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This story is a collaboration with Biography.com.
On April 3, 1936, Bruno Richard Hauptmann went to the electric chair proclaiming his innocence in the most famous kidnapping case in the history of the United States. Nearly a century later, a new, startling theory about the crime for which the German immigrant was convicted and executed—the March 1932 abduction and killing of “the Lindbergh Baby,” a.k.a. Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., the toddler son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh—is catching on. And it may just change everything we thought we knew about the case.
Charles Lindbergh had fame like no other in 1932. Known as “Lucky Lindy” for piloting the first solo trans-Atlantic flight five years prior, Lindbergh’s feats and personality kept the world’s fascination trained on him and his socialite wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. So when news surfaced that the couple’s 20-month-old son was kidnapped from his crib on March 1, 1932, in the family’s New Jersey home in the middle of the night, the world took notice.
According to Biography, that night, at approximately 9 p.m., a kidnapper crawled through the window of the Lindbergh’s home in Hopewell using a wooden ladder. While the parents sat downstairs, blissfully unaware, the kidnapper absconded with the baby. An hour later, the family’s nurse entered the baby’s room to find no child—just an open window and a poorly written ransom note demanding a $50,000 ransom.
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The cold case ended in tragedy two months later, when the “Lindbergh Baby” was found dead just miles from Lindbergh’s home. In time, the kidnapping and killing was pinned on Hauptmann, and the resulting “Trial of the Century” in 1935 ensued, with stories changing and evidence allegedly doctored. Hauptmann was ultimately found guilty and sentenced to death.
But these facts haven’t stopped the mystery from continuing. Now, almost 92 years later, Lise Pearlman, a retired judge and true crime author, is putting forth a fresh theory about the circumstances surrounding the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping. And it doesn’t center on Hauptmann—it points the finger directly at Charles Lindbergh instead.
“The wrong man was executed, and my hope is that Hauptmann will be posthumously exonerated,” Pearlman told the San Francisco Chronicle. “And I am certainly not the only one who wants that.”
This isn’t just Pearlman’s pet theory. Hauptmann’s family is on board, as is the cofounder of the Innocence Project, and a host of others with ties to the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping. So what’s their story?
What Is the New Lindbergh Baby Theory?
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“My theory is that the child was operated on,” Pearlman said. “We think at the very least that his carotid and probably his thyroid were taken out and kept viable for 30 days. We think he died on the operating table.”
Pearlman is basing her theory on medical reports from the case and papers written by both Charles Lindbergh and French biologist Alexis Carrel, along with statements Lindbergh made publicly, per Biography. The author believes Lindbergh sent his 20-month-old son to Carrel for speculative operations that ended up killing the child.
The theory goes that Lindbergh, who was a proponent of eugenics—the science of promoting desirable qualities in the human race, usually through some kind of controlled breeding—may have been working with Carrel to somehow fix the baby, who was considered sickly. The operations may have been some sort of experiment to figure out a cure or transplant.
The kidnapping and ransom, then, was a cover for the operating table-turned-murder.
“I think Carrel conducted the operation with Lindbergh’s permission—and Lindbergh was likely present at the operation,” Pearlman says.
When the operation didn’t work, Lindbergh needed a Plan B. And in the 1930s, kidnappings for ransom were basically commonplace, with roughly 3,000 a year occurring in the U.S. alone. Concocting a ransom-related kidnapping story was plausible—far more than experimental operations gone awry, at least.
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Pearlman certainly isn’t the first to mix Charles Lindbergh into the suspect list. That was happening as far back as the 1930s. But Pearlman has been keen on her perpetrator for years. She first published a book on her theory in 2020, claiming Lindbergh was the top suspect. She later filed a lawsuit looking to open the still-sealed evidence with the New Jersey State Police—and others have also tried.
“I don’t think anybody knows what happened, and we have an opportunity to get some answers, but the state of New Jersey is refusing to let us look at the evidence,” Pearlman’s attorney, Kurt Perhach, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I don’t really understand why.”
What Do We Know About the Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping?
The original case started out plainly enough. As Biography tells it, when police first visited the Lindbergh home following the baby’s abduction on March 1, 1932, “there were traces of forced entry, including a broken ladder and footprints on the ground beneath the nursery window.” But there was “nothing immediately useful to either the local Hopewell police or the New Jersey State Police.” Of course, it didn’t help that reporters and onlookers were trampling the site before the police even showed up.
By March 3, as J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI became involved in the investigation, the movement began to try to pay the ransom, and track down both the Lindbergh Baby and whomever had taken him. Charles Lindbergh himself, however, remained heavily involved in the investigation, and his own tactics included collecting (and perhaps coordinating) the statements of his staff, as well as accepting “help from associates with connections to organized crime” and working with “a retired school principal in the Bronx named Dr. John F. Condon,” according to Biography.
Condon insisted upon involving himself in the actual payment of the ransom, a chaotic affair involving a shadowy figure named “Cemetery John,” the delivery of the clothing Charles Jr. had been wearing (freshly laundered by the kidnappers), and the false revelation that the Lindbergh Baby “could be found in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, on a boat called the Nellie.”
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But the Lindbergh Baby wasn’t found in Martha’s Vineyard. Instead, 72 days after the kidnapping, the baby’s body was recovered “alongside a highway near the Lindbergh estate.” New Jersey State Police Chief H. Norman Schwarzkopf noted that the deceased child’s injuries indicated that they were caused “…with the purpose of causing instant death.”
The search for the Lindbergh Baby turned into the search for his killer. But it would take two years for their FBI to find their man in Bruno Richard Hauptmann, thanks to a returned gold certificate.
In 1933, Biography reports, the U.S. weaned off the gold standard, and all gold certificates worth more than $100 were ordered to be returned to the government. Each had a serial number, and one used in Lindbergh’s ransom payment came back with a license plate number written on it by a cashier from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a place frequented by German immigrants like Hauptmann, looking to track a potential counterfeit bill.
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That ransom certificate contained Hauptmann’s plate number. A subsequent search of his home revealed additional ransom certificates hidden in the garage, wood that was tied to the ladder used during the kidnapping, and the phone number of the intermediary that Lindbergh used in the ransom exchange.
Even without concrete links—Hauptmann’s fingerprints weren’t actually found at the Lindbergh home or on the ladder—the circumstantial evidence piled up. Hauptmann had the wood, the money, and the phone number, and he quit his job just days after the ransom payment.
Hauptmann fit the bill of the perpetrator, even though naysayers believe anyone could have made him look guilty by planting evidence and paying off appropriate people, as many stories changed between the kidnapping and the trial. Still, he was convicted and sentenced to death. And on April 3, 1936, Hauptmann died on the electric chair, claiming he was innocent until the end.
So, if Hauptmann isn’t the man, could the Lindbergh Baby’s killer really have been Charles Lindbergh himself? Pearlman and her supporters believe so. The sealed evidence may hold even more answers.
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