had been planted by the state police. The ransom money, she still insisted, was left behind by Isidor Fisch.