The Sixteenth Rail: The Evidence, the Scientist, and the Lindbergh Kidnapping

I found The Sixteenth Rail in my pile of unread books recently and decided to read it now primarily because I just read The Aviator's Wife, about the Lindberghs, a couple of weeks ago. The Sixteenth Rail is the story of the Lindbergh trial, or specifically of the evidence at the trial regarding the ladder used to commit the crime. The evidence was gathered and presented by one of the country's early forensic scientists, Arthur Koehler, a xylotomist. (What, you ask, is a xylotomist? One who studies wood, particularly the microscopic properties of wood.) Koehler would use his xylotomy skills to trace several of the rails and rungs in the handmade ladder found at the Lindbergh property to the man who was eventually arrested, tried, and executed for the crime, Bruno Richard Hauptmann.

I'm of two minds about this book. On the one hand, it's absolutely fascinating to consider the detective work that went into tracing the ladder components, particularly considering this was at the height of the Great Depression. Author Adam J. Schrager has clearly research every bit of minutiae pertaining to Koehler's quest and that, in and of itself, is no small feat. However, I often got bogged down in the very minutiae that gave the book substance. Paragraph after paragraph detailing the rpms and knife formations of different planers was too technical for my taste; likewise, the pages detailing testimony at the trial feel as if they are merely the official court transcripts rendered into chapter form. The most colorful bits were those that revolved about any number of characters, in the truest sense of the word, who were pulled into the orbit of the crime. At the end of the day, there was simply too much wood for me to recommend this book to most readers. Only the most dedicated crime readers or Lindbergh fanatics would fully appreciate Sixteenth Rail (being neither myself, I am sure I could not fully appreciate it either).

Fun side note: Both the author, Adam Schrager, and the scientist, Arthur Koehler, have undergraduate degrees from the University of Michigan. Go Blue!