48 Hours - Post Mortem | Lindbergh

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

"The Lindbergh Conspiracies" host Joe Nocera joins CBS News correspondent Jim Axelrod for a discussion about one of the most infamous true crime cases of the 20th century. The 1932 kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son captivated the world and became one of the first media frenzies of the modern era. But did convicted kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann act alone or was there more to the story? Learn why this case has been the subject of countless conspiracy theories.

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In March 1932, the whole world was captivated and terrified by the kidnapping of 20-month-old Charles Lindberg Jr., the baby son, the famed aviator. And there's a chance that somebody might notice one of the posters who'd recognize little Charles Lindbergh and so furnish a valuable clue. He was mysteriously taken from his nursery on the second floor of the family's home in New Jersey while his parents were downstairs. Meanwhile, the child is still gone and the parents are suffering tortures that only fathers and mothers can suffer. Little Lindy's disappearance, along with the discovery of his body, The arrest and prosecution of Bruno Houtman was the original true crime story of the modern media age,

yielding countless theories about what really happened to the baby of the most famous man in America. I'm CBS News correspondent Jim Axelrod, and welcome to a special episode of the 48 hours podcast. I'm joined today by Free Press senior editor and writer Jonas Sarah, who's out with a new six-part podcast. series about the kidnapping called the Lindbergh conspiracies. And we welcome in, Jonas Serra. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Great for you to be here. 94 years since this kidnapping.

So much news has developed and unfolded since then. So why this? Why does the Lindberg kidnapping still claim so much interest? Because it's a 94. It's a 94-year-old mystery that many people feel has never been solved. I think there's two other aspects to it, though. One is it's the original true crime story. I mean, it really is.

And we're a culture that's obsessed with true crime now. And secondly, I think it gives a snapshot of a different America. A more innocent country where a man like Charles Lindberg could be almost godlike in the admiration Americans had for him, which doesn't really exist anymore. Lindberg was the first person to prove that flight could be more than daredevils or war machines. Lucky Lindy, the first man to fly alone across the Atlantic. It was an American hero kind of thing. It was like, only an American could have done this. But in terms of Lindbergh as this enormous world hero, he's also a deeply flawed man.

He was a believer in eugenics. As many upper class white people were at the time, which is the sort of selective breeding to promote traits. Yes. And he made trips to Germany before the war. And they gave him some medal at one point. And he became part of the America First movement, which was in an effort to persuade the country not to go to war. He also was shown to be during this period of his life, anti-Semitic.

All right. So take us to March 1st, 1932. By Hopewell, New Jersey. What happens? Well, it was a Tuesday night. The Lindbergs were never at Hopewell, which was really their weekend retreat on a Tuesday night. Charles Lindbergh was married to Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who was an heiress and very wealthy. They spent a lot of their time in Englewood. Dwight Morrow, her father, who was a financier and a diplomat, lived in Englewood. They would spend the week in Englewood, and then they would hope well for the weekend.

But the baby had a cold, and Anne was feeling pretty run down too. So nursemaid Betty Gow, she puts the baby to bed. At 10 o'clock, Betty Gow goes upstairs, opens the door, looks into the baby. baby's bedroom, he's gone. Anne would later write, at first I thought maybe Charles was playing a prank. Believe it or not, believe it or not, he had once before hid the baby for 20 minutes from Anne and Betty as a prank. He did weird things. This is bizarre. Yeah. But that's the first thought. Maybe he's playing a prank. Right. Maybe he's playing a prank. So they go downstairs, Betty and Anne, and they say, Charles, the baby's missing.

And he runs up the stairs, and even before he gets in the room, he says, they've kidnapped our baby. Now, here's another little quirky thing. When Anne and Betty were in the room, they did not see an envelope. When Charles gets in the room, now maybe he was there and they just didn't notice it, because then they were panicked. Charles gets in the room and he sees an envelope, which is obviously. obviously the ransom note. So he takes the ransom note and he says, don't open it, we're going to let the police do that. He takes a gun, it takes a rifle, he runs outside,

can't find anything. He sees a ladder that has been dragged 60 or 75 feet away, and then they call the police. So quick question about the ransom note, because I know there was some reporting, not only didn't they see the ransom note, but then they found it on the windows sill. Yes, that's right.

Windows open. Correct. Some notes on the sill. Windy night. Windy night. Yeah. I mean. So you just stumbled on, you've just hit upon the first of many, many, many oddities.

Strange things that happen that don't add up. And this is part of the reason the case so fixate people, because once you start to dig in, It's like, oh my God, that happened. Oh, my God, that happened. Oh, my God, that happened. I'll tell you the next one. They could find no fingerprints anywhere in the room. Anywhere.

On the walls. On the drawers and the bed. No fingerprints. So what kind of evidence was there? The ransom note, obviously. Okay, so they had the ransom. There was the ransom note. There were footprints at the base

of the window. That's going to be helpful. It would be if somebody took a mold, but nobody did because the two cops that came were local cops. By the time the state police showed up, the grounds had been trampled to death by journalists. Somebody had leaked the fact that the Lindbergh baby had been kidnapped,

and journalists just swarmed all over the place. Now, the New Jersey State Police, at that point, run by, and this is a sort of famous last name in American history, Schwarzkopf. Famous first name, too. Norman Schwarzenkopf. Father of Storm and Norman. It turns out he worships the ground Charles Lindbergh walks on. So not only does he not investigate the possibility that the parents could be involved, he lets Lindberg manage the investigation of his own child. So you have one of the people involved as the parent of this victim dictating to all the investigators what they can and can't do.

You mentioned the note, the ransom note. Whether it's legit or not, what does it say? In very broken English, it says, give us $50,000 and you'll get your baby back. broken English. Well, it was written, it was clearly written by somebody who did not speak, for whom English was not their first language. So it had misspellings and not just vocabulary problems, but grammar problems. But then, Lindberg then went on to make a series of idiotic decisions. Well, take me through them, though, in terms of the decisions he made that you might be critical of.

Well, the first decision he made was to give the run. ransom note or a version of it, you know, to a couple of mobsters because the mob thought, because we needed another element to make it even weirder. Yeah. So because the mob was known to kidnap people once in a while, although as one of our experts on the podcast says, you know, this was such, he said, if the mob had done it, it would be a professional kidnapping. This was clearly not a professional kidnapping.

But once the ransom note was out there, anybody could copy it. It also had a little red mark, and then future ransom notes also had the little red mark. Sure. Well, then the whole thing's compromised at that point. Right. So they could have been anybody. Extortionists, mobsters. Let me ask you about doctor.

John Conte. Jaffe. Jaffe. Yeah. How does he get involved? So who is he? He writes a letter to his local paper, the Bronx Home News. And he basically says, he's a very pompous, full of himself, 70-plus-year guy.

And he basically says, I'm going to add $1,000 to the ransom money that I will contribute for myself. And the kidnappers put a note in the Bronx Home News saying, basically, huh, get in touch with us. But what happens is because the kidnappers give Jafsey a letter to give to Lindbergh, Lindbergh reads the letter and says,

okay, you obviously have some contact with these guys or this guy, so you're going to be my intermediary. So Lindberg is all in with Jafsie. So Lindberg becomes all in with Jafsy. That's exactly what happens. And they end up for Javsci. Jafsey at least ends up having meetings with these guys? Well, with somebody, he has two meetings and two different cemeteries.

Jaffsy's conducting all of his business in cemeteries. Yes, that's right. In the first meeting, supposedly, and by the way, I should just say for the record, Jaffsy is a major bullshitter. But he's the only person that you have who's on record. So you have to at some point assume he's not complete. completely making it up. So he has his first meeting with the kidnapper.

They have a long discussion. Jaffsey says, you've got to prove to me that you have the baby. You have to send me the baby's nightgown that he had, the night he was kidnapped, send the nightgown to the Lindberghs. So that happens. So then Jafsey meets again at a second cemetery in the Bronx. And this time Lindberg goes with him, but Lindberg stays in a car.

and Jassy has the ransom money in a box. How much? 50,000. As he's going to meet the kidnapper, the kidnapper extortion, wherever he was, the guy says, hey, doctor. And even though Lindberg is sort of around the corner in a car, Lindberg claims to have heard that and also claims that it was in a German accent. He takes the 50,000, he disappears.

Now, wait a minute, this claim was intriguing to you. Well, we tried to replicate it. I sat in a car in the same position that Lindberg was in, and Poppy, my producer, was at the cemetery, and we couldn't get in, so you have to stand outside. So she was actually closer than Jafsey would have been. And so she yells out, hey, doctor, and I couldn't hear a thing. Even with no traffic. So it essentially undercuts as part of Lindberg's story. He heard somebody with a German accent.

Say, hey, doctor. From the cemetery. Right. So all of this is unfolding. I'm sure folks are looking for little Indies, either the baby alive or sadly a body. And eventually, a body is found. A body is found six weeks later.

Where? in the woods about four miles from the house in Hopewell. And the only reason it was found is because a truck driver had to take a leak and walked into the woods and saw this partially decomposed body. And the coroner basically concluded that he had died from blunt force trauma. Nobody brags about their car's resale value at a dinner party. Nobody posts about it on social media. It's not the reason you fall in love with a vehicle. But five years in, it is one of the clearest signs you made the right decision. And Toyota makes that choice easy. For six consecutive years, Toyota has been named the best resale value brand by Kelly Blue Book. And many Toyota models like the Camry, Tacoma, and Forerunner, are best in their class, according to KB. Because Toyota doesn't just build vehicles for the moment. They build for the miles ahead, which is something every Toyota owner can appreciate. So stop by your local Toyota dealer and enjoy the affordability of a great deal today,

plus the value that lasts long after your purchase. Shop Toyota.com to find out more. Vehicles projected resale value and best resale value awards are specific to the 2026 model year. For more information, visit Kelly Blue Books, KBB.com. Toyota, let's go places. Let's talk about Bruno Richard helped. Right. So one of the great three-name notorious people in American history, John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, Bruno Richard Houtman.

Yeah. Who is he? He is a itinerant carpenter, an immigrant, who's been in the U.S. for about a decade. The first time he came illegally, he got caught and sent back. The second time, he managed to sneak through. But this is no Boy Scout. This is somebody who has a record. He's been, he was jailed in Germany. He didn't have a record in the U.S.

He seemed to be making honest living. His wife worked at a bakery. She made an honest living. They had a child. They rented a house in the Bronx. Needless to say, yeah, rented a house in the Bronx. Back to the Bronx. Yeah, that was...

Why did he very quickly become the sole suspect? Well, because he had ransom money on him. There was a certain kind of money called gold certificates that was about to go out of circulation. The Treasury Department knew this, and so they insomentering. And so they insisted that a whole bunch of the ransom money be made in goal certificates knowing that if somebody tried to to pass it off, it would be a tell. It would be a tell. So two years later, Houtman goes to a gas station, gives the gas station attendant a bill in a goal certificate. And the attendant writes down the plate number on the goal certificate.

that is traced. That is traced to Hauptman. They go into his house and they do a search and they find $14,000 worth of the $50,000 ransom. So that's a smoking gun. Well, it isn't, it isn't. It depends on who you ask. Hopman had a friend and business partner named Isidore Fish. He says, Isidore Fish gave him this box and said, please store this for.

me, I'm going to go to Germany right now. So he takes it home, he puts it up. Is it our fish does go to Germany? And then is it our fish dies of tuberculosis? At which point, Hauptman says, okay, he's dead now. I'm going to take a look at what's in here. Oh, wow, there's money in here. I'm going to take it. Were there any other suspects who were ever seriously considered as having taken part in the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh, Jr.? No. Here's the thing. Up until the moment they caught Hauptman, they had always assumed it was more than one person. Because, logically. Because how are you going to pull all of that off?

If you don't have more than one person. But once they got Hauptman, it was like, we're done. You know, it's interesting to hear you say this, Joe, about the idea, because what the prosecution's case essentially relied on was that Bruno Richard Hauptman, acting alone, drove from the Bronx, on a random night with no idea, or he really should have had no capacity to have any confidence about it,

that the baby was going to be there, the window was going to be open. And how did he know which window led to the baby's room? How did you know that was the only window in the house that could not be locked shut? So could Hauptman have been involved as part of a gang or something? Absolutely, absolutely.

But could he have done it by himself? I just find that implausible. And yet, Bruno Richard Houtman is tried. And it is the trial of the century. Right. So don't forget, this was called the crime of the century. And once the trial happened, it was the trial of the century. Now, I want to ask you something.

Yeah. So rumor has it that you had your relatives, your ancestors lived. So growing up, my grandfather and grandmother lived in Flemington, New Jersey. And for years in the 1930s, they had Axelrod's pharmacy on Main Street, across from the Hunterton County Courthouse. My grandfather had a lunch counter, and I can remember as a kid him telling me stories of Damon Runyon coming in. Walter Winchell would set up shop in my grandfather's pharmacy, Axelrod's pharmacy on Main Street, commandeer the phone, and Winchell was really establishing himself for the first time. as this sort of became this monster media figure.

Right. But he put himself on the map with his reporting from the Houtman trial. Right. Someone else from Flemington, who was a source for us, he said, you know, it's a town of 3,000 people. And the first week of the trial, there were 50,000 people there. He said the cars were backed up for like 10 miles. So inside the courtroom, what was going on that shaped

and influenced the proceedings, because if I understand you correctly, there is no way Bruno Richard Helpman had a fair trial. That is correct. By today's standards, it was an absolute travesty. And the fact of the matter is, even by the standards of the 1930s, it was an unfair trial. How so? Well, to start with, let's just take something simple like handwriting. So obviously, the prosecution is going to have handwriting experts who are going to say that the handwriting is the same as Hauptman's. But Hauptman says, when the police got them in the room, they said, okay, they didn't just say write some stuff.

They said, look at this note, and they showed him the ransom note. We want you to write this exactly the same way that this ransom note is, exactly the same way. Same spelling, same, you know, curvatures. Try to copy it. Try to copy it. Soon he gets in the trial and they say, well, look, look, it's the same.

It's the same. Didn't he have a lawyer? Oh, he had a terrible lawyer. We had a lawyer on our show who said he became a lawyer because when he read about the Lindbergh trial and he was like 14 years old, he said, you know, I could have done better than this. But having said that, it wasn't just a defense.

It was also the prosecution. The handwriting analysis is just, one example. I understand there was something critically important about the ladder. Yes. Well, that is in dispute to this day. What was it? Well, the prosecution said as definitive proof that Hauptman did it that a piece of wood from his attic had been cut out and made part of the ladder. It is a handmade ladder. It was not a ladder you go into Home Depot and buy. You've seen the ladder? Oh, yeah.

It's at the New Jersey State Police Museum. Yeah, anybody can see it. You can see it. It's a really interesting ladder. I know that's to sound weird. It's an unusual ladder. But this became a big, important piece of evidence for the jury to... Right.

And this is some of the stuff that I just find so unbelievable. That Attic had been looked at, you know, a dozen times by investigators after Houtman was arrested. The home that the Houtman's were living in was taken over by a police lieutenant who moved in. He was living in the house. Yes. And he's the one who comes to them and says,

hey, look at this hole in the attic. So let me give you the denouement, as they said. Please. David Willants, the prosecutor, gets up. And he's going through his closing statement, and he says, and then, Howman took an instrument and he hit the baby over the head and crushed his skull. Now, there had not been one word of testimony to this effect. The testimony had always been, well, the baby must have fallen and cracked his head on the ground to bring up. a new allegation in a closing argument that is like against every rule in the book yet neither

the defense attorney nor the judge said hang on here you know we we can't allow this did helpman take the stand himself he did did he help himself yeah not really he kind of got chewed up they caught him in a lie about the goal certificate His lack of language skills, you know, heard him badly. His lawyer heard him badly. His lawyer was being paid for by Hearst, the Hearst newspaper chain. I mean, which had a vested interest in wanting a salacious trial, which they certainly got. Did he?

Wow. I didn't, I've never heard that before. Did the defense lawyer write for Hearst or? No. They were paying Anna Litt, Anna Houtman. for her, quote, unquote, exclusive story. So in the least surprising verdict imaginable, Bruno Richard Helptmann is found guilty.

That's right. And this is 35, correct. He is executed in 1936. The Lindbergs as a couple, does this whole thing just engenders some sympathy for them, I would imagine, to be able to be. But they take off. Well, yeah, they take off for England for a while,

because, you know, they want to get away from the press, basically. They'd like to be a little more anonymous. It's, I mean, Charles Lindbergh hated the press. He'd been dealing with it since he flew to Paris. In fact, we have a clip from Anne Lindberg talking to Morley Safer in a 60 Minutes interview. He really couldn't bear invasions on his privacy. Now, there, I think there was something irrational.

He had an irrational feeling about the news, about newsmen. He felt they intruded on him. I don't think he was quite rational. He had reasons not to be. I mean, we were terribly pursued, and at the time of the baby's kidnapping, the newsmen, some of them behaved absolutely terribly, broke into the morgue and took pictures of the baby, and he never forgave him. You hear Anne Lindberg describe.

how much Charles Lindbergh hated the media. What is it, where does that leave you? I have some sympathy for him, to be honest. I mean, you know, so it's one thing to be, you know, chased by the media because you did something amazing, you know, and, but there's another thing to be chased by the media because your kid was kidnapped and killed. But it's only after this that he becomes a less sympathetic figure.

Very, very true, very true. as Hitler begins invading Poland and other countries in Europe, and he is the leading spokesman for the America First Movement. Did it cost Lindbergh in terms of popularity? It sure did. What a complicated math. Totally. The complications don't end there either.

Yes. Well, that's true. He dies at the age of 74 in Hawaii, very tiny funeral. 15 people, something like that. And it comes out years later, many years later, that he has fathered seven children in Germany with three different women. None of whom are his wife. None of whom are his wife, two sisters.

First of all he had, he has five other children. He had five other children with Anne. But then he, you know, he's always spent a lot of time in Germany. And so he fathered seven children with, three women, two sisters and his secretary. And basically a German magazine at some point in the late 90s, early 2000s breaks the story. They do DNA testing. They're real.

It's real. It's for real. He had adopted a new name, a double. Yes. Carew Kent? Carrou Kent, like Clark Kent, like a German version of. of Clark Kent. I mean, this story just keeps, if you're into bizarre,

this just keeps this story that keeps giving and giving and giving. Now, let me ask you this. It may not have been part of American culture in the 1930s to think about conspiracy theories. But certainly after the Kennedy assassination, and certainly part of our modern life is, you know, you can't have two people looking at the sky and agreeing it's blue.

There's always some sort of other, angle to be considered. Were there any conspiracy theories about the Lindbergh kidnapping, or did any develop later? As you said, Kennedy assassination, RFK, Martin Luther King, Warren Commission, CIA secrets exposed, on and on and on, and Americans start to lose faith in institutions, and start to lose faith in government. And so, Around the late 70s, early 80s, books start to be written for the first time that a look at the trial and make conjectures about what really happened. And as America itself has become more conspiratorials, so has the belief in the Lindbergh theories grown and grown and grown. to the point that one of the people in our podcast said,

you know, I think more people today believe Lindbergh has something to do with it than think Hopman had something to do with it. What would the rationale be for that? So there's a lot of theories that the child had rickets and had various other physical problems. Yeah, I had read some delayed speech. Right. There were issues never proven. Correct.

But this was sort of talked about later that Lindbergh as a eugenicist could not abide. Let me add one other thing to that. Anne Lindbergh wrote a... She published her diaries and letters from that era. And the diaries and letters about her son when he was alive, and he's babbling and talking and playing with his dad and playing with his mom and playing with Betty Gao. And you just read that.

Just like, no, there's nothing wrong with this kid. I found it very hard to believe. Is there a conspiracy theory that you encountered in your research that resonated? That perhaps isn't true. Well, what resonates to me is the idea that more than one person did it. Whether Houtman was involved or somebody else, you know, there's one guy out there that has a name of a different person that he believes did it. we don't need to get into that. It's too complicated. What I believe is that somebody inside

the Lindbergh household was involved. Was there any part of this investigation that involved DNA? They didn't have DNA back then. DNA didn't come to the late 80s, but there's a lawyer who is suing the New Jersey State Police Museum to have DNA tested on the ransom notes, because the stamps probably still have DNA and the envelopes, the way you lick the envelopes, has DNA. New Jersey is resisting this like crazy. But an appeal. Why? They say it'll damage the evidence. I don't really think that's the reason, to be honest. Can you imagine if there was DNA testing and it ruled out Richard Houtman? Right. The point is that there is an appeal ongoing right now, and we'll see what happens. All right. So sum up for everyone, listen.

watching your series, your investigation into the Lindbergh kidnapping. The takeaway for you that you feel sort of most relevant for the day in which we live is what? I connect it more than anything with the America we live in today. That it teaches you so much about the judicial system. It teaches you so much about how we're mired in conspiracy. It teaches you what the country was like back then versus what it's like today. And it's a damn good story. You know, this is what you and I live for.

Jonah, Sarah, with a damn good story. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. The Lindberg Conspiracies podcast is currently available wherever you get your podcasts. They're completely cut off from the outside world. A new Paramount Plus documentary. The narrative is we are a cult. No, I'm doing this out of my own free will.

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