The Crime of the Century

Bruno Hauptmann, just after being questioned in connection with the kidnapping.

(Library of Congress)

At 8:45 p.m., April 3, 1936, a halo of smoke wafted toward the high ceiling above Bruno Richard Hauptmann’s head. It served as the final protest by a man who the country couldn’t quite decide whether to consider an angel or a devil. Hauptmann died in the electric chair 70 years ago today for committing the “crime of the century.”

That crime was kidnapping and killing Charles Lindbergh, Jr., the son of the famous aviator. And still the question remains: Did Hauptmann do it? And did he act alone? Twenty-seven years before Lee Harvey Oswald, Hauptmann was the original disputed lone assailant. And the investigation into his alleged crime was as protracted and controversial, and even more bizarre.

“Not since Paris abducted Helen and precipitated the Trojan War has a kidnapping had so many repercussions,” wrote the FBI agent Leon Turrou. “It was more than a kidnapping; it was a catastrophe.” The case began at 10 p.m., March 1, 1932, in the Lindberghs’ home in Hopewell, New Jersey, when the nanny went to check on 20-month-old Charlie and found an empty crib. Police noted footprints in the mud below the baby’s window and, 75 feet away, a homemade wooden ladder abandoned in the grass. Up in the nursery, they opened a white envelope Lindbergh discovered on the windowsill. Inside was a handwritten note in broken English, ordering Lindbergh to “Have 50,000$ redy. . . . After 2-4 days we will inform you were to deliver the Mony. We warn you for making anyding public or for notify the polise the child is in gut care.” The note was signed with two interlocking circles punched with three holes, a design the kidnapper used to authenticate future communications.

The police at first suspected an inside job. They found no usable prints in the nursery; how could the kidnapper wipe the place clean and escape undetected with a baby in his arms? But until their child was safely returned, Lindbergh and his wife, Anne, would call the shots. Kidnapping was not yet a federal crime, so when America’s most famous aviator told state police how to investigate the disappearance of his son, they obeyed. Lindbergh wanted Charlie back above everything, and he would not allow the police to obstruct his attempts to contact the kidnappers. Later, when Lindbergh had qualms about his servants being treated as suspects, the police turned their attention elsewhere. There was no shortage of leads.

For such an intricate crime not to have been abetted by someone in the household, the police guessed, it must have been the work of organized crime. Prohibition had brought the Mafia to prominence in America, and a host of kidnappings had been pinned on various factions. Enter Mickey Rosner, a low-level bootlegger. He offered to use his gangland connections to solve the case, and, much to the police department’s chagrin, Lindbergh took him on. Rosner kept Lindbergh on the hook for a week, always claiming he was moments away from finding the baby. (Al Capone, ever civic-minded, also offered to help find the kidnapper, in exchange for a two-week vacation from jail. He was denied.) But on March 9 a frustrated Lindbergh dumped Rosner for a better go-between. This man, like everyone else, claimed to have made contact with the kidnappers. But unlike everyone else, he had proof.

John Condon, a retired school principal, had, out of concern or lust for glory (depending on whom you asked), written a letter to the editor of the Bronx Home News offering his services as a contact for the kidnappers. It was published on March 8, and the very next evening he was on the phone to Lindbergh, reading a largely misspelled letter he had received that day in the mail and describing the strange design at the bottom: two circles, three holes. Lindbergh immediately invited Condon to Hopewell.

Over the next four weeks, through classified ads in the New York American, Condon tried to arrange meetings with the kidnapper. One nighttime rendezvous with a cloaked figure in a Bronx cemetery ended abruptly when Condon refused to hand over the ransom money without first seeing the baby. But at a second meeting on April 2, Condon traded $50,000 in gold notes for directions to the baby’s location. The kidnapper claimed Charlie was being held on the boat Nelly near Cape Cod. Lindbergh flew over the area for two days but found nothing. A month later he realized why. On May 12 a truck driver discovered the body of a child in the woods two miles from Lindbergh’s house. The corpse’s homemade shirt, high forehead, dimpled chin, and overlapping toes identified him as Charles Lindbergh, Jr. Judging from the advanced decomposition, he had been dead a couple of months. Cause of death: fractured skull, mechanism unknown.

The news, as it made its way into the papers, horrified the nation. The case seemed like a real-life morality play that pitted the champion of the carefree, forward-moving 1920s against the depraved underworld of the 1930s. It appeared to be, at heart, a face-off between two Americas—the vigorous country of ten years ago, when anything was possible, and the crumbling America of today, when gangs committed unthinkable crimes for paltry sums. If the authorities couldn’t keep the family of one of the country’s biggest celebrities safe, how were ordinary Americans to sleep at night? Had the Great Depression crippled America’s moral center as well as its economy?

With all hope for his son’s safe return now dashed, Lindbergh gave investigators free rein. The crucial break came in April 1933, when the new President, Franklin Roosevelt, took the country off the gold standard and told citizens to exchange their gold notes for greenbacks. The police and FBI had been tracking the ransom bills as they made their way back to the New York City Federal Reserve Bank. Now, with gold notes increasingly rare, they could count on shopkeepers to notice them.

The cashier at a Manhattan gas station did just that on September 15, 1934, jotting down the license-plate number of a man who paid his 98-cent tab with a $10 gold note. The car’s registration listed the owner as Bruno Richard Hauptmann. When police arrested the out-of-work carpenter four days later, he had a $20 gold ransom bill in his wallet. Police found close to $14,000 in ransom money hidden around his property, behind wallboards, in a shellac can, and even in drilled-out holes in the wall studs of his garage.

Hauptmann, a 35-year-old illegal alien with multiple convictions for robbery in his native Germany, claimed he had found the money in a box entrusted to him by a friend who had returned to Germany and died in March 1934. But the police—and the jury—didn’t buy it. In the weeks, years, and decades to come, Hauptmann’s supporters would complain that he was condemned on nothing but circumstantial evidence. But no one, aside from the perpetrator, had seen the kidnapping or the murder. There were no usable prints in the nursery or on Charlie’s body. So, apart from a confession, evidence against anyone—Hauptmann, the Mafia, or any of the culprits that continue to be offered today—would have to be circumstantial.

And the state of New Jersey could tie Hauptmann to both the kidnapping and the extortion. Eight document experts testified that the handwriting on the ransom notes was Hauptmann’s. More damning, a police expert showed that one rail on the ladder found in the Lindbergh’s yard matched perfectly with a shortened floorboard in Hauptmann’s attic. And after some waffling, Condon identified Hauptmann as the man he had met in the graveyards those two nights. In the face of that evidence, Hauptmann still maintained he had nothing to do with the crime, even as an accomplice. But on February 13, 1935, the jury found him guilty with no provision for mercy. The judge sentenced him to be executed on March 18.

The news broke over a strangely conflicted America. Few doubted that Hauptmann had played some part in the crime, but many wondered if he had acted alone or struck the killing blow. In the year and a half between the baby’s kidnapping and Hauptmann’s arrest, Americans, abetted by inventive newspaper columnists, had had plenty of time to imagine byzantine plots behind the abduction. Local farmers had killed the baby so Lindbergh would move away and sell back their land. Escaped mental patients had taken him. Anne Lindbergh’s sister had murdered Charlie out of jealousy. The Lindberghs themselves had killed him, either accidentally or because he was defective somehow. But when the police put forth one lone unemployed German immigrant as the perpetrator of the crime of the century, the public’s theories—nourished by the time they had had to develop—would not die easily.

A flurry of appeals, stays, and political maneuverings kept Hauptmann alive for more than a year after his original date with the chair. As appeals to the New Jersey Court of Errors and Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court failed, he began to profess his innocence to the newly-elected governor of New Jersey, Harold Hoffman. Hoffman, gunning for the Republican nomination for President in 1936, saw an opportunity in Hauptmann’s pleas. He could not commute Hauptmann’s sentence alone; that was the job of the Court of Pardons, of which he was just one member. But if he solved the case and spared an innocent man, he could make a name for himself to contend with Roosevelt.

In January 1936 Hoffman granted Hauptmann a 30-day stay of execution and reopened the investigation. Thirty days stretched into three months as Hoffman tried and failed to prove police had planted the board in Hauptmann’s attic that matched the ladder rail. Finally on March 31, the day he was to be executed, Hauptmann was given one last, two-day reprieve while police investigated Paul Wendell, a disbarred attorney who had confessed to the crime in February. They discovered that he had been kidnapped and coerced into confessing by Hoffman’s friend Ellis Parker, a New Jersey detective edged out of the case by Lindbergh in 1932. Wendell recanted and was released; Parker was the first person arrested under the Lindbergh law, which made kidnapping a federal crime.

Crowds had gathered on March 31 outside the squat brick “death house” at the state prison in Trenton only to be turned away with the news of Hauptmann’s reprieve. Fooled once, few showed up again when a new execution date was set for April 3. At 7:30 p.m., an hour and ten minutes before Hauptmann was scheduled to die, Hoffman’s personal secretary read a statement from the governor to reporters: “I am now without power . . . to grant a further stay.” Even as witnesses gathered in the death chamber, the warden told an officer to find out if there were any messages to delay the execution. There were none. It was really Hauptmann’s last hour on earth.

As he was led into the brightly-lit chamber, trailed by two clergymen reading from the Bible in German, Hauptmann tried to smile at the reporters and lawmen gathered to witness his death. But his smile died somewhere in the making, and he turned swiftly and sat in the electric chair. “Here was Hauptmann’s chance to talk. It was the moment when he was expected to talk,” the Washington Post reported the next day. “No words came. There was only that dazed look—that look of the soldier about to get the bayonet, and knowing that nothing could save him.”

Hauptmann asserted his innocence to the very end. Weeks earlier, Hoffman had assured him that if he confessed, his sentence would be commuted to life. But Hauptmann refused. Why? Perhaps he was innocent; perhaps he never believed he would be put to death, trusting until it was too late that Hoffman would free him. Now a guard slipped a mask over Hauptmann’s head, and the executioner turned a brass wheel. Two minutes later, at 8:47 p.m., the last of six doctors to press a stethoscope to Hauptmann’s chest shouted, “This man is dead.”

If Hauptmann died a guilty man, in the public’s eyes at least, in death he became an innocent scapegoat. As the investigators and prosecutors who had helped convict him returned to their jobs, his supporters, most staunchly his wife, Anna, continued to declare that he was the victim of an unjust legal system. In the decades to come, Anna Hauptmann wielded one especially powerful tool in her fight to exonerate her husband: She stayed alive. Surviving well into her 90s, she spent the last 60 years of her life campaigning to generations too young to have been around for the trial.

In an America well-versed in Oswald and O.J., her story about a humble immigrant railroaded by a cabal of evidence-falsifying, perjuring state police seemed more plausible than some. And now, as in the 1930s, it is somehow more comforting than the alternative: that any one man, lurking unnoticed in the shadows, could steal our children from their own beds with no more motive than a few thousand dollars.

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.