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| Chapter 5- Scraps and pieces |
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| When I had organized all the information I had gathered in New Jersey, I contacted the webmaster of the Ellis Parker website. I had a lot of questions for him, starting with the house. I mean, what was the deal with Garden Street? Why had the Parkers moved from that beautiful house (at that time) on High Street? |
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| The grandson replied that the big house on High Street was sold after the trial to pay for Elise's legal bills. It was beginning to look as if Bruno Hauptmann wasn`t the only one who took a fall as a result of the Lindbergh kidnapping. |
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| Looking through the rest of my loot from the Garden State, a picture of Ellis Parker began to emerge. There was a photo of him in a horse and buggy; another of him with some cronies in front of the Elks Club (presumably it was actually open that day.). There was a Christmas card the Parkers sent in 1937, and a poignant article about him written by a reporter who attended his funeral. |
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| The clippings from the Courier-Journal told the lively story of Parker's trial, including an incident where one of the courtroom attendees rushed to the front and yelled that Parker got the right man. The trial had been hard fought and extremely contentious, with the opposing attorneys knocking heads constantly. |
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| Parker had remained defiant to the end. He argued with both the prosecutor and his own attorney, stubbornly denying he had anything to do with his suspect's abduction. The Judge's remarks made it clear strategy was ill-advised. Long sections of the transcript reported in the articles painted a vivid picture of a clash of colorful and headstrong people. |
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| He was a popular and well respected figure in the town and in the state. In keeping with his informal appearance he liked everyone to call him simply "Ellis", even children. This politician-style friendliness also helped him keep his finger on the pulse of the county, and head off trouble before it started. When there was a crime, he usually was aquatinted with both the victim and the perpetrator. He and his wife Cora had 15 children, though only eight lived. |
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| There was also another person I needed to know more about; Parker's secretary and Anna Bading, who served as his Dr. Watson. Apparently they were a crime-fighting team. I made a note to see if she had any descendants |
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| The Internet is a grand and glorious thing. After searching around, I found a copy of The Cunning Mulatto for sale. It was $80, but essential for finding out about some of Parker's cases. I had also heard of another, more recent book, Scapegoat by Anthony Scaduto. This was of particular interest since Scaduto had written the book based on interviews with one of the men Parker used to kidnap his suspect. I ordered that book as well. |
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| Meanwhile, Barbara was doing her Grand Inquisitor act. She mentioned my project to an old friend of her mother's and learned the woman had lived in Hopewell at the time of the kidnapping, had met the Lindberghs and had been to the house while it was under construction. The woman's father, in fact, had been one of the locals who were photographed in the newspapers standing by the body of the baby just after it was discovered. She filled me in on more details I had found nowhere else. |
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| Someone at work tipped me off to a local attorney who was a Lindbergh buff and had developed a Powerpoint slide presentation based on the evidence used in the trial. The idea was to demonstrate how modern presentation methods such as Powerpoint could be used to present closing prosecution arguments by using a famous case as an example. |
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| "What do you tell people in the audience who start arguing for Hauptmann's innocence?" I asked. |
| "I tell them to make their own presentation," he replied. |
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| . The attorney then told me of a law professor at the University of North Carolina who had an even more extensive file collection. I looked him up and called him. He was gracious and helpful, talking to me for almost an hour comparing notes on Ellis Parker. The UNC professor sent me a CD containing the FBI files on the case as well as a lot of other related material. I was grateful for the cooperation I had gotten so far. The FBI files turned out to be several hundred detailed pages containing a lot of material I hadn't seen before, and I marveled once again at the vast amount of man-hours expended on this case. (By them, not me.) |
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| The Cunning Mulatto arrived and I was pleased to see it gave Parker's own account of over a dozen of his cases covering his entire career. The accounts read like detective fiction as Parker solved the most baffling cases with deduction, psychology, and dogged determination. In one case he solved a murder on an army base even though there were 175 suspects. In another case he tracked and found an international fugitive without leaving New Jersey. The dates of these cases were not always mentioned, however, so I would have to follow clues and cross references to place them in time. Several of the cases were also related in various articles I had gotten in Mt. Holly and I was dismayed to see how inconsistent they were. In one case, for instance, Parker says he found the body of a murdered child by searching a suspect's house for fresh earth in the basement. A magazine article claimed he found it through the mother's ESP. I decided Parker's story was a lot more credible, but was concerned about the wildly varying versions. I shouldn`t have been surprised; they weren`t even able to locate his house with any consistency. One placed it across from the courthouse and another across from the jail. |
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| For all its vitues, however, The Cunning Mullato did not pretend to be an actual biography, and contained nothing about the Lindbergh case. I would have to find out that information on my own. |
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| As I plodded through the cases in The Cunning Mulatto, painstakingly trying to construct a timeline of Ellis Parker's career, Scapegoat arrived. The author had written the book as a result of being approached in 1976 by one of the men who had kidnapped the suspect for Parker. The man claimed he could tell Scaduto the real story of Parker and the Lindbergh kidnapping. This sounded uncomfortably close to the book I was writing, but as the story progressed, a strange thing happened; the book became less and less about Parker and more and more about the evidence regarding |
| Hauptmann`s guilt. Scaduto became convinced Hauptmann was innocent and had been framed. (Hence the title). In the end, Scapegoat became a narrative of the author's quest to find out the truth about the Lindbergh case. Ellis Parker was almost forgotten. |
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| Still, there was a lot of good information about Parker and the events leading up to the kidnapping of his suspect, although I would later find out much of it contradicted sworn testimony by the same individuals in 1937. |
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| By now I was even more curious about the confession Parker's suspect had signed. Several sources referred to it, but none had reproduced even a portion of it. None of my sources had even seen it. Scaduto wasn`t able to find a copy for his book, and even the UNC professor with the extensive files had never seen it and didn`t know anyone who had. Did it still exist? How could I write about Ellis Parker without knowing what was contained in the confession he extracted? Well, maybe it would turn up somehow. The project would be in trouble if it didn`t. |
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| Does the confession still exist? |
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| What does it say? |
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| Could it be in the still unopened safe? |
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| Don't miss Chapter 6- |
| Spadework |
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