Charles Lindbergh: What Really Happened?

Charles Lindbergh was the son of aviators Charles Lindbergh and Anne Lindbergh. On the 1st of March 1932, the Lindberghs nurse found that the 20 month old Charles wasn’t with his mother who had just gotten out of the bath. The nurse then informed Charles Sr that noone could find the child. Charles Sr immediately went into his son’s room where he found an empty bed and a ransom note. The note was badly written, words were spelt wrong and the grammar was incorrect.

Charles Sr then grabbed his gun and looked around the house and grounds with the family butler, which is when they found footprints in the ground underneath the baby’s window, a ladder and one of the baby’s blankets. The butler than called the police whilst Charles Sr rang his lawyer and the New Jersey state police.

The police soon arrived and began a huge search of the house and the surrounding areas. A fingerprint examiner looked at the note and the ladder but no usable finger or footprints were found. No adult fingerprints were discovered in Charles bedroom but the childs prints were. Due to the grammar in the note, police determined that the writer was German and hadn’t been in the US long. The FBI also made a sketch of the man they believed had kidnapped baby Charles.

The ransom would be paid by the Lindbergh family, it was packaged in a wooden box that was hand made, hoping that one day, that box could be easily identified.

On the 12th of May, a delivery truck driver pulled onto the side of the road about 4 miles from the Lindberghs home. The delivery truck drivers assistant went into a small wooded area to urinate when he discovered the body of a toddler. The skull had been fractured and the body was badly decomposed, with evidence of scavengers and evidence of an attempt at a burial.

The Lindberghs nurse was the one who identified that it was little Charles from overlapping toes that the child had and a shirt that the nurse had made for him. Over the next 30 months some of the ransom bills were being spent in a local German-Austrian neighbourhood. A bank teller in Manhattan recognized one of the bills used in the ransom and wrote down the number plate of the man who had used it. It came back to one Richard Hauptmann.

Hauptmann had an arrest history back in his native Germany and he was swiftly arrested in connection with the Lindbergh case. Hauptmann was questioned and beaten at least once during his interrogation. He claimed that he had been left the money by his friend Isidore Fisch. Fisch had died on the 24th of March 1934, shortly after going back to Germany. He consistently denied to the police that he had nothing to do with the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh.

On September the 24th, 1934, Richard Hauptmann was indicted for extortion and two weeks later on the 8th of October he was also indicted for the murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr. The case went to trial and Richard Hauptmann was found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to death.

Hauptman refused a last minute chance to commute his death sentence to life in prison in exchange for a confession and he was executed by electric chair on April the 3rd 1936.