Post Mortem | Lindbergh

In March 1932, the whole world was captivated and terrified by the kidnapping of 20-month-old Charles

“Lindbergg Jr., the baby son of the famed aviator.”

>> And there's a chance that somebody might notice one of the posters who'd recognize his little child's Lindbergg, and so furnish a valuable clue.

>> He was mysteriously taken from his nursery on the second floor of the family's home in

New Jersey, while his parents were downstairs. >> Meanwhile, the child is still gone, and the parents are suffering tortures that only fathers and mothers can suffer. >> Little Lindy's disappearance, along with the discovery of his body, the arrest and prosecution of Bruno Houtman was the original true crime story of the modern media age, yielding countless

theories about what really happened to the baby of the most famous man in America. >> I'm CBS News correspondent Jim Axelrod, and welcome to a special episode of the 48-hours podcast. I'm joined today by a free press senior editor and writer, Joan of Sarah, who's out with the news six part podcast series about the kidnapping called the Lindbergg Conspiracies.

And we welcome in Joan of Sarah. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. We're for you to be here, 94 years since this kidnapping. So much news has developed and unfolded since then.

So why this?

“Why does the Lindbergg kidnapping still claim so much interest?”

Because it's a 94-year-old mystery that many people feel has never been solved.

I think there's two other aspects to it, though. One is, it's the original true crime story. I mean, it really is, and we're a culture that's obsessed with true crime. Now, and secondly, I think it gives a snapshot of a different America, a more innocent country where a man like Charles Lindbergg could be almost god-like in the admiration Americans had

for him, which doesn't really exist anymore. Lindbergg was the first person to prove that flight could be more than dare devils or war machines. Lucky Lindy, the first man to fly alone across the Atlantic. It was an American hero kind of thing.

It was like only an American could have done this. But in terms of Lindbergg as this enormous world hero, he's also a deeply flawed man. He was a believer in New Genics. As many upper class white people were at the time, which is the sort of selective breeding to promote traits.

Yes, and he made trips to Germany before the war, and they gave him some medal at one point, and he became part of the America first movement, which was an effort to persuade the country not to go to war. He was also, he also was shown to be during this period of his life in antisemitic. All right, so take us to March 1st, 1932.

I hope well, New Jersey, what happens? There was a Tuesday night.

The Lindbergg's were never at Hopewell, which was really their weekend retreat on a Tuesday

night. Charles Lindbergg was married to Ann Marle Lindbergg, who was an ares, and that's right. Very wealthy. They spent a lot of their time in Engelwood. Dwight Marl, her father, who was a financier and a diplomat, lived in Engelwood.

They would spend the weekend in Engelwood, and then they would go Hopewell for the weekend. But the baby had a cold, and Ann was feeling pretty rundown too. So nurse made Betty Gow, she puts the baby to bed, a 10 o'clock Betty Gow goes upstairs, opens the door, looks into the baby's bedroom, he's gone, Ann would later write, at first I thought maybe Charles was playing a prank.

Believe it or not, believe it or not, he had once before hid the baby for 20 minutes from Ann and Betty as a prank.

“He did weird things, but that's the first thought, but maybe he's playing a prank, right?”

Maybe he's playing a prank. So they go downstairs, Betty and Ann, and they say, Charles, the baby's missing, and he runs up the stairs, and even before he gets in the room, he says, they've kidnapped our baby. Now there's another little quirky thing, when Ann and Betty were in the room, they did not

notice it, because they were panicked.

“Charles gets in the room, and he sees an envelope, which is obviously the ransom note.”

So he takes the ransom note, and he says, don't open it, we're going to let the police do that. He takes a gun and takes a rifle, he runs outside, can't find anything, he sees a ladder that has been dragged, 60 or 75 feet away, and then they call the police. So quick question about the ransom note, because I know there was some reporting, not only

didn't they see the ransom note, but then they found it on the window sill, that's right. Windows open, correct? Some notes on the sill, windy night, windy night, I mean, so you just stumbled on, you've

just hit upon the first of many, many, many oddities, strains, things that happen, that

don't add up, and this is part of the reason the case, so fixate people, because once you start to begin, it's like, oh my god, that happened, oh my god, that happened, oh my god, that happened, I'll tell you the next one, they could find no fingerprints anywhere in the room, anywhere, on the walls, on the drawers, and the bed, no fingerprints, so what kind of evidence was there?

The ransom note, obviously, okay, so they had the ransom, there was the ransom note, there

“were footprints at the base of the window, that's why it'd be helpful, it would be if”

somebody took a mold, but nobody did, because the two cops that came were local cops. By the time the state police showed up, the grounds had been trampled to death by journalists. Somebody had leaked the fact that the Lindbergh baby had been kidnapped, and journalists are swarmed all over the place. Now the New Jersey state police at that point, run by, and this is a sort of famous

last name in American history, Schwartzkopf, famous for his name too, Norman Schwartzkopf, father of Stormen Norman, it turns out he worships the ground Charles Lindbergh walks on, so not only does he not investigate the possibility that the parents could be involved, he lets Lindbergh manage the investigation of his own child, so you have one of the people involved as the parent of this victim dictating to all the investigators what they

can and can't do.

“You mentioned the note, the ransom note, whether it's legit or not, what does it say?”

In very broken English, it says give us $50,000 on you'll get your baby back, broken English. Well, it was written, it was clearly written by somebody who did not speak for whom English

was not their first language, so it had misspellings and not just vocabulary problems,

but grammar problems, but then Lindbergh then went on to make a series of idiotic decisions. We'll take me through them though, in terms of the decisions he made that sure you might be critical of. Well, the first decision he made was to give the ransom note a version of it to a couple of mobsters because the mob thought, because we needed another element to make it even

weirder. Yeah, so because the mob was known to kidnap people once in a while, as one of our experts on the podcast says, you know, this was such, he said, if the mob had done it, it would be a professional kidnapping. This was clearly not a professional kidnapping.

But once the ransom note was out there, anybody could copy it. It also had a little red mark and then future ransom notes also had the little red mark. So, well, then the whole thing's compromised at that point. Right. So, they could have been anybody, extortionists, mobsters, let me ask you about Dr. John

Hunter. Jeff See. Jeff See. Yeah. How does he get involved?

So who is he? He writes a letter to his local paper, the Bronx home news.

And he basically says, he's a very pompous, full of himself, 70 plus year guy.

And he basically says, I'm going to add $1,000 to the ransom money that I will contribute for myself and the kidnappers put a note in the Bronx home news saying basically, huh,

But what happens is, because the kidnappers give Jeff See a letter to give to Lindberg, Lindberg reads the letter and says, okay, you obviously have some contact with these guys or this guy, so you're going to be my intermediary. So Lindberg. Jeff See.

So Lindberg becomes all in with Jeff See. That's exactly what happens. And they end up, Jeff See at least ends up having meetings with these guys. Well, with somebody, he has two meetings and two different cemeteries. So he's conducting all of his business in cemeteries.

Yes, that's right.

And the first meeting, supposedly.

And by the way, I should just say for the record, Jeff See is a major bullshitter. But he's the only person that you have, it was on record.

“So you have to, at some point, assume he's not completely making it up.”

So he has his first meeting with the kidnapper. They have a long discussion. Jeff See says, you've got to prove to me that you have the baby. You have to extend me the baby's night gown that he had. The night he was kidnapped, then the night gone to the Lindbergs.

So that happens. So then Jeff See meets again at a second cemetery in the Bronx. And this time, Lindberg goes with him.

But Lindberg stays in a car.

And Jeff See has the ransom money in a box. How much? 2000. As he's going to meet the kidnapper, extortion of everyone, the guy says, hey, doctor.

“And even though Lindberg is sort of around the corner in a car, Lindberg claims to have”

heard that, and that, and also claims that it was in the German accent. He takes the 50,000, he disappears. No, wait a minute, this claim was intriguing to you. Well, we tried to replicate it. I sat in a car in the same position that Lindberg was in and popping my producer was at

the cemetery. And we couldn't get in. So you have to stand outside. So she was actually closer than, then, Jeff See would have been. And so she yells out, hey, doctor, and I couldn't hear a thing.

Even with the note traffic, so it essentially undercuts part of Lindberg's story. He heard somebody in a with a German accent, say, hey, doctor, from the cemetery. Right. So all of this is unfolding. I'm sure folks are looking for little Indies either the baby alive or, right, sadly, a

body and eventually a body is found six weeks later where in the woods, about four miles from the house in Hopewell and the only reason it was found is because a truck driver had to take a leak and walked into the woods and saw this partially decomposed body.

And the car in a basically concluded that he had died from blunt force trauma.

Let's talk about Bruno Richard helped, right. So one of the great three-name notorious people in American history, John Wilkes Booth, we RB Oswell, Bruno Richard helped. Yeah. Who is he?

He is a, I Tinnon carpenter and immigrant who's been in the U.S. for about a decade. The first time he came illegally, he got caught and sent back the second time he managed to sneak through. But this is no boy scout. This is, no, he's a record.

He's been, he was jailed in Germany. He didn't have a record in the U.S., he seemed to be making honest living. His wife worked at a bakery, she made it honest living, they had a child, they rented a house in the Bronx, he used to say, yeah, rented a house in the Bronx.

“Yeah, that's, why did he very quickly become the so-so-suspect?”

Well, because he had ransom money on him. There was a certain kind of money called goals certificates that was about to go out of circulation. The treasury department knew this and so they insisted that a whole bunch of the ransom money made in goals certificates knowing that if somebody tried to pass it off, it would

be a tell. It would be a tell. So two years later, Houtman goes to a gas station, gives the gas station a tentant

the goal certificate.

That is traced to Houtman.

“They go into his house and they do a search and they find $14,000 worth of the $50,000”

ransom. So that's a smoking gun. Well, it isn't, it isn't, it doesn't, the fence I know you ask. Houtman had a friend and business partner named Isidor Fisch. He says, isidor Fisch gave him this box and said, please store this for me.

I'm going to go to Germany right now. So he takes it home, he puts it up. Isidor Fisch does go to Germany and then Isidor Fisch dies of tuberculosis. At which point, Houtman says, okay, he's dead now. I'm going to take a look what's in here.

Oh, wow. There's money in here. I'm going to take it.

Were there any other suspects who were ever seriously considered as having taken part in

the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergg. No.

“Here's the thing, up until the moment they caught Houtman, they had always assumed it was”

more than one person, because for the logically, because how you're going to pull all of that off. Right. If you don't have more than one person, right. But once they got Houtman, it was like, we're done.

You know, it's interesting to hear you say this, Joe, about the idea, because what the prosecutions case essentially relied on was the Bruno Richard Houtman acting alone, drove from the Bronx on a random night with no idea or he really should have had no capacity to have any confidence about it, that the baby was going to be there, the window was going to be open.

What do you know, which window led to the baby's room? How did you know that was the only window in the house that could not be locked shut? So could Houtman have been involved as part of a gang or something? Absolutely. Absolutely.

But could he have done it by himself? I just find that implausible. And yet Bruno Richard Houtman is tried, and it is the trial of the century. Right. So don't forget.

This was called the crime of the century. The trial happened. It was the trial of the century. Now I want to ask you something. Yeah.

So rumor has it that you had your relatives, your ancestors lived. So growing up, my grandfather and grandmother lived in Flemington, New Jersey. And for years in the 1930s, they had axle rods pharmacy on Main Street across from the Hunting County courthouse, my grandfather had a lunch counter, and I can remember as a kid him telling me stories of Damon Runyon coming in, Walter Winchell, would set up shop in

my grandfather's pharmacy, Axelrod's pharmacy on Main Street, common deer the phone, and

Winchell was really establishing himself for the first time as this sort of he became

this monster media figure. Right. But he put himself on the map with his reporting from the Houtman trial. Someone else from Flemington who was a source for us, he said, you know, it's a town of 3,000 people.

And the first week of the trial, there were 50,000 people there. He said, the cars were backed up for like 10 miles.

“So inside the courtroom, what was going on that, that shaped and influenced the proceedings?”

Because if I understand you correctly, there is no way Bruno Richard Houtman had a fair trial. That is correct. By today's standards, it was an absolute travesty, and the fact that the matter is even by the standards of the 1930s, it was an unfair trial.

How so? Well, to start with, let's just take, let's just take something simple like handwriting. So obviously, the prosecution is going to have handwriting experts who are going to say that the handwriting is the same as Houtman's. But Houtman says, when police got them in the room, they said, okay, they didn't just

say right some stuff. They said, look at this note, and they showed them the ransom note. We want you to write this exactly the same way that this, that this ransom note is exactly the same way. Same spelling, same, you know, curvatures, try to copy it, try to copy it.

Then he gets in the trial and they said, well, look, look, it's the same, it's the same. Um, didn't you have a lawyer? Oh, he had a terrible lawyer. We had a lawyer on our show who said he became a lawyer because when he read about the winberg trial, and it was like 14 years old, he said, you know, I could have done better

than this. But having said that, it wasn't just a defense, it was also the prosecution. Um, the handwriting analysis, it's just one example, um, I understand there was something

Um, what was it?

Well, the prosecution said, as definitive proof that Houtman did it, that a piece of wood from

his attic had been cut out and made part of the latter. Okay. It is a handmade ladder. It was not a land that you're going to home depot and buy. You've seen the latter?

Oh, yeah, it's at the New Jersey State Police Museum. Yeah, anybody can see it. You can see it. It's, um, it's a really interesting ladder. I know that's the sound weird.

“It's an unusual ladder, but this became a big, yeah, important piece of evidence for the”

jury to write. And this is, this is some of the stuff that I just find so unbelievable. But attic had been looked at, you know, doesn't, it doesn't times by, by investigators after, after Houtman was arrested. The home that the Houtman's were living in was taken over by a police lieutenant who moved

in. He was living in the house in the house. Yes. And he's the one who comes to them and says, hey, look at this hole in the attic. So, um, let me give you the day no mom, as they say, please David will launch the

prosecutor gets up and he's going through his closing statement and he says, and then how when took an instrument and he hit the baby over the head and crushed his skull. Now there had not been one word of testimony to this effect.

“The testimony had always been, well, the baby must have fallen and cracked his head”

on the ground. To bring up a new allegation in a, in a, in a closing argument, that is, like, against every rule in the book yet neither to defense attorney nor the judge said, you know, we can allow this did help him take the stand himself. He did, did he help himself?

Yeah, not really, he kind of got chewed up. They caught him in a lie about the goal certificates. His lack of language skills, you know, heard him badly, his lawyer heard him badly, um, his lawyer was being heard paid for by Hearst, the Hearst newspaper chain. I mean, which had, which had a, which had a vested interest in wanting a salacious trial,

which they certainly got, did he, well, I didn't, I had never heard that before did the

defense lawyer write for Hearst or no, they were paying Anna, Anna Halman for her quote, unquote, exclusive story. So in the least surprising verdict imaginable, Bruno Richard Halman is found guilty. That's right. And this is 35 correct.

He is executed in 1936.

“The Lindbergues, as a couple, does this whole thing just engenders some sympathy for them?”

I would imagine. Yeah, absolutely. But they take off, well, yeah, they take off that for England for a while, because, you know, um, they want to get away from the press, basically. They'd like to be a little more anonymous.

It's, I mean, Charles Lindberg hated the press. He'd been dealing with it since his since he flew to Paris. And in fact, we have a clip from Ann Lindberg talking a morally safer and a 60 minutes interview. He really couldn't bear invasions on his privacy.

Now there, I think, there was something irrational. He had an irrational feeling about the news, about news, newsman. He felt they intruded on him. I don't think he was quite rational. He had reasons not to be, I mean, we were terribly pursued at the time of the baby's

kidnapping. The newsman, some of them, behaved absolutely terribly, broke into the morgue and took

pictures of the baby and he never forgave them.

You hear in Lindberg described how much Charles Lindberg hated the media. What is it? Where does that leave you? I have some sympathy for him to be honest. I mean, you know, so it's one thing to be, you know, chased by the media because you did

something amazing, you know, and, and, but there's another thing to be chased by the media because your kid was kidnapped and killed, but it's only after this that he becomes a less sympathetic figure, very, very true, very true. As Hitler begins invading Poland and other countries in Europe, and he is the leading spokesman

It sure did. What a complicated man. Totally.

“The complications don't end there either.”

Yes. Well, that's true. He dies at the age of 74 in a while, very tiny funeral, 15 people, something like that. And it comes out years later, many years later, that he is fathered seven children in Germany with three different women, none of whom are his wife.

None of whom are his wife, two sisters, first of all he has five other children.

He had five other children with Anne, but then he, you know, he's always spent a lot of

time in Germany, and so we fathered seven children with three women, two sisters and his secretary. And basically German magazine at some point in the late 90s or early 2000s breaks the story. They do DNA testing. And there is.

There is. It's real. It's for real. - A new name, a double, yes, Carroux Kent. Carroux Kent's, like Clark Kent,

like the German version of Clark Kent. - I mean, the story just keeps, if you're into bizarre, this just keeps the story that keeps giving and giving and giving. Now let me ask you this.

It may not have been part of American culture in the 1930s to think about conspiracy theories, but certainly after the Kennedy assassination, and certainly part of our modern life is, you know, you can't have two people looking at the sky

and agreeing it's blue.

There's always some sort of other angle to be considered.

Were there any conspiracy theories about the Lindbergh kidnapping, or did any develop later? - As you said, Kennedy assassination, RFK, Martin Luther King, Warren Commission,

CIA Secrets Exposed, on and on and on. And Americans start to lose faith in institutions and start to lose faith in government. It's so, around the late '70s, early '80s, books start to be written for the first time

that I look at the trial and make connections about what really happened. And as America itself has become more conspiratorials, so has the belief in the Lindbergh theories, grown and grown and grown.

To the point that, one of the people in our podcast said,

“you know, I think more people today believe Lindbergh”

has something to do with it and think Hopman had something to do with it. - What would the rationale be for that? - So there's a lot of theories that the child had rickets and had various other physical problems.

- Yeah, I had read some delayed speech. - Right.

- And there were issues never proven, correct?

- But this was sort of talked about later that Lindberg as a Ugenesis could not abide. Let me add one other thing to that. In Lindbergh, she published her diaries and letters from that era.

And the diaries and letters about her son when he was alive and he's babbling and talking and playing with his dad and playing with his mom and playing with Betty Gow. And you just read that and he just like, no, there's nothing wrong with this kid.

I found it very hard to believe. Is there a conspiracy theory that you encountered in your research that resonated? - Well, well, true. - No, what resonates to me is the idea

that more than one person did it. Whether Hopman was involved or somebody else, there's one guy out there that has a name of a different person that he believes that we don't need to get into that as to complicated.

“What I believe is that somebody inside the Lindbergh household”

was involved. Was there any part of this investigation that involved DNA? They didn't have DNA back then. DNA didn't come to the late 80s. But there's a lawyer who is suing the New Jersey State Police

Museum to have DNA tested on the ransom notes. Because the stamps probably still have DNA and the envelopes where you look the envelopes probably still has DNA. New Jersey is resisting this like crazy.

But an appeal. Why? They say it'll damage the evidence. I don't really think that's the reasons to be honest.

and it ruled out, right?

- Right, I wish it happened.

“- Right, the point is that there isn't appeal”

I'm going right now and we'll see what happens. All right, so sum up for everyone listening, watching your series, your investigation

into the Lindbergh kidnapping.

The takeaway for you that you feel

“sort of most relevant for the day in which we live is why.”

- I connect it more than anything with the America we live in today,

that it teaches you so much about the judicial system,

it teaches you so much about how we're hired in conspiracies, it teaches you what the country was like back then versus what it's like today. And it's a damn good story. You know, this is what you and I live for.

- Jonah Sarah with a damn good story. Thanks for being here. - Thanks for having me. The Lindbergh conspiracies podcast is currently available wherever you get your podcasts.

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