Bruno Richard Hauptmann’s mug shot. The wooden electric chair where he was put to death. A sponge like the one that was dampened with salt water and placed on his head to conduct the deadly jolts of electricity.
This grim assortment of relics is housed in a small museum in New Jersey, about 20 miles away from where the decaying body of Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., the toddler Hauptmann was convicted of kidnapping and killing, was discovered face down in the dirt.
Nearly 100 years ago, the Lindbergh case was known as the crime of the century by virtue of its cinematic details and the boy’s high-profile parents, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a diplomat’s daughter, and Charles A. Lindbergh, an aviator who had catapulted to fame by completing the world’s first nonstop solo flight from New York to Paris.
Hauptmann, a German immigrant who had worked as a carpenter and lived in the Bronx, was executed for the crime in April 1936. His great-great niece, Cezanne Love, and her aunt recently provided DNA samples in the hope that New Jersey’s courts would decide to clear the way for modern science to explore century-old doubts: Was an innocent man put to death? And, if not, did he act alone?
“I personally don’t think he did it,” Ms. Love said, noting that Hauptmann and his widow maintained his innocence, and his alibi, until the end. But if the evidence does link him to the case, “then so be it,” she said. “I want to uncover the truth.”
There were no fingerprints, and there was no confession and no explanation for how a solitary kidnapper might have orchestrated a toddler’s abduction from a second-floor nursery on a rainy Tuesday evening, while five adults and a dog were in the home. Hauptmann was convicted after a six-week trial in Flemington, N.J., and sentenced to death.
In the decades since, as the keepers of the Lindbergh kidnapping archives can attest, public interest in the case has never subsided — nor has skepticism about Hauptmann’s guilt. But a bizarre and grisly new theory about Lindbergh’s potential involvement in his son’s death, and renewed legal pressure to force DNA testing of evidence, have combined to thrust one of the country’s most enduring murder mysteries squarely back into public consciousness.
At the time of the boy’s kidnapping his father was a national hero.
But history would come to view the renowned pilot who died 50 years ago far more critically. Lindbergh was fascinated with the study of eugenics and was vilified by the media after accepting a medal for his contributions to aviation from Hermann Goering on behalf of Hitler in 1938 — seen by many as a sign of his sympathies with the Nazi regime.
Lise Pearlman, a retired California judge, now speculates that Lindbergh was capable of something even more sinister: sacrificing his son for scientific experiments that led to the child’s death.
“I take advantage of the distance in time to treat the boy’s father as a potential suspect in his kidnap and murder; like all the others on the list, a fallible human being, not a demigod,” Ms. Pearlman wrote in a 2020 book, “The Lindbergh Kidnapping Suspect No. 1: The Man Who Got Away.”
It is a theory that other Lindbergh researchers view with deep skepticism.
Ms. Pearlman acknowledged that her findings were based on circumstantial, yet compelling, evidence about the crime scene, the condition of the boy’s remains and the research that Lindbergh was conducting at the time with Dr. Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize-winning surgeon and organ transplant pioneer.
Last February, she shared her theory at a conference held by the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, broadening the reach of her views and stoking renewed debate about the crime’s persistent riddles.
Writers who have researched the case just as extensively as Ms. Pearlman said it would be impossible to definitively prove a whole new theory 100 years later. But that has not stopped people from trying.
A former Rutgers University professor, Lloyd C. Gardner, founded a social group decades ago that called itself the State Street Irregulars, a homage to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series. The group met at the bar of a restaurant in Lambertville, N.J., while Professor Gardner was writing his book on the subject, “The Case That Never Dies.”
