The Hoffman Case

The Lindbergh Case ended on Sept. 19, 1934 when Bruno Richard Hauptmann was arrested in The Bronx, N. Y. for possession of Lindbergh ransom bills. The Hauptmann Case ended in Trenton, N. J. last week when Hauptmann paid with his life for the murder of Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. (see p. 18). When and how the Hoffman Case would end, no man knew last week, but the political life of New Jersey's Governor Harold Giles Hoffman was indisputably at stake.

On the night of Oct. 17, 1935, eight days after New Jersey's Court of Errors & Appeals had unanimously affirmed Hauptmann's death sentence, Governor Hoffman, a Republican, secretly visited the condemned man's cell, talked with him for more than an hour. Shortly thereafter the squat, hard-driving Governor sensationally re-opened the quiescent Hauptmann Case by publicly expressing doubt of the German carpenter's sole guilt, announcing that he had launched an independent investigation of the crime under New Jersey's famed small-town detective, Ellis Parker. The Governor charged State Police Superintendent H. Norman Schwarzkopf, a non-Hoffman Republican holdover, with having bungled the original investigation. He accused Attorney General David T. Wilentz, Democrat, of having conducted Hauptmann's prosecution at Flemington with bias and prejudice.

Public criticism of Governor Hoffman's behavior was touched off late in December by the departure of Colonel Lindbergh & family for England (TIME, Jan. 6). At once a large section of the nation's Press hotly blamed the New Jersey Governor for driving the No. 1 U. S. hero into exile. One of its Democratic members demanded that New Jersey's Legislature investigate the Governor's actions. The Legislature, Republican-controlled, did nothing.

Party lines broke, however, when 30 hours before Hauptmann was scheduled to die on Jan. 17--New Jersey's Court of Pardons, a U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the U. S. Supreme Court having denied his pleas for clemency or delay-- Governor Hoffman granted him a 30-day reprieve "for divers reasons," hinted that important new evidence had come to light. Few weeks later, no new evidence having appeared, New Jersey's Republican State Committee openly broke with the Republican Governor by declaring its intention to displace him as leader of the Party.

Meantime the bickerings of Republican Hoffman and Democrat Wilentz were filling the Press with charges and counter-charges which grew more bitter every day. When Dr. John F. ("Jafsie") Condon took ship for Panama, Governor Hoffman threatened to have him brought back for questioning. Superintendent Schwarzkopf announced that purported representatives of the Governor had tampered with his State troopers, tried to make them admit that Hauptmann had-been framed. Governor Hoffman impugned the credibility of the chief state witnesses at the Hauptmann trial. Last fortnight he took a PWA wood expert to Hauptmann's home in The Bronx, emerged after several hours to announce that the expert doubted whether "Rail 16" in the Lindbergh kidnap ladder had actually come from the carpenter's attic. "Nonsensical!" cried Attorney General Wilentz. '"Outrageous!"

Wendel. At this point the proceedings dipped into pure fantasy. Fortnight ago members of New Jersey's Court of Pardons mysteriously received copies of a 25-page "confession" to the Lindbergh kidnapping signed by one Paul H. Wendel, a 50-year-old Trenton lawyer who was disbarred in 1920 after conviction of perjury, later voluntarily spent three weeks under observation in an insane asylum, was charged in 1931 with embezzlement and fraud but escaped trial. Attorney General Wilentz got a copy of the confession, learned that Wendel was being held under guard in a State colony for mental defectives at New Lisbon, N. J., had him ordered turned over to Mercer County (Trenton) authorities. By some mistake Wendel was committed to Mercer County jail, not on the 1931 charges, as planned, but on a charge of having murdered Charles Lindbergh Jr., the crime for which Hauptmann was to be executed three days later. In jail Wendel flatly repudiated his confession, said it had been wrung from him after a week's torture by three men who had kidnapped him in Brooklyn in mid-February. From Brooklyn, said he, he had been taken to the home of Detective Ellis Parker, then removed to the mental colony. There Detective Parker had persuaded him to sign a new 25-page confession, urging that he would make a million dollars out of it, promising that Governor Hoffman would help him escape punishment.

When this amazing news broke, Governor Hoffman vehemently announced that he had known nothing about the Wendel confession. Day before Hauptmann's scheduled execution he fought vainly, in a long, closed session, to persuade the Court of Pardons to commute the prisoner's sentence. Next day, declaring the Wendel confession "incredible," Justice Thomas W. Trenchard refused to stay the execution pending its investigation. Meantime the Mercer County Grand Jury headed by one Allyne Freeman, longtime Republican office-seeker and supposed good friend of Governor Hoffman, was weighing the charge of murder against Wendel. At 8 p. m., 20 minutes before Hauptmann was to be led to the electric chair, Foreman Freeman asked the prison warden by telephone to delay the execution until the jury had made up its mind. The warden, a Hoffman appointee, announced a postponement of at least 48 hours.

Princeton Protest. Next day Governor Hoffman cautiously admitted that he had known about the Wendel matter for some time. While New York and New Jersey police and U. S. Department of Justice agents moved to investigate Wendel's story that he had been kidnapped and tortured, public outrage boiled over. "IMPEACH HOFFMAN," screamed the Trenton Evening Times in a front-page editorial. "It is up to every citizen," roared this Independent sheet, "to demand Hoffman's impeachment and the jailing of all the political mobsters who are obstructing justice and defaming the name of the State."

That the feeling against Governor Hoffman was not exclusively political was further proved when Princeton's President

Harold Willis Dodds and 33 of his faculty and fellow townsmen presented an astonishing petition to the Legislature. "We hereby subscribe to the demand, 'Save Jersey Justice!' ", it began, requesting the Legislature "to investigate whether at tempts have been made, by public officials or by other persons, to annul . . . orderly processes of law and, if so, whether grounds exist for the removal or impeachment of such officials." The Grand Jury adjourned after two days without returning an indictment against Wendel. At 5 p. m. Governor Hoffman summoned Attorney General Wilentz to his office. The Attorney Gen eral had insisted that the Governor had no right to issue a second reprieve. At 7:30 p. m. Governor Hoffman announced that he would issue no reprieve. At 8:47 p. m. Bruno Richard Hauptmann was dead. Emerging from the State House some two hours later, Governor Hoffman at tempted to dodge a waiting crowd by cutting through a flower bed to the street. When a flock of impertinent questioners pursued him, the thickset Governor whirled, slapped one with his open hand, strode grimly on to his hotel. Motives. What motive had prompted Governor Hoffman's extraordinary efforts to save Hauptmann's life was last week anybody's guess. The Governor and his supporters insisted that he had been moved solely by his conviction that justice had not been done. Most public surmises came under the head of publicity & politics.

One guess made early in the case was that the Governor had sought to discredit Superintendent Schwarzkopf, whose term expires this spring, in order to have cause to replace him with a Hoffman follower. Later it was suggested that the Republican Governor had seen a chance to cripple his Democratic opposition in the State by discrediting Attorney General Wilentz. A third theory was that Governor Hoffman was simply seeking to strengthen his popular position because of factional disputes within his own Party, caused by his unpopular sales and income tax policies and by dissension over patronage.

Still another guess was that Governor Hoffman, a rising young statesman who a few months ago was being seriously talked of as his Party's possible choice for the Vice-Presidential nomination this year, had taken advantage of the Hauptmann case to make a name for himself. Had he succeeded in proving Hauptmann innocent or in revealing the whole story of the Hopewell crime, he would unquestionably have been a national hero. Many a plain person in & out of New Jersey feels that Hauptmann was railroaded to jail and death by invisible wealth and power and points, right or wrong, to the Lindbergh-Morrow-House of Morgan connection. Conceivably Governor Hoffman's activities would, if successful, be rewarded with political dividends from such persons.

Consequences. This week the lower house of New Jersey's Legislature listened to the Princeton petition, swiftly killed a resolution to investigate the Hoffman Case. But a test of Governor Hoffman's political fate had already been assured by Franklin William Fort, onetime (1925-31) New Jersey Representative, floor manager for Herbert Hoover in the Republican national convention of 1528.

Few weeks ago, when the Hauptmann furor had temporarily died down, New Jersey's Republican State Committee chose to indicate that harmony had been restored within the Party by endorsing Governor Hoffman as a candidate for delegate-at-large to the coming national convention. Day after the Hauptmann execution last week Republican Fort, confident of strong Party support, announced that he would run against Governor Hoffman for that job next May 19 on the sole issue of the Hoffman Case. "For five years," declared he, "I have taken no part in New Jersey political affairs other than to support the candidates of the Republican Party. I belong to no faction within the Party. But from my earliest boyhood two pictures stand out in my memory. One is of Jersey justice as an ideal of fair but unswerving enforcement of law through the orderly processes of the courts. The other is that the office of Governor is one of dignity and honor. When a Governor makes a mockery of our courts and juries and drags his high office into the mire, I cannot remain silent.

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