The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling - A New Series From The Free Press | The Lindbergh Conspiracies (EP03)

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

The investigation closes in on a German immigrant carpenter from the Bronx. When a chunk of the ransom money is discovered at his home, investigators think they’ve found a “smoking gun.” But is the evidence as airtight as it seems? Or is it a sign of a wider conspiracy that was never fully exposed? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before we get started, 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 that's access to our journalism, podcast, community features, and event perks. Subscribe today and save yourself waiting for the next episode. Remember when I said that Charles Lindberg did a lot of boneheaded things during the search for his kidnapped son? Well, let me give you a primo example. He instructed the bank that was putting together the ransom money, the money that John Condon was going to give to Cemetery John, to make sure they kept no record of the serial numbers of the bills.

That way, the money couldn't be traced. I kid you not. Why in the world would the great aviator suggest such a thing? Well, he felt that the easier he made it for the kidnappers to get away, the better the chances they would give him his child back. Of course, for those who now take a darker view of Lindberg's actions, it's just another data point suggesting his involvement in the crime. He wanted to make it easy for the kidnappers because, you know, he was in on it.

As usual, Norman Schwarzkopf was willing to go along. But that Treasury official, Elma Irey, the guy who put Al Capone in jail and refused to let him out for Lindberg's sake, he put his foot down. His title was Chief Law Enforcement Officer of the U.S. Treasury, and he told Lindberg that if the money went to the kidnappers unmarked, the Treasury Department would abandon the case. reluctantly, Lindberg went along with IRA's demand. And though he didn't tell us to Lindberg,

Iray had a little trick up his sleeve. When they put the ransom together, they had Elmer IRA, and he knew it wasn't well known, but he knew that President Roosevelt was going to order all gold certificates to be turned in. It was going to be illegal to hoard gold. So they made sure a substantial part of the ransom was paid in gold certificates, because in 1933, when this was going to be able to. going to happen, and IRA knew it was going to happen, they would become much easier to spot.

Gold certificates were bills that were backed not just by the U.S. government, like the dollar is, but by actual gold reserves. You know, the bricks in Fort Knox. They had a distinctive look. At IRA's instructions, the Treasury team recorded a master list of every serial number of the gold certificate bills intended for the ransom. Since smaller denominations of the bills, such as five and tens and twenties were going to be used in the ransom, the list was long, like 5,100 serial numbers. That was the money that Jaffezzi handed over to Cemetery John. We all know that they sent out lists of the serial numbers

and the bills to all the bank tellers and so forth, but checking every bill like this, the odds of them catching it isn't very good. But when it's just gold certificates, and they're unusual to see, it's, you know, and they're under orders, you will check every gold certificate. Over the course of the next few years, small amounts of the ransom money did show up in banks,

mostly in the Bronx. But by the time the banks figured out a particular bill was part of the ransom, too much time had passed for the teller to remember who turned it in. But then, on September 15, 1934, more than two years after Little Lindy was taken, a brown Dodge sedan pulled into a gas station. The driver was well-dressed,

and he spoke in a foreign accent. The manager of the station filled the tank. And when it came time to pay, the customer handed over a $10 goal certificate. Now, the attendant didn't suspect the man of being the Lindbergh kidnapper. He was just worried that he was going to get stiffed because the bank wouldn't accept the bill which were no longer legal tender. So he wrote the license plate on the back of the bill just in case.

This time, when the certificate was deposited, the certificate was deposited, was deposited, the bank quickly realized it was part of the ransom. The teller recalled that it had been deposited by a filling station. The police tracked down the right station, spoke to the manager, traced the license plate, and discovered the car belonged to, you guessed it, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German carpenter. They arrested Hauntman, even though they had other leads for other people at the time. They just dropped all the other leads and didn't want to pursue anything. That money kept appearing in New York, and they said, oh, forget about it.

We're not going to track the money anymore. So that was it. They had their man. Or did they? I'm Joe Nossera, and for the free press, this is the Lindbergh conspiracies. This is episode three, follow the money. Once Hoffman was arrested, the investigators stopped looking into other possible suspects.

Bruno Richard Hauptmann was the guiltiest man I ever knew, Elma Iray wrote after he retired. Once they had Hauptmann, the investigators had one clear-cut goal to gather enough evidence to put him in the electric chair. Some of that evidence was real and undeniable, but some of it was, well, pretty shaky. And that's a polite way of putting it. In Germany, where Hauptmann grew up, he was a small-time crook who had spent some time in prison for burglary and theft.

Historian Anthony Scuduto, who wrote a book about the case, unearthed anecdotes that show Hauptmann was clearly a rather cheeky criminal. While exercising in the jailyard one day, Hauptman slipped through an open gate, but not without leaving his prison close on the doorstep with a note that read, Best wishes to the police. He was 24 when he came to America as a stowaway in July 1923. It was his second attempt. The first time, he'd been caught and sent back.

A decade after coming to America, Hartman was living in the Bronx and working as an itinerant carpenter. His wife, Anna, who, by the way, fiercely defended him until her death in 1994 at the age of 95, She worked part-time in a bakery. They had just had a son named Manfred. Like most Germans in the U.S., Hopman faced prejudice, a holdover from World War I. Renele Delma has a rather pithy way of putting it.

German, illegal alien, anybody heard about illegal aliens lately? Hotman spoke broken English, and that was one bit of evidence against him. The gas station attendant, Jaffe, Lindberg, they all said the man they heard had a strong German accent. Remember, hey doc? But his inability to speak English fluently heard him in ways that went well beyond the evidence, especially during the trial. Here's Richard Cahill. When he was being cross-examined, he was asked about his past and his criminal past. And one of the fences that he had been charged and convicted of in Germany was a robbery, an owned robbery, where there were women who had baby carriages, and he and another person held them up at gunpoint.

And they were trying to say, oh, how could you do that with a baby and the child and so forth? And he screamed out, everybody had baby carriages. Well, nobody knew what he meant. What he meant was at that time period in Germany, there was horrible inflation. And it was a very difficult time. And what a lot of people did is they would hide their valuables in a baby carriage because what monster would go through a baby carriage. But he couldn't express it.

But then there was this. When investigators searched his property for clues, they found $14,000 in gold certificates. Certificates that were unquestionably part of the ransom. Houtman did have an explanation for this. Retired cop Greg Algren. He had a story about another immigrant, having given him the money to keep

before going back to Germany and dying of natural causes, tuberculosis, I believe. That story could be correct. As a matter of fact, There was such a fellow, another German immigrant named Isidore Fish, and he did go back to Germany in December 1933 nine months before Hauptmann was arrested. And he did die of tuberculosis. After Hauptmann was arrested, investigators retrieved the bills

Fish had used to pay for his return trip. And you know what? They were gold certificates with serial numbers that showed they'd been part of the ransom. But with Fish dead, prosecutors had zero interest. and pursuing an angle that might exonerate Hoffman. They take Haltman into the police station in New York, the Greenwich Police Station, and basically beat the hell out of the guy,

using a hammer, wrapped in a sock and everything else, and sleep depriving him, having him up constantly, forcing him to copy the ransom notes as they were, and so on. He won't fess up. Evidence that might suggest Hauptmann didn't do it, or at least didn't do it alone, is completely ignored. Now, I've got to tell you, from living in the Saralens across the driveway. You might remember from previous episodes,

Jim Davidson telling us he lived in the area. In fact, he lived very close to the Lindbergh House in Hopewell. They only paved that road in 1969. Right now, you can barely get two cars across it. Back then, it was literally a trail. And no signs up on the mountain. And to have somebody from the Bronx come out and find this house, there's almost an impossibility.

But yet, once Hartman found the money, that's how everything changed. And they didn't want to hear anything that distracted from the possibility that Bruno was their guy. And it was also interesting. The state police intimidated anybody that would back Haltman's excuse. Like the day the ransom money was paid, it was his birthday, and they were having a party his house. And that didn't mean anything to the police. And if somebody like Hans Koppelberg... Hans and Bruno were best friends.

...came forward and said, you know, I was at this party. They said, well, then you're going to be an accessory to the crime. So, you know, one by one, any of Haughtman's alibis were just intimidated out of the picture. To be fair, investigators kept finding evidence pointing to Hauptman's guilt, too. Remember, he was a carpenter. Tool marks on the ladder match tools he owned, and he seemed to have a set of chisels that matched the chisel found at the scene of the crime. Then there was the ladder, the infamous ladder.

Some of the wood used to make the ladder was found to match wood used as flooring in his attic. At his trial, a wood expert would say as much. And then there's something really odd. Condon's telephone number and address were found scrawled on a doorframe inside Hopman's closet. Arthur Maria Fredericks thinks all of these unanswered questions are what keep modern-day investigators tantalized and frustrated. I think the fact that the crime scene was not properly secured, that footprint evidence was eradicated, the fact that when you're dealing with a family of the wealth and influence of the Limburgs

and the person who is executed happens to be a poor undocumented immigrant, I do think that the evidence with Houtman, the latter evidence, the fact that when he was asked about having Condon's number, written in his closet, I think the unanswered questions of how did Houtman go from the Bronx to Hopewell, New Jersey? What did he intend to do with the child? In fact, with every piece of evidence against Hoffman, there's always seems to be something else that sheds doubt on it. Like that phone number in the closet? A journalist later said he wrote it. But they then why did Houtman agree that he'd been the one to write it?

Houtman's answer was, oh, I was a little bit interested in the trial, so I guess I jotted it down. Well, if I hadn't put Jaffsie's number in my closet, I would not say that I had. Greg Algren, the former cop who thinks the kidnapping was a Lindberg prank gone wrong, says there's plenty to point to Bruno being an extortionist, but not a kidnapper. In other words, the reason he saw Condon's note in the Bronx Home News was because he lived in the Bronx, and he saw an opportunity.

He could very well have been an extortionist, and I think one of the mistakes that people who came before us made is that they feel, well, if Holman didn't do it, then he must be innocent. It must be this guy who was framed, right? Then he must be this poor individual. But it's not black or white. How much thing he was an extortionist? I mean, the fish story could be correct,

but they really wanted to put him in Hopewell. think the evidence puts him in HOPA. So if you say, look, he's an extortionist. If he had gotten up and not stand and said, I tried to make money off this, I did all these things. And you take all of that away. If he concedes that, what evidence is there that he's in HOPE? So you think he basically was an opportunist?

Maybe he knew people who were involved. He acted upon that and then paid... That's a possibility. The death penalty for that decision, but just was not actually involved in the... the kidnapping itself. I mean, Lindler goes to the press and says, we will pay a ransom. No questions asked.

There'll be no prosecution. Just give us the baby. He says that in the middle of the American Depression. I mean, guess what happens? I mean, every con artist in the world is coming forward and deluging Hope on a Jersey with ransom demands and tips and everything else. We know the money was handed over. The last is there was no stranger abduction.

It's unlikely there was a stranger abduction. Because he's an ex-cop, Algren tends to be open to a variety of possibilities when a case hasn't been solved. It doesn't matter to him whether it's the Lindbergh kidnapping or a local homicide. Renele Delmont, though,

is convinced that Hoffman was railroaded and that Lindbergh is largely responsible. When we were at the cemetery, Greg and Rinal got pretty animated about this. Well, that's their story. It may not be true. She's talking about Condon and Lindberg. Remember, Ronell thinks Lindberg was in on it, and Condon, over time, became a co-conspirator. Right, but we don't, all we know is what people, I say this other time in my cases.

Somebody would say, well, this happened, and I'll say, no, we don't know that that's what that's what that's what witness A said happened. Right, the liar. Or the witness B said it. Right. All we ever know in the case is what people say about it. Right. We don't know what happened. That's my point.

Poppy and I spoke to a psychologist named Jerry Cross. He believes Hauptmann was innocent and he puts a lot of weight on the fact that he was German. To him, there was significant prejudice towards Germans after World War I. And maybe, just maybe, residing in the American psyche with something more, a premonition even. Hopman goes to a gas station and says, I got a nice $20 bill. And that's how he gets arrested. He didn't know if this was the Lindbergh money, but he's spending the Lindberg money, and that's how he got caught.

And he was totally innocent, but he was a German. That was extremely important that he be put to death. Because something was gurgling in the American unconscious. They knew something was going to happen. But it hadn't happened yet. Hitler is appearing. Nazism is starting to show its face. And then the Lindbergh child is kidnapped.

I think it's a premonition rather than a reflection of the past. Why are you so convinced that Hopman was innocent? Oh, simple. I could do a forensic approach, but I'll do a psychological approach. If you're guilty, I mean, he had a wife and he had a newborn baby, and he was offered, I don't know, $75,000 or $95,000. He was going to go to the electric chair. And a journal said, we'll give you a mind if,

You tell us the story. That money will go to your wife and their children. They'll be taken care of the rest of your life. And if he was guilty, that wouldn't have been a bad idea. But he said, no, I will never do that. He turned down the money. An innocent man would do that, but a guilty man would not do that. The ransom notes, of course, were important pieces of evidence.

So the question became, had Hauptmann written them? prosecutors hoped handwriting analysis would tie him to the crime. The handwriting is somewhat disputed because the police apparently told him to write in specific ways. That's author Mariah Fredericks. But I think they have hand-driving that he wrote prior to the investigation, and it's still a pretty good match. Here's the cool thing. You can actually go down to the New Jersey State Police Museum, where there's a big Lindbergh exhibit that includes a handful of the ransom notes.

Needless to say, Poppy and I did exactly that on a crisp October day last year. We have on here replications of the various key ransom notes, and what is immediately obvious seeing them like this is different writers. In all, the Lindbergs received

15 ransom notes and 13 envelopes. The most important one, of course, is the first one. The one that was left by the window on the night of. Poppy came to a pretty quick conclusion when she compared the original ransom note to the others in the Lindbergh exhibit. You don't have to be a handwriting expert,

but they are written by different people. From the night of to here, it doesn't all match. Although the handwriting experts said all the notes were written by Hoffman, the naked eye says otherwise. Or at least Poppy's naked eye. And I've got to tell you, mine too. Here we come to a pretty interesting,

modern-day twist in the plot. It would be really simple to determine Hauptmann's guilt or innocence right now. Simple. How? With DNA, of course. The kidnapper had to lick the envelope to seal it, and he also had to lick the back of the stamp. All these years later, the DNA of the kidnapper

would still be on the envelope and the stamp. But whenever the New Jersey State Police Museum has been asked to do DNA testing of the ransom note, it has always said no. When we asked their rationale, they wouldn't even discuss the matter. They acted like we wanted them to devolve a nuclear code. Anything with DNA testing, typing, anything to do,

any forensic examination, we can't discuss it this time. Kurt Perlack is a lawyer and Lindbergologist who has filed multiple lawsuits against the museum to get the envelopes tested. I think that the only way to get real justice here is to find out, out of these 225,000 pieces of paper, the 15 or so that might have tangible DNA should be examined, should be tested. And if Houtman's DNA is on those 15 pieces of paper, great. I think it's more likely than not that at least one of those pieces

of the paper does not have Houtman's DNA on that. Kurt says that officials at the museum have tried to put him off from pursuing this by telling him the Lindbergh kidnapping is another. Nothing Burger. Kurt, this is a 90-year-old case that nobody cares about anymore. So my answer back to that was, well, that's great. If nobody cares about this, then why do you guys care about it? Why can't you allow some DNA testing on a couple pieces of paper? Yeah, no, we're not going to do that. And they weren't really giving a reason as to why. It was just the answer is no. So like, they wanted me to clearly go away. But God bless him, he hasn't. We'll catch up with him again later. Meanwhile, let's head back to the 1930s.

Here's the case the police were building against Bruno. A German immigrant drove from the Bronx to Hopewell somehow made his way to Lindbergh's house in the woods. He then lucked out because it turned out to be the rare weekday the Lindbergs were there. He climbed into the warped, unlocked window using a ladder he had built himself. He grabbed the baby and climbed out

without leaving a fingerprint or a mud stain from his boots. How did the baby die? The investigator's theory was that the latter cracked, causing copmen to drop the baby. Little Lindy died when his head hit the ground. In a panic, he disposed of the body in the woods. Then he began sending the Lindberg ransom notes and took the money from Condon in the cemetery.

For a long time, he didn't spend the money because he assumed the banks had the serial members. But eventually he couldn't wait anymore. And he used one too many goal certificates. And he got caught. The state of New Jersey always viewed it as an open and shut case. He climbed in, he grabbed the baby, he climbed out, he dropped the baby. End of story.

But if that's not what really happened, if Halkman was just an extortionist trying to make a fast buck, why not just confess that and save himself? Rosen Helmonds gets on the jury box, up in the jury wooden box, in 1935, and he says, I'm a real jerk. I saw an opportunity to make money and saw Jeffsey's announcement in the Bronx News. I figured I could make some easy money, so I figured I'd scam a national hero. I'm sorry, I did that. I'm ashamed of myself.

Yes, I did that. I took the money. I went to the cemetery. I pocketed the money. I used it to buy things over the years. But I wasn't on that ladder in Hopewell. Does the jury convict... Yes.

There was no way he was going to live. The whole country wanted to see the guy die. I think if you admit to one, they're like, what else is this guy lying about? Doesn't matter that he was truthful about this one thing. It must be a ploy to cover up his larger crime, which was the kidnapping. One thing's for sure.

If the kidnapping itself was the crime of the century, the trial that took place in January and February 1935, was the trial of the sensory. The question nobody was asking in the 1930s is the question today. Did Richard Bruno Halpman get a fair trial? That's next time.