In September of 1934, a bank teller in the Bronx checked a gold certificate he’d received against the key provided by the Bureau of Investigation and discovered that it was one of the Lindbergh kidnapping ransom bills. He contacted the BOI. This was not in itself a major break in the Lindbergh case. Numerous gold certificates had been passed in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, such that investigators had a map of New York City up and had placed pins in all the places where the kidnapper seemed to have spent the ransom money. Most had been in either the Bronx or Upper Manhattan. What made this incident different was that a license plate number had been written on the bill. It had been passed at a gas station, and BOI investigators assumed that the attendant had been following the instructions sent out earlier that year to take down the license of anyone passing a bill whose serial number matched the list of ransom bills. In fact, when they spoke to the attendant, he actually hadn’t checked the note against the key to see if it was a ransom bill. He had written down the license number merely because he didn’t see many gold notes anymore and suspected it could be counterfeit. Either way, authorities had the license, and it led them to Richard Hauptmann, a German-born carpenter living in the Bronx. Everything fit. They knew that Cemetery John spoke with a German accent, and they suspected, based on the pattern of where the ransom bills had been spent and the fact that he had chosen Condon as intermediary presumably after reading Condon’s ad in the Bronx Home News, that he lived in the Bronx. They even suspected that he may have been a carpenter, because of the homemade ladder and the drawing he had provided for the construction of the moneybox for the ransom payoff. In fact, a forensic botanist had even traced the wood used to make the ladder to a lumber mill only 10 blocks from Hauptmann’s address, and his home was very centrally located in regards to all the meeting places that Cemetery John had chosen. They obtained a warrant and staked out Hauptmann’s home, waiting to arrest him when he left the house in hopes that he may have some ransom bills on his person. They followed his Dodge sedan as he drove toward Manhattan, and then stopped him, pulling him from behind the wheel and searching him at gunpoint. Sure enough, he had one of the ransom bills on him. “I was afraid of inflation, like in Germany, so I saved them,” he said regarding the gold certificate, private possession of which had become officially illegal back in December. Taking Hauptmann back to his home, the officers commenced searching the residence while Hauptmann’s frightened wife demanded to know what he had done. It was only because of some gambling trouble he had run into, Hauptmann reassured her in German, unaware that one of the police officers present could understand him. Hauptmann and his wife had a nearly one-year-old boy, whom his wife, Anna, took to a neighbor’s house while investigators ransacked his nursery. While they searched the house, Hauptmann’s landlady turned over some more ransom bills that he had passed to her, explaining that he had been paying his rent in gold certificates for around nine months. This would prove to be just the tip of the mountain of evidence that would eventually be accumulated to convict Richard Hauptmann. And added to it was the fact that he looked strikingly like the facial composite sketch based on John Condon’s memory of the man they called Cemetery John.

Those who believe Hauptmann to have been innocent point to the fact that the case against him was circumstantial, that John Condon would not identify him in a lineup, and under grueling and endless interrogation, during which he was denied food and sleep, he maintained his absolute innocence and gave a ready answer for anything investigators had on him. However, much of what was learned about Richard Hauptmann, whose first name was actually Bruno, seemed to cement his guilt. He had come to America from Germany, after more than one failed attempt, by stowing away on a ship. He insisted he had no criminal record in Germany, but eventually the German authorities informed investigators that he had been arrested numerous times for burglary and had done time in prison for grand larceny. Indeed, one of his burglaries involved using a ladder to climb into the second story window of a well-known person’s home, the house of the mayor of Bernhruch. In America, Hauptmann found work as a carpenter, and indeed, he admitted that he had for a time worked at the lumber mill to which the wood used to make the ladder had been traced, and that he had also bought wood from there. He told interrogators that he was doing carpentry work at a hotel on the day of the kidnapping, but investigators discovered that he actually didn’t start working there until 20 days after the kidnapping and that he quit on the very day the ransom money was paid to Cemetery John. Moreover, Hauptmann himself admitted that he had not worked as a carpenter since then but instead had been investing money in the stock market. It was his broker’s office in Manhattan to which he so frequently had driven. He had invested some $25,000 into stocks, money he supposedly had come by in buying and selling furs with a partner named Isidor Fisch, another German who conveniently could not corroborate Hauptmann’s explanation, as he had recently died of tuberculosis back in Germany. This mysterious Fisch fellow would prove to be very important to Hauptmann’s defense

Hauptmann smiling for cameras in his jail cell.

These simple circumstances of Hauptmann’s life may have looked quite bad for him, but worse than these were the pieces of hard evidence discovered in his home. He claimed never to have built or used a ladder in his work as a carpenter, but investigators found a sketch of his depicting a design for just such a ladder, showing how a rung might be attached to two rails. Moreover, police later discovered that in Hauptmann’s attic, one of the floor planks had been cut, and the wood grain matched one of the rails of the ladder used in the kidnapping: it appeared Hauptmann had scavenged some of the wood for the ladder from his rental. In his tool chest, Hauptmann had a set of chisels like the one found at the scene of the kidnapping, and more than that, the three-quarter inch chisel, the very size found beneath the nursery window, was missing from his set. Police seized notebooks with many examples of Hauptmann’s handwriting and had him write out numerous samples while in custody. It was apparent by the way his handwriting was inconsistent even within the same paragraph that he was trying to disguise his writing style, but regardless, more than one handwriting expert declared with certainty that he had written all the ransom notes, including the one left at the scene. And on the side of a closet door frame in his home, the smudged telephone number of John Condon was discovered, written in pencil. But of course, most damning of all was his possession of ransom bills. Investigators had found only a few on Hauptmann’s person at the time of his arrest, but were given a few more by his landlady, and knew he had passed one bill at a gas station. Hauptmann claimed the bills must have come into his possession through his business dealings, so it was important to tie him more unambiguously to the rest of the ransom money or by witnesses to the ransom payoff or the crime itself. While Condon equivocated about identifying Hauptmann in a lineup, the box office attendant at a theater where some ransom notes had been passed did positively identify him, as did the taxi driver who had delivered one of Cemetery John’s messages to Condon’s house. Moreover, two witnesses from Hopewell who claimed to have seen a vehicle near the Lindbergh property with a ladder in the backseat both identified Hauptmann as the driver. But the coup de grâce came when investigators searched the detached garage in which Hauptmann kept his car. He had painted the building fresh and padlocked it, and he had even run a wire from the garage all the way to his bedroom, where he could flip a switch and illuminate the little structure, seemingly as a kind of alarm. Investigators suspected the ransom money was in this garage from the start, as Hauptmann kept glancing nervously out the window at it while they were searching his home. At first, finding loose floorboards and disturbed soil beneath, they thought he had buried the money, but they found only an empty jar there, perhaps a former hiding spot for some of the money. Eventually, though investigators noticed some boards attached between joists, behind which had been constructed hidden shelves holding parcels of gold notes, wrapped in newspaper or hidden in cans. And later, after dismantling much of the garage, they found a two-by-four with holes drilled into it containing a pistol and more ransom bills, all in all totaling more than $14,000. When Hauptmann had been arrested and interrogated, the general belief had been that he was probably just one member of a kidnapping gang, but as his assets were tallied, including his stock market speculations, his bank deposits, the bills known to have been passed and circulated already, and the thousands found in his garage, it appeared that the entirety of the $50,000 ransom had been in his possession, making it very likely that he was the sole kidnapper.

When confronted with his possession of the ransom, Hauptmann said that it belonged to the enigmatic Isidor Fisch, his partner in fur trading. He said that when Isidor had gone to Germany, he had left behind a shoebox full of the gold notes, and that Hauptmann had only been spending money from it that Fisch owed him from loans. No one was buying this story, though, which since Fisch’s death in Europe could not be corroborated. Even confronted with so much evidence, Hauptmann remained steadfast under continued interrogation and did not confess. But by this time, authorities felt they had a strong enough case against Hauptmann even without a confession. The Trial of the Century began less than four months after Hauptmann’s arrest. The prosecution presented the evidence of the ransom money in his possession, the proof that he had constructed the ladder, the evidence that he had written the notes, which relied not only on handwriting analysis but also linguistic evidence in the form of Hauptmann’s consistent misspelling of words, and his positive identification by numerous witnesses—including Condon, who waited until the trial to identify him. Although a defendant found guilty of kidnapping would not typically have been sentenced to death, the prosecution argued that, even if the child’s death were accidental, since it had occurred during the committing of what was essentially a burglary, Hauptmann should be found guilty of first-degree murder. Hauptmann’s defense team challenged the validity of witness testimony and handwriting experts, further alleging police negligence in the investigation. Concentrating on his alibi, Hauptmann claimed that, though he wouldn’t actually start his job at the hotel for a few weeks, he had reported there on the day of the kidnapping, now saying he had mistaken his start date, which his employer could not confirm. To explain why he quit this job the same day Lindbergh paid the ransom, he said it had been due to a dispute over his salary. As for his whereabouts on the night Condon handed the money to Cemetery John, he said he was home playing music with his wife and a friend, which his wife and the friend confirmed, though under cross-examination his wife seemed less convincing and his friend admitted he wasn’t certain of the exact day. The defense insisted that police had coerced Hauptmann into creating the handwriting sample that would match the notes, though many of the samples used had been taken from existing pieces of writing and even in the courtroom Hauptmann continued to misspell words in such a way that they matched the ransom notes. The ransom money in his possession had been Isidor Fisch’s, he maintained, and in addition to Fisch, the defense named others they believed were more likely to be conspirators, such as the nursemaid, Betty Gow, or perhaps a certain servant at Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s family estate in Englewood, Violet Sharpe, around whom had swirled numerous rumors. And lastly, what about John Condon, the retired schoolteacher who had insinuated himself into the case and had been the only one to actually see Cemetery John, who had refused to identify Hauptmann in a lineup but then during the trial had changed his tune and fingered him as Cemetery John. The doubts cast by his defense team did not work on the jury, who found Hauptmann guilty of murder, but they convinced some following the case that he may indeed be innocent, such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Harold Hoffman, the Governor of New Jersey, who would postpone Hauptmann’s execution, urging further investigation. Eventually, though, more than a year after the verdict, Hauptmann’s appeals all failed and he was executed by electric shock.

Newspaper clipping with picture of witnesses who came from Germany to testify that Isidor Fisch had nothing to do with the kidnapping.

Hauptmann’s claims about Isidor Fisch have been roundly refuted. While the defense managed to find some witnesses to suggest he might have been Cemetery John, it was clear that the feeble, ailing Fisch did not match Condon’s physical description of the man who could so agilely jump graveyard fences and take such fast flight when spooked. Meanwhile, the prosecution produced multiple witnesses who swore that Isidor Fisch was at a certain friend’s house on the night of the kidnapping. Moreover, in the spring of 1933, when he would have been riding high on the hog like Hauptmann certainly seems to have been, Fisch appears to have been destitute. Fisch’s landlady testified that he consistently had trouble paying his rent and the BOI discovered that he had been sleeping on Manhattan park benches. Thereafter, increasingly ill, he left the country for Germany, and his sister, who also testified at Hauptmann’s trial, swore that he arrived in Leipzig with little money and only a few belongings. Add to that the fact that no ransom bills ever turned up in Germany, and it becomes an impossible-to-believe claim. It was not just far-fetched that Fisch had been involved, but also extremely implausible that he had absent-mindedly forgotten to take all of the ransom money with him when leaving the country. Even if he knew he was dying, you’d think he would take it with him to leave to his sister, who was taking him in. And Fisch’s poverty casts further doubt on Hauptmann’s claims of having made significant money with him, speculating in furs. And what’s more, the Fisch story falling apart proves that Hauptmann was coolly lying not only under interrogation, but under examination at the trial as well. His casting of doubt on John Condon, however, is a bit less easily dismissed. Many had been and continue to be suspicious of John Condon, who insinuated himself into the drama and then became the only person to have seen Cemetery John. Indeed, police at one point leaned on Condon, trying to get him to confess to lying about the whole ransom exchange and the phantom boat, the Nelly, which had never been found. Patrons of the show know from a recent exclusive minisode that another man, John Hughes Curtis, who had also claimed to be in contact with kidnappers and had similarly led Lindbergh on a wild goose chase after a schooner off the coast of Virginia, did confess to having perpetrated a hoax. However, unlike Curtis, Condon had received letters with Hauptmann’s telltale handwriting and spelling errors, signed with the distinct symbol to prove it was from the kidnappers. Moreover, after the payoff, there is no evidence that Condon ever had any of the ransom bills in his possession or was passing them, whereas there is ample evidence of Hauptmann having received the ransom, spent much of it, and hidden the rest. Even if Hauptmann was not suggesting Condon was involved, though, he was making much of Condon’s refusal to identify him, claiming this proved he was not Cemetery John. However, there is some explanation of this. Condon actually did indicate during the lineup that Hauptmann resembled Cemetery John, but he declared that he would hold his identification “in abeyance for the present,” which of course, is not how police lineups work, which officers told him, one of them shouting, “Either you can pick the man or you can’t!” One possible reason for this refusal to cooperate is that Condon, known to be melodramatic and to enjoy attention, wanted to wait for the trial so as to provide a sensational moment in the courtroom when he did finally identify Hauptmann. Another is that he was exacting some measure of revenge against the authorities who had not long ago treated him as a suspect. And lastly, there is the distinct possibility that Condon, who had spent the last year and a half examining an endless number of similar German-speaking suspects in mugshots and lineups, simply wasn’t certain. But this is not evidence that Hauptmann was not Cemetery John, especially when other witnesses, like the taxi-driver used as a message courier, did positively identify him. Rather, it just meant that Condon was simply not that strong an eyewitness.

Among the several persistent doubts about the case today is the idea that Hauptmann was only one member of a kidnap gang. From the very beginning, it was presumed by many that there had been more than one kidnapper. In fact, we hear it stated in newsreels as though it is fact. One persistent myth is that there were two sets of footprints at the scene of the crime, but in fact, the report of the New Jersey State Police who examined the scene does not mention two sets of footprints at all. Some have claimed that the ladder was too difficult to assemble and use alone, that Hauptmann must have had someone there to help him and perhaps hold it in place. However, one may assume that the man who built the ladder would be capable of assembling it, and examination of the crime scene showed, based on rubbing marks below the nursery window, that only two sections of the ladder were used. Moreover, there was evidence that the ladder broke and the kidnapper may have fallen, perhaps in the process killing the baby, which would further accord with the idea that no one else had been present to hold the sections of the ladder in place while the kidnapper descended. Nevertheless, the persistent assumption that the kidnapper did not act alone has led to many elaborate theories. Take the 2012 book Cemetery John by Robert Zorn. In it, the author presents a complicated case that two other German residents of the Bronx were Hauptmann’s co-conspirators, based mostly on the fact that his father, who had been neighbors with the men as a teen, recalled hearing the two men talk to a third man in German, and remembered them using the words “Bruno,” Hauptmann’s actual first name, and “Englewood,” the town where the Lindberghs usually stayed with Anne’s family, the Morrows, while their Hopewell home was being built. From this conversation, remembered in the 1960s and only shared with the author in the 1980s, Zorn weaves a large web, claiming that his father’s neighbor was Cemetery John, because, among other things, he was named John, because he lived in the Bronx just like Hauptmann, because his handwriting and accent also matched, and because he left America for Germany after Hauptmann was arrested and did not return until after his execution, at which time he opened some delis. He presumes a connection to Hauptmann without evidence, assuming they might have looked each other up because they were both from the same town in Germany. He makes a convincing case that his Cemetery John matched Condon’s description better than Hauptmann did because of a certain fleshy mass on his thumb, though when you realize that his evidence comes down to a blurry photo and a niece confirming privately to him the presence of a growth on his thumb, you start to realize his evidence is not ironclad. He presents the man’s trip to Germany as a kind of panicked flight, but in reality, he didn’t leave until the day of Hauptmann’s conviction. If he were really concerned about Hauptmann dropping the dime on him, why wouldn’t he have left five months earlier, when Hauptmann was arrested? And the man’s opening of some delis upon his return from Germany is presented as evidence that he was spending ransom money, but it must be remembered that no other person was ever caught in possession of the ransom money like Hauptmann was, and there is strong indication that the majority of the ransom money had either been spent by him, invested by him, or hidden by him. Add to that the fact that no ransom money was ever discovered to have been passed in Germany, and after Hauptmann’s trial and execution no further ransom money ever turned up, and it is clear that Zorn’s claims, while intriguing, lack much merit.

The image Robert Zorn claims in Cemetery John shows clearly that his suspect had the lumpy thumb that proves he was the real culprit. Reproduced under the doctrine of “fair use.”

Both at the time of the initial investigation and ever since, many suspected that a household staffer must have been an accomplice, perhaps telling Hauptmann that the Lindberghs would be at their unfinished estate that week, identifying which window would give him access to the nursery and what time to make the attempt. However, witness statements indicate that Hauptmann may have been casing the Hopewell mansion, and staff testimony indicates that, if he had been watching, he would have had no trouble figuring out which was the nursery window. It seems that, the day before the kidnapping, Mrs. Lindbergh had been strolling the grounds and stopped to toss some pebbles at the nursery window to get the nursemaid Betty Gow’s attention. Indeed, an additional, smaller footprint that appears to have caused some of the confusion about multiple sets of footprints was believed by police to have been left by Mrs. Lindbergh. Hearing the tap of the pebble, Betty Gow came to the window, carrying the baby, and moved his little arm to make him wave down to his mother. So it was entirely possible for Hauptmann to have spied out which window to enter without ever colluding with any servants. But unsurprisingly, as she had been in the nursery the most and had discovered the crime, Betty Gow became the person the police were most interested in at first. She had received a phone call from her boyfriend a half hour before the kidnapping. Had that been a signal? Had she hastily sewn together the baby’s flannel undershirt to ensure he would be warm when taken out into the cold? They questioned Gow, determining that she had no ties to the organized crime syndicates involved in the so-called “snatch racket,” and they interrogated her boyfriend, finding only an empty milk bottle in his car to suggest he might have had a baby in it, which he explained by saying he simply liked to drink milk and often emptied a bottle while driving. In short, there was nothing on Gow. Likewise, as if to indulge in the trope of the butler having done it, the good names of the Whateleys were dragged through the mud in newspaper stories suggesting their involvement, even though the investigation turned up no reason to suspect they had anything to do with the kidnapping. The suspicion then spread beyond the Hopewell staff to the staff of the Morrow household in Englewood, where the Lindberghs had been staying, with the idea that a servant there may have known when they were staying in Hopewell. Suspicion fell especially on Violet Sharpe, who seemed nervous and evasive in her first interview, though she explained her demeanor herself, expressing resentment that they were even questioning her about the crime. Because of her reaction to initial questioning, though, Sharpe became a principal suspect early in the police investigation.

Police suspicion was further piqued by the fact that Violet Sharpe had been out on a date to the movies with a man she said she barely knew on the night of the kidnapping. When pressed for his name, she claimed not to remember it, as she had only met him on the street the day before their date and had not seen him since. Indeed, she even resisted naming the movie they had seen or even describing it, saying they had no right to pry into her private life. In her second interview, she changed her story and said they had gone to a speakeasy, but couldn’t remember just where it was. This time she recalled that her date’s first name was Ernie. Police eventually came to believe that her Ernie was a certain known thief named Ernie Brinkert, whose business card they had discovered in Sharpe’s room, and Violet actually positively identified him, but police were baffled when this Brinkert produced an ironclad alibi, proving that he was neither the kidnapper nor the man who took Violet out that night. Following the discovery of the baby’s remains, Violet was interrogated further, grilled more and more harshly. Eventually, saying she would not endure further interrogation, she killed herself, drinking cyanide chloride, which was kept in the house to clean silver. Of course, at the time, and ever since, her suicide was looked at as proof that she was involved or knew more than she was saying, as is always the case with deaths surrounding much-debated and publicized crimes like this. The fact is, though, that police would go on to track down her Ernie, who confirmed her story that he had taken her to a roadhouse called the Peanut Grill that night, and police further confirmed this alibi with others present at the speakeasy. It became clearer and clearer that Violet Sharpe had only lied and been evasive in her first interview because she didn’t want it known that she was frequenting speakeasies. And afterward, when she incorrectly identified Brinkert, police had been interrogating her against her doctor’s wishes just after a surgery to remove infected adenoids and tonsils. She had been weak, having wasted away and become thin during her hospitalization, and was even running a fever. In addition, she was greatly depressed following the news that the baby had been killed, and had even written a letter to a friend in England saying that “life is getting so sad I really don’t think there is much to live for any more.” Add to that the humiliation and emotional distress of being roughly interrogated by police and made to feel that everyone believed she was responsible for the baby’s death, and we might better understand why she was driven to take her own life. Even though the Morrows and the Lindberghs continually insisted that neither Violet nor any other household staff member was involved, the police kept pushing Violet Sharpe until she was over the edge. She is often considered the second victim of the Lindbergh Kidnapping Case.

An example of the news coverage of suspicion of Violet Sharpe. Reproduced under the doctrine of “fair use.”

Claims of conspiracy within the family’s household have not remained limited to the staff, either. Some have gone so far as to theorize that the Lindberghs themselves might have been involved, and that the kidnapping was a hoax. Among the first to make such claims were Gregory Ahlgren and Stephen Monier in their 1993 work, Crime of the Century: The Lindbergh Kidnapping Hoax, in which they suggest that Lindbergh, who was fond of rough play and practical jokes, may have accidentally killed his own son and then concocted the kidnapping as a cover-up. They offer no actual evidence for the claim, relying only on insinuation, suggesting that Lindbergh had his baby’s remains cremated quickly in order to avoid an autopsy, when of course the baby’s remains did undergo an autopsy, conducted by Dr. Charles H. Mitchell of the county coroner’s office. Next came novelist Noel Behn’s 1994 book Lindbergh: The Crime, which retreads a conspiracy claim that first appeared during Hauptmann’s appeals, when he had the New Jersey governor’s ear and numerous alternative theories were being bandied about to see what stuck. The claim is that the Eaglet, or Baby Lindy, as newspapers frequently called him, was actually killed in an act of revenge by Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s emotionally troubled sister, Elizabeth, who had apparently been in love with Charles and felt spurned when he chose to marry her sister. Yet again, though, the work is short on actual evidence, citing records that show Elizabeth, an emotionally unstable family member, was being sheltered from press scrutiny after the kidnapping, which of course is hardly surprising. The claim that she had hurt the boy originates from a lawyer who was investigating the matter for the governor, who at 93 years old confided in private discussion with the author that another Morrow household servant had implicated Elizabeth, though in all the extensive police interrogation of the staff, there is no record of this. And finally, there is Lise Pearlman’s 2020 book The Lindbergh Kidnapping Suspect No. 1: The Man Who Got Away, which posits, unbelievably, that Charles Lindbergh purposely sedated his child and surrendered him to a fanatical surgeon for eugenicist experimentation. Certainly Lindbergh knew this surgeon, and certainly the doctor’s influence would lead him to embrace eugenicist thought, which in turn would eventually lead to Lindbergh’s well-known Nazi sympathies and anti-Semitism, but again, there just isn’t evidence to support it, and in fact, there is ample evidence from Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s letters to demonstrate how much Charles loved his son. All of these conspiracy claims suggest that, to cover up the death of his child, Charles Lindbergh launched a nationwide news sensation, which seems rather counterproductive. They claim that Lindbergh personally taking over the investigation before the discovery of his son’s remains was a way for him to control the cover-up, yet he doggedly followed every lead and tirelessly saw every wild goose chase through to its conclusion. And all reports indicate the extreme emotional distress that he and Anne were suffering during this time. Think, for example, of Condon’s description of Charles’s hands trembling when he opened Cemetery John’s letter to find out the location of his son. Furthermore, for any of these conspiracy theories to have been true, it would mean that numerous people, including the household staff who had been so thoroughly interrogated that one of them was driven to kill herself, were in on it and took the secret to their graves. I have little sympathy for the Nazi apologist that Charles Lindbergh would eventually become, but I sympathize with him immensely as a parent who lost his infant child, and none of these outlandish claims, all of them cooked up to sell books, do I find the least bit convincing.

Many of the claims that Hauptmann was innocent rely on assertions that the police investigation was flawed or negligent or even a fraud. There is no reason to believe that, for example, police planted evidence in Hauptmann’s home. Hauptmann claimed that he had not written Condon’s phone number on his closet wall, but of course the really damning evidence was the ransom money that Hauptmann had stashed around his garage, and he never claimed police had planted that. He copped to possessing it, offering only the lame excuse that it belonged to a friend. However, it should be acknowledged that there were definite missteps in the police investigation. Because there was no discernible tread in either the footprints or the nearby tire tracks, police just photographed them and didn’t bother making plaster casts, but they didn’t properly record their measurements, instead eyeballing them using a flashlight for scale. After the baby’s remains were discovered so near the Lindbergh home, critics questioned why the police had not properly searched all the woods in the few square miles around the house, or why they had not used bloodhounds. The head of the State Police said dogs had not been available, but this was shown to be untrue. The real reason was that he incorrectly believed that the crowds and the rain would have prevented the dogs from picking up a scent. But Hanlon’s razor, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity,” should show us that this is not evidence of a police cover-up. The police were often blamed for heedlessly destroying evidence at the crime scene, with one writer, Henry Morton Robinson, claiming they were “trampling every clue into the March mud, systematically covering with impenetrable layers of stupidity every fingerprint, footprint, dust trace on the estate.” But this is a myth. They were in some regards neglectful, but otherwise made every effort to preserve evidence before the arrival of the real culprits, the throngs of reporters and looky-loos who almost certainly did corrupt the crime scene. Additionally, when Hauptmann was put in a lineup for Condon and others to identify, authorities appear to have simply thrown their suspect in among a group of policemen who looked nothing like him in build or features, providing another reason why perhaps Condon was at first loath to identify him, if it seemed the police were trying to rush the identification. However, none of these criticisms overturn the persuasive evidence of the ladder, the handwriting, and his possession of the ransom money.

Handwriting evidence from the trial, via HistoricalTrialTranscripts.com

Trial evidence of from Hauptmann’s attic, proving he had assembled the ladder, via HistoricalTrialTranscripts.com

A concession should be made that there is some compelling reason to entertain the idea that Hauptmann may have had an accomplice whom he never gave up. Around the deadline for surrendering gold certificates to the treasury, about $3000 in gold notes from the ransom payoff were passed by someone who wrote the name J.J. Faulkner on a deposit slip. The address provided had been fake, and no description of the person was ever obtained. We might simply presume that this was Hauptmann, except for the fact that the handwriting on the deposit slip did not match Hauptmann’s. Of course, this has led to extensive theorizing, especially since, during Hauptmann’s final appeals, a letter to the governor arrived, signed by J. J. Faulkner, claiming Hauptmann was innocent. Now, there are claims that the handwriting in this letter matched the deposit slip and matched the ransom notes, but these claims were made by a private eye working to exonerate Hauptmann and were not supported by handwriting experts. Moreover, it makes no sense to claim that the writing in the Faulkner letter matched that in the Faulkner deposit slip and the ransom notes, since it was determined that the handwriting on the deposit slip and the ransom notes did not match. One has only to read Faulkner’s letter to the governor, with its florid, sophisticated language and lack of the ransom notes’ telltale misspellings, to discern they were written by someone else, and the fact that photos of Faulkner’s deposit slip signature had appeared in newspapers made it highly likely that the eleventh-hour letter to the governor was a forgery and a hoax. This has not stopped a grand conspiracy from emerging that J. J. Faulkner was actually a certain international spy who had masterminded the kidnapping plot, and that Hauptmann was only guilty of purchasing “hot” currency from the kidnapper at a markup in order to pass it himself and make a profit. Of course, this theory completely discounts the clear handwriting evidence, and lacks logic, for if that were all Hauptmann was guilty of, why would he go to his death rather than confess it and clear his name of child murder? If the Faulkner deposit was made by an accomplice of Hauptmann’s, they must have played a small part in the crime, having only received a small portion of the ransom. But just as likely, Hauptmann could have asked someone else, someone who didn’t know who he was, to fill out the deposit slip for him. It has been pointed out by those who believe Hauptmann had accomplices that a few bills of the ransom payoff were identified as far away as Michigan, but it must be acknowledged that, when money enters circulation, it travels. We don’t know whether those who passed a bill received it in some private transaction from someone else, so whoever carried these few bills to Michigan may have had nothing to do with the crime. In the end, since Hauptmann denied everything to his last breath, we will likely never know if he acted alone.

Hauptmann certainly was guilty of involvement in the kidnapping. Numerous times, the police caught him lying, about his employment and whereabouts on the day of the crime, about how much of the ransom money he possessed, and about how long he had been in possession of it and aware of it. The earliest bills discovered in circulation, back in 1933, had been folded distinctively into eighths, and when Hauptmann was arrested, a bill on his person was folded the same way, convincingly demonstrating that it had been he who was passing the ransom bills all along. If he had played only a small part in the crime, as a go-between or an underling, as he had tried to make it out to seem when speaking to Condon in the graveyard, then one imagines he would certainly have tried to cut a deal for a further stay of execution in exchange for information that might lead to the other perpetrators, especially since he had the ear of the governor, who was actively looking for a reason to pardon him. Instead, he went to the electric chair insisting on his innocence, likely because, if he couldn’t beat the charges, he did not want his wife and son to remember him as a confessed child killer. Nevertheless, there is certainly a case to be made that a miscarriage of justice occurred. With the distinct possibility that Charles Lindbergh, Jr., was accidentally killed during the kidnapping, and with no evidence that Hauptmann ever intended to purposely murder the child, the typical requirement for a first-degree murder charge—proof of intent, premeditation, or malice aforethought—was not met. To convict Hauptmann of first-degree murder, then, they had to rely on the common law doctrine of felony murder, that a death, even an accidental death, that occurred during or because of the commission of a felony crime, constituted first-degree murder. The problem was, kidnapping at the time was not a felony in New Jersey, so they actually charged Hauptmann with burglary, or more specifically, the theft of the child’s clothing. After that, the Lindbergh Law made kidnapping a federal crime, and now many states have a felony murder rule on the books that would make any accidental death during a kidnapping into a first-degree murder. Many argue that the felony murder doctrine is used to justify extreme sentencing, out of proportion with the severity of the crime, and certainly there is no sentence more extreme than that which Hauptmann received. One wonders, if he had been sentenced to life instead of death, if we might have eventually discovered more about the kidnapping or even obtained the confession he refused to give while the eye of the nation scrutinized him. Or perhaps, like James Earl Ray, he would only have further encouraged from his prison cell the outlandish conspiracy claims that developed through the years, such as the numerous assertions of people who claim that the remains discovered were not actually those of the Lindbergh baby, and that in fact they are the Lindbergh baby. More on that in an upcoming exclusive patron minisode. To conclude this series, let’s just say that, much like the JFK assassination, despite the muddying of the waters by conspiracy speculators and the press, when the sediment settles, it’s pretty clear to see that they did catch the right guy and he probably did act alone.

A photographic composite depicting Hauptmann being prepared for execution, courtesy The Met.

Until next time, remember, conspiracy speculation, no matter how untenable, draws the interest of the media far more than rational analysis. Back in the 30s, it made for an attention-grabbing headline at the newsstand, and today, it makes for tempting clickbait links. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping - Part Two: Cemetery John

Follow and Support Us!