GRIME: Hauptmann to Chair

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Bruno Richard Hauptmann, manacled between two guards, managed to walk from the Flemington courtroom after the death sentence had been passed on him last week. But as he was being led into his cell his knees gave way. The steelyeyed, German ex-convict crumpled, fell on his face. The guards dragged him to his cot. As he lay there, he broke down for the first time since his indictment last October for willfully killing the Lindbergh baby. "Oh, my God," he sobbed, "I feel awful!"

The crowd outside the jail felt fine. Several thousand folk, hysterical as lynchers, held carnival. The bars of the Union Hotel were running full blast. A butcher boy had his pocket picked. From time to time a tipsy woman would yell: "Kill Hauptmann! Electrocute him!"

At 10:30 p.m. the false verdict (see p. 48) caused little surprise. Fifteen minutes later when the actual death sentence was announced the crowd seemed to be of two minds: some screamed joyfully for blood while others hissed and stoned out several courthouse windows. But the world at large, as heard through its Press and Personages, was satisfied that justice had been done.

Reflecting the popularity of the penalty, the plebeian New York Daily News observed: "Here's a shift in public opinion that interests us. Before the verdict and while the lawyers and judge were summing up, most people felt that life imprisonment for Hauptmann would be sufficient, because of the circumstantial nature of the evidence. Now . . . most people seem satisfied. The feeling apparently is that Hauptmann was a thoroughly bad egg from the beginning and had better be put out of the way."

"One accepts the jury's opinion," agreed the Buffalo Courier & Express. "The nail holes were not mistaken!" exulted the Pittsburgh Press. The Philadelphia Inquirer boomed: "Justice well deserved has come to the man Hauptmann!" To various journals the verdict was: "logical" (Boston Transcript), "healthy" (Knoxville Journal), "salutary" (Albany News), "memorable" (Minneapolis Daily Sun), "in accord with law and fact'' (Detroit Free Press).

Missing Key. In the general scramble to second the jury's findings, few heads remained cool enough to reflect that this great murder mystery still remained pretty much of a mystery. "Unless future events supply the gaps in the tragic story," pointed out the Baltimore Sun, "there will remain a feeling that the real key to the mystery is missing. In other words, what preceded the entrance of Hauptmann into the Lindbergh house? By what conspiracy of chance or confederacy was he able to accomplish his purpose so easily? When Hauptmann has paid the extreme penalty for this crime, the final possibility for new light on the mystery will probably have ended."

That thought had also occurred to Senator William Edgar Borah whose first Government job was as a criminal prosecutor. Convinced that the crime was "only partly cleared up," he told Washington newshawks: "I have always believed that this crime was consummated through someone in the house cooperating with someone outside the house. ... I have strong convictions about the matter."