EP01 | The Broken Window

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 he is what exactly is, and if you look at the numbers, the numbers are false, the numbers are corrupt, it was a rig election, 100% and people know

“that that's why you have people marching all over the United States right now. They know”

it was a rig election. Conspiracies are like Japanese not-weed. 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 screwed. 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 appended. Conspiracies are now part of American life of course.

“The JFK assassination, a riged 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 see people agree on what actually happened. And such is the case of the subject of this podcast, the Lindberg Kidnapping. It took place a very long time ago, 1932. A child of a famous man was Kidnapping 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 that 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 can we talk about at night? What else would we keep our wives

“up late at night talking about if not for the Lindberg baby case?”

I'm Jonah Serra and from the free press, this is the Lindberg Conspiracies episode 1, the Broken Window. I'm going to start with that execution I mentioned. It's the night of April 3rd, 1936. Bruno Richard Hoffman, the man convicted of Kidnapping and killing Charles Lindberg's 20-month-old son, is strapped in the electric chair. He's about to die. The boy's father, Charles Lindberg, is the most famous and most admired

man in America. Howton, who was arrested two years earlier at his home in the Bronx, has become the most hated man in America. With the execution twice delayed, most Americans are anxious, no they're eager for him to breathe his last breath. In fact, in Trent and New Jersey, where the execution is taking place, parties are being thrown. I got interested in the Lindberg Kidnapping from listening to my parents talk about

growing up in Trenton 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 Hoffman die for the kidnapping of a Lindberg baby. And so, Silent and Stalin, Hoffman 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 Trenton. By 847 p.m., 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

The Lindberg 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 Hoffman 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 Lindberg 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 Lindberg drive light. And then this Robert Zorn, who says he knows who really kidnapped the Lindberg 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 with his large megaphone as I can possibly find. Or Renel Delmont, who used to run the popular website,

the Lindberg kidnapping hoax. This is drama. This is an opera. This is Vaudeville.

“Here's the thing though. These people who found themselves caught up in the Lindberg case.”

They're 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 Lindberg 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. Apparently, 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 Lindberg 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, driving up is trees rolling each side. Yeah, it's quite a little hike, and close you get to it more isolated, it seems.

Can't see the house, it's nothing indicating it. Driving a half a mile and we still can't see the house. That, in fact, is exactly why Lindberg chose the spot.

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

reporters had searched excessively for any morsel of news about the man that they have 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 had published the location. Lindberg's father-in-law, a wealthy financier and diplomat named

if you don't have better protection. Lindberg'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 their buttman. Get out of here before I call the police! Yet, when a writing for the Saturday evening post visited Lindberg 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 Lindberg 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, Lindberg 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 Lindberg'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 Lindberg'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. We'd be in Hopewell.

And why were the Lindberg's in Hopewell at night? Well, for the most ordinary of reasons. Charlie had had a cold and Anne 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 Lindberg Mani, a reimagining of a Lindberg 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”

Marrow household in Engelwood, and was waiting for little Charlie's return. She got a call that morning. Get the Hopewell immediately. When she arrived, she quickly took over the care of the baby. Around 7.30, 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 windows 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 Lindberg's nursemate and Anne Marrow, Lindberg, 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 shudder will come back to haunt her. She then goes downstairs and has dinner with Elsie Waitley, who is the cook for the Lindberg's.

“The baby falls quickly asleep. Soon, Charles Lindberg returns home or does he?”

Eight, the family hears the approach of a car, and everyone assumes that it's a car in Lindberg coming home. But it isn't until around 830 that they hear the honk 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 Lindberg has a bath and then heads down to his study. The exact time of the kidnapping, it's not known precisely. We do know the Charles Lindberg reported

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 Lindberg 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 that he goes to check on Charlie and discovers that he is going.

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

Anne thought at first that her husband might have hidden the child as a practical joke. Believe 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. Lindberg, do you have the baby?”

When he tells her no, he runs upstairs himself and get this even before he enters the bedroom.

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 ladder impressions, basically, two impressions with a ladder had sunk into the mud. They found a set of footprints leading away from the ladder. They followed him about 70 to 75 feet away and they found part of a ladder, two pieces of a ladder, clue two, the ladder. I mean the ladder is a really

crucial piece of evidence. Because you know the ladder is involved, right? Because that seems

it, 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 ladder. He's at conspiracy, I guess you'd say, a fixing an auto 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 ladder 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 ransom note they found a ransom note up in the babies room. The ransom note was simple and its demands. Give us $50,000 and you'll get your baby back. This was the great depression and Malinburg's

had money. The note was written in broken English and there was a strange 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 Anne 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 it 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. To climb into the bedroom from that position and then climb out again with a baby in hand you 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 intact. So they decided that if somebody got up there either through the front door or somehow made it up the ladder, somebody had to pass the baby out. That's surprisingly one of the big questions

it'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 Lindberg sell the family out to make some money? When the Lindbergs were away during the week, Ollie 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 Ollie weightly had given tours of the hopeful house to sightseers. I thought,

"Oh, 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 said there were no fingerprints. Seriously? No fingerprints? I should say. None that were usable at least.

there were no fingerprints in the room meant that that wound had been wiped. And the otherwise

wipe wouldn't Betty Gow's fingerprints beyond the crib or the mothers or the fathers or anybody. The view, the rib, the window, the window, so any of those tied surfaces that are why why was the room wiped? 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. And moral Lindbergg, 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 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. Kidnapping's 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 earlier and was, I think, poor speculation, but they speculated earlier that maybe the mob was involved in this because it wasn't uncommon for the people to have children kidnapped by the mob. This is lawyer Richard K. Hill Jr., whose book on the kidnapping is titled "Hotman's Ladder."

“And as long as you follow the instructions, you'd get your kid back. But 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 Lindberg case. Oh, it was insane. The entire thing was insane. 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

head to 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 K. Hill 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 landed the kidnapping. The New York evening post declared, kidnappers must know that if they harm the baby, they face the possibility of being torn limb from limb by the people of the U.S.

“Our hers reporter named Adela Rogers wrote, "Remember, Little Lindy was everybody's baby,”

or if they had none, they're only child. Kidnapped, Delinburg baby? Who would dare?" And the humorist will Rogers. 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, layering it's 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 them. And the day after the kidnapping, Lindberg issued an extraordinary statement to the press in which

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?”

By early morning, the local cops and there were only two of them that 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, Anne Maro Lindberg described the scene.

This house is bedlan, 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 Anne was referring to was Colonel H. Norman Schwartzkoff, and his official title was Commander of the New Jersey State Police.

Yes, he was the father of Stormen Norman Schwartzkoff of the First Golf 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 moving over the grounds. What have you supposed to do? Well, I've spotted a statue of Colonel Norman Schwartzkoff,

“H. Norman Schwartzkoff, 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? Schwartzkoff was 36 when Little Lindy was kidnapped.

Tall, broad shouldered, 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 Schwartzkoff 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 Hoffman. He knows all about Schwartzkoff because the two

men hated each other. In fact, his great Grand Uncle Fire Schwartzkoff in 1936, he's not a law enforcement person, he's a military man who understands vehicles, logistics, maneuvering in the field, he was not the right man for the job. When the call about the Lindbergh kidnapping which Schwartzkoff, he'd jumped in his police car and drove through the night. The gravel crunching beneath his tires as he arrived at the Lindbergh estate. Stepping into the house, Schwartzkoff surveyed the room

with a commanding presence. He introduced himself, griscally. 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 Schwartzkoff was to Lindbergh. It was simply assumed by Schwartzkoff 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 turned 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. Schwartzkoff, for his part, practically worshiped the famous avianer. I would do anything

priority should be on seeing to it that the ransom was paid, even if it meant the kidnappers got

away with it. Schwartzkoff 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. Schwartzkoff went along with that as well. But I mean, if you couldn't demand answers from Lindbergh's

“staff, how were 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 us 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 beyond. 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, so you take this upstairs and take this 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, 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,

of course, one more reason to think there was an insider involved. It's just, it's implausible that somebody shows up there out of 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 guy'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 where 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

and that whoever couldn't have the child actually did it by going up the stairs, taking the 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 if the

baby had cried or cried out 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. Back outside we looked up at the window again. The other thing we observed was that looking up at the window 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 wouldn't 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

interviewing got so hooked on the limber case because you know something we're hooked to.

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 limberers would never in Hopewell on a Tuesday night?”

Why was limber 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 you only window and the whole house it didn't latch and there was only a tent made of one window because it's the only one set of ladder in prison in the mud. The whoever put that ladder up against the house knew that that would be the only window you could get in. How did he have known that?

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 limber 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 Wagus, Wagus didn't bark. Why did Charles Lindberg skip that dinner and man hadn't that night? Lindberg had a speaking engagement at the wall dog of the story uh and Midtown Manhattan at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 1st, 1932, not only with get no show,

he left a room full of people waiting to hear him speak and instead of speaking there, he drove to hope well. What would make of the fact that Lindberg 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 at any law enforcement investigator. Did the tours the Butler gave to gate crashes allow someone a chance to scope out the house? Why was Lindberg 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 hope well. About four miles from the Lindberg 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 sink 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 half decomposed and half still recognizable. He hurries back to the car and he tells his partner to 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 mortg. They're pretty sure they know whose body it is. Betty Gowell was brought to the station and shown the corpse. Sure enough, she identifies it as

Charles Lindberg 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.

“Just to let you know, if you want to binge this whole series today and without ads,”

you should become a paid subscriber to the free press. Our paid subscribers can listen to all six episodes right now with no ads and we'll gain all the other benefits of a paid free press subscription. That's access to our journalism, podcasts, community features and event perks.