The Kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's Son

by Read Listen Learn


Kidnapping is an ugly crime. Someone - it could be a man, woman or child - is snatched by criminals and taken to a hiding place while the kidnappers negotiate the ransom with the terrified family. The victims are usually rich and the criminals can net hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Sometimes motivations, other than just the money, may exist for the kidnapping: revenge, politics, racism, or as a cover for murder. Sometimes, the kidnapping is organised from inside the family – an 'inside job' – by someone who knows the family's routines and the household security system. But, perhaps the most unsettling of kidnappings is the kind when hardened criminals steal a child right out of his bedroom.

The evening of 1st March, 1932. In a very large house in New Jersey, not far from New York City, everyone is settling in for the night. It's about 9:30 p.m. and the owner of the house, Colonel Lindbergh, hears a noise, a noise like something falling to the floor in the room directly above him. He thinks it might be pieces of wood falling from a box where he earlier put them. He thinks no more of it, until around ten o'clock when the children's nurse, Betty Gow, comes hurriedly to tell him that his little son, not yet two years old, is missing from his bed and has not been found yet.

The colonel jumps to his feet and goes to the little boy's bedroom where, indeed, his son is no longer to be found. But, as he looks quickly around the empty room, he sees a white envelope. Inside is his worst nightmare: a note from criminals saying they have taken his child and telling him to wait for further contact.

Lindbergh, stopping only to get his rifle, searches the house, and gardens where he finds a three-part home-made ladder. This was the ladder used to reach the upstairs window of the little boy's bedroom. Twenty minutes later, the police arrive, as does the colonel's lawyer and the first few members of the press, the vanguard of what will become a media circus. They will drive poor, foreign Betty Gow to suicide with their accusations, although her innocence is clear. They have come because Colonel Charles Lindbergh is not just rich, he is world famous.

He was born in 1902, the son of a Swedish immigrant who went on to become a senator. The boy, Charles, was his father's third child and the only one by his second marriage. When Charles Lindbergh was seven, his parents separated. In his childhood, he went to twelve different schools. He got a place at the University of Wisconsin to study engineering but he dropped out to go to Nebraska and train to fly planes. Like many young men of his generation, Charles Lindbergh was fascinated by the new flying machines. Unlike most of the other young pilots, flying would bring him success, money and fame.

Having qualified as a pilot, he 'took off', literally, touring around the U.S.A. at air shows and demonstrations for the public. Then the new Army Air Service invited him to come and do a year's flight training with them. They were looking to build a corps of excellent pilots to instruct and innovate. This was the beginning of Lindbergh's long, on-off relationship with the U.S. Air Force, in which he would become a general. For now, though, they put him on the reserve and returned him to civilian life.

After his military training, Lindbergh worked as an air-mail pilot, delivering urgent letters and parcels to ever more distant places. This also introduced him to international flying for the first time. He began to make risky, long distance flights as a way of promoting the airmail service and letting customers know about a new route, perhaps to Nicaragua, perhaps to Haiti. But his real fame came with his transatlantic flight from the east coast of America to the French capital, Paris, in 1927, in an aeroplane called 'The Spirit of St. Louis'. He landed in France on the 21st of May in a milestone event for aviation and 'young America' in the Jazz Age. A new dance style, fast and exciting, was named after Lindbergh's 'hop' across the Atlantic: the Lindyhop.

And so, his fame grew as his flight was recorded and commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp. Other daring flights were keenly reported in the newspapers and at the cinema. Charles Lindbergh was the all-American boy in a brave new world of trans-global flights.

He married a rich banker's daughter, Anne Morrow, and, in their big house in New Jersey, they had the first of six children, little Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jnr., his father's namesake. They would have him for less than two years.

As the hours and the days went by after the kidnapping, the press sensationalised it as the 'crime of the century'. And, by extreme over-reporting and interference in the case, they caused the suicide of the totally innocent but suspiciously 'British' nanny. Their irresponsible accusations, designed to sell newspapers to a xenophobic and sensationalist American public, drove the nanny to swallow silver polish. The hounding of the press was to drive the Lindberghs into exile. By their behaviour, the press guaranteed that it was the crime of the century they had said it would be.

In the meanwhile, everyone from the lowliest county sheriff to the president, Herbert Hoover himself, had sworn that they would catch the criminals who had stolen the beautiful young son of the national hero, Lindbergh. Then, they quickly got nowhere with their investigations.

All the while, Lindbergh, ever the man of action, had been doing a little investigating of his own. Also, the kidnappers had been in touch. A cloak and dagger game of secret meetings and arranged 'money drops' began. Sometimes, large rewards were paid for information that proved to be false. Every chancer, hoaxer and opportunist seemed to want to exploit the situation. The largest payment made was for $50,000. The dollar bills were not secretly marked but the serial number of each one was noted. Some of the money was in recently expired, high value bonds. The idea was to force the kidnappers to come into a bank to surrender the old bonds for cash where the police might be able to catch them if telephoned quickly by the bank staff.

That didn't happen but, over the next couple of years, some of the notes were spent around the New York City area. The police began to map every place where any of the ransom money was used. Little by little, the pattern of spending led the police to the German-Austrian area of New York. The police already knew there was a German connection. The ransom letters had contained lots of errors typical of a German speaker writing in English.

Before long, their investigations led them to the house of one Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a thirty-four-year-old German immigrant who worked as a carpenter. A carpenter would be just the person to make a clever little ladder perfect for the crime. Sure enough, police found wood in his house that perfectly matched the wood from which the ladder had been made. As if this were not enough, they also found nearly $14,000 of the identifiable ransom money in Hauptmann's garage. The charge would be murder and the punishment would be death by electric chair. The baby Lindbergh had been found dead in the woods not far from his home about two months after the kidnapping. His head had been smashed in with great force: then, wild animals had eaten the child's arms and legs. Neither the Lindberghs nor America were in a forgiving mood.

The trial lasted six weeks. Hauptmann maintained that the money in the garage was not his. It belonged, he said, to a fellow German, Isidor Fisch. The name was obviously Jewish. Supposedly, Fisch had disappeared some months before Hauptmann's arrest and, when he did not return, Hauptmann had looked through his belongings where he discovered the money. He started spending it freely, he reckoned, because the mysterious Mr. Fisch owed him a lot of money from a business gone bad.

Maybe it was true, partly true or just a racist lie designed to put the blame on an ethnic group many at the time saw as criminals and gangsters. The jury did not 'buy it' and Hauptmann went to the electric chair. To the very end, he swore he was innocent.

There remain many questions, however, around Isodor Fisch. Police and other experts have pointed out that both the kidnapping itself and the ransom process that followed could not be the work of one man. Hauptmann was almost surely guilty but, equally surely, he did not act alone. The 'Jewishness' of Fisch also raises questions.

Lindbergh, tall and blond, had some interesting beliefs on race. He felt that white, European blood was America's greatest strength. He was a eugenicist and showed himself an ever bigger supporter of Adolf Hitler, a man who shared many of Charles Lindbergh's racial beliefs: and Lindbergh was a proud and useful backer of Hitler, speaking publicly in support of the Nazi leader all across America right up to the beginning of the Second World War.

Lindbergh stated on more than one occasion that 'The British and the Jews...' were conspiring to drag America into a war against Nazi Germany, using their money and influence. He was immediately accused of anti-semitism, went on to reinforce this impression of him with more statements and always carried this racist label despite his slightly understated claims that he was not anti-Jewish. Interestingly, no-one in America ever accused him of being anti-British, though it was as clear as his anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathies.

Had Hauptmann deliberately invented a Jew to anger and distract Lindbergh? Or, had a German-Jewish refugee from the Nazis, sickened by Lindbergh's obvious racism and key support for Hitler in America decided to single him out for extortion and kill his first born son?

After the Second World War, Lindbergh's ugly race politics and pro-Nazi beliefs of the pre-war years were politely forgotten about, perhaps out of respect for his enormous personal loss and his war service in the air force. He remained a dynamic force himself, publishing books, exploring and becoming involved in protecting endangered species, among a whole range of other public activities.

When Lindbergh died in 1974, a bizarre secret double life began to unfold: it seems that Charles Lindbergh, always one to act not just speak, had decided to run a little eugenics project of his own. In his frequent post-war visits to his beloved Germany, he had left a trail of at least seven 'love children' by three different German women. The information was kept secret until the death of his widow, Anne.