I’ve said it from the first time I saw a photo of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. “He didn’t do it.” Without knowing anything about the case — I mean, how could I? I’m just a nobody from the outside looking in. Yet, I have long asserted that Hauptmann was wrongly accused. I don’t have any evidence. It was just something I’ve always seen in his eyes. It was the look of innocence.
But here is the thing. On April 3, 1936, Bruno Richard Hauptmann went to the electric chair. Although he had proclaimed his innocence in the most famous kidnapping case in the history of the United States, it didn’t matter. He died on that day at the hands of the Justice System.
Now, though, there seems to be some proof emerging. Nearly a century later, a new, startling theory about the crime is coming to light. It all began with the March 1932 abduction and killing of “the Lindbergh Baby,” a.k.a. Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. He was the toddler son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and Anne Lindbergh.
The new evidence may just change everything we thought we knew about the case.
Of course, back then, Charles Lindbergh was wildly popular. He had fame like no other in 1932. Everyone referred to him as “Lucky Lindy.” This came after he piloted the first solo trans-Atlantic flight five years prior.
At any rate, he was larger than life. The world held a fascination with 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, the entire world took notice.
According to the story (on 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.”
So. The whole thing ended in tragedy two months later. That is when the “Lindbergh Baby” was found dead just miles from Lindbergh’s home.
It didn’t take very long before the kidnapping and killing were pinned on Hauptmann. From that point, it was a total media blitz, and the resulting “Trial of the Century” in 1935 ensued. But all throughout the trial, witnesses were changing their stories. And, allegedly, evidence had been doctored. Hauptmann was ultimately found guilty and sentenced to death.
But now, almost 92 years later, Lise Pearlman, a retired judge and true crime author, is putting forth a theory about all this. And the guilty party is none other than Charles Lindbergh himself.
Judge Lise Perlman says:
“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.”
The whole story is long and drawn out, with a lot of details to support the findings by Judge Perlman. But basically, it is this. Lindbergh was a big supporter of eugenics (the science of promoting desirable qualities in the human race, usually through some kind of controlled breeding). Lindbergh had been working with a doctor / surgeon to “fix” his son, who had been “sickly” in infancy. And during the operations, the baby died. So Lindbergh needed a way to cover things up. Judge Perlman has found correspondence concerning these actions between Lindbergh and the surgeon.
At any rate, I find all of this highly interesting.
And, while our Justice system works a lot of the time, it is not fail-safe. We are seeing this repeatedly with wrong convictions, tampered evidence, and crooked players in the system.
As with anything, we need to be careful in our accusations.
Many people are sitting in prison, wrongfully blamed.
There is so much work to be done in our world. And this is another area to add to the growing list of “Things To Fix With Us Thick Humans.”
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“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
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“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.” – Benjamin Franklin
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“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” – Frederick Douglass
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Lindbergh might be guilty of kidnapping his own son
