The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling - A New Series From The Free Press | The Lindbergh Conspiracies

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

Joe Nocera has launched a six part series about the Lindbergh kidnapping. Enjoy episode one here and then head on over to ⁠The Lindbergh Conspiracies⁠ feed for the rest of the season. EP01 | The Broken Window One night in March 1932, the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh is taken from his nursery. A warped window, a ladder, and a ransom note mark the beginning of a case that will grip the world and launch a hundred conspiracy theories. Ninety-four years later, we return to the scene of the crime to ask: What really happened that night? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I would stake my entire professional career on the fact that Brigitte McCrone, 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. Pizza gate is real. The only question is, what exactly is it? And if you look at the numbers, the numbers are false. 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 abended. 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 hairtight. 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? What else would we keep our wives up late at night talking about, if not for the Lindberg baby case? I'm Joan O'Sira, and from the free press, this is the Lindbergh conspiracies. Episode one, The Broken Window.

I'm going to start with that execution I mentioned. It's the night of April 3rd, 19th. Bruno Richard Haltman, 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 Lindberg, is the most famous and most admired man in America. Haltman, 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 Holton execution party

at the Hotel Hilderbrecht, where the execution was broadcast live. There go the witnesses into the New Jersey State Prison at Trenton who are to see Bruno Richard Hopman die for the kidnapping of a Lindberg baby. And so, silent and stolid, Hopman 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 Haughtman 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 ever with 1,000 original.

pictures of the trial and kidnapping. Just by chance, I ended up buying a house that was directly across the Lindbergh driveway. And then there's Robert Zorn, who says he knows who really kidnapped the Lindberg baby. His life's work has been convincing the world that he's right. I found myself in the position of an accidental detective in 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 Rennel Delmont, who used to run the popular website, the Lindberg 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 Lindberg 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 Lindberg 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 Hopman 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'd 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 Lindberg, 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 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 Lindberg chose the spot. Ever since he flew across the Atlantic in 1927, the first person to ever do so,

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 nobody's in comparison to this man's star power. So he felt hounded by the press. He thought the house in Hopewell would offer him and his family some measure of privacy. But the newspapers had discovered where the house was being built,

and had published the location. Lindberg's father-in-law, a wealthy financier and diplomat named Dwight Morrow, had advised him to hire security guards, even warning that the baby will be kidnapped if you don't have better protection. Lindberg's wife, Anne, would note in her diary that every few days, strangers would arrive on the property, hoping to get a peek of the family and had to be chased away by Ali Waitley, their butler. Get out of here before I call the police. Yet when a writer for the Saturday evening post visited Lindberg on the property,

he asked that the family needed more security. I'm not worried about intruders. What a terrible misjudgment. And here's another misjudgment. On the only window that was accessible to somebody from the outside had warped shutters. And that was the window that opened into the baby's room, where little Charles Lindbergh Jr. was put to bed that fateful night. Now, here's the weird thing, or I suppose I should say, one of the many weird things.

On that evening, March 1, 1932, Lindberg was supposed to make a speech in New York, but he never showed up. No one knows why. March 1 was also a Tuesday. Ever since the family had begun using the house, they'd always returned to Lindberg's in-laws' home on Monday morning. That's where they lived during the week.

This was the first time they'd ever spent a night on a Tuesday, okay? the Lindbergs were extremely guarded about their schedule. How could a kidnapper have possibly known that on that particular Tuesday, little Lindy, as the press called the baby, would be in Hopewell. And why were the Lindbergs in Hopewell that night? Well, for the most ordinary of reasons.

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 Frederick's wrote a fine novel called The Lindberg Nanny, a reimagining of the Lindberg 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 Anne start putting him to bed. They put him in his little sneaky 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 Marl 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 shudder

will come back to haunt her. She then goes downstairs and has dinner with Elsie Waintley, who is the cook for the Lindbergs. 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 Lindberg 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 a study beneath the nursery. He described it as a cracking out like the slats on orange crates, I believe is the way he referred to it.

Strangely, no one else in the house ever reports hearing that sound. Nor does Lindberg get out from his chair to see if something's happened outside. There was a dog in the house. He doesn't bark. So it's not until 10 o'clock or so that Betty Gow walks upstairs to see how the baby is doing. As is the family custom,

Betty goes to check on Charlie and discovers that he is gone. She went first to Anne Lindberg or see if she had taken the child and she hadn't. Anne thought at first that her husband might have hidden the child

as a practical joke. Believe it or not, that's something he'd done before. And then she went downstairs to see Charles who was down in his study. And she said, you know, Mr. Limburg, do you have the baby? When he tells her no, he runs upstairs himself.

And get this, even before he enters the bedroom, he shouts. And they've kidnapped our baby. He grabs a loaded rifle and a flashlight, and he races outdoors to search the grounds. But he finds nothing. When the kidnapping took place, there were three clues. A Buck's Brothers' three-quarters wood chisel. They did another. if it belonged to a carpenter there

who was used to try to pry the window open. So, clue one, chisel. Underneath the window, they found ladder impressions, basically two impressions where the ladder had sunk into the mud. They found a set of footprints leading away from the ladder. They followed him about 70 to 75 feet away, and they found part of a ladder, two pieces of the ladder. Clue two, the ladder.

I mean, the ladder is a really crucial piece of evidence. Yeah. Because you know the ladder 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.

They found a ransom note up in the baby's room. The ransom note was simple in its demands. Give us $50,000 and your... get your baby back. This was the Great Depression, and the Lindbergh's 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 Anne Lindberg 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 window sill, 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. Lindberg 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. So they decided that if somebody got up there, either through the front door, or somehow made it up the ladder, Somebody had to pass the baby out. That's surprisingly, one of the big questions

that's always surrounded the kidnapping is whether it was an inside job. Had Betty Gao handed the child down to somebody on the ladder instead of putting Little Charlie to bed? Had the cook or the butler, a husband and wife team, been involved somehow? Did someone working for the Lindbergh sell the family out to make some money?

When the Lindbergs were away during the week, Ali Waitley, the butler, sometimes gave tours of the house to strangers who showed up wanting to get a peak of the famous family. Had he accidentally allowed the house to be staked out by a future intruder? When I saw that Ollie Waitley had given tours of the Hopewell House to sightseers, I thought, oh, that's a bit odd. And when the police got to work, they found other things that were fishy as well. The fingerprint man arrived who checked the room for fingerprints, said they, there were no fingerprints. Seriously?

No fingerprints? I should say. None that were usable, at least. The lack of prints led investigators to conclude that the kidnappers wore gloves. The fact that there were no fingerprints in the room meant that that room had been wiped. I mean, otherwise, why wouldn't Betty Gow's fingerprints

be on the crib or the mothers or the fathers or anybody? The bureau, the crib, the window, the windowsill, any of those hard surfaces that are... Why was the room wiped? And so there you have it. A family that wasn't supposed to be there. A window that was warped and left open. A baby taken.

A ladder, a chisel, and a ransom note left behind. And two parents desperate for answers. Anne Marl Lindbergh, who wrote a number of books in her lifetime, published one in 1973 titled, Hour of Gold. Hour of Lead. It's a collection of her diary entries and letters from the year before her son was kidnapped

and the year after. She writes that she found herself startled as she re-read the letter as she wrote to friends and family right after the kidnapping. It was, of course, a nightmare. When I first reread them, I was shocked and bewildered.

How could I have been so self-controlled, so calm, so factual in the midst of horror and suspense? and above all, how could I have been so hopeful? That line jumps out because it's a reminder that despite her horror at discovering her son missing, there was hope that night. Surely they all thought the baby would be returned. Kidnappings were common during the Depression,

and it was usually a straightforward transaction. You get your relative back, and I get my money, and we go our separate ways. kidnapping wasn't even a federal crime until after little Lindy was taken. The police speculated earlier and it was, I think, poor speculation, but they speculated early that maybe the mob was involved in this,

because it wasn't uncommon for famous people to have children kidnapped by the mob. This is lawyer Richard Cahill, Jr., whose book on the kidnapping is titled Hotman's Ladder. And as long as you follow the instructions, you'd get your kid back. But this, by any reasonable looking, was done by an amateur.

It wasn't done by the mob. If it had been in those days, it would have been done and done properly. This wasn't. In your book, you talk a little bit about how the press covered the Lindberg case. Oh, it was insane. The entire thing was insane. You have the press on day two, right? As soon as this kidnapping is announced, as soon as the press gets wind of it,

you have all this press from New York City and other places descending on the Lindberg home. That's Candace Fleming. She wrote a young adult book about Lindberg. And when things get cordoned off by the police, and you have press that are climbing trees trying to climb over walls, and you have regular citizens as well, creeping up to the house through all these woods. And you think about that the first time I read it,

it made me sick because I thought all that evidence, right, that no one had gone out to the woods yet. Here's Richard Cahill again. One of things that happened is somehow, nobody knows for sure. Could have been an operator, could have been someone in law enforcement. This got leaked on the night of the kidnapping to the police. press and the press descended on the house. And two of the detectives, they saw press walking all over the place and looking at stuff and picking it up, so they picked up the evidence and took it inside to preserve it.

But any footprints evidence is compromised. Any other evidence, you know, fingerprint evidence is compromised. So that makes it difficult. It's nearly impossible to exaggerate the frenzy that overtook the fourth estate when it learned of the kidnapping. The New York Evening Post declared, Kidnappers must know that if they harm the baby, they feel. faced the possibility of being torn limb from limb by the people of the U.S.

A Hearst reporter named Adela Rogers wrote, Remember, little Lindy was everybody's baby, or if they had none, their only child. Kidnapped, the Lindbergh baby? Who would dare? And the humorist, Will Rogers. Why don't lynching parties expand their scalp and take in kidnappings? The competition was fierce,

with the relatively new medium of radio competing with newsmen, for scoops. Every edition, you had newspapers that hired ambulances so that they could snap pictures and write copy and then race back to the city in this ambulance, blaring its sirens, so that they could get a brand-new story out for the evening edition. As much as Lindbergh found reporters intolerable,

he was willing to use the press to help him get his son back, or so he hoped. Newspaper stories and ads conveyed messages to the kidnappers. and even issued a list of the food her son should eat so the kidnappers would know what to feed him. And the day after the kidnapping, Lindbergh issued an extraordinary statement to the press in which he offered a reward of $50,000 for the safe return of his child. But then he went further, saying that he himself was prepared to meet with the kidnappers.

We further pledge ourselves that we will not try to injure in any way those connected with the return of the child. He was effectively telling the kidnappers that they would not be prosecuted if they gave back Little Lindy. Of course, Charles Lindbergh had no authority to offer the kidnappers' immunity, but he did it anyway.

Who would dare challenge the great aviator? By early morning, the local cops, and there were only two of them, had been pushed aside by the New Jersey State Police. The state police were relative to the state police. relatively new and had zero experience handling criminal investigations. Pretty soon, state troopers were the one swarming all over the Lindbergh property, turning the garage into a temporary police headquarters and bunking in the main house.

In the letter to her mother-in-law, Anne Marlindberg described the scene. This house is bedlam. Hundreds of men stamping in and out, sitting everywhere. On the stairs, on the pantry sink, the telephone goes all day and night. people sleep all over the floors on newspapers and blankets. The chief of the Jersey police has not been able to sleep since the things started. I wish I had more to tell you. 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 Anne was referring to was Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, and his official title was commander of the New Jersey State Police. Yes, he was the first. father of Storman Norman Schwartzkoff 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 his 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 Indy 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 Disfledgling Organization, they're inventing the organization as they go along. That's Patrick Bamarack. I'm the great-grand-nephew of New Jersey Governor Harold Hoffman. He knows all about Schwarzkoff because the two men hated each other. In fact, his great-grand-uncle fired Schwartzcoff 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 Lindberg kidnapping reached Schwarzkoff, he jumped in his police car and drove through the night, the gravel crunching beneath his tires as he arrived at the Lindberg estate. Stepping into the house, Schwarzkoff 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, Jay Edgar Hoover. He saw to it that a high-level treasured, 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 Lindberg. It was simply assumed by Schwarzkopf and everyone else in America, for that matter, that Lindberg 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? The answer is that Lindberg was the most admired man in America. Schwarzkoff, for his part, practically worshipped the famous aviator.

I would do anything he asked of me, Schwarzkoff was once quoted as saying. So when Lindbergh told him that the president, priority should be on seeing to it that the ransom was paid, even if it meant the kidnappers got away with it. Schwarzkopf did not object. And when Lindbergh also told him that his household staff was above reproach, and that he wouldn't allow the state police to consider them potential suspects, Schwarzkoff went along with that as well. But, I mean, if you couldn't demand answers from Lindberg's staff, how were you ever going to find out if someone on the inside had been involved.

On a warm, cloudless fall day, Poppy and I visited the scene of the crime. It had taken us weeks to get this visit approved. The Lindbergh home is now a halfway house for teenage girls. For several decades, at least, it's been owned by the state of New Jersey. And visits from curious journalists, I can tell you, are not encouraged. In fact, when we arrived, we were met by a very large human being who I know I probably shouldn't call him a bouncer except that he was you know a bouncer he ordered us back to our car and told us not to return

until we got in rid of all of our electronic gear including our phones when we were finally allowed in we were introduced to a young resident who served as our guide but our bouncer was never far behind I lost my nerve what I got my guy I've totally lost my nerve what the hell now I got to tell you Being followed by this guy who could break our necks in an instant, it did not instilling me the warm and fuzzies. Let's be honest, Poppy. It was not my finest moment as a journalist.

I couldn't get out of there fast enough. Poppy and I debriefed afterwards. What happened, Joe, when we went inside? So she takes us upstairs and takes us into what in 1931 was Charles Lindberg Jr.'s bedroom. It was a large room. It had the window still there. And what was immediately kind of observable, it's quite a distance to cross out of the window, over to the crib, and out again.

And then when we were on the ground floor looking up, it was very clear that it'd be hard to know what window. It's hard to, there's so many windows, it's huge, you'd need to know which one. Right. Which is, of course, one more reason to think there was an insider involved. It's just, it's implausible that somebody shows us. up there out of nowhere and picks exactly the right window when there are a dozen second floor windows in various places around the house. We then walked downstairs. There were two more rooms

we were allowed to see, a library, and what had once been Betty Gow's bedroom, which was to the left of the library and just below the baby's bedroom. We did a bit of a sound test, so we shut the doors, I went up the stairs just to see if someone had come through the front would they have heard and you said you could hear. Right. And don't forget that there are a series of theories around this that, in fact, they never did go up the ladder and that whoever kidnapped the child actually did it by going up the stairs, taking the child out of the bed and either coming down the stairs with the child or handing it off to somebody who was on a ladder. Yeah, and I think, I agree. I mean, if we'd open the front door and then you could hear right through, it's just right

there. It's just impossible. They had to go through the window. Right. Yes. That's right, because the stairs are right next to the library. And, you know, that's where the family and the servants were sitting, you know, talking when it happened. We then asked the young woman whether she felt, you know, noise carried, and she said it kind of did. Now, everyone says it was a windy night, but it is hard to imagine that if the baby had cried or cried out, they wouldn't be heard from where they were sitting. I kind of wonder if, I don't know, again, was it an insider that the baby recognized?

Back outside, we looked up at the window again. The other thing we observed was that looking up at the window, it's not a huge height. I wouldn't be scared to go on a ladder to that window. Yeah, I agree with you on that. The issue then still becomes, though, you know, how difficult was it to crawl in to the room from wherever the ladder happened to be positioned? It would have been difficult.

Yeah, I don't know. Like, an athletic man, I think, could get in. Good upper body strength, you just pull yourself in from the ledge. It's a solid window to pull yourself in. Easy for you to say, Poppy. Can you see what's happening here? Poppy and I, we couldn't have been at the house for more than an hour. And yet, you know, here we are now.

Our minds are just flooded with questions and theories and arguments and about how in the world the strangest of kidnappings took place. And now we really do understand why all the people we're interviewing got so hooked on the Lindberg case. Because you know something? We're hooked too. Let's do a quick review. How did the kidnapper or kidnappers know that the family would be in Hopewell

on a Tuesday night when the Lindbergs were never in Hopewell on a Tuesday night? when the Lindberghs were never in Hopewell on a Tuesday night. Why was Lindberg so hell-bent on keeping his staff from being interviewed? How did the kidnappers know which room the baby was sleeping in? How do you know which window was the only window in the whole house that didn't latch? And there was only attempts made at one window because there's only one set of ladder imprints in the mud. So whoever put that ladder up against the house knew that that was the only window you could get in. would he have known that.

Was it really possible for the kidnapper to pull himself into the baby's room using that ladder and then carry the baby out without being heard? Either somebody inside of the house, there were only five people in the house, took the baby out of the crib and walked out the front door, and then somebody was outside, and they gave that baby to somebody outside. Or somebody put the ladder outside, and then somebody from inside the house picked the baby out of the crib and handed it to somebody on the ladder. Why didn't Lindberg check outside when he heard that crows?

cracking noise. Why didn't the baby cry out? Why didn't the family dog bark? They had a dog that barked at everything named Waggouche. Wauge didn't bark. Why did Charles Lindbergh skip that dinner in Manhattan that night? Lindberg had a speaking engagement at the Waldorf Historia in Midtown Manhattan at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 1st, 1932. Not only was a no-show, he left a room full of people waiting to hear him speak. And instead of speaking there, he drove to Hopewell. What would you make of the fact that Lindberg had previously hidden the child from Anne and Betty Gow as a practical joke? I mean, that's something that would jump out at any law enforcement investigator.

Did the tours the butler gave to gatecrashers allow someone a chance to scope out the house? Why was Lindberg so insisted that the FBI be kept away? Why? Why? Why? The questions are endless. Before we leave you, we need to do. jump ahead 10 weeks to May 12, 1932. Most of the press has left Hopewell. About four miles from the Lindbergh mansion, a truck driver named William Allen,

pulls over to the side of the road. He has to pee. He steps cautiously into the undergrowth. His boots sinks slightly into the soft ground. He moves a few paces deeper, past some trees. When he spots something, It's a strange shape, nearly entirely hidden by branches and moss. As Alan moves closer, his chest tightens.

He suddenly realizes that what he's seeing is a child's body. He freezes in horror, stops breathing for a second. He sees a fractured skull and a face that's half decomposed and half still recognizable. He hurries back to the car and he tells his partner to take a look. When his partner returns with the same horror in his eyes, they know what they have to do. They rush into town and report what they found. The police retrieved the body and take it to the morgue. They're pretty sure they know whose body it is.

Betty Gow has brought to the station and shown the corpse. Sure enough, she identifies it as Charles Lindberg Jr. The great aviator confirms it as well. This is no longer a kidnapping. case. It's now a murder investigation. There are two shocks in that six and a half week period where one is the shock of the kidnapping in March, and then on May 12, 1932, when the body has discovered that afternoon, that's the second shock. Despite the greatest manhunt in history, the baby's murder was not discovered until his little body was found here in the woods

near his home two months later. This area had been searched thoroughly and nothing had been found. So where in the world did that body come from? That's next time. Just to let you know, if you want to binge this whole series today and without ads, you should become a paid subscriber to the free press. Our paid subscribers can listen to all six episodes right now with no ads and will gain all the other benefits of a paid free press subscription

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