Lindbergh by A. Scott Berg

Author:A. Scott Berg [Berg, A. Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101494288
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 1999-08-31T22:00:00+00:00

“I feel sure in closing,” Reilly said, “even Colonel Lindbergh wouldn’t expect you and doesn’t expect you to do anything but your duty under the law and under the evidence.”

The next day, Attorney General Wilentz delivered a summation that United Press reporter Sidney Whipple said “made up in vituperation what it may have lacked in logical argument.” Over four and one-half hours, he pleaded with the jury to throw the book at Hauptmann, because since his apprehension, nothing “has come to the surface or light that has indicated anything but the guilt of this defendant … and no one else. Every avenue of evidence, every little thoroughfare that we traveled along, every one leads to the same door.”

Then he pelted Hauptmann with insults—calling him “a fellow that had ice water in his veins, not blood,” an “egomaniac who thought he was omnipotent,” a “secretive fellow … that wouldn’t tell anybody anything,” the “filthiest and vilest snake that ever crept through the grass,” an “animal … lower than the lowest form in the animal kingdom, Public Enemy Number One of this world.”

In response to the defense’s suggestions of police improprieties, the Attorney General asked Colonel Schwarzkopf to stand up. “Does he look like a crook?” Wilentz asked. “Does he deserve that sort of treatment for this burglar, this murderer, and convict?” Whipped up by his own frenzy, he even launched into a description of the killing of the baby that he had not mentioned before, one at complete variance with the murder he described six weeks earlier in his opening argument. Wilentz had originally stated that the baby died when the ladder broke. Now he suggested the baby was killed prior to that—“What else was the chisel there for? To knock that child into insensibility right there in that room.”

Wilentz spent most of the day effectively recapitulating the evidence. He said that a parade of living witnesses had come to testify against Hauptmann, while the defense conveniently blamed people who were dead. To accept their argument, Wilentz argued, one had to accept a “grave conspiracy.” Late in the day, he played his trump card: “Colonel Lindbergh’s identification of his voice,” Wilentz said plainly, “—if it is good enough for Colonel Lindbergh under oath, if Colonel Lindbergh says to you, ‘That is the man who murdered my child,’ men and women, that is good enough.”

The next morning, Judge Trenchard delivered a seventy-minute charge to the jury. Lindbergh lunched in town at attorney George Large’s house with Colonels Breckinridge and Schwarzkopf, then drove home to Englewood. Fortunately, the tension was lessened by another visit from Harold Nicolson.

After spending two months in England, Nicolson returned to Englewood that very morning to continue his research on Dwight Morrow. He spent the afternoon sipping sherry with Betty Morrow, Aubrey Morgan, and Anne Lindbergh. Shortly after Charles returned from Flemington, dinner was served. They turned on two radios as they sat, one in the pantry, the other in the drawing room. “Thus there were jazz and jokes

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