According to this book review which appeared on the Daily Caller the full details are now available and the case has been solved.
The reviewer is also quite keen on this work. Some examples: The author has kept that promise [to his father]in a book both judicious and gripping. The term “page turner” is used too frequently, but Cemetery John is just that. Once you start reading it, you will not stop. This book should be on the top of everyone’s summer reading list. You won’t be disappointed.
Sounds like a good read to me and about a most interesting subject.
When we were pulling up the carpet after a flood in our Victorian house, there was linoleum tile under the carpet. Under the tile, there were newspapers from 1936 that covered the Lindburgh baby kidnapping in detail. Fascinating read.
Don’t anybody spoil the ending for me. I haven’t read the book yet.
Bush did it...
The Lindbergh kidnaping is about the only thing Obama hasn’t blamed Bush for.
I am happy for the author to get his book published and hope that the effort gets the reward that it deserves BUT no book, no research EVER satisfies all conspiracy mavens. There is a dark corner in all informed people's psyche that says 'BUT' and nothing will ever quiet that 'BUT' universally.
We like our conspiracies and will never put them down until the vey story disappears into the depths of time. Remember how Hatshepsut becoming Pharaoh? Now that is a real conspiracy ... if you care.
However on the original topic, one of the most eye-raising facts about this story is the change in our legal system. The convicted kidnapper, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, had a six week trial in 1935 and 14 months later was executed. Think of the OJ Simpson trial for comparison 60 years later that took 8 months plus. Now add the fact that today the average execution is carried out about 20 years following the verdict. This disparity is hugh!
My grandad was a reporter for the Journal-American and the first on the scene, even beat the police there. He saw Lindbergh with a flashlight and a shotgun stalking from the area below the window, with murder in his eyes...
The actual kidnapping and death occurred in 1932 not 1936. Bruno Hauptman was executed for the crime in 1936.
It was an inside job! The butler did it.
I read Anne Lindbergh’s autobiography and there is just an overwhelming sadness in it. The pages on the kidnapping and its aftermath are quite sad, and, as I recall, she spends the remainder of the book writing about her efforts to learn resignation and acceptance.
Sorry, you are off by four years. Assuming a kidnapping actually occurred (there are theories that the baby died a few days earlier than reported by other means and that the kidnapping story was concocted by Lindbergh and friends and family as a cover-up), it was on March 1, 1932.
According to this book review which appeared on the Daily Caller the full details are now available and the case has been solved.
I read the Zorn book twice cover-to-cover and am not convinced at all he has solved the case. But I do appreciate the diligence of his work. (I have also read other materials on it in the past and saw the relatively new PBS Nova documentary on the case in which Zorn is a participant.). Zorn states that an erstwhile neighbor of his grandfather and his then teenage father in a German neighborhood in the Bronx, an immigrant by the name of John Knoll (who does not appear in any of the extensive official investigatory records), was the mastermind of the kidnapping and the man known as "Cemetery John," who received ransom money from an intermediary representing Lindbergh in a dark cemetery at night. But in order to implicate Knoll, he asks the reader to make too many leaps of faith, all too numerous to detail here. One of the most glaring is that the man receiving the ransom money ("Cemetery John") is immediately turned into a kidnapper, without considering the possibility that he could have been a clever extortionist, probably one of several in a group, who took advantage of the widely publicized event so as rip off Lindbergh without knowing anything about the fate of the baby.
This is a most fascinating mystery and it's unlikely to ever be solved to the satisfaction of most crime buffs. After all, it still provokes a wide range of opinion after 81 years.
My mother was a child when the kidnapping happened.
She always said that the child was mentally defective (her words) and Lindbergh couldn’t deal with the fact he had a less than perfect child so he was behind the kidnapping.
Good circumstantial evidence is more reliable that testimonial evidence and good circumstantial evidence was produced at the trial. As certain as things can be on this earth Bruno Hauptmann was GUILTY!
WaPo logic: who cares? It was just a local crime story.