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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, 48 listeners. This is Anne-Marie Green. The team wanted to share a preview episode 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 consumed the country. It also yielded countless conspiracy theories. Journalist Joe Nocera investigated it all. And just a 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.
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 American. And we have every right to ask on whose behalf was he working? Pizzagate is real. The only question is, what exactly is it?
And if you look at the numbers, the numbers are false.
Chapter 2: What happened during the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh Jr.?
The numbers are corrupt. It was a rigged election, 100%. And people know it. That's why you have people marching all over the United States right now. They know it was a rigged election. 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 upend 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. Plusters 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 upended.
Chapter 3: What were the public reactions to the Lindbergh kidnapping case?
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 is 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 hair tight. 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 would we talk about at night?
Chapter 4: Who was Bruno Hauptmann and why was he accused?
What else would we keep our wives up late at night talking about if not for the Lindbergh baby case?
I'm Joe Nocera, and from the Free Press, this is The Lindbergh 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 Hauptmann, 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.
Du Bois' father, Charles Lindbergh, is the most famous and most admired man in America. Hauptmann, 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 Trenton, New Jersey, where the execution is taking place, parties are being thrown. I got interested in the Lindbergh kidnapping from listening to my parents talk about growing up in Trenton and going to a Haltman execution party at the Hotel Hildebrecht, 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 Lindbergh baby. And so, silent and stolid, 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 8.47 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 Fini to the sordid 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 to frame an innocent man.
But over time, the idea that Hauptmann 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.
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Chapter 5: What evidence was found at the Lindbergh crime scene?
There were a thousand original pictures of the trial. and kidnapping, just by chance, I ended up buying a house that was directly across from the Lindbergh driveway. And then there's 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.
One of the greatest cold cases in history. In fact, he gets angry at some of the others in this world whose theories differ 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 as large a megaphone as I can possibly find.
Or Ranelle Delmont, who used to run the popular website The Lindbergh 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 Lindbergh 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 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 Hauptmann 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 Hopewell, 15 miles north of Trenton.
Months earlier, Charles and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh had built a house deep in the woods and were 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, it is trees walling each side. Yeah, it's quite a little hike. And the closer you get to it, the more isolated it seems. Can't see the house.
You know, it's not like there's nothing indicating it. Driving a half a mile and we still can't see the house. That, in fact, is exactly why Lindbergh chose the spot. Ever since he flew across the Atlantic in 1927, the first person to ever do so, reporters had searched incessantly for any morsel of news about the man that they had labeled the great aviator.
His flight was an 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 nobodies in comparison to this man's star power. So he felt hounded by the press.
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Chapter 6: How did the media influence the Lindbergh case?
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 wrote a fine novel called The Lindbergh Nanny, a reimagining of the Lindbergh kidnapping through the eyes of Betty Gow, who was little Lindy's nursemaid, as she was called back then. She was a key player on the night of the kidnapping. Betty had spent the weekend at the Morrow household in Englewood and was waiting for little Charlie's return. She got a call that morning.
Get to Hopewell immediately. When she arrived, she quickly took over the care of the baby.
At around 7.30, she and Ann 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 petticoat 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 Lindbergh's nursemaid, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the baby's mother, were trying to pull them shut on the knife, and they couldn't do it.
They both try, but her failure to close that shutter will come back to haunt her. She then goes downstairs and has dinner with Elsie Waintley, who is the cook for the Lindberghs.
The baby falls quickly asleep. Soon, Charles Lindbergh returns home. Or does he?
At 8, the family hears the approach of a car, and everyone assumes it's Colonel Lindbergh coming home. But it isn't until around 8.30 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 Ann have dinner, after which Lindbergh has a bath and then heads down to his study. The exact time of the kidnapping is not known precisely. We do know that Charles Lindbergh reported hearing a cracking sound at one point when he was in his study beneath the nursery. He described it as a cracking like the slats on orange crates, I believe is the way he referred to it.
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Chapter 7: What were the main theories surrounding the Lindbergh kidnapping?
I mean, the ladder is a really crucial piece of evidence.
Yeah.
Because you know the latter is involved, 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 a conspiracy, I guess you'd say, aficionado.
And you'll be hearing from him and his wife, the science writer Sarah Rose Siskind, 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 baby's room. The ransom note was simple in its demands. Give us $50,000 and you'll get your baby back. This was the Great Depression, and the Lindberghs 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 Ann Lindbergh first went up to the baby's bedroom, they didn't see a ransom note. It was only later, when Lindbergh himself went up there, that he discovered it.
It was sitting on the windowsill, which leads to another puzzling question. There was a howling wind that night. If an envelope with a ransom note in it was sitting by a warped shutter, and it was, how was it not swept to the floor by the wind? Also, kind of curious, Lindbergh 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. Its 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'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. 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.
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Chapter 8: What role did law enforcement play in the investigation?
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 Ann was referring to was Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, and his official title was Commander of the New Jersey State Police. Yes, he was the father of Stormin Norman Schwarzkopf of the First Gulf War.
A decorated World War I veteran, he had founded the Jersey State Police in 1921. Its 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 this statue looming over the grounds. What have you spotted, Jay?
Well, I've spotted a statue of Colonel Norman Schwarzkopf, H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the first superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, right? So anyway... He's wearing kind of boots, breeches. He looks, he's got a mustache. He looks very 1930s, doesn't he? Schwarzkopf 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 Schwarzkopf 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 Bamarack. I'm the great-grandnephew of New Jersey Governor Harold Hoffman. He knows all about Schwarzkopf because the two men hated each other. In fact, his great-granduncle fired Schwarzkopf 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 reached Schwarzkopf, he 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, Schwarzkopf 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, J. Edgar Hoover.
He saw to it that a high level treasury 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 Schwarzkopf was to Lindbergh.
It was simply assumed by Schwarzkopf and everyone else in America, for that matter, that Lindbergh couldn't possibly be involved in his own son's kidnapping. Greg Algren 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?
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