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?
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.
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What happened in December 1996 ?