EP02 | The Great Aviator

- This style is very good.

- That's a whole lot. - Cool, what do you say? - Stift on the bar and test computer, focus management, finance, and so on. - Negar, but that's not what you said. - Eh, just a few photos of the launch of the launch of "Shining" market. - It's very good. - It's very good.

- Hold your money to her, with this style. - Before we dive in, for a very limited time, the free press is offering 20% off paid subscriptions. That means you can listen to all six episodes of the "Linber Conspiracies" right now,

add free without waiting. Head to THEP.com to upgrade. - Charles Linberg was not the world's friendliest guy.

“- I think when I came to dealing with aircraft,”

he was probably a mechanical genius, but I don't think I'd like him. - A genius sure, but not a very nice person seems to be the unanimous opinion among "Linber Galegis." He made his wife fly with him in those 1920 era planes,

when she was pregnant and had morning sickness. He played ridiculous practical jokes that no one else found funny, like putting ice down someone's back at dinner party. In an effort to prevent his son from being coddled, he could be quite cool.

- Little in these nurse, Betty Gow, was not allowed to pick him up if he started crying. Here's one of our "Linber Experts" Jim Bomb. - He built a chicken-wired pen in January of 1932, up in North Jersey, which gets very cold,

and he put him in this pen outside for hours, and nobody was allowed to go grab him, the kid was crying, and he said, "No, don't touch him." - He was also a big proponent of the so-called "Science of Ugenics," which claims that people with superior genes,

i.e. upper-class white people, should only reproduce with others who shared the same race and class. Once while driving us around to key locations, Jim Davidson put it even more bluntly. - He just was an asshole, he was a awful person.

- Candace Fleming, in writing a biography of "Linber" found it unavoidable. - I kept bumping up against Charles Lindberg

“and Charles Lindbergh's very weird personality, right?”

He is a most unusual and unpleasant man. - But this reality only became clear much much later. If you read any account of Charles Lindbergh in the 1920s,

you'll discover that there has never been

and I do mean never. - An American hero or celebrity who even came close. - When he crossed the Atlantic, he was one of the first big new media stars in a world where there were radios,

there were national daily newspapers, there were movie tone reels, things like that. - This is a friend Nick Lesby. - He was a public figure in a way that couldn't have existed 10 years before.

He was everywhere, he embodied Americanness, and he was triumphant, a mixture of moxie and technology, and then the kidnapping helped to make him a tragic hero. - But then came the rise of Hitler in the late 30s and the beginnings of World War II in the early 40s.

- He becomes not that great hero that we thought he was in the 20s.

“- You mean the father comes about because he embraces the Nazis?”

- Yes, he embraces the Nazis. - The revelation that Lindberg believes strongly in new genics along with the realization that he approved of the Nazis has led some of the Lindberg conspiracies to some fruity dark places.

The darkest of all is the theory more widespread than you think. The Charles Lindberg may have somehow been involved in the death of his own son.

- I'll always believe Lindberg did this

in some way as responsible. - Could that really be possible? - I'm Jonocero, and this is the Lindberg conspiracies from the free press. Episode two, the Great A theater.

- How many times did you take a flight last year? - Myself, I've lost capital, but you know, it's got to be 20, 30. And you know what, I don't even think about it. But a true wasn't like that in the 1920s. One thing people tend to forget is that flying was really dangerous back then.

Air travel, the kind of air travel we take for granted today.

It didn't exist. And though Pilots promoted air travel back then by doing stunts at county fairs,

“the truth is way too often the planes would crash.”

- They did, oh yeah, the engine would just stop in mid-flight. - Candice Fleming. - Or you'd land badly and the whole thing would just flip. Yeah, so it was unbelievably dangerous. And lots of people had tried to get across the Atlantic

and had died at the process, men and women. At the time, crossing the Atlantic was the holy grail of flight. If a pilot could pull it off, it would send a signal that flying was for real, not just something for deer devils, but a genuine mode of travel.

A wealthy hotel magnet offered a reward of $25,000

to anyone who flew nonstop from New York to Paris.

That's the equivalent of $450,000 today. And a handful of flyers who either brave or foolhardy or both took the bait. Lindberg was one of them. He was 25 years old.

- It also helped that the end of the 1920s and we've had this decade of excess

“and what many Americans thought was immorality.”

And here comes this wholesome, handsome, seemingly moral, young man who kind of drops literally for a lot of Americans literally sort of dropped out of the sky and ended up as part of that race to get from New York to Paris.

- Imagine Roosevelt Field, early in the morning of May 20, 1927. It's a large dirt, air strip and wrong island that the military used to train pilots during World War I. The early morning air is charged with anticipation and excitement. Spectators have arrived to see Lindberg's historic departure

but they're outnumbered by all the journalists and photographers swarming the field. Their flash bulbs are popping as they capture every moment to this groundbreaking event. Lindberg stands next to his aircraft, the spurred of St. Louis,

named after his sponsor, the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce. It poses briefly for the photographers his face set in a determined expression.

“The single-endin mono-plane, sleek and silver,”

gleams under the rising sun. They didn't have TV cameras back then, of course, but here's Jimmy Stewart starring as Lindberg in the 1957 film, the spirit of St. Louis. It was directed by Billy Wilder.

- Well, I guess I might as well go. - Lindberg designed and built the plane himself and flies it alone. And there's something about that solo American hero doing this unbelievable feat.

Everybody thought Lindberg was gonna die when it happened. - That's author Tom Dorty, who wrote a great book about Lindberg and his relationship to the press. - Like, all the experience pilots, they said, "Yeah, this kid is very courageous.

He has a lot of moxie, we really appreciate it." And it's really a shame he's gonna die in the cold Atlantic when he attempts to do this. - But, of course, he didn't die. - Now, for most of us, we can probably think of a generational moment

that we all universally experienced because of the media, I mean, to say, from my generation, it would have been in the Kennedy assassination, for another generation, the challenger, 9/11, you know, January 6, that you kind of glued to the set,

experiencing something for a prolonged period of time. - Radio was relatively new, and it allowed people to follow this incredible event in real time.

There was an experience they'd never known before.

- So, Lindberg takes off March 21st, Friday morning, and for the next 33 and a half hours, people are riveted to the news. Now, we don't have radio in the home yet, but we do have shortwave communication,

and a lot of major department stores and things have radio. So, we are getting instantaneous updates about Lindberg. So, he takes off, he flies over Newfoundland, and then he disappears, basically 18 hours until he spotted off the coast of Ireland,

and that anticipation all through Friday, they're all these accounts of, you know, as sports arenas, they stop the fight. So, everybody can stand up and say a prayer for Lindberg. He had her productions, they're stopped.

So, people can remember Lindberg, American families all across the nation, are saying a prayer for Lindberg at dinner, and so, when he lands in Paris, everybody feels this sense of participation

and this sense of joy. And then, he proves to be, you know, 25 years old handsome, dignified, modest.

a 10-22 pm on the 21st.

During his 30-plus hours in the air,

he'd flown 3,800 miles. He hadn't slept in 55 hours.

“As the news spread, that Lindberg would be landing that afternoon,”

and estimated 150,000 people flock to the airport to watch his descent. As the spirit of St. Louis approaches, the crowd's excitement builds to a fever pill. The plane touches down on the runway, it's wheels kicking up dust.

People cheer, they wave flags, they open champagne, while, of course, they do its friends. Lindberg exhausted the triumphant, taxes the plane to a halt, and met a sea of flashing cameras and clapping hands. And he instantly becomes the most famous,

the most beloved man in the world. So, he's this ascendant beloved character that united people in a way that is very difficult to think of today. I don't know if we ever in the 20th century had a character that the public so universally and so rapturously embraced.

After he returned home, Lindberg toured 82 cities in all of the then 48 states, with ticker tape parades and keys to the city and speeches to adoring crowds. President Calvin Coolidge awarded him the Medal of Honor in a distinguished flying cross.

He served as a paid consultant to transcontinental air transport in Pan Am, and is an unpaid consultant to the US government. He was in constant demand.

“Why do you think was such a big deal that he crossed the Atlantic?”

That he was the first across the Atlantic. He really symbolized for Americans. He really symbolized to this idea of American exceptionalism. That's Candace Fleming again. The fact that we had Americans had conquered science and technology

and had flown across the Atlantic, which had to many people was still sort of mysterious. They a lot of people, particularly pastors and reverence across the country and churches, actually preached that he was, you know, like of God.

God had given him this amazing gift to fly across the Atlantic.

So he really represented so much more than just a guy that did a stud flight across the Atlantic. The press of course couldn't get enough of him. The word paparazzi hadn't been coined yet, but everywhere he went, photographers were there, hoping to take an unguarded photo or get him to answer and off the cuff question.

There's celebrities who can handle being followed everywhere they go, but Charles Windberg was not one of them. He actually despised the attention. Unfortunately for him, he was also a handsome bachelor, which meant that the press interest in who he might marry was insane.

So, what's the question we all have ladies?

“Who is this handsome young man going to marry, right?”

The press of the age who's going to be his princess. And a couple of years later he picks Anne Morrow, who is the very smart, pretty daughter of a wealthy politician and businessman. And I think it says something about Limburg that he picks Anne, 'cause she was a very serious woman, brilliant woman in her own right,

who becomes his co-pilot navigator. Once reporters learned that he was dating Anne Morrow, they followed the couple everywhere, including their wedding and their honeymoon. In many ways Anne Morrow couldn't have been more different from her husband. She was petite, shy, intellectual, warmhearted and moody as one author described her.

She was a sophisticated woman who'd grown up in a wealthy household. He, by contrast, was basically a rogue, who'd been raised on a small farm in Minnesota. He met her in Mexico City where her father, Dwight, was the American ambassador to Mexico. And he woulder in part by taking her flying with him. She founded thrilling.

Tell us a little bit about what their marriage was like. Their early marriage and definitely wanted to marry a hero. So she looked at him, sort of, white.

I'd believe he could do no wrong, believe he could always stay in control.

He always was in control, matter of fact. But she was okay with that, because she really believed that he always knew what was right, and he could get things done. And she did what he told her to do. So Anne Morrow becomes an exceptional pilot in her own right,

because Lindbergh wants her to be a flying partner. He expects her to be this sort of partner, not just a woman who's going to stay home with their kids,

But he wants her actually co-piling, navigating in those airplanes with him,

“because he expects to do far more flights than just across the Atlantic.”

Charles and Anne wanted a big family, and they wasted no time. Married in May, 1929, Charles Jr., Little Indy, was born 13 months later in June of 1930. He was instantly the light of his mother's life, of course. Here's Anne describing her little boy in a letter to her mother-in-law. The baby can wind up your music box by himself.

He's more interested in the elephant and says something that sounds like elephant, but he still prefers the great pussycat with a flat tail to take to bed at night. Anne wrote that letter in January 1932. The next letter she wrote to her mother-in-law was on March 2nd. Its purpose was much, much, sadder.

To give her some details of that awful event of March 1, when her precious baby was kidnapped. And also, to give her some hope.

“The detectives are very optimistic, though they think it will take time”

and patience. In fact, they think the kidnappers have gotten themselves into a terrible jam. So much pressure, such a close net over the country, such sympathy for us, and the widespread publicity, every police force on its metal, that their one hope is to get the baby back unharmed.

Café is in a best form. With Cuba, via a café of Knopf-Drucks on Gano's Moment, with the new Cuba-Wann Capsule-Machine von Chivo, full-mundig arroman, thanks to innovative press brutality,

and over 17-year-old coffee, for every match. Alébe Premium Café is already in the 1920s. And that is now the Cuba-Wann Capsule-Machine in Diner Chivo-Fiale and of Chivo-DE.

Anne Moral-Linberg wasn't the only one who believed her husband was always

right. So did Norman Schwartz-Coff, the head of the New Jersey State Police, who was in charge of the investigation. Except he wasn't in charge. Incredibly, Charles Linberg was in charge of investigating the kidnapping of his own son. And every decision that needed to be made, Schwartz-Coff deferred to the Great Avierator.

You may recall that one of the first things Linberg told Schwartz-Coff, was that he had such complete trust in every member of his household staff that they could not be questioned as if they were suspects. And Schwartz-Coff agreed. You know what I find crazy about this, Jo,

is if we look at modern cases, it's so in the opposite, in the sense that John Bernay's parents number one suspect. Any time a kid goes missing now, you look at the parents.

“Well, I think it goes well beyond that. I mean, if you want to understand why so many”

people think that Linberg may have been involved, it's because he was putting himself in charge of the investigation. And he was sealing the police off from all these potential areas to investigate.

And you know, in addition, there's always been beliefs that somebody on the inside must

to play a role. And it's hard to imagine that Linberg himself didn't have those thoughts, even if he wasn't involved. And yet, there he was not letting the cops do their job. And it just sort of think, why? I'm going to put one note in defensive Linberg though. If you believe his innocent, he's a father out of his mind,

in grief and worry. He's also arrogant, so he thinks he can do a better job. But also, the cops were a new invention. It wasn't like he necessarily thought these men really knew what they were doing, and he probably thought he could do a better job. So there's that. And he also probably didn't want to think that the people in his own household were involved. He did trust these people, and he felt her responsibilities to him.

As the weeks went by, one especially aggressive investigator, Harry Walsh, did start to suspect that a maid who worked for the Linberg's in-laws in England might have played a role. Her name was Violet Sharpe. She was young, British, unmarried, and given that she was working for a cultured, wealthy family, perhaps a little too carefree for her own good. Walsh was a Jersey city cop,

so utter sports coughs control, and he didn't just interrogate people. Harry Walsh rallbeat them, and a series of increasingly hostile interviews, Walsh caught Violet in a handful of lies. The gist of it was that she was out on the

town the night before the kidnapping. At first, she told Walsh he'd gone to the movies with

Walsh thought she might have tipsed someone off that night. Here's Richard Kale. She lied about where she was because she didn't want to admit as a servant of a prominent family that she went with a man she barely knew to a speak easy. It would have been a major scandal for her, and I could have cost her her job. With each interview, she became increasingly distraught. When she learned that Walsh was coming to interrogate her

for a fourth time, she screamed. "I won't go! I won't! I won't!" She ran up to her room, where she had some cyanide. That's not as strange as you might think. Women in the 1920s sometimes used it to delout their clothes. Shops swallowed it and died within minutes. In the immediate aftermath of her death, Walsh was widely criticized for having treated her so harshly. All these years later, her suicide has caused any number of modern-day investigators to conclude

that she was involved in the kidnapping. Author Richard Kale, however, is not one of them. If you were a poor servant in those days and you worked for a prominent family, scandal like that could ruin you because no other prominent family would take you. Violet Sharp was just another victim of the limber kidnapping. Not directly, but certainly

“indirectly, she had nothing to do with it. So, the police investigation, how would you summarize it?”

That's my producer Poppy doing a little interrogating of her own with Jim Davidson. I mean, it's very unusual that limber was the in charge of it, but it was the 1930s. So, how do we put it in context? Was it particularly bad or was that just the best they could do? Well, I know I think it was the best they could do because first of all, we have limber running the investigation up until they find the body.

And there were lots of clues, and in the Laura's of the Taze book, the Great Limber Colour Ballouk, she talks about, you know, all these reporters are in hope well. But they start going out and they're finding all of these clues. Laura V. Tray was a reporter for the New York evening journal who covered the kidnapping and wrote a quicky book about it before the baby's body had even been found. She was the first conspiracist when you get right down to it. She thought the kidnapping

was nothing but a hoax, and they reported the state police and the state police never investigated them.

And there are dozens of clues that popped up that the state police never investigated. Now, is that because limber told them not to? I don't know. So, what did limber and the state police focus on? The main issue, of course, was on getting the baby back. Limber had a trusted confidant named Henry Breckenridge. Breckenridge knew someone who was connected to the mob, and he broke her to meeting between Limber and two mobsters who offered

to help find the child. After speaking with them, Limber wrote a letter authorizing them to act as a go between. In one of his most bone-headed moves and trust me, there were many. He actually

gave the mobsters a copy of the ransom note. Think about that for a second. The wording of the

ransom note. It's spelling mistakes. The amount of money the kidnappers were demanding. It was

“no longer a secret. Others who saw it would be able to copy it and pretend to be the kidnappers”

in the hopes of tricking Limber and to giving them the ransom money. Jay Edgar Hoover, who was keeping a close eye on the case, was appalled. And that wasn't all he was upset about. Less than four months earlier, Al Capone had been convicted of tax evasion. Not surprisingly, Capone claimed that he could get the Limber and baby back. But of course, he'd have to kind of a deal to stay out of prison first. Supposedly, he cooked up the scheme to kidnap the Limber

baby and tell the authorities he could get the kid back if he could get out of jail. And the day after the kidnapping is Lieutenant's Met at Limber House and said, you know, we can probably get your baby back. But I was going to have to have some freedom to get around and interact with all these other gangs and Limber contacted the federal government about it and who does he deal with

“but Elmer Airee. Airee was a Treasury Department investigator who had played a key role in Capone's”

tax evasion conviction. And he says there's no way he's going to get out of jail.

A few days after the kidnapping, a second ransom notoride. This one demanded $70,000 up from the original

symbol at the bottom. Dear Sir, we have warned you, note to make anything public, also notify

“the police. Now you have to take consequences. Means we will have to hold the baby until”

everything is quiet. We can note, make any appointments just now. We know very well what it means to us. It is really necessary to make a world affair out of this or to get your baby back as soon as possible to settle those affair in a quick way will be better for both. Don't be afraid about the baby. Keeping care of us day and night. We also will feed him according to the diet. We are interested to send him back in good health and ransom was made ours for $50,000 but now we

have to take another person to it and probably have to keep the baby for a longer time as

we expect it. So the amount will be $70,000. $20,000 in $50 bills, $25,000 in $20 bills, $15,000 in $10 bills,

and $10,000 in $5 bills. Don't mark any bills or take them from one serial number. We will form

“you later where to deliver the money. But we will not do so until the police is out of the case”

and the papers are quiet. The kidnapping we prepared in years so we are prepared for everything. And who did Lindberg give it to? Not the state police? No, he gave it to his Momster Medalman. Let me tell you a little something by the way about the mob and the kidnapping. The kidnapping was actually costing the mob money because vehicles were being stopped as the police searched for the baby. And though the cops obviously didn't find little Lindy, they did find plenty

of illegal booze. It was the tail end of prohibition and a Lindberg kidnapping had become an

occupational hazard. A few days later, a third-note shirt-up. This one is going directly to Breckenrich.

Dear Sir, Mr. Condon may act as go-between. You may give him the $70,000. We have notified you already in what kind of bills. We warn you not to set any trap in any way. If you or someone else will notify the police, there will be a further delay. After we have the money in hand, we will tell you where to find your boy. You may have an airplane ready, it is about 150 miles away. But before telling you the address,

a delay of eight hours will be between. With each passing day, Lindberg became increasingly desperate. He attended a sails. He continued to play footsie with mobsters even after it was cleared to everyone else they had no idea where the baby was. Ransom notes kept arriving, meetings at all hours, and the mail just poured in. In the letter to her mother-law and said that the state police had sorted the letters by subject matter.

Dreams, 12,000, sympathy, 11,500, suggestions, 9,500, Kranks, 5,000. Isn't it surprising the number of people who have written their dreams to us? Also the demands for money have been very shocking. The number of people who say if we will hand over such in such an amount, they will deliver the child. On March 8th, a new character walked onto the state, a blustery, valuable, narcissistic, retired school principal named John F. Condon.

Myself, I would describe him pretty simply. He was a big bullshitter. 72 years old, Condon lived in the Bronx and he called himself "jafsy". John F. Condon say "jafsy". By the time it was over, kid become as much a part of the kidnapping story as Lindbergh himself, which everyone agrees is exactly how he wanted it. Opinions about him, I have to say, a pretty much unanimous. Do you think John Condon was a flimplamman?

“I mean, I don't. I think John Condon was just a goof. He was very self-important and wanted to”

be involved in everything. That's which it came again. And then of course, once it was revealed, he was the go-between. I think he loved the media attention and he reveled in it. Seven days into the kidnapping, Lindbergh had given up on the mob and was looking for a new go-between. Someone who truly had a line to the kidnappers and couldn't negotiate the release of his son. Inexplicably, almost absurdly, Condon became that trusted intermediary. He did it by writing a letter

to his local paper, the Bronx Home News. In its utter pomposity, the letter was classic Condon and the editors of the Home News couldn't resist putting it on the front page. With a view to assisting the brave Colonel and his devoted wife, Mrs. Lindbergh,

With his little fingers causing the joy of which offers no parallel in the world,

“in which only a mother can experience. I make an offer to the kidnappers.”

In addition to the $50,000 offered by the Colonel, I offer $1,000 which I have saved from my salary. If the one who handed the Colonel son out of the window to the man on the ladder, we'll go to a Catholic priest and confess his or her transgression, giving the child unharmed to any priest whom the kidnapper will name. I stand ready in person at my own expense to go anywhere, alone on land or water,

to give the kidnappers the extra money and promise never to utter his name to anyone.

Here's another one of those weirdly suspicious things. It appears that the kidnappers are at least the people who claim to be the kidnappers read the Bronx Hall News. Who knew? Because the following night, Condent found an envelope from the kidnappers,

“although honestly, who could say if they were the real kidnappers?”

Telling them to get the money from Lindberg and put three words in an ad in a different newspaper the New York American once he succeeded. The three words were money is ready. Spelled M-O-N-Y, I-S-R-E-D-Y. Inside the envelope was a second envelope intended for Lindberg alone. It said that day the kidnappers had authorized Condent to be their go-between. Once Lindberg saw that letter at 3 a.m. on March 10th, after Condent drove to Hopewell,

he agreed to work through this man he'd never met before. It isn't possible to know

whether Jafsi had actually intended to be the intermediary. It is original letter to the Bronx Home News, he never makes that offer. But once it happened, he embraced the role with Gusto. The old narcissist was at the center of everything and he could not have been happier. Here's Poppy talking to Richard Kael. I do want to ask you about Condent. Jafsi is the roast infuriating in the wing, red-haring kind of person in the whole thing. No doubt.

What do you make of him? Is he just a chance so who we though his way into the case? How do we deal

“with him? Oh god how long do you have? Here's the thing with Condent. People say oh he wrote to”

become a go-between. No we didn't. That is not what he wrote. When you look at the actual letter he sent. He sent to a local publication called The Bronx Home News. People say why did he pick that local publication? Is it because he knew that the kid afterwards said no, he knew the editor and he knew his letter would get in there. Whereas if he wrote to the bigger ones it might not. And his actual letter that he wrote, he idolized Lindberg. Great man like Lindberg has to

have to resort to speaking with gangsters and he got all worked up. And the reason Lindberg trusted him, that letter in the second envelope also had the strange symbol at the bottom. The one that was on the original ransom note. So Condent was the only one who claimed to be in contact with the kid deficit. Got a note with that symbol. There's a lot of other ones that you know that came forward and they were cranks. But he had the note that had the symbol. So as a result,

whether he believed him or whether he thought that he was, you know, in on it with the kid and for whatever, Lindberg had no choice but to go along with the guy because that symbol made it pretty clear that he was talking to the right people or person. Okay, this, jaff see drives me completely bananas because on one level, it's really suspicious that he puts it in the Bronx

News and then lo and behold someone responds that's reading that. Because it's always too much

of a coincidence. But it also could mean jaffes involved that it was planned from the beginning. And there are certainly people who believe that as we will get to shortly. He's a 72-year-old man who's really not the brightest bulb. So I have a hard time thinking that he was involved. But there are various theories that put him at the center of the whole kidnapping. With jaffes see on the scene, the action now moves to a cemetery in the Bronx.

Or rather to two cemeteries where he meets with the man he believes is the kidnapper. These meetings will later become the focus of enormous scrutiny. The prosecutors will use them to help send Bruno Hopman to the electric chair. But the modern-day skeptics will point to those same meetings to show that Bruno's trial had been a shame.

The first meeting took place on March 12th in Woodland Cemetery, which was and is New York's upscale burial ground for the famous and powerful.

According to Condon, and as prone to exaggeration as he was, this is the only version we have.

“He and the kidnapper sat on a bench and talked calmly for an hour and ten minutes.”

The man called himself John, so of course the newspapers quickly dubbed them Cemetery John. He told Condon that the baby was still alive. That he and others had spent a year planning the crime, and that others, the newspapers, had fingered his possible suspects like Betty Gow, had nothing to do with it. Jaffee claimed he had monitors the kidnapper for raising the ransom demand by $20,000.

Cemetery John agreed to send the baby sleeping clothes as proof that little Indie was still alive. Sure enough, a sleeping suit was soon delivered. Of course, it could have been just one that they'd seen in a photograph and then bought in a store. There was a lag of about three weeks between the two meetings. In another letter to her mother-in-law, Ann Maro Lindberg attributed the delay to the non-stop tabloids

scrutiny. The herald tribune had a good short editorial by Walter Littman called "let Lindberg alone," quoting Charles' statement about feeling that he did not have to report every action of his, and that he should be left free to carry on his actions privately. The herald tribune and the times and others have been very good, but

“the tabloids I believe have cost us this terrible delay in waiting. We don't know what in the future.”

I think such papers are really criminal. The second meeting took place at St. Raymond's Cemetery, a sprawling grounds near the East River. This meeting, and again, it's only Jeff's account, was much briefer.

Condon said that he handed Cemetery John a small box with $50,000 in it, not the $70,000 the kid never

had demanded. Nonetheless, Cemetery John grabbed the box and without waiting to count the money ran off into the woods. He promised to share details of how the baby would be returned. The Lindberg's would just have to be patient. Although Jeff's failed to retrieve the child, he emerged with a tale for the ages, which he told and retold in various permutations to the end of his days. Of course, as was always the case with Condon, one question

lingered. Was any of it true? If you believe that helpman is guilty, you basically have to believe Condon is who he says he is, which is just this impartial party who comes out of nowhere to become a principal player in the case, meeting the kidnapper in one cemetery, one night, and then a little later, meeting the kidnapper again in another cemetery, which is again, this kind of motion-picture detail. You know, like, sure, we're meeting in a cemetery,

you know, what is this Frankenstein? Oh, I'm so excited to be. That's where Nell Delmont, the woman who used to run the popular website, the Lindberg kidnapping hopes, and who has convinced that Lindberg was somehow involved in his son's kidnapping. Poppy and I met up with her, as well as ex-cop-grade organ, who made her own visit to St. Raymond's. Over the years, the cemetery has grown considerably, but the main difference between now and when

Jaffey met cemetery John, is that you can't just walk into it anymore. The best we could do was peer through a big, graded fence. Lindberg put helpman in the electric chair, there's no

“two ways to look at it. Here's another one of those crucial details that the Lindberg conspiracies”

delight in. The great abigator actually went to the cemetery with Condon, but while Jaffey went to meet cemetery John, Lindberg stayed in the car. The car was parked right around the corner, not far from the cemetery, but not right next to it either. This is Robert Zorn. Now Lindberg was

in a car, catty corner to St. Raymond's cemetery, where the second meeting took place,

okay, and it's from within that cemetery, he heard a voice yelling, "Hey Doc, hey Doc, okay." That was cemetery John shouting to Condon as Jaffey approached. Supposedly, he spoke in a German accent. During Hopman's trial, Lindberg would claim that he was absolutely sure, positive, that it was Hopman's voice he had heard saying, "Hey Doc, hey Doc." And so, two and a half years later, he's identifying that as having been Hopman's voice. It's positively ridiculous.

Here's where now again. But even if you heard a sound, even if you did here, could you say,

cop, who went to the cemetery with us. He's more agnostic about who did it, though he's convinced

“that no one person could have done it alone. Here's his insight as a former police investigator,”

and if I wouldn't have identified it to some reliable. Not because they're lying, it's not because they have a financial interest, not because they're part of a conspiracy in the world, but bank, it's just unreliable. I don't believe any of it's true. I don't believe there was a cemetery, John. This is ridiculous. The whole thing is cocoa. Poppy and I tried a little experiment. Are you yell to me, and I won't be able to hear it. I went to the spot where Lindbergh had

sat in the car, while Poppy stood by the cemetery gate pretending to be jafcity. There's no possible way. There you go. No possible way. I don't care if it was the dead of night, and there were no other cars around, and there was no noise. It can't be done. It's not about it.

And even if you can hear some voice, you can never say who's it is. You can never say it was a foreign

voice. They've proven it. There are articles in large journals about this, but even if you could, is my point. Would you put a man in the electric chair on that testimony? You couldn't. That's not

“in three years later. So did Lindbergh lie about hearing a German voice or hearing any voice?”

And if so, why? Did Condon exaggerate the account just to make himself seem more important or to help his hero somehow? Or was he in on the whole thing? Was this a setup? There are modern day investigators who are convinced that it absolutely was. Can you see why these events have spawned a dozen conspiracies? Author Thomas Dorty says the cemetery in Condon are ground zero

“for the various theories about the kidnapping. You have to believe Condon is who he says he is”

to believe that help him is the killer. Now, Condon is somehow in on the case, then that whole

scenario goes astray. In the next episode, they arrest their man Bruno Hoffman. They finally

napped someone for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr. And when they raid his house, what's written on the inside of his closet? The phone number of John F. Condon.