March 1.

Eighty-three years ago this day, at around 9:00 P.M., someone entered the grounds of a property known as Highfields, in the Sourland Mountains near Hopewell, New Jersey,  placed two sections of a strange-looking, homemade, three-stage extension ladder against a brand new white field stone house, and climbed to the top.

Of that much we can be reasonably certain.

Reading in the room below was the most famous man in the world, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, who in 1927 had flown the Atlantic alone, transforming himself, unwittingly and to his regret, into the first modern celebrity. Alone in his study, Lindbergh heard a “crack”—it sounded, he said, like something breaking apart an orange crate—but the night was windy and raw, and he thought nothing of it.

Shortly afterward, Betty Gow, both the Lindbergh maid and the nurse of the 20 month-old child, Charles Lindbergh, Jr., who had been put to bed (with a cold) in the room at the top of the homemade ladder, entered the nursery to check on the boy.

He was gone.

The note lay on the window sill.

As her husband scrambled to his closet for a rifle, the pregnant Anne Morrow Lindbergh, her universe collapsing into the black hole of a single upstairs window in her new home, leaned out into the night. The wind raked the barren trees, and in the distance she heard a high whine that might have been an animal—or might not have been.

The Lindberghs never saw their child alive again.

J. Edgar Hoover got involved. President Herbert Hoover got involved too. So did Congress, the United States Department of the Treasury, both Weimar and Nazi Germany, movie stars, Al Capone, and cranks and lunatics of every description. Acting through an unlikely intermediary, “Dr.” John F. Condon (forever after known as “Jafsie”), a retired Bronx P.E. teacher with a penchant for bluster and self-promotion, Lindbergh paid $50,000 to someone with a German accent who claimed to be holding and caring for his son.

In May, the cruelty of the crime, compounded by more than two months of demands, false leads,  and empty promises from the supposed kidnapper, came into focus. A laborer left the road, not far from the Lindbergh home, and went into the woods to relieve himself. There, he found the tiny body, decomposed and torn apart by animals, tufts of white-blonde hair and the Lindbergh chin dimple still visible. Nearby lay a bag containing more hair. A mute, incongruous wire ran through the lush spring foliage: one of the extra telephone cables hurriedly strung up the hill to handle the torrent of Lindbergh news pouring into and out of Hopewell.

In 1934, luck and good detective work led to Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German immigrant living in the Bronx, not that far from Dr. Condon’s house or from the two cemeteries where Condon had parleyed with and paid ransom to a shadowy, German-sounding figure who came to be known as “Cemetery John.” In the mid-1930s, the trenches of France and Belgium were very real memories for Americans, and there can be no question that the public hated Hauptmann because of his origins. However, they also hated him because of the overwhelming evidence showing that he had taken Charles Lindbergh, Jr. from his own bed in the middle of the night and had somehow left him decaying and alone in the woods on a late winter evening.

In the past eight decades, writers have expended gallons of ink in an effort to exonerate Hauptmann. His defenders blame Lindbergh’s mentally disturbed sister-in-law, his dissolute brother-in-law, the mob, and (the perennial favorite) Lindbergh himself. The details will never be settled, but Hauptmann was guilty. The accused, a carpenter, had many thousands of dollars in carefully documented Lindbergh ransom money hidden all over his garage, buried, and cleverly concealed inside boards. A “wood expert” showed that a missing board from Hauptmann’s attic floor was, in fact, “rail 16” of the ladder, an odd looking, starkly utilitarian affair, which was derided by some (including Hauptmann) as an embarrassing piece of junk, but in fact was light and versatile and a respectable bit of carpentry. Hauptmann had quit working and had bought new furniture at exactly the same time the ransom was paid. The day detectives entered his home, he had a $400 radio in his living room—at the height of the Great Depression. Investigations inside early Nazi Germany showed that Hauptmann had used a ladder to commit crimes there before he emigrated, had once threatened a woman and her child, and had active arrest warrants in his home town. In a notebook in Hauptmann’s home, police found a sketch of a wooden ladder. In a closet they found, written on a door frame, a telephone number: the number of John “Jafsie” Condon, Lindbergh’s intermediary. Some skeptics have suggested that the phone number was planted, but Hauptmann himself acknowledged that he wrote it there. Missing from Hauptmann’s chisel set was one the same size and brand as a chisel found on the ground at the crime scene. Whatever else may be true, Bruno Richard Hauptmann was deeply involved in the kidnapping and death of the Lindbergh Baby.

In 1935, in a tiny, picturesque courthouse in Flemington, New Jersey, a jury convicted Bruno Richard Hauptmann of killing Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr.  The court sentenced him to death by electrocution. Hauptmann appealed and lost. Convinced that Hauptmann must have had accomplices, New Jersey’s governor, Harold Hoffman, pleaded with the condemned man for information and offered clemency if he would confess and tell all that he knew. Hauptmann stubbornly insisted that he knew nothing and went to his death on April 3, 1936, leaving behind his bewildered wife and small son and cryptically warning that the book would never be closed on the case.

The kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. cast a pall over already desperate 1930s America and recast “Richard” Hauptmann (as he had always been known) as his little-used first name: “Bruno,” the villain of the century. If the immigrant carpenter was guilty, as he surely was, a great many loose ends remained. No one has conclusively shown how the Lindbergh Baby died or whether he was intentionally murdered. One leg of the custom ladder was broken. Most researchers believe that this break was the sound Charles Lindbergh heard in his study and that the person on the ladder dropped the baby (who was probably in the bag) when this happened. Tests showed that a bag dropped in this scenario might easily have struck a ledge below. Some recent research has suggested that the baby was simply murdered by a blow to the head and that the perpetrator (or perpetrators) had no intention of returning the child for ransom. Lindbergh cremated the body, so there is little evidence to study.

That Hauptmann did not receive a “fair” trial by modern standards, or perhaps even by 1930s standards, is beyond question. Kidnapping was not a federal crime until Congress passed the “Little Lindbergh” law in the wake of the case. It was not even a felony in New Jersey. State officials had a suspect, an obvious kidnapping, and a dead victim. Turning that into a capital murder conviction was not easy, since the abduction was a misdemeanor and there was no conclusive evidence that the kidnapper had meant to kill the child. To get around this problem, prosecutors charged Hauptmann with causing the death (intentionally or not) of the child in the course of the felony theft of the clothing he was wearing. Causing someone’s death while committing a felony was a capital crime, and it was with this ploy that the state of New Jersey disposed of Bruno Hauptmann. Even against a reviled suspect, this feat of legal legerdemain would never survive press or court scrutiny in the modern era.

Also unsettled is whether Hauptmann had accomplices. The ladder was found on the ground, but marks on the wall of the house indicated that it had been deployed to the side of the window, not directly under it, presumably so that someone in the room below, the very study in which Charles Lindbergh was reading, could not see the movement outside that room’s window. Entering the nursery window  from the side would have been difficult and dangerous with no one to steady the ladder. Exiting with a 30 pound toddler would have been genuinely hazardous. An accomplice would have made all of this easier and safer. On the other hand, the ladder did break and the baby did somehow die, so perhaps help was needed but was not there.

The window problem led investigators to consider whether someone had handed the baby out to the kidnappers. Police extensively investigated the Lindbergh domestic staff as well as the staff at Next Day Hill, Anne’s parents’ estate. The Hopewell house was not really even finished, and the Lindberghs had been living there only on weekends, spending the rest of their time with the Morrows. The child was abducted on a Tuesday night, and it was only Charlie’s cold that had convinced Anne to remain at Hopewell into the week. Only the Lindberghs, the Morrows, and their staffs would have known that the baby was in Hopewell.

One Morrow servant, Violet Sharp, who was not officially present at Highfields on March 1, gave wildly inconsistent accounts of her actions that Tuesday. Police interviewed her three times, becoming more demanding as the discussions progressed. When they arrived at Next Day Hill to question her for the fourth time, she ran from the room, drank a bottle of poisonous silver polish, and died before their eyes. She was only 28. Perhaps Violet Sharp was involved in the kidnapping; no evidence proves it. Perhaps she had somehow discussed the family’s plans with a stranger or a friend with evil intent and could not live with the guilt and fear. She had an impressive bank balance for a Depression-era domestic; no one knows why. If Hauptmann had help, he took the names to the electric chair. No accomplices were ever located or charged, and about half of the ransom money was never found.

Americans have a notable tendency to employ spectacular crimes as cultural landmarks. Kidnapping was a well-known phenomenon in 1930s America. On the night little Charlie Lindbergh disappeared into the March darkness outside his nursery window, only eight years had passed since the “crime of the century” kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks, in Chicago, by the infamous “thrill killers,” Leopold and Loeb. Before Charlie, though, the targeted families had been rich and well-known within their circles but hardly international celebrities. Now there was a new crime of the century and of a new type. More would follow. The post-war mass cultural forces unleashed by the 1920s—radio, glossy magazines, talkies, jazz—had created a new kind of fame and a new kind of victim. Charles and Anne Lindberg’s child was the first casualty of the modern cult of celebrity. An obscure German carpenter surely bore the blame for that tragedy, but twentieth century culture itself was an accessory, both before and after the fact.

KB