I can’t find much to watch on television these days, despite the proliferation of channels– “More means worse”, as Kingsley Amis said about the universities – but I have been gripped these past few weeks by the dramatic reconstruction of the OJ Simpson affair of 1998, which created a worldwide sensation at the time, ending with Simpson’s surprising acquittal.
Faced by the damning evidence of blood stains and witnesses linking him to the murder of his ex-wife and her lover, Simpson’s lawyers, who in this version include the actor and co-producer John Travolta, mounted their only possible defence: that their client was the innocent victim of a racist conspiracy on the part of the Los Angeles police force. It worked.
More than once in this riveting serial reference has been made to the Simpson drama as “The Trial of the Century”. Exactly the same expression was used to describe an American trial in 1935 that was even more sensational than that of OJ.
Outside America, few people knew who OJ Simpson was. But Col Charles Lindbergh was renowned throughout the world as a result of his historic 1927 solo flight in The Spirit of St Louis from New York to Paris.
When a German-born carpenter, Richard Hauptmann, went on trial at the little courtroom in Wilmington Massachusetts accused of kidnapping and killing Lindbergh’s two-year-old son Charlie, it was headline news all over the world and scores of journalists and sightseers flocked to the town.
You can still see much of the trial because it was filmed. You can witness the laughing crowds thronging outside the court, the souvenir sellers, the film stars coming to watch the sport.
And at the centre of it all the impassive figure of Hauptmann, a stocky, dignified man answering questions in a thick German accent, whose only link to the crime was a stash of the ransom money found in his possession two years after the kidnap.
No one who reads Ludovic Kennedy’s masterly account in his book The Airman and the Carpenter (1985) will be left in any doubt that Hauptmann was innocent.
If he showed little emotion in the dock it was perhaps due to his belief, shared by so many victims of injustice, that sooner or later the truth would emerge and the real villains would be identified.
But it never happened. After a parade of perjurers, handwriting and other “experts”, after Lindbergh himself gave evidence, Hauptmann was found guilty and sentenced to the electric chair.
There was a Good Friday atmosphere outside the courthouse when the guilty verdict was announced. “One could hear the almost diabolical yelling of the crowd,” the British diplomat Harold Nicolson, listening to the radio commentary at Lindbergh’s nearby home, wrote in his diary. “This is a cry for blood.” Hauptmann’s lawyer C Lloyd Fisher wrote: “It is the clamour of the crowd for no matter whom.”
Prosecuting counsel David Wilentz was convinced, as many others were, that Hauptmann would now make a confession. But he rejected an offer from the authorities to commute his sentence to life imprisonment if he confessed.
As that execution loomed Wilentz must have been disconcerted to receive a letter from the condemned man, as must his wife, Anna, a devout Lutheran: “Mr Wilentz, with my dying breath I swear by God that you have convicted an innocent man. Once you will stand before the same judge to whom I go in a few hours.”
In his final statement Hauptmann was to write: “I am glad that my life in a world which has not understood me has ended. Soon I will be at home with my Lord – And I love my Lord. So I am dying an innocent man. I am at peace with God.”
To Ludovic Kennedy and to many atheists, such statements may appear embarrassing and irrelevant, showing only how an otherwise admirable man can be misled by fanciful and absurd beliefs in God and Jesus Christ. But to anyone who shares these beliefs, Hauptmann’s powerful words are more convincing proof of his innocence than any amount of forensic evidence.
Richard Ingrams is a former editor of Private Eye and The Oldie. His new book, Ludo and the Power of the Book: The legal campaigns of Ludovic Kennedy, will be published by Constable later in the year
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