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“he is Conceding the defendant to the electric Chair!” When the trial resumed Thursday morning, the prosecution turned its attention from handwriting to focus instead upon the discovery of the murdered infant’s body. William allen and orville Wilson described to the jury how they found the remains and contacted the police.1 sgt. andrew Zapolsky of the new york state police then testified. he described going to the area of woods where the body of the child was found partially facedown . he rolled it over to examine the face. referring to a picture of the child in his possession, Zapolsky made a tentative identification of the body as that of Charles lindbergh Jr.2 officer harry Walsh of the Jersey City police department added to the identification . after viewing the body, Walsh went to the lindbergh estate and retrieved samples of the flannel material used to make the baby’s nightshirt. he described to the jury how these matched the remnants of clothing on the corpse.3 he also admitted that he was careless with a stick and poked a hole in the child’s skull.4 Crossexamination offered little, though Walsh embarrassedly admitted not informing the coroner of the hole he inflicted on the skull. it was now time to present Walter swayze and Charles mitchell, the men who performed the autopsy. having offered an identification of the remains, the prosecution next had to prove that the child was murdered. swayze testified that he took the body from its grave in the woods and brought it to the mortuary, where he observed the positive identifications by Charles lindbergh and Betty Gow.5 after assisting dr. mitchell with the autopsy, swayze signed the death certificate and, per the express wishes of Charles lindbergh, cremated the remains.6 reilly offered a brief but effective cross-examination. in just three questions, reilly brought out that swayze was not a physician and wrote the death certificate entirely upon someone else’s—that is, dr. mitchell’s—conclusions. This meant that the death certificate was hearsay. to reilly’s chagrin and over his vigorous objections, Judge| 245 || 28 | | 246 | hauptmann’s ladder trenchard allowed the certificate into evidence.7 Though reilly was angry at the decision , Judge trenchard’s ruling was legally correct.8 dr. mitchell was understandably nervous when he took the stand. he had not actually performed the autopsy due to his arthritis. he was very careful to say “we” when describing the autopsy procedures. he never expressly lied, but author Jim Fisher properly notes in his book that mitchell kept “within the letter if not the spirit of the perjury law.”9 attorney General Wilentz asked the doctor whether the remains were recognizable . mitchell replied, “The facial expression was quite good on this child. The facial muscles had not deteriorated, although the body was generally in a bad state of decomposition.” “have you seen pictures of the lindbergh child?” Wilentz asked. “For that matter,” mitchell answered, “we had a picture of the lindbergh child produced at the morgue that evening and i made a comparison, the best i could between the picture and the facial expression of the child, and i was very much impressed with the fact that it was the same child.”10 as for the results of the autopsy, mitchell told the jury that there was no question that the child died from a skull fracture.11 referring to the fracture as “quite extensive ,” the doctor testified it was his opinion that the fracture was caused by external violence, and that the child likely died either instantaneously or within moments of the injury.12 he also was certain that the child was still alive when the fatal blow was struck. during the examination of the skull and brain, mitchell found a blood clot on the inside of the skull at the site of the fracture. if the child was already dead when struck, there would have been no such bleeding.13 This was crucial testimony. Wilentz was concerned about a possible legal hole in his case. to obtain a conviction, he had to prove that the crime of murder occurred within the jurisdiction of the court. The body was discovered in mercer County, but the kidnapping took place in hunterdon County. Wilentz intended to use mitchell ’s testimony to try to convince the jury that the child would have died within moments of the “external violence,” which, he argued, occurred at the lindbergh estate in hunterdon County...

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