Presenting the Lindbergh Conspiracies

of a brand new podcast series from our colleagues at the Free Press, about one of the original

“true crime stories of the modern media age. It's called The Lindbergh Conspiracies. In 1932,”

famed Aviator Charles Lindbergh's baby boy was kidnapped from his nursery, the search, arrest, and trial consume the country. It also yielded countless conspiracy theories. Drill is Joe Nossera investigated it all, and just to note that the Free Press, like CBS News, is owned by Paramount Skydance. Take a listen and then join us for a follow-up discussion in our next podcast episode. Café in his best form, with the nine cube of one

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and of chieble de eh. I would stake my entire professional career. On the fact that Brigitte Macron,

the current first lady of France was born a man. And I think the real answer is Jeffrey Epstein was

working on behalf of Intel services, probably not America. And we have every right to ask, on whose behalf was he working? Peach the gate is real. The only question is, what exactly is it? And if you look at the numbers, the numbers are false. The numbers are corrupt. It was a

“recollection 100%. And people know it. That's why you have people marching all over the United”

States right now. They know it was a recollection. Conspiracies are like Japanese knotweed. The invasive plant is hollow inside, and it looks innocent enough. And yet, just a little bit of it can rapidly spread up to 10 feet tall. And up in the foundations of whatever it is you're trying to build. You're screwing. The more you try to get rid of it, the more you'll drive yourself mad with finding new areas infested, clusters of small, cream-colored flowers growing in plumes everywhere you look.

And that's what conspiracies do too. They grow and they grow and they grow until the original foundation has been utterly abandoned. Conspiracies are now part of American life, of course. The JFK assassination, a rigged election, the prison cell death of Jeffrey Epstein. It's a very long list. There are so many moments of our shared history where we can't seem to agree on what actually happened. And such as the case of the subject of this podcast, the Lindbergh kidnapping.

It took place a very long time ago, 1932. A child of a famous man was kidnapped and then murdered. A German immigrant was eventually charged with the crime and executed. But the case against the accused was far from her type. And the official explanation of how he pulled it off was so unsatisfying.

“Did people have been filling the void with their own theories ever since?”

Some people say it's the original true crime story. me, I'm calling it the first great American

conspiracy. What else would we talk about at night? What else would we keep our wives up late at night talking about if not for the Lindbergh baby case? I'm Jonah Ciro, and from the free press, this is the Lindbergh conspiracies episode one, the broken window. I'm going to start with that execution I mentioned. It's the night of April 3rd, 1936. Bruno Richard Haltman, the man convicted of kidnapping and killing Charles Lindbergh's 20-month-old son,

is strapped in the electric chair. He's about to die. The boy's father, Charles Lindbergh, is the most famous and most admired man in America. Haltman, who was arrested two years earlier at his home in the Bronx, has become the most hated man in America. What the execution twice delayed, most Americans are anxious, know they're eager for him to breathe his last breath.

I got interested in the Lindbergh kidnapping from listening to my parents talk about

“growing up in Trent and going to a halt, then execution party at the Hotel Hilderbrook,”

where the execution was broadcast live. There go the witnesses into the New Jersey State Prison at Trenton, who are to see Bruno Richard Haltman die for the kidnapping of a Lindbergh baby, and so silent and solid, Hottman goes to the chair of doom, paying with his life for the crime that rocked the world. The hotel had a whole ballroom set up with a live band

and dancing, and when they flipped the switch, all the lights dimmed in that end of Trent. By 847 pm, the lights were back at full strength. The deed had been done.

“Winged words fly by wire and by air tonight, so that all may read”

"feanied" to the sorted tale, but there are only three words. Bruno is dead. The Lindbergh conspiracies didn't start right away. There were people, even back then,

who never bought the official line, but they were few and far between.

The country was just so relieved that the crime had been avenged. Besides, America was a more innocent place in the 1930s. And people generally didn't believe that prosecutors would stoop so low as the frame an innocent man. But over time, the idea that Hottman had been railroaded by a corrupt government that became the prevailing view, as well as the obsession of the people who populate this podcast. Like Jim Davidson, the guy whose parents went to the

execution party in 1936. I started collecting Lindbergh memorabilia, and I had so much memorabilia. I probably had one of the finest collections in the country, and then I started collecting pictures ever with thousand original pictures of the trial and kidnapping. Just by chance, I ended up buying a house that was directly across the Lindbergh driveway. And then this Robert Zorn, who says, he knows who really kidnapped the Lindbergh baby. His life's work has been convincing the world

that he's right. I found myself in the position of an accidental detective in one of the greatest cold cases in history. In fact, he gets angry at some of the others in this world who's theories different from his. They don't care about facts. They don't care whom they hurt. And they will be dealt with. I will be dealing with them very personally, and with his large megaphone, as I can possibly find. Or Renel Delmont, who used to run the popular website, the Lindbergh kidnapping hooks.

“This is drama. This is an opera. This is Vaudeville. Here's the thing though. These people who”

found themselves caught up in the Lindbergh case, they are not crazy. They're not. The fact is, once you dive into it, once you begin to learn about all the contested facts, all the strange rabbit holes, all the media hysteria, and not least, the very odd behavior of Charles Lindbergh through it all. You inevitably start asking yourself, "What really happened?" In the months that my producer Poppy Damon and I spent in this world, with she and I looking at the same set of facts and conducting

the same interviews, we developed very different theories about what had happened. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Ultimately, there's one thing we all agree on, and it comes from Bruno Hopman himself. Currently, he said in one of these letters, "They think when I die, the case will die. They

think it will be like a book I closed. But the book, it will never close." He was right.

The crime had taken place in a tiny New Jersey town called Hopwell, 15 miles north of Trenton. Months earlier, Charles and his wife and Maro Lindbergh had built a house deep in the woods, and we're using it as a weekend home. When Poppy and I visited the house not long ago, we were struck by how secluded it is even today. So, in driving up, it is trees rolling each side. Yeah, it's quite a little hike, and close you get to it more isolated, it seems.

Driver and a half a mile, and we still can't see the house. That, in fact, is exactly who I Lindbergh chose to spot.

Ever since he flew across the Atlantic in 1927, the first person to ever do so,

reporters had searched incessantly for any more sort of news about the man that they had labelled the great aviator. His flight was in a historic feat of engineering and stamina, the ultimate triumph of the human spirit. We'll tell the story of his astonishing fame in the next episode.

“But what you need to know is that pick a celebrity, Taylor Swift, George Clooney, the Beatles.”

They all look like nobody's in comparison to this man's star power. So he felt hounded by the press. He thought the house in Hopewell would offer him and his family some measure of privacy. But the newspapers had discovered where the house was being built,

and it published the location. Lindbergh's father-in-law, a wealthy financier and diplomat named Dwight

Moro, had advised him to hire security guards, even warning that the baby will be kidnapped if you don't have better protection. Lindbergh's wife Anne would note in her diary that every few days strangers would arrive on the property hoping to get a peak of the family and had to be chased away by Oli Waitley there butler. Get out of here before I call the police! Yet, when a writing for the sanity evening post visited Lindbergh on the property,

“he asked that the family needed more security. I'm not worried about intruders.”

What a terrible misjudgment. And here's another misjudgment. On the Oli window, if that was accessible to somebody from the outside, had warp shutters. And that was the window that opened into the baby's room. Where little Charles Lindbergh Jr. was put to bed that fateful night. Now, here's the weird thing, or I suppose I should say, one of the many weird things.

On that evening, March 1, 1932, Lindbergh was supposed to make a speech in the York,

but he never showed up. No one knows why. March 1 was also a Tuesday.

Ever since the family had begun using the house, they'd always return to Lindbergh's in-laws home on Monday morning. That's where they lived during the week. This was the first time they'd ever spent a night on a Tuesday, okay? The Lindbergh's were extremely guarded about their schedule. How could a kidnapper have possibly known that on that particular Tuesday,

“little Lindy is the press called the baby would be in hope well?”

And why were the Lindbergh's in hope well at night? Well, for the most ordinary of reasons. Charlie had had a cold and anghen had caught the cold. She was also pregnant at the time, and she says, "I'm exhausted. We're staying put." Mariah Fredericks were a fine novel called the Lindbergh Manny, a reimagining of the Lindbergh kidnapping through the eyes of Betty Gow, who was little Lindy's nursemate as she was

called back then. She was a key player on the night of the kidnapping. Betty had spent the weekend at the Maro household in Engelwood, and was waiting for little Charlie's return. She got a call that morning. Get the hope well immediately. When she arrived, she quickly took over the care of the baby. Around 730 she and Anne start putting him to bed. They put him in his little sleepy suit. Because they've stayed longer, he doesn't have adequate clothing and Betty makes him a little

shirt out of her petty coat just on the spot. They want to close the window for the sick child, but of course, they can't. As it turned out, the shutters of that southeast corner window of the nursery were warped. In fact, Betty Gow, the Lindbergh's nursemate and Anne Maro, Lindbergh, the baby's mother, were trying to pull them shut on the night and they couldn't do it. They both tried, but her failure to close that shutter will come back to haunt her.

She then goes downstairs and has dinner with Elsie Wayne Lee, who is the cook for the Lindbergh's. The baby falls quickly asleep. Soon, Charles Lindbergh returns home. Or does he? At eight, the family hears the approach of a car, and everyone assumes that it's Carl Lindbergh coming home. But it isn't until around 830 that they hear the hunk of the horn, which is his signal to the people inside the house, please lift up the garage door.

He and Anne have dinner after which Lindbergh has a bath and then heads down to his study.

hearing a cracking sound at one point when he was in his study beneath the nursery. He described it as

“a cracking helicopter. The slats on orange crates, as I believe, is the way he referred to it.”

Strangely, no one else in the house ever reports hearing that sound. Notice Lindbergh get out from his chair to see if something's happened outside. There was a dog in the house. He doesn't bark. So it's not until 10 o'clock or so that Betty Gow walks upstairs to see how the baby is doing. As is the family custom, Betty Gow's to check on Carl Wei and discover that he is gone.

She went first to Anne Lindbergh or see if she had taken the child and she hadn't.

Anne thought at first that her husband might have hidden the child as a practical joke. But leave it or not. That's something he'd done before. And then she went downstairs to see

“Charles who was down in the study. And she said, you know Mr. Lindbergh, do you have the baby?”

When he tells her no, he runs upstairs himself. And get this. Even before he enters the bedroom, he shouts and they've kidnapped our baby. He grabs a loaded rifle and a flashlight and he races outdoors to search the grounds. But he finds nothing. When the kidnapping took place, there were three clues. A buck's brothers, three quarters, wood chisel. They didn't know if it belonged to a carpenter there who was used to try to

pry the window open. So, clue one, chisel. Underneath the window, they found latter impressions, basically two impressions for the latter. It's sunk into the mud. They found a set of footprints leading away from the latter. They followed him about 70 to 75 feet away and they found

part of the latter. Two pieces of the latter. Clue, too. The latter. I mean, the latter is a really crucial

piece of evidence. Yeah. Because you know the latter is informed, right? Because that seems, you know, the way that the kidnapper got in and maybe got out. I spoke to my friend Nick Gillespie, editor at Large at Reason Magazine about the latter. He's at conspiracy, I guess you'd say, "Aficionado." And you'll be hearing from him and his wife. The science writer Sarah Rose Siskin, who is a conspiracy skeptic throughout the show. It's quite a marriage they've got.

“It's this tantalizing. I think in a contemporary context, the latter is fascinating because”

it is clearly important and it clearly is inscrutable. And then there's one other clue that will become the focus of almost a century of investigation. The ransom note ransom note ransom note ransom ransom note they found a ransom note up in the babies room. The ransom note was simple and it's demands. Give us $50,000 and you'll get your baby back. This was the great depression and malindburgs had money. The note was written in broken English and there was a strained red circular symbol at

the bottom of it. We warn you for making anything public or for notify the police.

But here's another curious fact. When Benny Gow and Ann Lindberg first went up to the baby's

bedroom, they didn't see a ransom note. It was only later when Lindberg himself went up there that he discovered it. It was sitting on the window sill which leads to another puzzling question. There was a howling when that night. If an envelope with a ransom note in it was sitting by a warp shutter and it was. How is it not swept to the floor by the wind? Also kind of curious? Lindberg didn't open the envelope to read the ransom demand. He waited for the police to arrive.

Outside the imprint of the ladder in the ground showed that it had been placed to the right of the window. It's height meant that it had to be at least two feet below the sill. Declimate to the bedroom from that position and then climb out again with a baby in hand, you'd practically have to be an Olympic gymnast. They found the ladder on the ground 75 feet away. Which means the kidnapper would have had to drag a heavy ladder with a baby under his arm.

It just doesn't seem plausible. Do you want more? We got more. At the time they had a dresser in front of the window with a small suitcase on it and toys on that and all of those were in tact. So they decided that if somebody got up there either through the front door or somehow

That's surprisingly one of the big questions that's always surrounded the kidnapping. It's

whether it was an inside job. Had Betty Gow handed the child down to somebody on the ladder instead of putting a little Charlie to bed. Had the cook or the butler, a husband and wife team,

“been in vows somehow, did someone working for the Lindbergg sell the family out to make some money?”

When the Lindbergg's were away during the week, Ali weightly the butler sometimes gave tours of the house to strangers who showed up wanting to get a peek of the famous family. Had he accidentally allowed the house to be staked out by a future intruder? When I saw that Ali weightly had given tours of the Hopewell house to sightseers. I got that's a bit odd. And when the police got to work, they found other things that were fishy as well.

The fingerprint man arrived who checked the room for fingerprints that there were no fingerprints. Seriously, no fingerprints? I should say, none that were usable at least. The lack of prints led investigators to conclude that the kidnappers wore gloves. The fact that there were no fingerprints in the room meant that there wouldn't have been white. And the otherwise white wouldn't Betty Gow's fingerprints beyond the crib or the mothers or the

fathers or anybody. The bureau, the window, the windowsill, any of those cloud surfaces that are why why was the room white? And so there you have it. A family that wasn't supposed to be there. A window that was warped and left open, a baby taken, a ladder, a chisel, and a ransom note left behind. And two parents desperate for answers. Ann Marllenberg, who wrote a number of books in her lifetime.

Published one in 1973 titled "Our of Gold, Our of Lead." It's a collection of her diary entries and letters from the year before her son was kidnapped in the year after. She writes that she found herself startled as she re-read the letters she wrote to friends and family

right after the kidnapping. It was, of course, a nightmare. When I first re-read them, I was

shocked and bewildered. How could I have been so self-controlled, so calm, so factual in the midst of

“horror and suspense? And above all, how could I have been so hopeful?”

That line jumps out because it's a reminder that despite her horror at discovering her son missing, there was hope that night. Surely they all thought the baby would be returned. Kidnappings were common during the depression and it was usually a straightforward transaction. You get your relative back and I get my money and we go our separate ways. Kidnapping wasn't even a federal crime until after Little Lindy was taken.

The police speculated early and it was, I think, poor speculation, but they speculated early that maybe the mob was involved in this, because it wasn't uncommon for things we would have children kidnapped by the mob. This is lawyer Richard Kay Hill Jr, whose book on the Kidnapping is titled "Hotman's Ladder." As long as you follow the instructions, you'd get your kid back. But this by any reasonable looking was done by an amateur. It wasn't done

“by the mob. If it had been in those days, it would have been done and done properly. This wasn't.”

In your book, you talk a little bit about how the press covered the Lindy case. Oh, it was insane. The entire thing wasn't saying. You have the press on day two, right? As soon as this kidnapping is announced, as soon as the press gets wind of it, you have all this press from New York City and other places descending on the Lindberg home. That's Candice Fleming. She wrote a young adult book about Lindberg. And when things get cordoned off by the police,

then you have press that are climbing trees trying to climb over walls and you have regular citizens as well, creeping up through the house through all these woods. Then you think about

that the first time I read it made me sick, because I thought all that evidence, right? That.

No one had gone out to the woods yet. Here's Richard Kayhill again. One of the things that happened is somehow, nobody knows for sure, could have been an operator, or could have been someone in law enforcement. This got leaked on the night of the kidnapping to the press and the press descended on the house. And two of the detectives, they saw press walking all over the place and looking at stuff and picking it up. So they picked up the evidence

and took it inside to preserve it. But any footprint evidence is compromised. Any other evidence, you know, fingerprint evidence is compromised. So that makes it difficult. It's nearly impossible to exaggerate the frenzy that overtook the fourth estate when it learned of the kidnapping. The New York evening post declared, "Kidnapper's must know that if they harm the baby. They face the possibility of being torn limb from limb by the people of the

or if they had none, they're only child. Kidnapped, the Lindberg baby? Who would dare?"

“And the humorist will Rajas. Why don't lynching parties expand their scope and take in”

kidnappings? The competition was fierce. With the relatively new medium of radio competing with newspapers for scoops. Every addition, you had newspapers that hired ambulances so that they could snap pictures and write copy and then race back to the city in this ambulance, blaring at sirens so that they could get a brand new story out for the evening edition. As much as Lindberg found reporters intolerable, he was willing to use the press to help him get a

son back, or so he hoped. Newspaper stories and ads conveyed messages to the kidnappers, and even issued a list of the food whose son should eat so the kidnappers would know what to feed him. And the day after the kidnapping, Lindberg issued an extraordinary statement to the press in which he offered a reward of $50,000 for the safer turn of his child. But then he went further, saying that he himself was prepared to meet with the kidnappers. We further pledge ourselves

that we will not try to injure in any way, those connected with the return of the child. He was effectively telling the kidnappers that they would not be prosecuted if they gave back little Lindy. Of course, Charles Lindberg had no authority to offer the kidnappers immunity,

“but he did it anyway. Who would dare challenge the great aviator?”

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By early morning, the local cops, and there were only two of them, had been pushed aside by the New Jersey State Police. The State Police were relatively new and had zero experience handling criminal investigations. Pretty soon, state troopers were the ones

“swarming all over the Lindberg property, turning the garage into a temporary police headquarters”

and bunking in the main house. In a letter to her mother-in-law and Maro Lindberg described the scene. This house is bedlong, hundreds of men stamping in and out, sitting everywhere, on the stairs on the pantry sink, the telephone goes all day and night. People sleep all over the floors on newspapers and blankets. The chief of the Jersey Police has not been able to sleep since the things started. I wish I had more to tell you. I know it is a terrible strain on you.

It is easier to be in the place where things are happening even if you can't do anything. I am in that position. The chief end was referring to was Colonel H. Norman Schwartzkopf, and his official title was Commander of the New Jersey State Police.

Yes, he was the father of Stormen Norman Schwartzkopf of the First Gulf War.

A decorated World War I veteran, he had founded the Jersey State Police in 1921. It's first big task was catching bootleggers, and he had trained the first few classes of troopers himself. In fact, if you visit the State Police headquarters, one of the first things you see is his statue, looming over the grounds. What have he supposed to do? Well, I've spotted a statue of Colonel Norman Schwartzkopf. H. Norman Schwartzkopf, the first superintendent of the

New Jersey State Police, right? So anyway, he's wearing kind of boots, breaches, he looks, he's got a moustache, he looks very 1930s, doesn't he? Schwartzkopf was 36 when Middle-enddy was kidnapped.

Paul, broad shoulder, and always impeccably dressed in his gray uniform and polished boots,

he carried himself with the rigid confidence of the military man he'd once been. Whatever his other skills, though, he knew absolutely nothing about how to investigate a crime. When Schwartzkopf was appointed as head of the New Jersey State Police, this fledgling organization, they're inventing the organization as they go along. That's Patrick Bammarak. I'm the great Grand F.U. of New Jersey Governor Harold Huffman. He knows all about Schwartzkopf because the two

men hated each other. In fact, his great Grand Uncle Fire Schwartzkopf in 1936. He's not a law enforcement

He was not the right man for the job. When the call about the Lindbergh kidnapping reached Schwartzkopf,

“he'd jumped in his police car and drove through the night. The gravel crunching beneath his tires”

is he arrived at the Lindbergh estate. Stepping into the house, Schwartzkopf surveyed the room with a commanding presence. He introduced himself, briskly. I'm here to take charge. This case is now under the jurisdiction of the New Jersey State Police. What he was doing, of course, was claiming turf. He was especially keen on keeping away another fledgling organization, the FBI, and its press savvy young leader Jay Edgar Hoover. He saw to it that a high-level pressure

investigator was pulled off the case. But the one person, he didn't keep away quite shocking, really. Was Charles Lindbergh himself. Anyone who looks into the Lindbergh kidnapping today is bound to be astonished at how deferential Schwartzkopf was to Lindbergh. It was simply assumed by Schwartzkopf and everyone else in America for that matter. The Lindbergh couldn't possibly be involved in his own son's kidnapping. Greg Algrin is a former detective turn Lindbergh

“kidnapping sleuth. And I think now we know that probably the parents should be looked at as”

much as anybody else. So why didn't that happen? The answer is that Lindbergh was the most

admired man in America. Schwartzkopf, for his part, practically worshiped the famous avianer. I would do anything he asked to me. Schwartzkopf was once quoted as saying. So when Lindbergh coldened that the priority should be on seeing to it that the ransom was paid, even if it meant the kidnappers got away with it. Schwartzkopf did not object. And when Lindbergh also told him that his household staff was above reproach and that he wouldn't

allow the state police to consider them potential suspects. Schwartzkopf went along with that as well. But I mean, if you couldn't demand answers from Lindbergh staff, how will you ever going to find out if someone on the inside had been involved? On a warm cloudless fall day, Poppy and I visited the scene of the crime. It had taken us weeks to get this visit approved. The Lindbergh home is now a halfway house for teenage girls. For several decades at least,

it's been owned by the state of New Jersey and visits from curious journalists I can tell you are not encouraged. In fact, when we arrived, we were met by a very large human being who, I know I probably shouldn't call him a bouncer except that he was, you know, a bouncer. He ordered his back to our car and told us not to return until we got rid of all of our electronic gear,

including our phones. When we were finally allowed in, we were introduced to a young resident who

“served as our guide. But our bouncer was never far behind. I lost my nerve. What are you going to do?”

I've told you I lost my nerve. What the hell? Now, I got to tell you. Being followed by this guy who could break our next in an instant, it did not instill in me the warm and fuzzies. Let's be honest, Poppy. It was not my finest moment as a journalist. I couldn't get out of there fast enough. Poppy and I debriefed afterwards. What happened, Joe, when we went inside? So, it takes us upstairs and takes us into what in 1931 was Charles Lindbergh Jr.'s bedroom.

It was a large room. It had the windows still there. And what was immediately kind of observable would it's quite a distance to cross out of the window over to the crib and out again. And then when we were on the ground floor looking up, it was very clear that it'd be hard to know what window. It's hard to, there's so many windows as huge. You'd need to know which one. Right. Which is, you know, of course, one more reason to think there was an insider involved. It's just, it's implausible

that somebody shows up there at a nowhere and picks exactly the right window when there are a dozen second floor windows in various places around the house. We then walked downstairs. There were two more rooms we were allowed to see, a library, and what had once been beddy gown's bedroom, which was to the left of the library and just below the baby's bedroom. We did a bit of a sound test. So, we shut the doors. I went up the stairs just to see if someone

had come through the front, but they have heard, and you said you could hear. Right. And don't

forget that there are a series of theories around this that, in fact, they never did go up the ladder

child out of the bed and either coming down the stairs with the child or handing it off to somebody

“who was on a ladder. Yeah. And I think I agree. If we'd open the front door and then you could hear”

right through it. It's just right there. It's just impossible. They had to go through the window. Right. Yes. That's right because the stairs are right next to the library. And, you know, that's where the family and the servants were sitting and now talking when it happened. We then asked the young woman whether she felt, you know, noise carriage, and she said it kind of did. Now everyone says it was a windy night, but it's, it is hard to imagine that it's the

baby had cried or cried out. They, they wouldn't be heard from where they were sitting. I kind of wonder if, I don't know. Again, if was it an insider that the baby recognized it. Back outside, we looked up at the window again. The other thing we observed was that looking up at the window, it's, it's not a huge height. I wouldn't be scared to go on a ladder to that window. Yeah. I agree with you on that. The issue then still becomes though, you know, how difficult

was it to crawl into the room from wherever the ladder happened to be positioned. It would have been

“difficult. Yeah. I don't know. Like, an athletic man, I think could get you, get in. Good”

off of body strength. You pull yourself in from the ledge. It's a solid window to pull yourself in. Easy for you to say, Bobby, could you see what's happening here? Poppy and I, we couldn't have been at the house for more than an hour. And yet, you know, here we are now. Our minds are just flooded with questions and theories and arguments and about how in the world the strangers of kidnappings took place. And now we really do understand why all the people we're interviewing

got so hooked on a Lindbergh case because you know something? We're hooked too. Let's do a quick review. How did the kidnapper or kidnappers know that the family would be in Hopewell on a Tuesday night

when the Lindberghs were never in Hopewell on a Tuesday night? Why was Lindberghs so hell bent

“on keeping a staff from being interviewed? How did the kidnappers know which room the baby was sleeping in?”

I don't know which window with the only window in the whole house that didn't latch and there was only attempts made of one window because there's only one set of ladders in prison in the mud. So whoever put that ladder up against the house knew that that was the only window you could get in. Oh, it didn't own it. Was it really possible for the kidnapper to pull himself into the baby's room using that ladder and then carry the baby out without being heard? There's somebody inside of the

house that were only five people in the house took the baby out of the crib and walked out the front door and then somebody was outside and they gave that baby to somebody outside or somebody put the ladder outside and then somebody from inside the house picked the baby out of the crib and handed it to somebody on the ladder. Why didn't Lindbergh check outside when he heard that cracking noise? Why didn't the baby cry out? Why didn't the family dog bark? They had a dog that barked at everything

named Wagush, Wagush didn't bark. Why did Charles Lindbergh skip that dinner and man hadn't that night? Lindbergh had a speaking engagement at the Waldorf Historia and Midtown Manhattan at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 1st, 1932. Not only would get no show, he left a room full of people waiting to hear him speak and instead of speaking there he drove to Hopewell. What would make of the fact that Lindbergh had previously hidden the child from Anne and Betty Gow as a

practical joke? I mean that's an awful, that's something I would jump out of any law enforcement investigator. Did the tours the Butler gave to gate crashes allow someone a chance to scope out the house? Why was Lindbergh so insisted that the FBI be kept away? Why? Why? Why? The questions are endless. Before we leave you, we needed jump ahead 10 weeks to May 12, 1932. Most of the press has left Hopewell. About four miles from the Lindbergh mansion, a truck driver named William Allen, pulls over to the

side of the road. He has to pee. He steps cautiously into the underground. His boots, sinks slightly into the soft ground. He moves a few paces deeper, passive trees. When he spots something, it's a strange shape, nearly entirely hidden by branches and moss. As Allen moves closer, his chest tightens. He suddenly realizes that what he's seeing is a child's body.

He freezes and horror stops breathing for a second. He sees a fractured skull in a face that's

take a look. When his partner returns with the same horror in his eyes, they know what they have to do.

“They rush into town and report what they found. The police retrieved the body and take it to the”

morgue. They're pretty sure they know whose body it is. Betty Gow has brought to the station and shown the

corpse. Sure enough, she identifies it as Charles Lindbergg Jr. The great aviator confirms it as well.

“This is no longer a kidnapping case. It's now a murder investigation.”

There are two shocks in that six and a half week period where one is the shock of the kidnapping

in March and then on May 12th, 1932 when the body is discovered that afternoon, that's the second

“shock. Despite the greatest man hunting history, the baby's murder was not discovered until his little”

body was found here in the woods near his home two months later. This area had been searched thoroughly and nothing had been found. So where in the world did that body come from? That's next time.