Posted on 04/30/2007 8:35:23 PM PDT by mission9
Long before the O. J. Simpson trial, the "trial of the century" was the Lindberg baby kidnapping and murder case. The son of the most famous American family of the 20th century, (Colonel Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh) was kidnapped in 1932 and declared dead after being missing for six weeks. The body (so badly decomposed that proper identification was not possible), was presented to Charles Lindberg. Mr. Lindberg identified the body as that of his missing son, even though witnesses question even the sex of the corpse. Bruno Haupmann, a carpenter, and German immigrant, who had some acquaintance with the Lindberg family, was tried and convicted in a media circus show trial. Mr. Haupmann was executed soon after his conviction. Forensic evidence of the child's corpse, and other evidence of the location of corpse have always been questioned. The child's body was cremated within hours of Charles Senior's posthumous identification.
In a stunning new development, seventy three years after these dramatic events, Charles A. Lindberg, Jr. ......
(Excerpt) Read more at associatedcontent.com ...
Thanks, as I am sure I sound I read/saw some programs about this case long ago. I do remember the history channel or someone doing something on theory that Linbergh killed his own baby some guy came up with a few years back.
Of course as with all such claims, I doubt at first. We shall see if this one turns out differently.
BTW, wasn’t there something about a meeting to pay a ransom in central park and the accents of the people there?
That would be his sister-in-law, Anne Murrows sister Elizabeth.
According to Noel Behn's book, Lindbergh: The Crime, Lucky Lindy's sister-in-law was so upset that he didn't marry her, she went berserko and killed the boy. Lindberg made up the kidnapping story to avoid scandal in the two prominent families.
If this seems a little far-fetched, think back to December, 1996. History repeating?
I think there is a lot of reason to doubt Hauptmann’s guilt, but that doesn’t mean the baby wasn’t really kidnapped and murdered. Hauptmann was caught passing some of the ransom money, and they found more of the ransom money at his house. However, he could have just bought some of the “hot” money from someone, and not been involved in the kidnapping.
I wrote a dual biography of Charles and Anne Lindbergh entitled Loss of Eden, published by HarperCollins in the early 1990’s. After publication, I used to get phone calls from people who claimed to be the Lindbergh baby. One of them was a black woman who claimed that her race and sex had been changed as part of a conspiracy to disguise her identity. She had discovered the truth by doing five hours (!) of research at the New York Public Library. (My own research rarely goes this quickly.)
Never heard of this claimant, but there are still a few of these nuts around.
Hauptmann was guilty as sin, period. He had a record of attempted child kidnapping in Germany before he brought his benighted self to the US. The evidence was overwhelming and when he fried it was one time the State of NJ got it right.
Having investigated this case quite thoroughly while writing Loss of Eden, I assure all here that the evidence against Hauptmann was overwhelming. Investigators believed that he had an accomplice — another German-American carpenter and handyman, who fled while under surveillance — and probably, through this accomplice, a contact among the servants of the Morrow inlaws who tipped Hauptmann off that Anne, the nanny, and two elderly servants would be alone with the baby at the remote house in Hopewell.
Lindbergh was supposed to be in NYC that night, speaking at a banquet. In fact, he skipped the engagement and was home during the kidnapping. Supposedly, he was in his study — though my timeline suggests that he was having a bath in the bathroom at the far end of the second floor from nursery.
I visited the Hopewell house, which was used for many years as a home for troubled youths. The layout suggested to me that it would have been no problem for the kidnapper to pick up the baby and bolt down the stairs and out the door without being heard by any member of the family. (The theory presented at the trial was that Hauptmann took the baby and climbed back down the ladder that he had used to gain entrance through the nursery window. This is unlikely. Prosecutors preferred this theory because they wanted to hold the trial in Flemington, where they thought the jury would be most favorable. It suited their purposes to argue that the baby died when it was dropped from the ladder, before it was taken over the county line.)
However, the baby’s absence was quickly discovered. By the time the fleeing kidnappers got off the property and as far as a small hill on the road to Princeton, they would have been able to look back and see that the house was all lit up. This was a sign that the police had been called and their chances of getting the baby back to New York City undetected were slim. They panicked, killed the child, and left its body in the woods not far from the road.
All of the counter theories — blaming Anne Lindbergh’s sister Elizabeth, and even Lindbergh himself — were raised at the time and authors like Noel Behn just recycle them. They are all nonsense, and don’t fit the evidence at all.
(Elizabeth had been in California with her mother, consulting with cardiologists about her heart disease and just returned on the day of the kidnapping. The story that Elizabeth was somehow involved is a slur on the character of a lovely woman who never had children of her own and devoted her life to running a nursery school in Englewood. It was first raised by a con artist who was trying to extort money from Evelyn McLean, the owner of the Hope diamond, based on a false claim that the Lindbergh baby was still alive and he could produce it.)
By the way, if a family member HAD killed the baby, Lindbergh would hardly have been so stupid as to invent a kidnapping and invite the state police, the FBI, the T-men and the press on to his property to search for clues! He had friends who were doctors, including his Rockefeller Univ. mentor Alex Carrel. It would have been a simple matter to get one of them to sign a death certificate, calling the death an accident. No one would have been the wiser.
Nor would the Lindberghs have allowed their infant’s body to lie unburied in the woods for animals to feast on! And there’s no doubt this was the body — it was recovered along with a handsewn nightshirt made by the nanny.
In short, it was Hauptmann. He wrote the ransom notes without doubt and still had much of the money hidden in his garage at the time of the arrest. The ladder used matched wood found in his attic. He was the man who met with a go-between in a Bronx cemetery to negotiate the ransom payment.
Hauptmann was caught because he spent one of the ransom bills at a gas station, a fact noticed by an alert employee. The statute of limitations on his crimes in Germany was almost up. Had he not been arrested it is likely that he would have taken his family back to Germany and escaped justice permanently.
Isidor Fisch, mentioned by one poster here, was a small time crook and acquaintance whom Hauptmann didn’t meet until after the kidnapping. Hauptmann may have tried to use Fisch to launder some of the ransom money, but that was the extent of his involvement.
Questions remain only because prosecutors did not outline how Hauptmann came to have inside knowledge of the family’s whereabouts and plans. They had strong suspicions but no hard evidence, and it would have been risky to admit there was an accomplice whom they couldn’t produce at the trial.
The kidnapping happened but a mile from where my office now stands.
A new suspect emerges!
Hear, hear! Has all the earmarks (no pun intended) of a fabrication.
Even if I were sadisitic enough to travel time and space to kidnap a child for ranson, with inflation the ransom money would be just enough for me to pay barely half of my student loans.
I believe that the Staties in NJ were right: Hauppman did it. A failing business, a history of odd, self-obsessed behavior, an inability to "hold it together" during questioning, etc. I don't think that he really wanted to kill the kid, but that he snapped and panicked when the NJSP got closer to him.
Do you have further information on what Lindbergh Sr.'s motivation was ? Was it to garner sympathy ? If so, why?
Strange, because he was a eugenicist, and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh had written that when looking for a marriage partner, high on his list was good health, including eyesight.
Choosing a wife was like buying a good horse.
Only with a good high-jacking.
The whole Hauptmann affair clearly demonstrates the need for immigration reform. The time for a wall between Germany and the U.S. is long since past.
Eerie.
Has the guy claiming he’s the son of Lindberg given a DNA sample? So called ‘lie detector tests’ especially as designed in the 1970’s are rather easily beaten if you know how they work.
I’m not buying this story unless DNA has been provided.
?????
What happened in December 1996 ?
Says his DNA and a Lindbergh daughter’s (taken from postage stamp) match on the maternal side. Lindbergh family won’t give DNA. He is trying to subpeona them.
I read a biography on Lindbergh some years ago and thought then that the timing of this was suspicious. He had financial backers who were concerned that he was sliding from the limelight and needed some publicityIIRC. I believe that he might have been meeting with some of them that night; I just forget the exact details. I remember thinking that Bruno had something to do with the kidnapping, but was never convinced that he murdered the child. I thought that someone may have set this up to get Lindbergh some publicity and something went terribly wrong and baby was murdered.
“Says his DNA and a Lindbergh daughter’s (taken from postage stamp) match on the maternal side. Lindbergh family won’t give DNA. He is trying to subpeona them.”
Odd they won’t cooperate, and clear it up.
He got 700 miles more combat range. That made the Island Hopping campaign where they didn't invade every island.
It also made it so the P38s had enough range to shoot Yamomoto down.
Considering the number of “Lindbergh Baby’s” that have shown up through the years, I would think they would have the DNA on file some place for whatever claimants rear their heads.
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