One day earlier this month, Adam Schrager, a former Madison television newsman now teaching journalism at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, began receiving email links to a startling story from that morning’s edition of The New York Times.
“That’s the beauty of having written on this,” Schrager told me last week. “I got it sent to me by a bunch of people.”
In fact, as a Times subscriber, Schrager had already read the article, which carried the online headline, “The Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping: A Grisly Theory and a Renewed Debate.”
Schrager read it with more interest than most, having authored a 2013 book, “The Sixteenth Rail: The Evidence, the Scientist, and the Lindbergh Kidnapping,” on the case.
The 20-month-old son of world-famous aviator Charles Lindbergh — who, in 1927, made the first nonstop solo New York to Paris flight — was taken from the Lindbergh’s New Jersey home on March 1, 1932. A ransom note — as well as a ladder — were left behind, and though the ransom was paid, Charles Lindbergh Jr. was found dead that May, about 4 1/2 miles from the Lindbergh home.
In 1934, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a carpenter and German immigrant, was arrested after passing at a New York a gas station a $10 gold certificate that was part of the ransom payment. Hauptmann, who would also be linked to the ladder, was convicted of murder and executed in April 1936.
Which, all these years later, hasn’t stopped skeptics and conspiracy theorists from suggesting the justice system screwed up.
“It’s the story that never ends,” Schrager said. “The investigation, the trial — it’s fascinating. And it didn’t end cleanly for a lot of people. It’s bound to keep generating headlines.”
This month’s Times article includes a Hauptmann relative asking for DNA testing on the nearly century-old evidence. One particularly gruesome theory advanced in the story by an author (and retired judge) holds that Lindbergh himself, a flawed man preoccupied with racist, scientifically inaccurate eugenics, committed infanticide.
Schrager’s compelling, well-researched “Sixteenth Rail” book focuses on a wood scientist named Arthur Koehler, who worked for the U.S. Forest Service’s Forest Products Laboratory in Madison.
Koehler was able to trace the wood from the ladder at the crime scene to a mill in South Carolina, and from there to a lumber yard in the Bronx, New York, where Hauptmann had worked. Koehler was able to match the growth rings on Rail 16 of the ladder with floorboards from Hauptmann’s attic.
Koehler testified at Hauptmann’s trial, which journalist H. L. Mencken called “the greatest story since the Resurrection,” while writer Edna Ferber said the media frenzy surrounding the trial “makes one want to resign as a member of the human race.”
On the witness stand, Koehler was anything but frenzied.
“Koehler was the final prosecution witness in the trial of the century,” Schrager said, “and was so good the defense counsel even said he’d never seen a performance like it.”
In A. Scott Berg’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 biography “Lindbergh” the author wrote, “Technical though Koehler’s testimony was, the jury, gallery, and even the prisoner sat spellbound.”
Another Madison link to this story is Lindbergh himself. He grew up in Minnesota and came to Madison in September 1920 to study mechanical engineering. He was in the city off and on until 1922, when he left school to take flying lessons at the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation. The best account of his Madison time is likely to be found in Anne Vandenburgh’s book, “Lindbergh’s Badger Days.”
When Berg’s book was published in September 1998, I was early in my time writing a daily column for The Capital Times. I went to 35 N. Mills St., the three-unit student apartment where Lindbergh had lived, hoping to ask occupants if they knew a hugely famous man had once lived there.
One young woman told me she’d never heard of Lindbergh. But a wildlife ecology student named Adam Ray said, “Lindbergh? No kidding? That’s pretty neat. The first solo flight across the Atlantic, right? And wasn’t his baby kidnapped?”
One final connection. In October 2014, Reeve Lindbergh, an author and the youngest daughter of Charles and Ann Morrow Lindbergh, came to give a lecture at UW–Madison. It was her first time in the city and she was driven by Forest Products Laboratory, where Koehler worked when he testified in the murder of the little boy who was Reeve’s brother.
I had a chance to interview Reeve Lindbergh after her lecture. She couldn’t have been more gracious. She talked about the time that, as a 7-year-old girl, she was alone in a small rental plane with her father when the engine stalled in midflight. They landed safely in a cow pasture. Her father never referred to it as a crash, she said, but rather a forced landing.
He was uncomfortable with fame, Reeve said, to the point of exiting a restaurant if someone recognized him.
And the kidnapping?
Her parents didn’t talk about it, Reeve Lindbergh said.
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