University Place

cc >> Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW Madison Biotech Center. I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other cosponsors, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW Madison Science Alliance, thanks for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. It's your opportunity to share in the discovery here at you public land-grant research university. Tonight, it's my great pleasure to introduce to you Adam Schrager. He's an investigative producer and reporter with WISC-TV, the CBS affiliate here in Madison. He's covered politics for more than 20 years, most recently at Wisconsin Public Television and at KUSA-TV in Denver. Previously, he worked at commercial television stations in La Crosse, Madison, and Milwaukee in the 1990s. Adam is the author of "The Principled Politician," a biography of former Colorado governor Ralph Carr whose stand on behalf of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor would cost him his political career. The book led state lawmakers to name the new state justice center after the former Colorado Chief Executive. His latest book is entitled "The

Blueprint

How the

Democrats Won Colorado

and Why Republicans Everywhere Should Care." It's coauthored with Rob Witwer. It has been lauded by the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and political figures across the political spectrum. In his career, Adam has won numerous journalism accolades, including more than 20 Emmy Awards. He taught journalism at the University of Denver and at Marquette University for a number of years and has conducted scores of seminars on the impact of the media on politics. Schrager has an undergraduate degree in history from the University of Michigan and a graduate degree in broadcast journalism from Northwestern University. I think tonight is going to be one of the great sagas of sleuthing science that has national and historical importance and two great connections to Wisconsin because Charles Lindbergh went to college here, and the gentleman we're going to hear about worked here in Madison at the Forest Products Lab. Please join me in welcoming Adam Schrager to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.

APPLAUSE

Democrats Won Colorado

>> Thank you so much.

APPLAUSE

Democrats Won Colorado

Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. It's a bit ironic for me to be here in a lab since I think that the last lab I was in was when I was in college at the opening level course of botany back in 1986, if I'm not mistaken. I'm more of a social science guy than I am a physical science person, and yet I am always fascinated in my career. I know Tom mentioned I've been doing this 20 years, 20-plus years, I know I look like I'm 12 years old, but really I've been doing this a lot longer. I'm always fascinated by the people who are self-described, they self-describe themselves as ordinary. And yet, when they're placed in extraordinary situations, they act extraordinarily. Tonight, we're going to hear of one such person, a gentleman by the name of Arthur Koehler. Now, to really understand this story, I need to take you back to 1927. I'm sorry, I'm going to start in 1932. 1932 the Dow-Jones reached its lowest level of the Great Depression. It bottomed out at 41.22. That's not 4,122, but 41.22. Hard to imagine in today's day and age when the Dow is closing over 15,000. Jack Benny's radio show debuted. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was dedicated in Arlington National Cemetery. Walt Disney won an Academy Award for inventing a character by the name of Mickey Mouse. Bing Crosby wrote the great song Sweet Georgia Brown. Hemingway, Faulkner, Huxley, Laura Ingalls Wilder all released books. But maybe the most important day in that year was March 1st of 1932, and that was the day that the world's baby was kidnapped. Now, to really understand who the world's baby was, I do need to take you back five years earlier to 1927. May of 1927, specifically. And you need to understand that Charles Lindbergh, at that point in time, the father of the world's baby, was simply the most famous man in the world. He sought to become the first person to ever fly across the Atlantic Ocean in May of 1927. Many had tried and failed before him. Some had tried and died before him. Lindbergh's mother visited him the night before his take-off. For the first time in my life, she told her son, I realized that Columbus also had a mother. Hundreds turned out at Roosevelt Field in New York on the morning of May 20th. It was originally called Curtiss Field, but the airfield had been renamed in honor of Teddy Roosevelt's son Quentin who had died in World War I.

At 7

40 in the morning with 451 gallons of gasoline and five sandwiches, Charles Lindbergh boarded his craft. He was asked by a reporter if the food that he had on board with him, those five sandwiches, would be enough for the journey. "If I get to Paris," Lindbergh replied, "I won't need any more. And if I don't get to Paris, well, I won't need any more either."

LAUGHTER

At 7

Twelve minutes later,

at 7

52 New York time, he took off with the crowd cheering loudly. Lindbergh never heard the applause over the din of his plane, a din he would become accustomed to over the next day and 3,600-plus miles. The world waited and waited anxiously. Even humorist Will Rogers found no reason at that time for humor. As Lindbergh's fate remained unclear he wrote no attempt at jokes today. In his syndicated column nationally, he wrote Lindbergh is somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where no lone human being has ever ventured before. He is being prayed for to every kind of supreme being that had a following. If he is lost, it will be the most universally regretted loss we have ever had. The image of a sole pilot trying to achieve the previously unachievable captured America like nothing else before it. Alone, asked an editorial in the New York Sun, is he alone? At whose right side rides courage, with skill within the cockpit and faith upon the left, does solitude surround the brave when adventure leads the way and ambition reads the dials? Lindbergh fought fog, fatigue, and fear.

And at 10

21 Paris time on May 21, 1927, 33 and a half hours after taking off, the Spirit of St. Louis plane landed and bedlam ensued. Lindbergh would later write that a French general told him it is not only two continents you have united, but the hearts of all men everywhere, an admiration of the simple courage of a man who does great things. The son of America would quickly be adopted by the rest of the world. Theater audiences in Berlin erupted at the news of his success. An Indian publication outside of Bombay proclaimed few things have so deeply stirred the hearts of India. The triumph Lindbergh has achieved is a matter of glory, not only for his own countrymen, but for the entire human race. His return to the United States evoked continued chaos. Here he is at a speech in front of the Washington Monument where President Calving Coolidge promoted him to colonel in the Army Air Corps Reserves and introduced him to the country on live radio. Now, Lindbergh spoke only 106 words in that address. Mainly about cooperation between America and Europe. And yet, 30 million people, 30 million, were riveted to his every word. He would leave Washington with his image on a 10-cent postage stamp, the first time a living American had ever earned that honor. New York came next with multiple parades in different boroughs, each drawing hundreds of thousands of screaming citizens. Then it was back to St. Louis and the same story. Hundreds of thousands of people attending a ticker tape parade simply to celebrate his accomplishment. To put this into perspective, in the time from when he lands in Paris to the time that he returns to the United States a couple of weeks later, Charles Lindbergh received three and a half million letters, 100,000 telegrams, and 14,000 parcels. Over the next three months, Lindbergh would fly his plane to 92 cities in 49 states. Cities like Madison, Wisconsin, where he would give 147 speeches and he would ride in 1,290 miles of parades in an effort to promote commercial aviation. This picture is courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society, by the way, as is this one showing him getting ready to speak at Camp Randall Stadium. You see a packed Camp Randall Stadium there, and there's him on the day getting ready to speak there. He received $5 million worth of offers, including movie roles, product endorsements, and public appearances. The Lone Eagle, as he was called, remained a worldwide phenomenon. As Fitzhugh Green, who helped put Lindbergh's accomplishments in perspective for the pilot's autobiography, as he wrote, "Whether it was his modesty or his looks or his refusal to be tempted by money or by fame that won him such a following we cannot say. Perhaps the world was right for a youth with a winning smile to flash across its horizon and by the brilliance of his achievement, momentarily to dim the ugliness of routine business, politics, and crime." Many said that his sudden meteor-like appearance from obscurity was an act of providence, but as Green concluded, whatever the reason for it all, the fact remains there was a definite phenomenon of Lindbergh quite the like of which this world had never seen. So when Charles A Lindbergh, Jr, was born in June 22, 1930, on his mother Anne Morrow Lindbergh's 24th birthday, little Charlie, or the eaglet as he was known to the papers, became, as I mentioned, the world's most famous baby. A seven-and-a-half-pound instant celebrity. The United Press Wire Service had reported no royal child for whose arrival a nation waited with anxious interest ever attracted more public speculation before its birth or was watched more closely afterward. Would it be a boy? Would it be a girl? Would he be a flier like his father? Numerologists, astrologers, and others wrote articles on the subject. The baby's first picture, his orange juice diet, any change of nurses all were duly recording in the press in greater detail than if the youngster himself had been heir to the thrown. And so when Arthur Koehler and America picked up their newspaper on March 2, 1932, this is the headline from the New York Daily News. Arthur Koehler picked up the State Journal in 1932 and read the news that Charles, Jr, had been kidnapped, the country, frankly, was stunned. And so too was Arthur Koehler. He reacted like any father would. He had a son himself, George, who you see him with right there. George was only 48 days older than Charles, Jr. Arthur Koehler would later tell the Saturday Evening Post, I looked across the breakfast table at my smallest child, a baby son, and I suppose I shuddered. Arthur Koehler's next reaction, though, was less predictable, and it's why we're here tonight. You see, he didn't focus on the ransom note or the chisel which had been left at the scene of the crime. Instead, as Arthur Koehler read about that homemade ladder that had been left behind by the person who committed the crime he said, I grew excited. You see, that ladder, because it was made of wood, seemed just like a daring challenge. Within a few days after that, he continued to tell the Saturday Evening Post, I wrote a letter to the Lindbergh baby's father saying I thought it might be possible, possible to trace that ladder's members until the wood matched up with other wood so as to compromise the man involved. Of course, he said, I'm not Sherlock Holmes, but I've specialized in the study of wood. Just as the doctor devotes himself to stomachs, or tonsils, or human vertebrate, narrows down his interest to a sharp focus on the single field of his pet passion, so I, a forester, have done with wood. Arthur Koehler believed trees themselves to be among the most interesting things in the world. Arthur Koehler was an employee at the Forest Product Laboratory here in Madison, Wisconsin. It was the preeminent facility at the time to study wood from technical and scientific standpoints. The facility dates back to 1909 when the US Forest Service sought the cooperation of a university willing to provide space and equipment to create the world's first research facility dealing solely with wood. The University of Wisconsin at Madison was selected over a number of universities who had also shown a keen interest and made very generous offers. The university here in Madison promised to build, heat, light, and power the new laboratory at an initial cost of $50,000. A lot of money back in 1909. The Forest Product Lab's early work focused on building relationships with the principal forest industries, laying out its general plans for research, and gathering as much data as possible on the fundamentals and properties of wood. It was to this wood mecca that Arthur Koehler arrived in January 1914. His colleagues in Washington pitied him for what they said was his new assignment which was being sent to "Indian country."

LAUGHTER

And at 10

But to Arthur Koehler, it was a return home, back to his home state where he grew up on a farm outside of Manitowoc where his dad cultivated bees, and the one rule in the family was not to use the hammer and the saw on Sundays out of respect to one's religious neighbors. Arthur Koehler's job functions when he arrived here in Madison were simply described as the determination and description of species, the instruction of industrial representatives, and the relation of structure to properties. 3,000 pieces of wood came to the Forest Products Lab for identification in September 1918, the most in its short history. We were in the middle of World War I, and the government wanted to make sure that the wooden parts of the war equipment came from the best possible lumber. And, thus, knowing the origin of the material coming to the laboratory was vitally important to winning in Europe. Two million people back then worked in the wood industry. It was also a vital importance to this nation's economy. It is not hyperbole to say that Arthur Koehler literally wrote the book on wood. He authored "The Properties and Uses of Wood," released in 1924 and published by McGraw-Hill out of New York and London. And he released it in part to increase interest in wood by more widely disseminating information about it. But more fundamentally, he believed the work was important because the better selection of wood materials and improved manufacturing process he believed could also mean the production of more satisfactory products. Thus, it would be of direct benefit to the consumer and eventually of an advantage to the manufacturer as well. The builder, he wrote, he sees to it that his lumber is carefully selected and properly seasoned and that treated and non-durable wood is not used in situations which favored decay is building not only for the advantage of his client, but also for the good of his own reputation and the permanency of his own interests. By 1932, Arthur Koehler had been promoted to run the Department of Silvicultural Relations. He belonged to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Sigma Xi Honorary Scientific Fraternity, the Society of American Foresters, and the International Association of Wood Anatomists. He was an associate editor for the Journal of Forestry. He was overseeing a staff and supervising efforts dealing with wood quality in southern hardwoods and conifers. And, in addition to his management role, he also continued his own work in the lab, furthering some efforts he had started in 1920 to recognize wood of abnormal shrinkage so that it could be guarded against or properly diagnosed immediately if troubles arose. He had spent many years studying the patterns of wood pores, the structure of its cells by species, how it grows, thickly in years of rainfall and skimpily in years of drought. For him, the world perhaps had too limited boundaries, fixed by its kinds of trees and the wood they produced. He worked all day on wood with microscopes, calipers, scales, and even x-ray machines. He embodied the researcher's creed of go as far as you can go, go as far as you can see, and then see how far you can go. So you can imagine the outcry in this country when Charles A Lindbergh, Jr, is found dead. Two months later. And it only heightened the intensity surrounding this case. The leads were dwindling, and the police were hitting roadblock after roadblock. There can be no immunity now, that was on the newsreel that movie-goers in the summer of 1932 heard before their picture started. It is up to America, the newsreel continued, to find the perpetrator of this crime or it is to be America's shame forever. The challenges for the police, though, in this case were significant. As we mentioned, there were only three pieces of evidence that were listed at the crime. You look at the police report from March 1, 1932, in the Lindbergh estate, there are only

three pieces of evidence

the ransom note, a common three-quarter-inch chisel, and the ladder. So, with these challenges facing them, it's not surprising to hear the head of the New Jersey State Police, a man by the name Colonel H Norman Schwarzkopf, who would be the father of a more common General Schwarzkopf that we remember from the Desert Storm days, but as he told the United Press in the summer of 1932, if the kidnapper in this case came into this room and told me personally that he had kidnapped this baby, I'd have no case against him. There are no fingerprints. Nothing that would directly connect an individual with this crime. When we get our break, we will depend on circumstantial evidence. We have scores of circumstances which we will seek to fit with the circumstances in the life of the man that we find with the ransom money. And if they dovetail even 60%, we will send that man to the chair. Now, Arthur Koehler's original note to Charles Lindbergh was never answered, but he would be invited to investigate the ladder after the New Jersey State Police officially asked the FBI for help. The FBI turned to the Forest Service. The Forest Service turned to the Forest Products Laboratory, and the Forest Products Laboratory turned to Arthur Koehler. And so on February 26, 1933, Arthur Koehler was aboard a train for Trenton, New Jersey, and looking forward to his first up close and personal look at that ladder. He didn't know that he would not be home again for a couple of months. He would later remember, as I sped eastward, I tried to visual the paths that might lie ahead of me, the objectives that might develop, and the guide marks that might direct me in a successful search. The ladder had apparently offered no decisive clues to the previous police experts. Would my wood detection methods prove adequate, he wondered, to this critical test? Or would the ladder be as devoid of fruitful suggestion to me as to any layman? While the prospect was vague, it might somehow, he believed, become clearer through his microscope. He resolved to examine that ladder up and down, inside and out, and without any mental reservation. And so on February 28th, a couple of days before the one-year anniversary of Charles, Jr's, kidnapping, the moment was not lost on Arthur Koehler. If it had been the steps to a gallows, he said, it could not have repelled or fascinated me more. For the next four days he would inspect, examine, and analyze every piece of that instrument of evil. His first reaction was one of disdain. You see, what it seemed to speak out loudly, he said, was a charge against its maker, indicting that man as a slovenly carpenter. He called its construction slipshod at best. As he told the New Jersey State Police, these carpenters who build things for experiments and tests at our laboratory, you can't hurry them. You can't say, just knock these boards together because I'm in a hurry. You hurt their feelings. Thank you, Tom. They simply have to do a good job, he told the police. Their best because the trade, the carpentry trade has old, old traditions, but this ladder, he believed, this ladder was shamefully done. It was what's called a telescopic ladder, a hybrid between a step ladder hinged in the middle and a full extension ladder. Meaning it was either extendable or compressible in nature as its sections overlapped. There are three sections to this ladder, and they were strangely narrow in Koehler's view. Their width decreased from 14 inches at the bottom to 11 inches at the top so that they could be nested together for transportation purposes. Each section was 6' 8-1/2" long. So together they reached a total height of 18 feet with overlapping parts. Now, the ladder had not been jointed together carefully. All the maker had done was overlap the uprights and pin them with some dowels. You can see the dowels right here. And the support for those dowels, the support for the joints was inadequate, which was proved when sometime during the crime the lower ends of the middle section of the uprights starting at the holes had actually split. Now, this was a one of a kind ladder. This was not a ladder that had been bought from a store. It had been constructed for this crime. Arthur Koehler knew this ladder had to be taken apart. Every rung, every rail was numbered and measured again. Calipered for width and thickness, identified for species, and scrutinized for every mark, man made or machine made, in nature. You see, as Arthur Koehler explained to the law enforcement officers who looked at him dumbfounded, there are in the United States about 160 species of wood, he said, that are sufficiently abundant to be designated as commercial. Some of these, he told them, are easy to identify exactly. However, others are almost impossible to distinguish from their nearest relatives. But any one can be quickly assigned to a narrow group by those who know the signs, someone like Arthur Koehler. For instance, he said, there are about 40 different kinds of American pines, but they fall into three groups of species, at most having the wood virtually alike, and these are usually close neighbors geographically. Barring finer structural details, the criteria of wood identification, he ran in kind of a classroom mode as he was describing this to the investigators, are the annual growth ring structure, the pore or resin duct structure, and the cell structure, besides helpful incidental features such as knots or other defects. Tree rings or annual growth layers, Koehler explained, can be seen with a simple hand-held magnifying glass. Each ring tends to mark the passage of one year in the life of a tree. Now, the science of tree ring research of dendrochronology was not yet known to a mass audience in 1933, and certainly not to the New Jersey State Police. AE Douglass, who was working in the field at the time at the University of Arizona, but he was still four years away from opening up the country's first laboratory on the topic. Douglass, Koehler, and other experts knew of only one year in history, 1816, when rings were missing in oak and elm trees in the northeastern United States. It was called the year without a summer. Temperatures worldwide had decreased by almost one and a half degrees. It snowed the first week of June in upstate New York and Maine, and lakes and rivers as far south as Pennsylvania remained frozen until August, choking off tree growth throughout the region. But 1816 was the anomaly. The norm could offer terrific clues, Koehler believed, to wood identification. Cutting cross-wise into a tree trunk shows the observers the growth layers as rings. While cutting length-wise of the trunk and through the center shows them as parallel bands. For identification purposes, Koehler preferred to cut along the side of the trunk to get the best view of the layers as they emerged at the surface in what he called the flowing curved contours. By looking at the rings on the ends of the lumber, Koehler could roughly estimate the size of the trees that the wood had come from. Sharply curved rings throughout the wood indicated small trees, usually second growth from lands that had been previously logged over. Rings whose curvature was slight indicated large trees from virgin stands. Now, the size of the trees could also be indicated by the diameter of the hardwood, or the darker colored core found in all pine logs and most other tree species. So we talked about the numbering of this ladder, and for the purposes of this I'm going to show you on this picture. So this ladder had 11 rungs. Starting from the bottom, one, two, all the way up to 11. The rails on the side where someone would hold on, on the lower section this is rail 12 on the left, rail 13 on the right, rail 14 here on the left, rail 15 on the right, rail 16 the top section on the left, and rail 17. Let me give you some details about them. Now, the bottom cleat, or rung one as I was saying, was number one, the top cleat was number 11. Numbers one through 10, they were made of a softwood, a ponderosa pine or a California white pine as it used to be called. Number 11, that topmost rung, that was actually Douglas fir. Rails 12 and 13 here on the lower section, those were North Carolina pine. And the rails in the middle section, 14 and 15, they were the same length as those on that first section but they were Douglas fir, which is largely grown in the Rocky Mountain west. Number 17, on the top right-hand side, Arthur Koehler identified as a Douglas fir as well, just like the rails beneath it. Number 16, though, upper left-hand corner, rail 16 was different from the other five rails in some very striking respects. Like 12 and 13, it was North Carolina pine, but number 16 was a more knotty type of lumber than the others. And there were other major differences to indicate that it had not come from the same tree that produced the others. First of all, rail 16 had not been machine-planed like the others, but instead hand-planed on both edges. That suggested to Arthur Koehler that it had been worked down from a wider piece of wood. It was also slightly narrower than the other rails. Why he planed both edges of rail 16, he said to the New Jersey State Police, is a mystery unless it was rough edged to begin with. The edges were not always at right angles to the face, and scratches made by the plane wobbled back and forth along the edge. The scratches left by a hand plane on both edges of this rail were exactly the same as those on one side of each of the cleats or the rungs. So rail 16 has the same planer marks, hand planer marks, as one side of each of these rungs. It proved conclusively to Koehler that they were made by the same plane and presumably at approximately the same time. Probably, he surmised, when the ladder was made. Now, he came to that conclusion because a plane, he said, would hardly show the same pattern due to dullness for a number of years. Number 16 also contained four nail holes that had been made previously by square cut or eight penny nails made of iron. Now, those nails had been in use since the early 19th century, but they had been phased out at the end of the 1800s, as it became much cheaper to make round, wire nails from soft steel. By 1913, 90% of the nails were wire nails. However, square cut nails were still used in some home constructions. The spacing of the nail holes also indicated a clue. It indicated to Koehler that the board and the nails had come from a building of some kind. The nails in number 16 even more significant because none showed any sign of discoloration or rust, telling Koehler definitively that this board had been nailed in a place that had been sheltered from the weather. Specifically, he told the police, that it had come from a "protected location inside a building." He speculated that it came from the interior of a crude building, possibly an attic, a shop, a warehouse, or a barn. This is the spring of 1933. Although cut nails do not rust as easily as wire nails, he said, if the wood had been nailed down outdoors in the early days when cut nails were commonly used and it had been exposed to the weather since then, there should have been considerable rust and discoloration around the nails, but there wasn't. He believed further that the boards had been pried off whatever they had been fastened to and the nails were driven out of the back side. Remember these facts for a moment. Now, Arthur Koehler's investigation would transpire over the course of the next year and a half. Unlike CSI and NCIS of today, which get solved in a convenient 60 minutes, this investigation took a little bit longer. And in some ways, he traveled everywhere across the east coast. He visited lumber mills, yards, manufacturing plants, hen houses, outhouses, basements. You name it. He went everywhere he could to try and make this wooden witness talk. He contacted nearly 2,000 companies in all which dealt with wood. What he was able to do is to track rails 12 and 13 to a South Carolina lumber mill, follow their path back to a New York lumber yard, only to hit a dead end when he learned that sales receipts had not been kept. In the fall of 1934, a suspect, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, was arrested when he passed one of the bills that had been used to pay for the ransom, and a gas station clerk wrote down his license plate number. Police would find thousands of dollars of the ransom money hidden in Hauptmann's home and in his garage. What would ensue next would be a media explosion unlike any since Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic. Media came from all over the world, the world, China, New Zealand, Australia, simply to cover his ensuing trial in Flemington, New Jersey. Reporters stated that the telegraph wire that had been strung to provide for more immediate coverage literally blacked out large swaths of the sky above. HL Mencken, the great writer of the day, called this the greatest story since the resurrection. Now, once this trial began, besides Charles Lindbergh and Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the eyes of the world were on this omnipresent ladder. It rested behind the witness box, over the shoulder of those testifying. Local kids sold ladder replicas on the courthouse yard in Flemington, New Jersey. It was the single most recognizable piece of criminal evidence in the single most viewed trial in history. What Koehler found, though, after Bruno Hauptmann was arrested would tie Bruno Hauptmann to the crime scene, and thus tie him to the murder of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. What he viewed under his microscope, what he viewed under his microscope, the prosecution knew, was a proverbial smoking piece of wood, if you will. David Wilentz, the top prosecutor in the case, openly said he did not understand what Koehler was doing, but as he told reporters before the trial, he planned to "wrap the kidnap ladder right around Hauptmann's neck." "I mean it," he said, "that's exactly what we're going to do." Koehler, meanwhile, everything he had done from the early part of 1933 to now, the fall and the early winter of 1934-1935, had been done in secrecy. He had a special workshop set up at the lab. His secretary was sworn to confidentiality. She wasn't allowed to discuss what he was working on. Correspondence related to this trial, to this crime, to this investigation were sent to him under a code name at the lab. Schwarzkopf, meanwhile, had reporters hounding him, asking him who the star witness was going to be. I'm not telling them it's you, he said to Arthur Koehler, we're going to keep you a secret. That is, if Arthur Koehler would qualify as a witness in the first place. You see, the defense would challenge his expertise. We say that there is no such animal among men known as an expert on wood, is what Frederick Pope, the defense counsel, said. It is not a science that has been recognized by the courts. It is not in a class with handwriting experts, with fingerprint experts, or with ballistic experts that has been reduced to a science and is known and recognized by the courts. The witness, Pope continued, you know, he could probably testify as an experienced carpenter or something like that, but when he attempts to qualify and express opinions as a wood expert, well that, he said, is quite different. For instance, he told the judge, a physician examines a patient and he finds certain symptoms and he expresses an opinion. He's qualified because he represents a science. A fingerprint expert examines fingerprints. He makes measurements and comparisons. He expresses an opinion because that has been reduced to a science and has been recognized by the courts, but this, he said pointing to Koehler, this idea of wood science, this is no science. This is just merely a man who has had a lot of experience in examining trees, who knows the bark on trees and some things like that. Well, the prosecution didn't expect the challenge, and thus asked for an immediate recess. And they decided to figure out a strategy in the recess.

And the strategy was this

the attorney general would simply ask Arthur Koehler to list his writings on this topic and then allow the judge to decide if, in fact, he were an expert on this opinion. And so, with a steady, clear monotone, halting only to take a deep breath, Arthur Koehler began. "An Improved Method of Infiltrating Wood, Our National Forests, How the Taste of Wood Affects its Use, How the Odor of Wood Affects its Use, What Makes Wood Float, The Burning of Wood, How a Tree Grows, Forest Trees as Sources of Food, What Wood is Made of..." Mouths in the courtroom were starting to open, and the defense counsel Pope could do nothing. "A Visual Method," Koehler continued, "of Distinguishing Long Leaf Pine, Identification of Oak Woods, Woods Older Than the Hills, Native Woods as a Passable Substitute for Boxwood, Guidebook for the Identification of Woods Used for Ties and Timbers, A Plea for a Closer Discrimination in the Use of the Woods Grain and Texture With Respect to Wood, How to Distinguish Douglas Fir From Spruce..." Koehler's voice continued consistently and matter-of-factly. "Information for Inspectors of Airplane Wood, The Grain of Wood with Special Reference to Direction of its Fibers," also part of the "Inspection Manual of Aircraft Production, American Substitutes for Boxwood, Relation of Moisture Content in Drying Rate of Wood to the Humidity of the Atmosphere, Factors Affecting the Strength of Wood, Selecting Wood for Airplanes..." In the front row, famous journalist Damon Runyon couldn't keep up with his pen and his legal pad. The reporter who loved finding the extraordinary in his stories would write a column for sure about this bald-headed, mild-looking, middle-aged man from what he described as the woods of Wisconsin.

LAUGHTER

And the strategy was this

He would not be alone. There was a throng of media that came to cover this trial. "How to Tell Birch, Beech, and Maple Apart," Koehler continued, "The Shrinking and Swelling of Wood, The Identification of Mahogany, Defects Found in Lumber, Handbook of Box and Crate Construction, Lumber Used in Motor Vehicle Manufacture, Distinguishing Characteristics of Mahogany, The Identification of Tree Mahogany and Certain So-Called Mahoganies, The Identification of Pulpwoods, The Identification of Douglas Fir Wood, What Makes Lumber Sell..." The crowd pressed to see if he would continue. "Let me interrupt for a moment," the judge finally said after Koehler had read 34 of his 52 titles.

LAUGHTER

And the strategy was this

"Mr. Pope," he said turning to the defense table, do you still wish to question this witness as to his expert capabilities?" Well, the defense objection to Arthur Koehler obviously was overruled, and when he was finally allowed to take the witness stand, when he was finally allowed, this is the tale that he shared. The 16th rail, the upper left-hand part of the ladder used in the kidnapping of Charles A Lindbergh, Jr, had been previously connected to a board in Bruno Hauptmann's attic. The wood in the ladder came from the accused's home. The testimony was critical. It was critical because it would tie Bruno Richard Hauptmann to the Lindbergh home on the night of March 1, 1932. It would turn an extortion case, simply Hauptmann had the ransom money, and it would turn it into a murder case. Koehler said since no two pieces of wood are the same, it is evident that these two came from the same piece. To stress that point further, he said there was no doubt, no doubt, that the board from the attic floor and the ladder rail were at one time one piece. It was nailed down here. This stretch right here is where rail 16 came from. And that part of it, Arthur Koehler testified, had been cut off, removed, and used for the ladder rail. It was simply the best evidence that had been provided at this trial. Now, further, in a scene that you'd expect to see on today's shows like Law & Order or maybe in the olden days of Perry Mason, he literally attached the plane, the hand plane that was found in Bruno Hauptmann's garage, he attached it to the judge's bench and he took a piece of North Carolina pine at which point he strained and he planed that piece of wood. And then he took a piece of paper and a light blue pencil, and like so many people have sketched coins in their childhood, he put that piece of paper over the wood and he colored in the markings. And then he took the 16th rail and he took a similar piece of paper and the same light blue pencil and sketched out its marking as well and held both up for the jury to see and they matched. The reaction, as you can imagine, was dramatic, and I'm not simply speaking about the reaction from the prosecution. This is what the defense had to say to reporters after Koehler was done testifying. "There has been nothing better than that," said defense lawyer Pope who had tried continuously and unsuccessfully to stop Koehler's demonstration. "It is quite simply," he said, "perfect." Now, the Universal Press Service reporter also got a quote from Edward Reilly who was the lead defense counsel, and his answer to the question about how Arthur Koehler's testimony went over was as follows. He said, "I have never heard more damaging testimony or seen a more enthralling demonstration than that presented in the courtroom today by Arthur Koehler." These were the defense lawyers.

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And the strategy was this

Not the prosecution.

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And the strategy was this

Sherlock Holmes in the witness box is what the headlines across the country proclaimed. Runyon wrote that article. "The tale of scientific wood and tool detection," he wrote, "told today by a bald-headed, mild-looking, middle-aged man from the woods of Wisconsin. An expert for the government of the US named Arthur Koehler puts the greatest fictional exploits of Sherlock Holmes in the shade." The New York Times said Koehler "...testified in the role of a modern Sherlock Holmes while attorney general Wilentz played the part of Dr. Watson by asking questions now and again to draw him out." You can see the tree ring matching right here. The lines are matching. That's what Koehler determined. Now, the New York Post, realizing the importance of Arthur Koehler's testimony, presciently wrote, the Hauptmann trial may go down in legal history less as the most sensational case of its time than as the case which brought legal recognition to the wood expert on a par with handwriting, fingerprint, and ballistic experts. Koehler was mentioned in 2,653 articles in 284 different newspapers in 40 states, according to the clipping service employed by his laboratory. But maybe the most dramatic reference came from a British writer, and I'll spare you my bad English accent.

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And the strategy was this

I'll just read it as me. "A little baldish, shiny, implacable man with an amazingly clear vocal organ, he was like the instrument of a blind and atrociously menacing destiny. You shuddered," he wrote, "at the thought of what might happen to you if such a mind and such an inconceivable industry should get to work upon your own remote past. A man who searched 1900 factories for traces of the scratches of a plane on a piece of wood. It was both fantastic and horrifying. I have never, and in my time," he writes, "I have seen some things. Imagined that a moment could be more shockingly moving as when with the air of a conjurer producing a rabbit from top hat. He brought from invisibility a common plane and proceeded utterly matter-of-fact to plane a piece of plank, producing exactly the grooves and scratches that are to be found on the ladder. That is the principle item of the state's evidence. You felt that if the motionless and always motionless prisoner sits in the end motionless in the electric chair, that little sleuth with the implacability of a weasel hunting by scent an invisible prey will be the man who will have sent him there." Just got to love the British reporters.

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And the strategy was this

There's something about that that's just too good. Arthur Koehler was the final prosecution witness in the trial of the century. Bruno Richard Hauptmann would be convicted of murder and eventually sentenced to death. Now, there remained questions about whether Bruno Hauptmann acted alone, and whether he had help Arthur Koehler himself didn't know. He wondered but he did not know definitively. What he did know, though, with absolute certainty was that the 16th rail came from Bruno Hauptmann's attic. As he told NBC radio after the trial ended, the variation in the width rings of the annual rings is a characteristic for each tree which is not like that in any other tree. In fact, it is like fingerprints, he said. No two are alike. One end of the kidnapping ladder showed exactly the same width and variation in width of the rings as one end of the board from Hauptmann's attic, which left no doubt in my mind that they were once one board. Science, he went on to say, comes in identifying the planer marks, as such in distinguishing them from the natural grain or other marks on wood, in measuring them to the hundredths and the thousandths of an inch, in arranging the proper illumination so that those marks could be seen to the best advantage and photographed. Not to a small extent, though, to the exercise of the power of imagination. While a scientist, he said, must be truthful in his observations, he must also have the capacity to let his imagination wander, wander along restricted channels so as to realize the possibilities to which those observations may lead. This is particularly true in scientific detective work, he said, because the observations are of little value unless clues can be properly interpreted and followed up. He concluded, in all of the years of my work, I have been consumed, consumed with the absolute reliability of trees. They carry in themselves the record of their history. They show with absolute fidelity the progress of the years, storms, drought, floods, injuries, and any human touch. A tree never lies. A tree never lies. You cannot fake or make a tree, Arthur Koehler said. And, interestingly, even with the advent and popularity of television programs like CSI, and NCIS, and others featuring scientist detectives, there are scientists today who worry about the legacy of Arthur Koehler. Scientists like Dr. Shirley Graham at the Missouri Botanical Gardens who wonders whether there are future Arthur Koehlers being trained. She explained that today there are very descriptive fields in plant science, like plant anatomy, morphology, and taxonomy. And they've taken a backseat, she told me, to newer disciplines based on molecular information and increasingly on more sophisticated computer-based statistical programs of assessing data. Now, these data, she said, are not infrequently derived from studies of the past two centuries because insufficient numbers of new scientists are being trained in these descriptive fields. There is inadequate support, she said, in the universities for classic training, and few positions available even after extensive post-graduate studies. I can think, she said, for example, of very few practicing plant anatomists in this country today. The legacy of Koehler's work, she said, is that there are still important roles for studies that generate the original data. To name a few in fields of forensic science or data that demonstrates an organismal level changes in climate through time for describing the still unknown plant species of the planet or for working out the biology of living organisms, the history of the various lineages of life forms. Koehler's legacy, she believed, was to show how basic descriptive science still has modern value and important applications. When Arthur Koehler passed away in 1967, newspapers around the country called him the greatest scientist detective of modern times because he helped solve the crime of the century. He used tree ring technology years before it was common to connect the 16th rail with Bruno Hauptmann's attic. He embodied that researcher's

credo

go as far as you can see and then see how far you can go. There's a famous poem by Joyce Kilmer called "Trees." It's known to foresters and many others. I read it in high school. And in conclusion, I'd like to paraphrase it. Speeches are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.

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credo

I thank you for your time and your attention, and I'm more than happy to answer whatever questions you may have. Thank you.

APPLAUSE