March 1st 1932: The Kidnapping of Charles. A. Lindbergh Jr.

Charles Lindbergh had become a household name as an aviator, making a non-stop solo flight from New York to Paris taking 33 hours, the first solo transatlantic flight in history. He was an officer is the US Army Air Corps Reserve and received a medal of honor for history making flight. Charles married Anne in 1929 as she, in his mind, ticked all the right boxes for an ideal romance: keen intellect, good health and strong genes. Allegedly, his family's farming background had taught him how important it was to have good traits and strong genes too pass on to offspring. He also claimed that he didn't like how other pilots behaved, womanizing and using their occupation as a way of trying to become more attractive to girls and that a long lasting, stable relationship was more important to him. 

Eugenics, to those unfamiliar is the idea that the strongest and most intelligent should breed while those who are smaller, weaker, have medical conditions or mental health problems should not, ultimately creating a superior race. In a round about way, this is the message that Charles Lindbergh was trying to communicate. 

The couple had their first child in 1930 and named him Charles Jr. On the evening of March 1st 1932 Charles and Anne Lindbergh put their 20 month old son Chas. Jr. to bed in an upstairs room of their home near Hopewell, New Jersey. The couple were currently renovating the home and not all of the rooms were livable at the time so the couple were balancing their time between their time between their other home in Englewood and the house Hopewell (roughly 60 miles away from each other) which they would stay a couple of days at a time with a skeleton staff while overseeing the work being carried out on the house. Anne was pregnant with their second child at the time. The couple had planned to travel back to Englewood that day but Chas had become slightly unwell and Anne had decided that she would rather not travel with a sick child so the couple stayed the extra night in Hopewell. 

About hour after Chas had been put to bed, the nanny-Betty Gow, went to check on him. When she went upstairs and discovered the cot empty she raised the alarm. A search of the house was carried out and a ransom was found by the window of the same room Chas was taken from. The ransom note demanded that $50,000 dollars be prepared and that the police or the public were not to be involved. The note went on to explain the way in which the bills were to be broken down and to wait 2-4 days for contact on where to deliver the money to. 

While the writing on the note is quite messy, I think we can assume a man wrote it, there are even to my eyes some very noticeable oddities about the note. Back in 1932, letters were far more commonly written than they are in 2020. At the time, people would not usually have started letter or note with "Dear Sir!", exclamation marks were used far less frequently than they are in current times.

"We warn you for making anything public or for notify the police. the child is in gut care", another line reads. The grammar is poor, intentionally or otherwise. The use of the word "gut", the German for "good" also had many police officers believing that whoever wrote the note, was not a native English speaker and German may have been a preferred language. The bottom of the letter signed off saying "indication for all letters are singnature and 3 holes", signature being spelt wrong. There were three puncture marks in the letter, the middle one being surrounded by a red dot and then 2 interlocking blue circles. 

Upon finding the note, Charles grabbed a gun and went to check the outter perimeter of the house. He found thread marks indicating activity underneath the window and found some scratch marks on the right hand side of the window sill. It was clear that a ladder had been used to climb up to the window, somebody had gone through the unlocked window and taken Chas from his cot. Nobody in the house had heard a thing. The police in Hopewell took charge of the investigation. Shortly afterbthey started their enquiries they found a custom made ladder nearby. It collapsed in on itself to make it easier to move and carry. They also found a baby blanket, which Charles and Anna both identified as belonging to Chas. Muddy footprints in the nursery were found but too smudged to determine the size of them. There were no fingerprints or blood found at the scene. Hopes were starting to dwindle as more ransom notes began to arrive to The Lindberghs. 

In the subsequent letters, The Lindbergs were informed that "it" was in good care and safe but the kidnapper began to start changing demands, namely, asking for more money. The public were beginning to make public appeals for the safe return of baby Chas. Al Capone, who was in prison at the time even offered assistance in funding the safe return of Chas. Various other criminal put out rewards themselves for information regarding Chas. A retired school principal, John Condon also offered his assistance in acting as an intermediate between the kidnapper and The Lindberghs by means of a bulletin notice he put in The Bronx Home News. John Condon became the point of contact for the case in terms of negotiations. 

Mr. Condon eventually got the kidnapper to agree to a meeting. On March 12th Mr. Condon went to Woodlawn Cemetery as instructed by  a further note to meet with he man he had been corresponding with. A man, who identified himself as John, showed up to the cemetery. They discussed how they would exchange the ransom and John agreed to give a token to show he was sincere, to prove he had the infant and that he was in good health. Four days later on March 16th, a baby-grow was delivered to Mr. Condon. On March 1st, the very day that Chas had been kidnapped, his nanny had finished hand stitching him a baby-grow. Police verified that this was in fact belonging to the missing boy. 

On the 29th of March Mr. Condon received another ransom note, threatening that the ransom amount may be increased to $100,000. Condon had to negotiate to reduce the ransom amount back down to the original $50,000. Eventually, John and Mr. Condon were ready to meet on April 2nd, the money was exchanged for a final thirteenth note. During this exchange between the two, it is believed that John put a "what if" scenario to Mr. Condon. He was curious to know what would be the outcome if baby Chas was dead, he asked if he would burn if that baby was dead. Alarmed, Mr. Condon pressed but John reassured Mr. Condon that the boy was fine before making his exit into a nearby woods where he could not be tracked. The note that Mr. Condon received that evening was the final correspondence that would be received from the kidnapper. It detailed the location of a boat called The Nellie, which was near Martha's Vineyard, baby Chas was safe on the boat. The following day, police combed the area looking for the boat, Charles Lindbergh flew planes over the area searching for the vessel but no sign of the boat was ever found. Mr. Condon told police that the man had a thick German accent, this verified their suspicions about the letter being wrote by a non-native English speaker and while it was dim when the two men had met, Mr. Condon swore he would be able to identify the man if he ever saw him again. 

On May 12th 1932, The Lindberghs were hit with a devastating blow when a truck driver discovered the decomposing body of a small child a mere 5 miles from their house. Investigators would determine that the boy had died approximately 2 months before it was found. It had been hastily buried in a shallow grave off the main road. The boy was missing limbs and organs, it is believe that they were taken by animals as he had been buried in such a shallow grave. The boy's skull was badly fractured. The theory that seems to be most logical to fit the scenario is that Chas had died in the process of the kidnapping and had never made it more than the 5 miles from where he was taken. Betty Gow, the nanny who had first noticed Chas missing identified the boy even in the state of decomposition from the over-lapping toes on his right foot and also from a shirt that was found as she had stitched it herself. Charles Lindbergh order than his son be cremated. 

When Charles Jr. was born he was immediately put on a special diet to increase his calcium intake and he was also treated with a light therapy to help his levels of vitamin D. His head was slightly too large in comparison to the rest of his body and his bones were found to be soft, growing slightly crushed on top of one another and inwards. He was by all means a healthy and happy baby but when it came to standing and walking, the slight deformation in his bones caused him to struggle and his feet pointed inwards rather than straight in front. These were all symptoms of rickets disease. Rickets is usually caused by a prolonged deficiency of vitamin D, however there are also hereditary problems that can lead to rickets. Charles Lindbergh was a man who highly supported the idea of only allowing the strongest to reproduce and forcing the weak to be sterile. 

How might it impact his public image if it was found that his own son had a hereditary mutation?  

The police had kept a record of the serial numbers on the bills that had been handed over to John, they printed 250,000 notices with the numbers of them, which were sent out to various establishments. The serial numbers were tracked in small batches but none of the users could ever be traced. After numerous leads from New York to Chicago and Minnesota, dead end after dead end, the police came to a complete standstill in the investigation. The case went cold. 

On September 18th 1934 a manager from the Corn Exchange and Trust Company at 125th Street and Park Avenue phoned the New York City Bureau office with information regarding a $10 gold certificate which had been discovered just minutes before the call had been placed. The previous year it was decreed that all gold certificates were to be exchanged for cash bills by May 1st 1933. As the certificates were supposed to have been cashed in over a year prior the teller at the bank notified the manager immediately. It was quickly figured out that the bill had been received from a gas station on 127th Street and Lexington Avenue. The filling station attendant became suspicious of the man who had cashed the bill and taken a good description, recalling that the man had paid for 5 gallons on the 15th of September using the $10 gold certificate. The attendent had been clever enough to record the car registration number. 

The car was registered to a Bruno Richard Hauptmann with an address on 1279 East 222nd Street, Bronx, New York. 

Finally, police had a lead. 

Police and FBI set up surveillance outside the residence of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. The following evening, September 19th, they made an arrest when a man matching the description of Mr. Condon and the gas station attendant left the premises to enter his car. He was Bruno Richard Hauptmann who went by the name Richard, a German from Saxony. He had moved to the USA 11 years ago when he hid as a stowaway aboard a ship and had landed in New York in July of 1923. He was a carpenter by trade. He had a criminal record for theft and was upon searching the home of Hauptmann, it was found to contain $13,000, which was less than one-third of the ransom money. A door frame was with Mr. Condon's phone number scrawled on it and several other gold certificates which serial numbers matched that of the batch from the ransom. Mr. Condon positively identified him as the man he had met with in the graveyard on the two occasions. Other witnesses came forward to say that they had seen him in the vicinity of the Lindbergh house at times preceding the kidnapping.

Richard Hauptmann was in a tight spot, while all the evidence against his was circumstantial and there was no blood, no fingerprints or solid cold hard evidence against the German, he was the only man police had in custody and he there was enough circumstantial evidence to go to trial. This case had generated a lot of attention and the whole country was waiting on a conviction. 

Tool marks found on the custom made ladder, matched tools that belonged to Hauptmann. The wood that was used to construct the ladder was a match as the same kind of wood he used as flooring in his attic. There was the obvious cash and gold certificates with the serial numbers which matched the money handed off in the ransom. The phone number of Mr. Condon was wrote on a door frame in the residence of Richard. Handwriting on the ransom note matched the hand writing of Richard Hauptmann.

On February 13th 1935, the jury returned a guilty verdict and Hauptmann was sentenced to death. On his appeal trial the court upheld the original guilty verdict. 

Bruno claimed that he was innocent right up until his death and never implied that he had any accomplices.

While I think that Bruno is guilty, I don't believe he was the mastermind behind the kidnapping. I believe that somebody, possibly Charles Lindbergh, let him know that the family would be in the house that night as they were supposed to be in Englewood until a last minute change in plans. 

The kidnapper knew in advance presumably which window was the nursery where Chas slept. 

The weather than night was quite rainy and the ground would have been slippy, I don't believe that Hauptmann could have safely climbed the ladder in those conditions without somebody keeping the bottom steady.  

 

The ladder was found broken and away from the property. Some have speculated that Chas was killed in an accident when the ladder broke climbing down from the window. If the ladder broke up at the house, I think the kidnappers would have left it behind at the house rather than slow themselves down carrying a broken ladder, only to discard it almost immediately after. What I believe may have happened is that the two men were struggling to carry the ladder and baby Chas as they were making their to a third man and a getaway car parked beyond the front gate of the property. In the mud and wet ground there was an accident where the ladder was found and at this point one of the two men accidentally stepped on baby Chas' head and this is how the skull fracture occurred. 

I believe a third man bmmust have been waiting off the property with a getaway vehicle, driving too close too the house may have caused suspicions or aroused unnecessary attention from those inside. 

I think Charles Lindbergh was involved and he wanted to get rid of his son. I think he was ashamed to have a son with a genetic disorder and I think he would have felt weak. This may also be why he was so quick to have the remains cremated. 

While the story if The Lindbergh Baby is technically solved, there still seems like so many unanswered questions.