The Lindbergh Kidnapping

The case

Late on the evening of 1 March 1932, the nurse Betty Gow went to check on twenty-month-old Charles Lindbergh Jr. in his nursery at Highfields, the house his parents had just built in the New Jersey countryside near Hopewell. The cot was empty. On the windowsill was an envelope. Under the window lay a homemade ladder, broken where one rung joined the next. The note inside asked for $50,000 and was written in an English that suggested a German speaker.

The boy's father was the most famous man in America. Five years earlier Charles Lindbergh had flown alone from New York to Paris, and he and his wife, the writer and aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh, could not go out without a crowd. Within hours the grounds were trampled by police, reporters and sightseers. Lindbergh took charge of much of the response himself, bringing in friends, lawyers and even go-betweens from the underworld, while the New Jersey State Police under Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf ran the official inquiry.

The most important intermediary turned out to be the least likely. John Condon, a retired Bronx schoolteacher in his seventies, offered in a local newspaper to act as go-between, and the kidnapper accepted him. Using the name 'Jafsie', Condon met a man who called himself John in a Bronx cemetery, received the child's sleeping suit as proof, and on 2 April 1932 handed over $50,000 at St. Raymond's Cemetery. Much of it was in gold certificates, whose serial numbers the Treasury had recorded. In return Condon got a note saying the boy could be found on a boat called the Nellie off the Massachusetts coast. No such boat was ever found.

On 12 May a truck driver stopped by the road near Mount Rose, a few miles from Highfields, and found the child's remains in the woods. He had probably died on the night he was taken, from a blow to the head. The country's grief turned into a demand for action, and within weeks Congress passed the Federal Kidnapping Act, soon known as the Lindbergh Law. The investigation drifted. A servant at the Morrow family home, Violet Sharpe, took poison during repeated questioning; her alibi was later confirmed.

The case was solved by the ransom money. Gold certificates surfaced in New York for two and a half years, many along a subway line between the Bronx and Manhattan. In September 1934 a petrol station attendant who took a ten-dollar gold note from a customer wrote down his car's licence number. It led to Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German carpenter who had entered the country as a stowaway in 1923 and had a criminal record at home. More than $13,000 of the ransom was hidden in his garage. Hauptmann said a friend, Isidor Fisch, had left it with him before returning to Germany, where Fisch had since died.

The trial at Flemington in January and February 1935 drew hundreds of reporters. The prosecution, led by Attorney General David Wilentz, had Condon and Lindbergh identify Hauptmann's voice and face, handwriting experts compare his writing with the notes, and the wood scientist Arthur Koehler testify that one rail of the ladder had come from a floorboard in Hauptmann's attic. Condon's telephone number was written inside a closet in his flat. On 13 February the jury convicted him of murder in the course of a burglary, and he was sentenced to death.

Hauptmann insisted he was innocent to the end. He refused offers of money and of a life sentence in exchange for a confession. New Jersey's governor, Harold Hoffman, publicly doubted that one man could have done it alone and delayed the execution, but the appeals failed. Hauptmann was electrocuted at the state prison in Trenton on 3 April 1936.