July - September 2013
Forest Products Laboratory played key role in solving Lindbergh kidnapping
"The Sixteenth Rail" by Schrager
The memory of an aunt's oversized scrapbook and its cache of newspaper clippings about the Lindbergh kidnapping is still vivid. Homemade paste made from flour and water, held the newsprint to the pages, making the scrapbook bulky to handle.
My first view of those precious pages came before I could read. Sadly, that scrapbook was left behind when the family moved from Minnesota.
The kidnap victim was the 20-month-old son of Charles A. Lindbergh, who was famous for making the first solo flight across the Atlantic. The baby had been taken from his second story nursery and murdered.
Remembering that scrapbook, it's not surprising I was eager to read Adam Schrager's new book about the kidnapping that took place on March 1, 1932.
In The Sixteenth Rail, Schrager writes how, at the baby's birth, he became an instant celebrity, with press reports about him being written "in greater detail than if the youngster had been heir to the throne."
Left behind at the crime scene was a ransom note, a chisel, a wooden dowel and a three-section (16-rail) homemade wooden ladder. The ladder was the most important piece of evidence.
The book details many coincidences. For instance, years earlier Lindbergh and wood expert Arthur Koehler had earned UW-Madison degrees on the same date on the same stage. Lindbergh, who had flunked out of the university, received an honorary degree after his history-making flight. Koehler was there to receive his master's degree in forestry.
Another coincidence is that the superintendent of the New Jersey State Police was Colonel H. Normal Schwarzkopf, father of the Gulf War's Stormin' Norman.
Schwarzkopf appealed to the public to cooperate with police and report any sightings of unfamiliar infants in their neighborhoods.
The Federal Kidnapping Act was passed the month after the kidnapping and was signed into law by President Hoover, who also "offered New Jersey authorities the support and assistance of the FBI."
Soon those authorities, using that promised assistance, sent small pieces of wood that were chipped from the ladder to the FPL for identification. Those pieces landed on the desk of Arthur Koehler.
Koehler, who headed the section of Silvicultural (forestry) Relations at the Forest Products Laboratory (FPL), Madison, had grown up on a farm near Manitowoc. His dad's passion was carpentry and it was natural for his son to likewise enjoy the same woodworking hobby.
After earning his bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan, Koehler went to work for the U.S. Forest Service as an "assistant in the study of the cellular structure of wood." His work started in the Wood Anatomy unit at FPL in 1914; eventually he headed a new division, Wood Technology. From this position Koehler often served as an expert witness in court cases.
When the FPL received those small pieces of wood from the ladder, Koehler was told to drop whatever he was doing and identify the wood as soon as possible. He also was told not to tell anyone what he was doing.
It took Koehler less than a week to identify the seven wood samples. The steps and sides of the ladder were Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine, from western woods; there also was yellow pine from the south.
Next, Schwarzkopf hired Koehler to come east and examine the ladder itself. Now, nearly a year after the crime, Koehler joined the investigation. In four days, he presented his report, complete with diagrams. Only the sixteenth rail was puzzling.
Thus, starting the search for the origin of the different woods used in the ladder. During his search, Koehler sent 40,000 circulars to lumber mills all across the country asking for their help in tracing the wood.
While the wood identification work was going on, an alert gas station attendant had written down the license plate number of the car whose driver had paid for his purchase with one of the ransom bills. The bill numbers had been carefully noted when the ransom was paid.
The car was traced to Bruno Richard Hauptmann who lived in the Bronx.
The story of how Koehler traced the different woods and the surprise discovery about the wood in Rail sixteen reads like one of today's best detective novels.
Koehler's detailed testimony at the trial and the book's descriptions of the jury members make for fascinating reading.
As I read the book, I could not help but think how the investigation, into both the wood and the ransom money, was effectively conducted without the benefit of today's computer technology.
Communication among the investigators was conducted by the U.S. Postal Service, the telegraph and the telephone.
Schrager's book takes the reader to the trial during the questioning of Koehler whose succinct responses led a famous writer of that day to refer to his performance on the witness stand as "putting Sherlock Holmes in the shade."
The publisher of this book is Fulcrum Publishing in Colorado.