Hon. Lise Pearlman - Charles Lindbergh Revealed

[00:00:03] Louis Goodman: Welcome to Love Thy Lawyer, where we talk with attorneys about their lives and careers. I'm your host, Louis Goodman. Today, we welcome the Honorable Lise Perlman to the podcast. Ms. Perlman was the first presiding judge of the California State Bar Court. Following her retirement from the bench, she has become a bestselling author and speaker on famous 20th century trials.

She's been the chair of the Oakland Public Ethics Commission, president of Women Lawyers of Alameda County, and on the board of California Women Lawyers, she is also very involved with the Lake Merritt Breakfast Club in Oakland. Judge Pearlman recently published an amazing book about the Lindbergh kidnapping case called Suspect No. 1: The Man Who Got Away.

Judge Lise Pearlman, welcome to Love Thy Lawyer. 

[00:01:01] Lise Pearlman: Thank you so much, Louis. 

[00:01:03] Louis Goodman: Where are you speaking to us from right now, Judge?

[00:01:06] Lise Pearlman: From my home in Oakland, where I've been for over 40 years. 

[00:01:09] Louis Goodman: Where are you from originally? 

[00:01:11] Lise Pearlman: Connecticut. Bethel, Connecticut. Small town in Western Connecticut.

[00:01:15] Louis Goodman: So did you graduate from high school in Connecticut?

[00:01:18] Lise Pearlman: I did at Bethel High School. I was first in my class. 

[00:01:21] Louis Goodman: I'm not surprised. And where did you go to college?

[00:01:25] Lise Pearlman: I started out at the University of Pennsylvania, and then I transferred when Yale opened up to women, to the first class of women undergraduates at Yale. 

[00:01:34] Louis Goodman: When you graduated from Yale, you ultimately went to law school. Where'd you go? 

[00:01:38] Lise Pearlman: I went straight to law school, and I went to what was then called BOLT. It's UC Berkeley Law. 

[00:01:44] Louis Goodman: Well, that was quite the change coming all the way across the country and going to live in Berkeley after growing up in Connecticut and going to school back east. 

[00:01:54] Lise Pearlman: It was snowing when I applied.

Made it easier. 

[00:01:58] Louis Goodman: You know, in a lot of ways, that's why I ended up going to, well, what was then known as Hastings because I had gone to the University of Rochester in upstate New York, and it was snowing a lot there, and I decided I could continue my education someplace where it wasn't snowing. 

[00:02:12] Lise Pearlman: Right. Actually, I applied to both Stanford and Bolt, and Stanford didn't give me a scholarship, and Bolt did, so that made it easier too.

[00:02:22] Louis Goodman: When did you start thinking about being a lawyer? 

[00:02:25] Lise Pearlman: Early on, one of my heroes was Abraham Lincoln. I loved reading about him and his career both as a lawyer and later as a politician and as president. Loved Perry Mason when I was a kid. Never went into criminal law. I wasn't interested in that for my own practice, but I love litigation.

[00:02:43] Louis Goodman: Can you briefly just take us through your career? You went to law school. You graduated from Berkeley Law, Bolt, and then went into practice, ultimately became a State Bar Judge. Can you just kind of briefly take us through that career? 

[00:02:57] Lise Pearlman: Sure. First thing I did was I should be a teaching fellow at Stanford Law School for a year.

Then I came to practice law in Oakland, for two different firms until I applied for the position of judge in the State Bar Court and was appointed by the Supreme Court as the first presiding judge. And then after I left the court, I came back and did arbitration and mediation for several years. I was on the Public Ethics Commission. I was on the board of California women lawyers and women lawyers of Alameda County as its president. And I started writing. In 2000, I started writing my first book and I have five books, and I have another one in the works. Since then, all history books. 

[00:03:39] Louis Goodman: How long were you on the State Bar Court?

[00:03:42] Lise Pearlman: One term, six years.

[00:03:44] Louis Goodman: I have some other questions I want to get back to, but I really want to talk about this book that you've recently written about the Lindbergh kidnapping case. I would just like to say a little bit about my own, I don't know, notions about Charles Lindbergh. I have a photograph of the spirit of St. Louis on my wall in my office. I sent that to you when I invited you to come on the podcast and I've read about Lindbergh and I have always recognized him as an extraordinarily flawed person, but he's also someone who in some ways I've had a great deal of admiration for in terms of what he was able to accomplish in terms of his flight across the Atlantic.

I mean, it's an amazing feat, and in some ways I think he was one of the first just real media stars that we've ever had. He's buried in Hana in Maui and I made a point of going to visit his grave, which is very hard to find. I tried on one trip down to Hana to find it, was unable to do it, did some more research and went back a year later and finally found the little churchyard where he's buried and I just wanted to visit that grave site, I don't know, because I just wanted to do it and I did. And I've read some biographies of Lindbergh, so I have some information about him and then I read your book and wow, uh, I have to say certain bubbles were burst and I'm wondering if you could give us just a summary in your own words of your book about the Lindbergh kidnapping.

[00:05:33] Lise Pearlman: Oh, happy to. I want to start by saying is that when I grew up, Lindbergh was a hero. I think my parents had some reaction to him because he was pro-Nazi. But Hauptmann was a supervillain, and that was what I had learned as a kid. 

[00:05:50] Louis Goodman: And Hauptmann was the person who was convicted of the kidnapping of the Lindbergh child.

[00:05:56] Lise Pearlman: Bruno Richard Hauptmann was executed for the crime. And what happened was I was doing research on a background for the Huey Newton trial of 1968, because Faye Stender, who had been on California Women Lawyers Board, as one of its founders, was always memorialized with an award given out in her name to women lawyers who also devoted themselves to the underserved.

And so that got me intrigued with her biography, and then Abra wrote that first. And when I did that, she had considered the Huey Newton 1968 death penalty case one of the top trials of the century. So, I wrote a book about it and I compared it to other trials that over time had been called the trial of the century.

And that happens like every couple of years. And so I look at lists of what cases were on those lists. And Alan Dershowitz, other lawyers and journalists have created their own. And I took the overlaps. And I decided to write a chapter a piece on each of them and the Lindbergh case was one. And what troubled me about it having been a judge is that it was still somewhat mysterious what really happened.

There were many people who assumed that Hauptmann was guilty and wrote about that. There are others who believed his wife who as a widow for 60 years tried to clear his name and thought that he had been framed. 

[00:07:23] Louis Goodman: One of the people who was very much in Hauptmann’s corner was Eleanor Roosevelt.

[00:07:29] Lise Pearlman: Absolutely. And Clarence Guerra also, but there were, they were in the minority who had suspicions about the case at the time. The actual, the governor, the new governor who came in when the jury had just decided that he was on guilty and ought to die, grew concerned as well, and he actually tried to reopen the case. But in any event, that got me interested in researching on my own what I thought really must have happened because these conflicting sources, I couldn't just say, some say he's guilty and some say he was framed and leave it at that. As a judge, I wanted to know what I thought. So I wound up doing the research.

And when I did the research, I realized number one, Hauptmann had a terrible case in terms of the, how they prosecuted him. His own lawyer, his lead lawyer, had a picture of Lindbergh on his desk and worshipped him, told the FBI that one of the agents during the trial that he hoped Hauptmann got the chair and he only met with him, this was the part that really upset me when I started the research. He only met with Hauptmann in jail four times between October, when he was brought in by Hearst newspapers and paid by Hearst newspapers for exclusives every day, until the trial, which was in early January. Ten minutes average per time.

Forty minutes altogether. It was all recorded by the police. And he left Hauptmann in tears every time he came to visit. It was atrocious. And he was also syphilitic and an alcoholic. So that didn't help either. But in any event, that's what got me into it. And then the more I got into it, I realized that there was a huge problem with the corpse that nobody else seemed to have noticed. 

[00:09:17] Louis Goodman: Tell us a little bit about the corpse and the way it was found, where it was found, when it was found, the burlap bag that was found in the vicinity of the corpse, and why those things are so suspect. 

[00:09:33] Lise Pearlman: Well, the corpse was found 10 weeks after the little boy disappeared within five miles of the Lindbergh home in the woods by a trucker who happened to be going there to relieve himself.

He was black and he couldn't do that at a local gas station or anywhere else. He went in the woods. In any event, he called the police, the police came and when they took pictures that afternoon of the body, it was half buried in leaves and dirt under a tree, but the foot was sticking out and they could tell there was a body there in the back of the head and it was face down.

And what was bizarre about it from my perspective was that when they turned it over, the face was intact. The rest of the body was skeletal except for the right foot. It was missing both hands. It was missing in the lower part of the left leg. The assumption when the police looked at it and when the trucker looked at it was that wild animals must've attacked this body in the time that been there and for the last couple of months. Well, I went straight to the Oakland Zoo and the head of the zoo, and I asked him, look at this picture. Does this look like something left by wild animals? And the answer was no. 

[00:10:44] Louis Goodman: Why not? 

[00:10:45] Lise Pearlman: They would have scattered the bones. They would not have left them intact. The child was wearing two t shirts and nothing else, just pelvic bone and leg. And the T-shirts had to be cut off by the police.

And they cut them off to bring to the nanny to ask her if she recognized him, which she did. She said, these are the two he was wearing. I put them on him the night he disappeared. They had otherwise been complete with a little bit of fraying over there a little bit of time on the edges but how did you cut them off, the police cut them off open it up and inside you have a chest cavity with a partial heart, a little bit of the liver and nothing else. How did those organs disappear? The assumption was that wild animals had eaten. Well, they had to have gotten through the two t shirts first and they, there was no indication of bite marks or scratch marks on the, on the t-shirts. In addition, the police immediately sent the dirt and leaves surrounding the corpse to a high-end lab, Squibb lab, which is now Bristol Myers Squibb.

And Squibb Lab analyzed it and said, there's no blood on these T-shirts. There's no purge or anything like that on the T-shirts. How on earth do you lose all the organs underneath, without any blood there? There was no blood in the dirt or leaves around it, around the corpse. 

[00:12:12] Louis Goodman: Now, I wanna go back a little bit because you have some early biographical material about Lindbergh and how he had had a rather difficult childhood, difficult upbringing, and then, you know, he got into flying airplanes and was a male pilot, and then all of a sudden after he crossed the Atlantic, he's the greatest hero in the world. But he was also very interested in something called eugenics.

[00:12:43] Lise Pearlman: Absolutely. His father was too. 

[00:12:45] Louis Goodman: And eugenics, I mean, it's essentially, as I understand it, a way of looking at social Darwinism, human Darwinism, and attempting to get the human genome in a good place, just as you would if you had a herd of cattle, or a herd of sheep, and Lindbergh wasn't the only one at this time who was interested in eugenics, lots of people were, and he worked very closely with someone who actually won a Nobel prize, this Dr. Carroll. 

[00:13:18] Lise Pearlman: Carrell. Oh, he was French. 

[00:13:19] Louis Goodman: Dr. Carrel and Dr. Carrel won a Nobel prize. 

[00:13:24] Lise Pearlman: Nobel prize for vascular surgery. He didn't win it for eugenics, but he was one of the world's leading proponents of eugenics. He helped organize the first international conference on eugenics in London in 1912. 

[00:13:37] Louis Goodman: And eugenics at the time, wasn't as disfavored as it is now. 

[00:13:44] Lise Pearlman: Opposite. Eugenics was essentially a secular religion for lawyers, doctors, other professionals, politicians, 

[00:13:52] Louis Goodman: Pilots. 

[00:13:54] Lise Pearlman: Yeah. Throughout the United States and England, it was huge. On the first conference was actually chaired, I think by Darwin's son. And so they wanted to create essentially a master race.

They wanted to clean the fiend pool and have only the best have children. And so they passed laws in the United States that had women being against their will, being sterilized.

[00:14:19] Louis Goodman: Why is it important to know that Lindbergh worked with Dr. 

[00:14:25] Lise Pearlman: Carrel. 

[00:14:25] Louis Goodman: Carrel. 

[00:14:26] Lise Pearlman: Carrel. It's very important because Carrel had been working for about 20 years when Lindbergh met him. Not quite. Well. He'd been working for decades, since 1906 he'd been a research scientist for the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.

And he was their prize doctor because he was the only one in the United States who had gotten a Nobel Prize in medicine up until that time. And when they met, Lindbergh's son had just been born recently. He was born in June of 1930 and he met Dr. Carell in November of that year. But he was introduced to Carell because the obstetrician had told Lindbergh that Dr. Carell was trying to accomplish heart bypass surgery. And that was of interest to Lindbergh because when his son was born, they used a mechanical device to help him with his breathing. He wondered if you could have a similar device for a heart because his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Morrow, had a defective heart from childhood rheumatic fever.

And he wanted to see if they could save her life. So that was how he got introduced to Dr. Carrel. And then he started working pretty much full time as a volunteer at Carrel's lab. Carrel was using a device called a perfusion pump that looks sort of like a kerosene lamp, hand blown glass that would hold organs or tissue that had been harvested from a subject, some of them animal and some of them human, to try to keep it oxygenated and viable until it could be transplanted. And Lindbergh helped him with that because Lindbergh was an expert mechanic and mechanics weren't really used very much in science labs at that time, medical labs. And so he was very welcome to come in and make improvements on this device.

Which at the time allowed bacteria in it too often and the organ would become necrotic, and Lindbergh worked on making sure that didn't happen.

[00:16:32] Louis Goodman: Lindbergh's son, the child who was the subject of the kidnapping, seems to perhaps have had some sort of birth defect that may have even been caused because of Lindbergh's taking his wife, the child's mother, on a series of very long cross-country airplane trips that were probably not the best thing for a pregnant woman to have done.

[00:17:01] Lise Pearlman: Open cockpit. Open cockpit, very high up, ultraviolet rays. Yes, it was not a good thing. 

[00:17:08] Louis Goodman: Aviation fuel. 

[00:17:10] Lise Pearlman: Yeah, she got violently ill when she was seven months pregnant. And was supposed to be confined to home for the last two months of her pregnancy because of oxygen deprivation and probably inhaling toxic fumes.

But I think that the damage that might have been done to the child would probably be early in the pregnancy, even before maybe she knew she was pregnant, but they were doing lots of flights there too. 

[00:17:32] Louis Goodman: In any event, the child seemed to have some problems. What sort of problems did the child have? 

[00:17:38] Lise Pearlman: Well, his pediatrician documented that he had an oversized head. He had a, basically an oversized chest. His legs were probably a little smaller than normal because he was of average height for a 20-month-old. He was 33 inches tall when he disappeared. He had flaky skin for a bit of a reason they didn't diagnose. He had a rickety condition that could have been from birth as opposed to vitamin D deficiency in his diet.

And he had overlapping toes on his feet. Those were the main things that the doctor pointed out, and in fact, he noticed the same things when he was brought to the morgue. But he still could not identify the corpse, because it was so, it had, most of the body had deteriorated so much, he wasn't sure who, whether it was his patient or not.

[00:18:27] Louis Goodman: If someone were really involved in eugenics and really believed in it as a secular religion, what would their view of a child like this be? 

[00:18:38] Lise Pearlman: The view of Dr. Carrel and of Lindbergh and of actually of many other doctors who were doing research at the time was that feeble minded babies, which they, that was a category they considered to include, children with epilepsy and a variety of things, didn't deserve to live and they used them for experiments.

Dr. Carell and Lindbergh, well, Carell received a letter, but a letter addressed to him and to Colonel Lindbergh. When are you coming by? I have some feeble-minded prospects for you. This is from the head of an institution in New Jersey. Actually, the whole set of institutions in New Jersey was on the oversight board.

And that was letter in 1935, but it seems to me, obviously they'd been doing that for a while. And in fact, there's a 1938 article in the New York Times about Carell focusing for the last several years, exclusively on man and listing that he had removed at least a thousand organs of different types, kidneys and thyroids, you know, stomachs, whatever.

There's a whole list. Reproductive organs. 

[00:19:51] Louis Goodman: From human beings who were considered to be feeble minded? 

[00:19:56] Lise Pearlman: Well, he didn't say that, and they didn't ask, but that was what he appears to have been, had a pipeline for. And he wrote in his diary, Dr. Carell, that basically that research doctors who only focused on autopsies were essentially chickens.

[00:20:15] Louis Goodman: Okay, now, I want to shift gears here a little bit, and I would like to talk to you about my understanding of the prosecution case against Hauptmann, as I understood it before I read your book. And the prosecution case, as I understand it, is that there was ransom money that had been paid out to someone who said that they had the child, and Lindbergh gave him fifty thousand dollars in certain bills, some were gold certificates that were used at the time. And, you know, there'd been a recording of the serial numbers of these bills. And one of the bills was used, I believe, at a gas station. And the gas station attendant was ordered by his boss that any bill, you know, over 5 dollars, to write down the license plate of the car that used the bill.

And so the license plate number was written on the, on the bill. And then that license plate ultimately came back to Hauptmann. Hauptmann was investigated and they looked in his house. And one of the things that the investigation allegedly found was that some of the boards in the attic of the house had been used to build this homemade ladder that was used to go up the side of the Lindbergh house in New Jersey and take the baby from the nursery.

And that the nail holes in the ladder matched those of the missing board in the house that Hauptmann lived in the Bronx. So that was always my understanding of the case against Hauptmann now in your book You discussed the ladder, you discuss the window, you discuss the condition of the soil under the window, and I would like you to tell us what your research has found out, and why my discussion of the prosecution case against Hauptmann is wrong.

[00:22:26] Lise Pearlman: Okay. Well, where shall I start? I will start with something else, which is Dr. Mitchell, who was the medical examiner at the morgue, told the reporters multiple times and actually testified in a 1933 case that the child did not die on March 1. He died at the earliest on March 3 somewhere else. Okay, so there's that, because that was not the theory on which Hauptmann was convicted.

The crime, it actually did not happen when, where, or how Hauptmann was convicted and executed for it. Okay, so what evidence did they have? Well, the police found in his garage, hidden in his garage, about fourteen thousand dollars from the ransom money, which was identifiable. What didn't come out at the trial, I believe, is that someone had spent three thousand dollars of the ransom money in May of 33, who the handwriting expert said was not Hauptmann.

What also didn't come out at the, or most people don't remember about the case, is that two weeks before Hauptmann was arrested, the fellow who accepted the money in St. Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx, in April of 30, was called Cemetery John. And there was an all-points bulletin for Cemetery John two weeks before Hauptmann was arrested with a different description of a taller man who had just spent one of those ten dollar ransom bills for a small piece of fruit or vegetable at a stand.

And the fellow who was running the stand was interviewed shortly afterward because the bill turned up as one matching the ransom and the police immediately went to see him. And he was very clear about what the person he saw. He seemed to be American, or at least he spoke English without an accent.

Hauptmann had a very heavy accent. He was taller and thinner and well dressed. And he had the hands of someone who was not a manual worker, which Hauptmann was. He was a carpenter. Okay. So they send out this all coins bulletin for this fellow. And then two weeks later, Hauptmann spends another ten-dollar bill separately and gets arrested.

They go to his home, and they find this money hidden in his garage. And he told them what happened from his perspective, which was that he had a friend named Isidore Fisch, who was also a business associate, who in December of 33, left a shoebox with him that it was wrapped and tied, and then Fish told him, this is important papers I want you to keep for me until I return from Germany, going home to visit family.

Well, Fisch died on that trip. And Hauptmann forgot about it until the summer of 34. He opened up the box which had been at the top of a kitchen closet because it rained really hard, and he took down everything that was in there. He opened it up and he said, I didn't even know there was money in it.

I have no idea where it came from. That was called his Fisch story. Actually, the police corroborated a lot of the Fisch story, and so did the FBI, but that didn't come out at the trial either. In any event, he said he never, he didn't even know where the Lindberghs lived, he didn't know anything about it.

What they, what happened then is the police took over his apartment immediately after his arrest, and had it under their own control for three weeks before they invited an expert, a wood expert, in to look at it. And lo and behold, at that point, there was evidence that tended to implicate Hauptmann. What was it?

It wasn't the whole ladder. What they claimed at trial was that one of the rails, there are six rails to a three-part ladder. One of the rails had been planed down from a board in the landlord's attic so that it matched the width of the other rails. And that was called Rail 16 because there were, they counted the rungs as parts too, and that was what they tied him to the kidnapping because the arrest for the money was just a New York extortion claim, to extradite him to New Jersey, they had to tie him to the March 1 disappearance and the death of the child. And they used that ladder as that method. 

The biggest problem with it, if you look back at it today, is that the wood expert used a visual comparison to say that it, that came from the exact same source as another piece of, of that same plank in the attic, same tree.

You can't do that anymore. His office will not do it. What is done today and has been done for the last 15 or more years, is DNA, wood DNA testing and the state of New Jersey won't do it. And they still kept that. They've kept that evidence because it's the star exhibit in the New Jersey state police museum is the Lindbergh case.

They even have the electric chair there, but let me, I can add some more about the actual crime. It makes very little sense that someone would have tried to invade the home on the night of March one, which is a rural area. It was a storm. It was windy and rainy in the high thirties, low forties, with five people in the house, the staff and both Lindbergh's.

They had no shades on the windows and somehow, someone supposedly crept up to the house, put the ladder up, got to the second floor knowing where the nursery was, knowing that they had a, maybe knowing that they had a household rule from Lindbergh that no one was to disturb the child between 8 and 10 p.m. And so came between those, that time frame, managed to take the child out, stuff him in a burlap bag, take him down the ladder. The kid weighed 27 to 30 pounds, the ladder could not hold more than 180 pounds without breaking. That was what the police found. Hauptmann weighed 175 all by himself, so it should have broken.

Nothing fell in the mud that night. The next morning it was all clear, except for the indentations where a ladder had been. So there was nothing that fell, although that was the theory on which he was tried. And then, this will shock you, I imagine, but the prosecutor realized that the child not crying out was a problem.

And so, he changed theories in closing argument and said that the child was clubbed to death in his crib, banged against the headboard, and maybe a chisel was used to, and also he was choked. None, there was no evidence at the trial to support that whatsoever. And 

[00:28:53] Louis Goodman: And there was no blood found in the crib or anywhere in the bedroom, 

[00:28:57] Lise Pearlman: no blood in the burlap bag.

The squib lab found no, no blood in the bag, no blood on the clothing that he wore because he also wore a sleeping suit over originally over the T shirts. And that was sent back to Lindbergh in later in March to prove the kidnap gang, which is what they originally thought, had taken the child. The kidnap gang sent it back as proof.

There are all kinds of problems with the trial. One person who read my book was the former governor, Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, who was asked to pardon posthumously, Hauptmann, and she didn't feel there was enough evidence to do that at the time, which is in the 1990s, but she was troubled by the record.

She read my book, and she changed her mind. She said this is a staggering miscarriage of justice, and she supports getting the New Jersey Attorney General to reopen the case to at least look at the DNA evidence.

[00:29:48] Louis Goodman: Okay, so you are convinced that Hauptmann was not guilty. Who did the kidnapping of the Lindbergh child, in your view, your honor? 

[00:30:01] Lise Pearlman: In my view, Lindbergh, who was an inveterate, mean spirited, practical joker. He'd hidden his child once before when he was eight months old, hid him in a closet. And it's the first thing the nanny and his wife did on the night of March one is accuse him of doing that again, which he denied.

I think that what happened was he, it was a ruse that the kidnapping was a ruse. The ladder in the yard was perceived by the first two responders as not strong enough to have been used that way that the holes that indentations in the ground didn't show that they had borne enough weight To have had anybody of any substantial weight on it And they thought that it was an insider who had just passed the kid out the front door and set this up as a ruse. I think they were right. 

The only person who was documented to be upstairs alone between 10 o'clock and midnight when the room was, Fingerprint man was working was Lindbergh.

[00:30:57] Louis Goodman: How does the lab where Dr. Carrel worked, how does that fit into this now? 

[00:31:04] Lise Pearlman: I believe that what happened was that, Lindbergh through probably through his attorney, because I think he was involved as well, hired several criminals, so essentially low life criminals who were available, to pretend to be a kidnap gang.

And so what, so that was what threw everybody off because when the, when the reporters descended, they interviewed all kinds of people in town and the, not a big town, maybe 900 people in the town. Oh yeah, I saw some strangers in, who were driving a New York car a couple days ago, various reports like that.

Somebody asking, how, where's the, where did those Lindberghs live? Different things like that. So it made it look like a gang had been there. But I think what happened is Lindbergh handed it off to one or two of them who had parked in the Featherbed Lane, which is right near the house. They took the child back to a house they were staying in, in the next town, and I, my guess, because there's no evidence, is that a member of Carrel's staff came and picked up the child from there and drove the child to the Princeton lab of Rockefeller where Carrel did a lot of his vivisections.

[00:32:11] Louis Goodman: Do you believe that this child was vivisected? 

[00:32:14] Lise Pearlman: Yes, I do. 

[00:32:16] Louis Goodman: And would that account for the fact that there were organs missing from inside the body without the t-shirts being damaged by animals? 

[00:32:25] Lise Pearlman: I consulted as starting in 2019, Dr. Peter Spath, who is a forensic pathologist, who actually helped with the Golden State killer arrest and conviction.

In any event, he examines all of the medical reports, the report of the trucker, the report of the first responding police to the site of corpse. And the weather conditions and other factors, testimony that was given, and he came to the conclusion that at least the kidneys were surgically removed.

There was no other explanation.

[00:32:58] Louis Goodman: And then when the investigation was going on, and later the trial, Lindbergh himself was very involved in a way that no victim would ever be involved, certainly not in a modern-day investigation or trial. I mean, to the extent that Lindbergh directed the head of the state police, Colonel Schwarzkopf, who was actually the father of Norman Schwarzkopf, who people may remember from the 

[00:33:26] Lise Pearlman: Gulf War.

[00:33:27] Louis Goodman: Gulf War, yeah, the first Gulf War. But anyway, Schwarzkopf was really looked up to Lindbergh, and Lindbergh managed to really direct this investigation in ways that threw it off. 

[00:33:38] Lise Pearlman: Well, he was put in charge by the then governor, Lindbergh was within a couple of days, which is shocking because he was, he should have been a suspect.

He was one of the people in the house when the child disappeared. Scotland Yard told New Jersey State Police, when there's an abnormal child, you should suspect the parents and they refused to do that. But Lindbergh also sat at the prosecution table during the Hauptmann trial and he was the star witness on the very first day.

He said that on April 2, 1932, when he was parked 200 feet away from the cemetery where the money exchange was exchanged for a note supposedly telling where the child could be found alive, and it was a wild goose chase. He said he heard the cemetery John yell two words. Hey doctor and that in a foreign accent of a stranger and that he now recognized the voice of that man as Hauptmann and there were experts at the time who opined not in court because they weren't invited to testify, that it was absurd, that there's no way that you could recognize a stranger's voice a couple of weeks later, let alone two and a half years later.

But the jury believed him, and when they were polled after the trial, they said that was when they made up their minds. 

[00:34:50] Louis Goodman: And in fact, Lindbergh sat at the prosecution counsel table with a pistol in a shoulder holster, while he was sitting there at the counsel table, just a few feet from Hauptmann during the trial.

[00:35:03] Lise Pearlman: Well, at least on the first day, I'm not sure he kept wearing it, but it was a signal, according to reporters who saw it, that if you don't, if the jury doesn't do its job with him, I will. It was a very threatening kind of behavior. And he was deeply involved in that. He had been orchestrating it since the beginning.

There was a lot of evidence that disappeared under his watch. One of the most important things that I found out, there was a neighbor, Ben Lupica, and he was a teenager coming home from his senior year of school at a sports event. And he's, this is on the night of March one, he's driving the family car and he sees another car at the foot of the Lindbergh's driveway driven by a slim man wearing a fedora.

So he couldn't see his face, and it was dusk. And he had a, a sectional ladder in the car over the passenger seat. And he was acting suspiciously, he stopped and waited. And so Lupica decided, well, I guess I better go on. And he did go on. He thought the fellow was an overdressed window washer or something because he was wearing a kind of a city fella's winter coat.

It wasn't until maybe 50 years later that when he was interviewed, he realized that was probably Lindbergh himself.

[00:36:12] Louis Goodman: Well, Lise, I have to say that this book is really one of the most amazing things that I have ever read, and I just can't recommend enough for anybody to read it. It's, it's extremely well written, it's fun to read, it's a bit of a page turner, and frankly I'm just shocked that a lawyer can write this well.

So, I want to recommend that everybody get the book, again, the name of it is  Suspect Number One, The Man Who Got Away, you can get it on Amazon, you can get it for your Kindle, you can get it on paperback, hardcover, you can get it on audiobook, however you get it, get this book and read it, listen to it, because it is an amazing story about someone who I considered one of my very flawed heroes.

So, let me just ask a few other questions here, completely off the subject of the book, but because these are things that I always like to ask people as attorneys. I'm wondering, what do you think is the best advice you've ever received, and what advice would you give to a young attorney just starting out?

And you could answer that as one or two questions, however you'd like. 

[00:37:21] Lise Pearlman: I think the best advice I ever received, certainly in litigation, was to play your case as closely as possible to the other side in terms of facts that you don't really disagree about, you know, focus on the ones that you do and not to be as taken to the extreme.

And I tried to do that as a judge in a way, because when I was deciding cases, I always like to look at it from the perspective of the losing party and explain it in a way that I hope they could understand and maybe accept. 

[00:37:52] Louis Goodman: Do you think the legal system's fair? 

[00:37:54] Lise Pearlman: No. 

[00:37:56] Louis Goodman: Why not? 

[00:37:56] Lise Pearlman: It aims to be fair. But we have a lot of flaws in the system.

I'll give you one example. In jury trials, we still don't seat poor people in a lengthy trial. If it's two weeks or more, it's too much of a hardship. We don't pay enough from the state to cover the costs of being there. So, it's too much of a hardship. So that's not fair. You don't get a real cross section.

So that's one built in unfairness. The other is just a lot of money and, for rich defendants. And they can work the system, they can make a lot of motions, take appeals, do a lot of things that poor defendants can't do. 

[00:38:32] Louis Goodman: You've sat as a judge. What mistakes do you think lawyers make in front of judges?

And how can we as attorneys be better advocates for our clients when we're in court? 

[00:38:45] Lise Pearlman: That's a good question. I remember one lawyer in an appeal in the state bar court who said to me, dripping with sarcasm, with all due respect, that's not going to work. Well, you know, show the court that you do respect the judge.

Listen to what the, what the judge is doing. There were other times when I had appellate arguments where the attorney was, seemed to be really annoyed that I was asking questions. You know, interrupting me. I wanted to say X, Y, or Z. Guess what? You're trying to convince the judge. You're not making a speech for an audience.

So, think about who you're trying to convince and how. Listen to the tentative, if there's a tentative ruling, where is the judge coming from? And that's what you have to focus on. 

[00:39:28] Louis Goodman: What if you had a Super Bowl ad? Someone gave you 60 seconds on the Super Bowl and you could put out any message to this huge audience and say anything that you wanted.

What would you use your 60 seconds to address in your Super Bowl ad? 

[00:39:45] Lise Pearlman: I think it would be that humanity in general worldwide and certainly in the United States would be better off if we all tried just to work together and in a peaceful manner to proceed with humanity, with kindness, with an attitude that of cooperation.

[00:40:04] Louis Goodman: Lise, if someone wants to get in touch with you, perhaps about the book, perhaps to do an interview, perhaps to just speak with you about any professional matter, what's the best way to get in touch with Judge Lise Perlman? 

[00:40:20] Lise Pearlman: The best way is through my website. Which is my name, www. LisePerlman, P E R L M A N.com. Send messages there, I will receive them and I will respond. I did want to add one thing about Lindbergh and Carrel. They wrote a, people don't realize, they wrote a book together in 1938, The Culture of Organs, and they ended it with a plea to other researchers to join them in the forbidden field of human vivisection.

[00:40:53] Louis Goodman: Lise, besides that parting comment, is there anything else that you would like to talk about, anything else that you wanted to say or comment on that we haven't had a chance to discuss? 

[00:41:05] Lise Pearlman: Well, I did want to mention, I'm not just with the Lake North Breakfast Club, I'm also a Rotarian of the Uptown, Oakland Uptown Rotary.

But we just did a performance at Cal, and I want to do this again in New Jersey, of a mock trial, mock retrial of Hauptmann and several members of the Breakfast Club joined in and several members of my Rotary joined in. We had over 20 people playing the role, Ann Lindbergh, Charles Lindbergh, all the witnesses that were key, excerpts from their testimony, because it was a 30 day trial and I've got this down to two and a half hours, but added a character, which is a modern lawyer who has access to all the documentation that came out in the last 30, 40 years, that was hidden from the defense in 1935.

And what I want to do is do that again in New Jersey. And I invite anybody who cares about the issue to get in touch with me, because what we're trying to do is get the New Jersey government to reopen the case and perhaps embarrass them into doing so, because each time I've done this twice now, once in Marin and once in Berkeley, I asked the audience, should this case be reopened based on what you've seen?

And the answer is overwhelmingly yes. 

[00:42:18] Louis Goodman: So there's one other comment that I have as well, which is, my dad was a lawyer and he saw the Lindbergh trial up close. I don't know if he was really, I don't think he was there, but you know, he was, we lived in New Jersey and he practiced law in New York and he told me at the time of the O. J. case that everything about the O. J. case really reminded him of the Lindbergh case in the way people talked about it, the way people followed it on a day to day basis, and that it was, that the New York Times published transcripts every day of the trial, people read these transcripts, people listen to the radio reports, just like 

[00:43:05] Lise Pearlman: Was the, was the most famous reporter of his day. He had 50 million followers on radio and in this column. And he covered it very closely as did hundreds of other reporters. 

[00:43:16] Louis Goodman: So it really was at least one of two trials of the century, the Lindbergh trial and the OJ trial. So anyway, I do really appreciate your taking the time to talk to me today on the podcast.

It's been a pleasure to talk to you. And I appreciate all the work that you did on this book because it is an amazing experience to read it. 

[00:43:39] Lise Pearlman: One thing I want to add to is my chief researcher was my daughter, Jamie Ben Thudde, and she did an amazing job. 

[00:43:46] Louis Goodman: Judge Lise Perlman, thank you so much for joining me today on the Love Thy Lawyer podcast.

It's been a pleasure to talk to you. 

[00:43:53] Lise Pearlman: And a pleasure, Louis. Thank you so much for inviting me. 

[00:43:50] Louis Goodman: That's it for today's episode of Love Thy Lawyer. If you enjoyed listening, please share it with a friend and follow the podcast. If you have comments or suggestions, send me an email. Take a look at our website at lovethylawyer.com where you can find all of our episodes, transcripts, photographs, and information.

Thanks to my guests and to Joel Katz for music, Brian Matheson for technical support, Paul Robert for social media, and Tracy Harvey. I'm Louis Goodman.

[00:44:38] Lise Pearlman: Oh, that's an interesting question. I don't think I better answer that question.