I Sat in Court the Day an Infamous Cold Murder Case Finally Broke Open
Back when I was a young and inexperienced reporter at Newsday, on Long Island, I was assigned the courts beat in Suffolk County. It was considered by editors at the paper to be both an entry-level beat, but also one that produced big stories that ran for weeks in the paper.
One morning in the winter of 1979, I got a call from an assistant district attorney who, in so many words, said: "Today will be very interesting. Make sure you stick around." He mentioned a particular courtroom I should be in at a certain time.
So I went. I took a seat in the front row, just behind the rail that separated the well of the court from the spectator area.
I can't remember today exactly what time it was that morning, but all of a sudden the double doors to the hallway swung open and officers escorted in a middle-aged man, his hands cuffed behind his back.
He was tall and muscular, with long arms that ran down to overly large hands. I could see that as he walked a few feet away from my seat. He had a full head of graying hair and a face that looked like a road map to a failed life.
While he was in his late fifties, he looked much older. He had the worn look of a man who'd been around the block a few times, someone who sat on a bar stool night after night and drank himself into oblivion.
His name was Rudolph Hoff. He lived on Grand Avenue in Lindenhurst, a small village on the South Shore of Suffolk County.
Standing before the judge, he was arraigned on a murder charge in the exceedingly violent, mutilation murder of a 52-year-old housewife from Lindenhurst named Kathryn Ann Damm.
While that charge was, in itself, not unusual in a criminal courtroom, what was astonishing was when the murder took place—October 1954. I heard the assistant tell the judge this was the oldest cold case in New York State. This made me sit up.
A million questions went through my head: Why now, 25 years later, was he arrested? What evidence could there be after all this time? Who was the woman he allegedly killed?
Over the coming weeks, day after day in the courtroom, I sat listening to testimony. On October 2, 1954, the last game of the World Series between the New York Giants and the Cleveland Indians was played. The Giants won all four games and the Series.
The Lindenhurst bar where Hoff sat and where he met his victim was a dive joint tight to the railroad tracks called the Alcove Bar and Grill. A radio that sat on the bar under the long lines of gin and whisky bottles blared out the games to a crowd of blue collar laborers and, like Hoff himself, German immigrants.
Journalistically, the story was a reporter's gift: A gruesome murder in a small village, layered with the mystery of why no arrest was made at the time. The drama of the witnesses who took the stand added to the mystery.
Even the World Series added drama to the story. In the first game of the Series, the Wednesday before the murder, Willie Mays made a famous catch on the warning track while running at full speed. He spun around and threw to home plate, blocking a Cleveland victory.
I could picture the scene in the Alcove as the announcer shouted out what had just happened on the field that would forever be immortalized as "the Catch."
At one point during the trial, it looked to me that the prosecution would not get a conviction. The long delay in making an arrest was too big a mountain to climb.
Making it worse, the judge, Robert Doyle, tossed Hoff's confession to police, saying it was made without a lawyer being present. There was not much left after that.
Then the bombshell went off. On another day when I was sitting in the front row, the double doors burst open once again and a tall, lanky woman, her hair braided down her back, entered the courtroom escorted by a detective.
She walked through the gate into the well of the court, and right past Hoff's seat at the defendant's table.
I watched him as he turned to see who it was. His face dropped.
Right before my eyes, and the eyes of everyone in the courtroom, he sank into shock. It was as if a ghost had appeared before him. I could have cut the tension in the room with a butter knife.
Hoff was looking at his ex-wife, Gurli Hoff. And he knew what she knew when she took the stand. In her German-tinged accent, she told a story that—like Willie Mays' catch— was incredible.
On the night of the murder, after midnight, she awoke to the sounds of water running in the bathroom. Without knocking, she opened the door—to see her husband washing a large amount of blood off his arms and clothes. He ordered her to wash the bloody clothes and he went to bed.
Hoff was a violent man. That was clear at his trial. He radiated menace on the day he was first brought into the courtroom and walked by my seat.
Gurli Hoff divorced him later, knowing that he was guilty of the murder of the woman whose body was found in a field north of Lindenhurst Village.
She washed the bloody clothes that night, but she took the bloody belt, put it in a jar, and buried it in the backyard.
On her day to testify, she told this astonishing story and the jury convicted Hoff. Judge Doyle sent him upstate for a life sentence.
Before Hoff left the Suffolk County Jail for the ride in a caged van to an upstate prison, I asked the sheriff if I could speak with him. The sheriff set aside a secure room in the jail and Hoff and I sat down at a table, he in handcuffs, me writing on a yellow legal pad.
He, of course, proclaimed his innocence. He insisted he was framed by an ex-wife who hated him. Then, out of nowhere, he launched into a story about his German-born mother, who lived in the Bronx, and her friendship with another German-born woman named Anna Hauptmann. I had no idea what he was talking about.
Anna Hauptmann was the wife of Richard Hauptmann, the German immigrant and carpenter who was tried and convicted for the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the toddler son of Charles Lindbergh in what was hailed by the press as "The Crime of the Century." The State of New Jersey executed Hauptmann in the electric chair on April 3, 1936.
I was not following Hoff as he launched into how Richard Hauptmann was framed and "murdered" by New Jersey. Why was he talking about this case at all?
In February 1981, I wrote a magazine piece for Newsday about the Hoff case. By then, more information had come out about Hoff, directly addressing the question of why he was not arrested in 1954 when everything pointed to him. He was even questioned and released days after the discovery of Damm's body.
It turned out, in a twist more fitting in a detective novel, that Gurli Hoff had a close relationship with her neighbor, a man named Jack Holmgren, who was a sergeant in the Babylon, Long Island, Town Police Department. He later became a high-ranking member of the Suffolk County Police Department.
While working in Babylon, he had been involved in the investigation of the Damm case. He knew the details—and he shared some of them with a Hoff family member, including telling him that the phone in Hoff's house was tapped. He told the family member to tell Hoff to make calls from another house.
Holmgren retired from the Suffolk County Police Department in 1972. He died on January 26, 1979—the very day Hoff was picked up for questioning and later arrested for the savage murder of Kathryn Ann Damm. I didn't see this timing as a coincidence.
I did not envision writing a true crime book about the Hoff case. My first book was true crime: Bad Company: Drugs, Hollywood and The Cotton Club Murder.
I knew working on that book how hard it is to find enough material—through interviews, through court records and other primary source documents—to write a solid work of nonfiction about a real-life murder.
Still, the Hoff story stayed with me. Increasing my interest was Hoff's out-of-the-blue reference to Richard Hauptmann and the Lindbergh case.
I read many books about the Lindbergh case and came away with the conviction that Hauptmann could not possibly have, on his own, gone to a remote part of New Jersey, put a makeshift, poorly-constructed ladder against a second-floor window in Lindbergh's mansion, climbed up, crawled through the window, removed the child from his crib, crawled back out the window, and down the ladder. The child's battered body was later found by a road not far from the mansion.
The mansion was fully occupied on the night of the removal of the child. Lindbergh and his wife were there, as were staff members. A dog was also present. Whoever was behind the crime knew which window on the second floor was that of the nursery.
It surely was not a lucky guess on the part of the kidnapper, who could certainly see the house was occupied, as to which window in the mansion was the nursery.
And how did the supposed kidnapper enter the nursery, and remove the child, without leaving any physical evidence such as fingerprints or mud from his shoes—anything, really—in the room?
Even the handoff of ransom money in a Bronx cemetery to a Lindbergh associate sounded absurd, with Lindbergh later testifying that he heard Hauptmann's voice.
To my mind, and to so many others, the prosecution wanted first and foremost to appease Lindbergh, a gigantic cultural figure of the day, and get a conviction in a death penalty case.
Many of the books I read used the word "framed" when discussing the conviction and execution. To this day, exactly what happened in that house on a night in the winter of 1932 remains a mystery.
It's hard to look at the case without seeing someone in the house as being directly-involved in the removal of the child. The whole episode that night has a coordinated feel to it.
And then there's Lindbergh himself. This American "hero," as so many saw him, had loud pro-Nazi sympathies in the 1930s, helped lead the "American First" movement before the onset of America's involvement in World War II in 1941, and blamed Jewish interests for wanting America to go to war against Germany.
Without a Hoff true crime book, my idea turned to writing about the case—changing names and other details—as a detective novel. Fiction, in other words. It would be set in post-war Lindenhurst in 1954.
The setting was perfect. Lindenhurst in the mid-1930s had a large German Bund chapter—pro-Hitler German-Americans who paraded down the village's main street in their Nazi uniforms and waving swastika flags.
Surely, I could fit this into the plot. East of Lindenhurst on Long Island, in the hamlet of Yaphank, was a German Bund camp that featured large gatherings of Nazi sympathizers goosestepping around and shouting out their devotion to Hitler.
All this, I hoped, could fit into a novel. I created a detective, along with his German friend and Holocaust survivor who runs a funeral home in the village, as the main characters.
As a novelist, I had license to interpret facts, to, essentially, write my own version of the "truth." I called the novel The Ruins.
I had not written fiction before. I found it enormously challenging to go from journalism and three nonfiction books to the novel. There were many avenues to explore. As a fiction writer, perhaps I could explain why Hoff brought Hauptmann up when I spoke to him.
While I was working on the novel, Hoff sent letters to me from his upstate prison, imploring me to drive upstate and visit him. I ignored them. He died in prison on October 22, 2008. He was 84 years old.
The Ruins, a first novel, began that day in 1979 when Rudolph Hoff was brought into the courtroom. Great stories have great beginnings.
Steve Wick is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His first fiction book, The Ruins , will be releasing with Pegasus Crime on February 4, 2025. The novel is heavily inspired by the murder trial of Rudolph Hoff, which Steve covered extensively for Newsday in the 1980s.
All views expressed are the author's own.
