“Perfunctory! Are you aware that the body was examined, in the morgue, by…let me find it.” He shuffled through some of the many documents and folders on his desk; quickly centered on the correct one and read, with rather a triumphant flourish, “The child’s own pediatrician, Dr. Phillip Van Ingen, examined the remains. The undertaker reported Dr. Van Ingen as saying, and this is a quote: ‘If you were to lay ten million dollars on a table and tell me it was mine, if I could say positively that this was the Colonel’s son, I couldn’t honestly identify this skeleton.’”
“Skeleton? I knew the body was decayed, but I understood the facial features were intact….”
“Haven’t you ever
I shook my head, no.
He plucked a glossy photo from a folder. “They couldn’t even verify the sex,” he said, and handed the photo to me.
“Jesus,” I said.
It was just a tiny black pile of bones; you could make out a skull, more or less, and a rib or two; the left leg was missing.
My mouth felt suddenly dry. “I heard that the child was identified by its toes overlapping in some distinctive way…”
“Well, there’s only one foot there to check at all,” Hoffman said. “But Dr. Van Ingen’s examination of the child, on February eighteenth, ten days before the kidnapping, reported both its little toes were turned in, overlapping the next toe. The corpse, what there was of it, had overlapping toes as well—but it was the
“It’s hard to tell even that,” 1 said, and handed the damn photo back to him.
“One fact is indisputable—the physician at the mortuary measured the body and found it to be thirty-three and one-third inches long. Van Ingen’s measurement on February eighteenth was twenty-nine inches.”
“Some of that could be attributed to growth of bones after death,” I said, thinking it through. “But hell—not four and a half inches…”
“Of course this all points up one of the major blunders of the trial,” Hoffman said.
I nodded. “You mean, Hauptmann’s defense counsel stipulating that the corpse found at Mt. Rose was Charles Lindbergh, Jr.”
It had gotten a lot of play in the press. Wilentz had been questioning the woman in charge of St. Michael’s Orphanage, located less than a mile from where the little corpse had been found; Wilentz wanted to dispute the notion that the body in the woods might have been one of the orphanage’s charges.
But Reilly interrupted the proceedings almost immediately, saying, “We have never made any claim that this was other than Colonel Lindbergh’s child.”
Even the prosecution was stunned by this preposterous bungle. There was no logical reason for Reilly to have handed Wilentz the
“Who the hell hired Reilly, anyway?” I asked.
“Hearst.” The Governor said this with a quiet, ironic smile.
“Hearst! Good God, the Hearst papers crucified Hauptmann! Hearst is an old Lindbergh crony, for Christ’s sake…”
“Well,” Hoffman said, with a small shrug, playing devil’s advocate, “Reilly was, at one time, a top trial attorney. You know, he got a lot of the big prohibition gangsters off, in his day.”
I sat up. “Oh, really. Like who?”
Hoffman shrugged. “One of his more notorious clients, I suppose, was Frankie Yale.”
Until his demise in 1927, Frankie Yale had been Al Capone’s man on the East Coat. Capone had, in ’27, bumped Yale and replaced him with one Paul Ricca.
Could Reilly have been in Capone’s pocket? Had the red-nosed shyster thrown the case?
“You know, Mr. Heller,” Hoffman said, “there are those in this state who believe I’ve gotten into this thing for my own glory, my own gain…considering the fact that I’m receiving death threats, that my home and my wife and three little girls are under twenty-four-hour guard accordingly, and that the press is demanding my impeachment, I doubt I’ve made a ‘good political move,’ in ‘siding with’ Hauptmann.”
“What
His cheerful mask collapsed. “Look—all I’m after is the truth. The people of this state are entitled to it, and Hauptmann has a right to live if he didn’t murder the Lindbergh baby. This was a shocking crime—and, in the interest of society, it
“You’ve let this thing get to you, Governor. You’ve let it touch you. That’s dangerous.”
With a thumb over his shoulder, he gestured at the state flag. “Mr. Heller, as Governor of this state, I have a
“No politician ever got rich doing his duty.”
He flinched at that; it was barely perceptible, but it was there. He said, “I haven’t expressed an opinion on the guilt or innocence of Hauptmann. But I share, with hundreds of thousands of people, doubts about the value of the evidence that placed him in the Lindbergh nursery the night of the crime.”
“I’m not all that familiar with the evidence.”
