On the night of March 1, 1932, the 20 month old son of aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne, was taken from his second floor nursery at the family's estate near Hopewell, New Jersey. A ransom note demanding $50,000 was left behind. Nearly three years later, the trial of the man accused of the crime became known as the "trial of the century."
The child, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., was found dead on May 12, 1932, about 4.5 miles from the home, according to Wikipedia's account of the case. He appeared to have been killed by a blow to the head. By then, a go between named John F. Condon had already handed $50,000 to a man who called himself "John" at St. Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx.
How the case was cracked
Kidnapping was not yet a federal crime. The Bureau of Investigation, forerunner of the FBI, was put at the disposal of the New Jersey State Police in May 1932 and took jurisdiction over the case in 1933. Investigators circulated the serial numbers of the ransom bills and tracked them as they turned up.
The break came in September 1934. A ransom gold certificate was traced to a gas station, where the manager had written down the license plate of the man who spent it. The plate led to Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German born carpenter living in the Bronx. Investigators found more ransom money at his home, and Condon's address and phone number were found written in pencil inside a closet.
The kidnapping had already led Congress to pass the Federal Kidnapping Act, which made taking a victim across state lines a federal crime. Laws like it are one reason the same conduct can be charged in both state and federal court, a split we explored in the Luigi Mangione case.
A courtroom under siege
Hauptmann's trial opened on January 2, 1935, in the Hunterdon County Courthouse in Flemington, New Jersey, before Judge Thomas Whitaker Trenchard. New Jersey Attorney General David T. Wilentz led the prosecution. Hauptmann pleaded not guilty and testified that he was innocent, Smithsonian magazine notes.
His lead lawyer, Edward J. Reilly, was hired by the New York Daily Mirror in exchange for the rights to publish Hauptmann's story, according to Wikipedia's account. The writer H.L. Mencken called the kidnapping and trial "the biggest story since the Resurrection."
The evidence leaned heavily on new kinds of experts. Arthur Koehler, a wood scientist with the Forest Products Laboratory, concluded that wood from the kidnap ladder matched a plank in Hauptmann's attic. Eight handwriting experts testified that his writing matched the ransom notes.
Reporters swarmed the small town, and every hotel room was booked. The jury returned its guilty verdict on February 13, 1935, and Hauptmann was sentenced to death. He was executed in the electric chair on April 3, 1936.
What the trial left behind
The press frenzy had lasting effects inside courtrooms. In 1937, the American Bar Association adopted Canon 35, recommending that judges bar cameras and broadcasting equipment, after the Hauptmann trial drew "adverse criticism of still photography and voice recording," the Christian Science Monitor reported.
Doubts never fully went away. Some authors have argued that Hauptmann was framed, while others, including author Jim Fisher, have maintained that he was guilty. His widow, Anna Hauptmann, sued New Jersey twice in the 1980s, and both suits were dismissed.
For defense lawyers, Flemington is an early warning about trials run in the press and about expert testimony a jury has never heard before. Sixty years later, a different courtroom earned the same nickname, as we recalled in our look back at the O.J. Simpson verdict. It is the kind of case defense attorney Daniel Rosenberg and the Two Taps legal panel of Michael Dye and Lloyd Golburgh take apart on the show.
Two Taps News stories summarize reporting and the analysis discussed on Two Taps and Friends. They are not legal advice. Read our standards.
