Word: hauptmanns
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...
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...