For 52 anguished years since her husband, Richard, was executed for the kidnap-slaying of the Lindbergh baby, Anna Hauptmann has fought a lonely battle to convince the world he was innocent of the crime of the century.
Today, at 89, with the help of her lawyer, Robert Bryan, she is confident that the goal is near. But time is running out.
The fragile, white-haired widow tells her story in the Blue Comet Diner, a dozen blocks from her tidy little house in Yeagon.
Bryan arrived at Anna Hauptmann`s door in 1981, carrying copies of FBI documents involving the Lindbergh trial. He had obtained them through the Freedom of Information Act. Bryan believed the documents vindicated Richard Hauptmann.
”God had a hand in it,” says Anna Hauptmann of Bryan`s appearance in her life.
Then, three years ago, Bryan came upon even more convincing evidence:
23,000 previously concealed documents from the estate of Harold Hoffman, New Jersey governor at the time of the 1935 trial in Flemington, N.J. Hoffman believed that Charles Lindbergh perjured himself.
Lindbergh was a national hero after flying from New York to Paris in 1927, the first solo, nonstop flight across the Atlantic.
According to Bryan, the Hoffman documents confirm that in an atmosphere of mass hysteria and bigotry after the kidnaping and murder of 20-month-old Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., the State of New Jersey railroaded Bruno Richard Hauptmann to his death.
”Please don`t call him `Bruno.` It was a name he hated,” Hauptmann pleads, her faded blue eyes staring through thick-lensed glasses. On the witness stand, Hauptmann maintained then, as she always has, that on March 1, 1932, when someone climbed a makeshift ladder to a nursery window at the Lindberghs` Hopewell, N.J., home, ”Richard was with me. And God is my witness, I tell the truth.”
But the jury didn`t believe her.
The evidence was damning. According to the prosecution, part of the $50,000 ransom money was found in Hauptmann`s New York home. Pieces of the wooden ladder used in the kidnaping matched pieces of wood sawed from Hauptmann`s attic. Handwriting on the ransom notes, including Germanic words and misspellings, matched that of other writings by Hauptmann.
”Who was I? Just a German hausfrau.” Opening hands gnarled by arthritis, Anna Hauptmann makes a gesture of futility. Hardly visible on the third finger of her left hand is her white-gold wedding band, worn thin.
”I will not die until I get Richard`s name cleared,” she has vowed. Yet, after her husband`s execution on April 3, 1936, she came close to ending her own life. ”I went to Philadelphia, you see, because I didn`t want to be a burden to my relatives. I missed Richard so, I couldn`t believe it had actually happened to him. I didn`t know how I was going to manage, because I had no money. The New Jersey police had taken away everything we had.
”I was standing on the curb outside the train station, clutching Manfred (her 3-year-old son) with one hand and my heavy suitcase with the other, thinking, `I can`t go on. . . .` Then I heard this little voice saying, `No, Anna, no!` ”
The message was clear to her: Her life had a purpose-to vindicate her husband. For 45 years, without other resources, she relied on prayer. Now she has an ally in Bryan, a prominent Death Row attorney who works for her without a fee. He has been commuting regularly from his San Francisco offices to New Jersey courts to file suits in her behalf, which are just as regularly dismissed.
Bryan believes the dismissals to be politically motivated: The chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, Robert Wilentz, is the son of David Wilentz, the New Jersey state attorney general who tried the case.
But Bryan is not giving up. He is convinced he knows who the real kidnap- murderer was and is eager to retry the crime of the century.
He`s also eager to help Anna Hauptmann achieve another of her goals:
meeting with Anne Spencer Morrow Lindbergh before it`s too late.
”I must meet with her,” Hauptmann says. ”We are two old women who have lost loved ones in a tragic way. I must tell her that my Richard did not do that awful thing. Before it`s too late, I must clear the air.”
The two women have not seen each other since the trial. Hauptmann admired Lindbergh then and does now.
When Anne Lindbergh took the stand more than a half-century ago, Anna Hauptmann told reporters she understood her terrible grief: ”We are both mothers. She loved that baby the way I love my Manfred.”
Though Bryan tried to set up a private meeting between the two women a few years ago, Lindbergh did not respond. But he`s not giving up.
Neither is Hauptmann.
In letters directed to members of the New Jersey legislature, Bryan quoted from a note written by Richard Hauptmann 52 years ago. It could easily have been written by his widow today.
”They think when I die, the case will die. They think it will be like a book I close. But the book, it will never close.”
