I’ve been to the Smithsonian and seen The Spirit of St. Louis hanging from the ceiling. It’s tiny. Charles Lindbergh became the first person to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic in that wee thing when he was only 25. And while Charles turned out to be not such a good guy (his antisemitism being one aspect), no one deserves to have their young son kidnapped and murdered.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: March 1, 1932--
Five years after the flight that brought international fame to his father, on the morning of March 1, 1932, it was discovered that 20-month-old Charles Jr. was missing from the family’s New Jersey home. Stuck into the windowsill was an envelope containing a poorly written ransom note demanding $50,000. At some point during the night a kidnapper had used a ladder to enter the child’s room.
A mass investigation coupled with media shitstorm ensued. A second note arrived via mail on March 6; the ransom was upped to $70,000. Shortly thereafter was a third note, and a fourth, to arrange a go-between to hand over the cash. More notes followed and eventually $50,000 was handed over to a stranger in early April who said the child could be found on a boat named Nellie at Martha’s Vineyard. But the child was not there, because Charles Jr. had been dead since the day after he was taken.
On May 12, a truck driver pulled over to piss and found the decomposed body of Charles Jr. less than five miles from the Lindbergh home. His skull was badly fractured. A servant at the home was ruthlessly interrogated and ended up taking her own life the following month, only to have her alibi check out.
The ransom bills had the serial numbers recorded, and in an investigation lasting over two years police tracked many of them, spent along the subway route between the Bronx and Manhattan. Part of the ransom was also gold certificates, and an observant gas station attendant coupled with an alert bank teller handling the certificates helped point toward a German immigrant with a criminal record named Richard Hauptmann. The evidence found in his home was overwhelming and he was tried, convicted, and executed via electric chair in 1936.
Hauptmann maintained his innocence, which murderers often do. Conspiracy theories ran rampant, but the evidence is convincing he did it. Charles Lindbergh went on to have five more children with his wife, as well as seven other children with three other women (while remaining married) in secret while stationed as a Brigadier General in Germany in the 1950s and 60s. None of the children knew who the occasional visitor of a father was until one of them read an article about Lindbergh in the mid 1980s, 10 years after Charles’s death, and the story of the secret Lindbergh children slowly unraveled.
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Great read!