The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling - EP05 | Suspect Number 1

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

In the decades after the trial, a conclusion that once seemed certain begins to collapse. As Charles Lindbergh’s legacy darkens and a postwar America grows more suspicious of official narratives, new theories arise about what really happened—and who really killed the Lindbergh baby. 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. There are some people who are not so sure that will ever know what really happened on March 1st, 1932 in Hopewell, New Jersey. Like Jim Davidson. It's never going to be solved, just like Kennedy's assassination. I'm putting this out there as a new conspiracy theory. Melia Earhart took the baby.

That's our friend Sarah Siskin. She's just kidding. The only theory that hasn't been written about that I might write about is alien abduction. Jim Davidson's kidding, too, I think. And yet, Poppy and I had promised to look at every single theory in turn, assessing their merits so that we could come to our own conclusions. When we first started this project and were just learning about the different conspiracies, I had a conversation with one of my free press colleagues, Kieran Noonan.

She'd been part of our team digging into the case. She said something that is stuck with me. It's totally dizzying. And the thing that I keep finding is every theory I read, I suddenly believe that's the truth. Like, they're all extremely compelling. You know, some seem more outlandish than the others. But, you know, when you read the books on them, you're like, maybe they've got a point. In this episode, we dig into those theories.

One more shocking and stranger than the next. And also, totally plausible. I'm Joe Nossera. And for the free press, this is the Lindbergh conspiracies. This is episode five, suspect number one. At the end of the last episode, it was 1936. Lindberg was 34 years old when Hauptmann was executed. In the months after, the Lindbergs fled the glare of the media,

living for long stretches in England and France, where anonymity felt just barely possible. My name is Thomas Doherty. I'm a professor of American Studies at Brandeis University, and the author of Little Lindy is kidnapped. how the media covered the crime of the century. At the end of 1935 and into 1936, he flees to England, which is seen as a country that will not be as dangerous.

And I think at that point, he realizes we've got to get out of this madhouse. Of course, some feel that even their leaving was suspicious. Life resumed in increments. Their son, John, had been born later in 1932, followed by Land in 37 and in 1940, Scott in 1942, and Reeve, the youngest in 1945. While Charles returned obsessively to flight and aviation, Ann turned inward, shaping her experience into journals.

Even as their family grew, though, their parents never spoke of Little Lindy. By the 1940s, Lindberg's stature as a hero who could do no wrong was eroding. He makes six or seven trips to Nazi Germany and expresses his admiration for the for the Luftwaffe and for the way the Nazis are getting the country moving again. Limburg's defenders say that when he comes back, he is channeling information to American intelligence about the progress of the German war machine. But I think most of us believe that he has an authentic admiration

for the way Hitler is getting Germany on the march again. And then when he returns to America in the late 1930s, he becomes a leader, or one of the, certainly the main spokesman and the most famous spokesman, for something called the America First Committee, which is an isolationist organization that wants America to stay out of this dreadful European war.

We remember how those Europeans got us into that other great war, and that didn't turn out too well. And so we, innocent, moral America, want to stay away from corrupt, violent Europe and not have anything to do with this next conflagration. And Limburg is quite eloquent, and a popular voice for that opinion. It is now time to tell the people of this country

the truth about their position. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction. The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration.

Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government. And in late 1941, he gives a notorious speech in Des Moines, which crosses over from isolationism into anti-Semitism. That Limburg states publicly what he had been muttering privately, which is the Brits and the Jews want us into this war, America into this war for their own purpose. I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war. No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany, but no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without society. the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them. A smear campaign was instituted against individuals who opposed intervention.

The terms fifth columnist, traitor, Nazi, anti-Semitic were thrown ceaselessly at anyone who dared to suggest that it was not to the best interests of the United States to enter the war. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction. And you can really see the culture shift on Lindbergh in, once he embraces the America First ideology.

Roosevelt insults him, and in a peak of anger, Lindbergh resigns his commission in the Army Reserves. and then after Pearl Harbor, he wants to get back in, and Roosevelt won't let him, so he won't be recommissioned. But interestingly enough, Limburg becomes a civilian consultant to an aircraft manufacturer and then goes out to the Pacific and trains pilots, and, of course, this is totally against military regs, as a civilian, flies combat missions and takes down some Japanese zeros. And the explanation of this is every pilot in the Pacific had probably became pilots. because of Limburg, and there's nobody in the Army Air Force that's going to tell Charles Limburg he can't fly a plane. He later gets, say, a commission and medals for his service in the Pacific

Theater. And a general in the Pacific Theater actually said what Limburg taught our pilots save them 50% of the fuel that they would have used, because who knows more about fuel conservation than Charles Limburg. And the consequence of that, of course, is that instead of taking Four islands, you only have to take two. That's sort of the, maybe, the kind of the penance that Limburg does during the Second World War. He never recanted his admiration for the Nazis. In the post-war years, Charles and Anne settled more permanently in the United States. Beneath the surface, fractures widened.

Anne had an affair with her personal physician in 1953. And Charles led an increasingly private law. abroad. More on that later. Charles spent his final years in Maui, where he died of cancer in 1974. He was laid to rest in a simple, quiet, and swift funeral attended by only about 15 close friends and family, wearing his khakis and resting in a locally made eucalyptus casket. Anne lived on for decades after her husband's death. She spoke to CBS's 60 Minutes on April 20th, 1980. Morley Safer was the correspondent.

He asked her about the effect of the kidnapping on Lindbergh. He didn't express himself very much about it. And I think that is a Swedish tradition. And I think he held it all in. Whereas I wrote rings in my diary, I could get above it by writing about it. 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. Anne died in 2001. By then, alternate theories about what really happened to Little Lindy had already taken root. Do you have a theory of who actually kidnapped the baby? I think it's mafia connected, covered up by Jay Edgar Hoover, and the mafia had Hoover giving blowjob to his second and command. man. So you know that story, right?

Well, yeah, of course. Everybody knows that. So that's why Hoover's covering it up, and because the mafia was involved. Oh, because the mafia knew Hoover was a homosexual. Yeah. So, yeah, there's the mafia theory with Hoover and his blowjob. Not one of the dominant theories, to be honest. But then there were all the Lindberg did it theories. people have come around to believing that Lindberg

had something to do with the death of the child. Previously, it was just focused on Halpman and Lindbergh was an innocent victim, but it's no longer that way. Jim Davidson even says it's the prevailing theory now. Part of the reason we did this podcast to tell you the truth. We wanted to understand where the Lindberg did it theories came from, why they became so prominent,

and whether there was anything to them. I think as the decades have changed, I think probably more people today feel that Lindberg did it more than Haughtman did it. Because probably the last 10 books that came out have one theory or another how Lindberg was involved. For instance, Greg Algren, who co-authored a book in 1993 called Crime of the Century, believes that it's possible that it was a prank gone wrong, a prank pulled by Lindbergh himself. It's true that Lindbergh had once hidden his son

from his wife and his nanny Betty Gao, and to an ex-cop like Augrin, that raised the suspicion that he could have done it again, except this time with disastrous consequences. His core belief, though, is simply this. The kidnapping was not the work of a stranger who climbed into the window at hope, well and took little Lindy.

We believe, and I believe, that it is unlikely that there was a stranger ofduction. There had been other books written before us that had talked about the trial and whether or not I thought he was guilty or not guilty or what his degree of guilt was. But they had all, as far as I can tell, everybody who looked at this before us, started with the assumption that there had been a real third-party abduction, they had been a stranger abduction. And what we said is, wait a minute, forget about whether or not. the evidence against Houtman. Is this even a kidnapping?

Is it likely that this was a kidnapping? And I think now we know a lot about domestic violence, domestic situations that we probably weren't as aware of in 1932. And we can all think of cases where a child has been murdered or disappeared. Algren told me that nowadays, when a child disappears or dies mysteriously, parents are always suspects. and often the prime suspects. And we know from FBI statistics

that if a child under the age of five is murdered, that one of both parents is responsible, 85% of the time. So I don't think we were aware of that in 1932. In fact, if you look at Attorney Riley's summation, he says to the jury in defending Holman, we all know that in cases like this, everybody should be a suspect except the parents.

and I think now we know that probably the parents should be looked at as much as anybody else. Here's what Algren told me about the prank theory. We looked at the various theories, we thought that the most likely, and I'm not saying it's over 50%, but more likely than any other particular theory, was that there was this prank on Beth. I mean, he did have this habit of playing very cool pranks on people. He did it at a time, and he was disagreeing with something that they were doing or they weren't listening to him.

They weren't complying with his wishes. You know, he poured water on Ian's silk dress once and she was having an animated discussion with Amaria Earhart about feminism. He didn't like a former roommate of his who was to go out and drink, so he replayed and come home and drink water from a pitcher, so he replaced the water with kerosene. Donia killed the guy. He had a few months earlier hidden the child. I mean, that's an awful, that's something that would jump out at any law enforcement investigator. People don't usually phrase it like this, but he was an immature human being. Yes.

I mean, at the time, based on his behaviors, I'm not talking to Stephen, I said, you know, his behaviors were almost sociopathic. Let me list a few other theories that Poppy and I have heard along the way. Anne's older sister Elizabeth kidnapped Little Lindy because she was jealous that Charles had fallen for Anne instead of her. Elizabeth, you should know, had a serious heart condition, and she would die in her early 30s. She and her sister were very close, and Charles Lindbergh was desperate to find a way to help her regain her health. I myself, owe Elizabeth Morrow, a significant debt of gratitude. A few years ago, my son graduated from the Elizabeth Morrow School, which she founded in Englewood. In fact, the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades are all in Dwight Morrow's old mansion.

I feel confident in saying that Elizabeth Morrow did not kidnap her. sister's baby. Another theory revolved around Anne's younger brother, who was said by the conspiracy theorist at least, to have suffered from some sort of mental illness and that somehow he did it. No? How about? Hopman was involved, but he either had help from someone working for the Lindbergs or from someone he knew in the Bronx. Oh, and here's one more I just can't resist. It's the Rosaline Russell Theory. In November, 1944, shortly after Houtman had been arrested, the famous actress wrote a letter to J. Edgar Hoover about a conversation she'd overheard in a New Jersey speakeasy. She heard a man telling someone that Anne's father, White Morrow, had had an affair

with one of the Morrow maids who became pregnant. Morrow had the child sent to France, where he was brought up by a couple there, was an intermediary sending them money while keeping the from finding out who his real father was. And who was that intermediary? Are you ready for this? John F. Condon, Jafsey. According to this theory, the boy eventually discovered who his father was,

perhaps from Condon, returned to America, demanded $50,000 from Dwight Morrow's widow, kidnapped little Lindy when she refused to pay it, and set the ransom at, you guessed it, $50,000. There's also this whole rabbit hole joke. that you can go down, that I have been down, that argues that the body found in the woods

wasn't actually Charles Limburg Jr. That it was misidentified. Maybe it was a body from a nearby orphanage that had been placed there and that the real Charles Lindberg perhaps lived on. And from time to time people have emerged to claim they were Little Indy, you know, that he never died, he grew up.

And this idea was so prevalent that it's become a sort of meme, even appearing on The Simpsons. Over the decades, Over the decades, hundreds of such claimants surfaced, some writing long explanations and sending photographs as proof. We even spoke to a journalist who had been fooled by one of these claimants only to ultimately learn he was a fraud.

Of course, it must have been very painful for the family to have these people contact them. And I must say, I don't see any reason to believe little Lindy made it out of Hopewell alive. Not everybody in the 1930s believed Hopman deserved a fry. There was one person, aside from his wife, of course, who was convinced that the trial was unfair and that there simply had to be other people involved in the kidnapping.

His name was Harold Hoffman, and he was the governor of New Jersey. And what happened to him sent a powerful message to anyone who dared question the official version. Harold, the governor, was of the belief that, that Bruno Houtman was involved in the crime, but did not act alone. And they were undiscovered co-conspirators out there somewhere. Remember Patrick Bamarack?

I'm the great-grand-nephew of New Jersey Governor Harold Hoffman. When Hoffman took office in 1935, he was 38 years old. The youngest governor in the country and widely viewed as a man with a bright political future. But he had doubts about what it transpired during the trial. So after the appeals court confirmed the guilty verse, verdict. The governor took it upon himself to meet with Bruno Hopman in his cell. His goal was to get Hauptmann to name his co-conspirators. If he did, the governor told him, he wouldn't get the

electric chair. He's doing the same thing in the cell with Harold as he did on the stand, which is simply saying, I did not do this. And Harold's message to him was, tell me who, otherwise there's nothing I can do. Governor Hoffman had asked Ellis Parker, a well-known and flamboyant detective to investigate the case for him. As Ellis uncovered facts that favored Hotman, the governor became increasingly troubled. He used his power as governor to delay the execution by 30 days to give Parker more time to investigate.

The newspapers were furious. The New York Times describes his actions as indefensible. The rush to execute Bruno so quickly was something that was putting, like, closing the door on the event, the story, you know, obtaining that swift justice, but it also was removing the possibility that Bruno Hotman would at some point fess up and reveal the identities of his co-conspirators. Every step Hoffman took to reinvestigate the case was splashed on the front page and roundly condemned. Swartzgorf refused to cooperate with him and Hoffman ended up firing him

shortly after the execution. And the governor let Parker pursue an alternative theory that a New Jersey man had been involved in the kidnapping instead of Hotman. It was a huge mistake. In 1936, Parker and his associates abducted Paul Wendell a disbarred Trenton attorney. This guy was really low life in Trenton.

And he just hated Lindbergh with a passion, because Lindberg was everything that he wasn't. With no more than that to go on, Ellis transported Wendell across state lines, held them in a private home, and coerced them into signing a confession to the Lindbergh kidnapping. Once free, however, Wendell recanted saying it had been extracted under torture. In a great irony, Parker and several others were indicted in federal court for, yep, kidnapping. Ellis Parker was arrested for kidnapping under the newly-pillar. the newly produced Lindbergh kidnapping law.

Hoffman's investigation into the Lindbergh case ended his political career. The LS fiasco made his doubts look reckless and even dangerous, and helped cement the perception that challenging the verdict was destabilizing rather than principle. Hoffman wrote a series of articles for Liberty Magazine

detailing his meeting with Hoffman and all the many holes in the case, many of which are the same holes we've been talking about in this podcast. That didn't help his cause either. Once viewed as a potential vice presidential candidate, the Republican Party tossed him aside. He did not get the Republican Party nomination

for the next go-round to run for a governor. So while he had run for re-election, it was the party itself, as much as the voters in the primary level of the election, that essentially kicked him out of that aspect of his political career. Once Houtman was executed, the official story became the only story.

And it stayed that way for the next 40 years. Charles Lindbergh's baby was taken by a kidnapper who climbed through a window, and that man was eventually captured and executed for the crime. The Lindberg kidnapping became part of American lore. But then America changed. In 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

In September, 1964, the Warren Commission issued an 888-page report, concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald had been the lone gunman. Amateur sluice, unwilling to accept its verdict, picked it apart. Wasn't there a second gunman on the grassy knoll? How could a single bullet have penetrated both Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connolly, who was riding in the same car as the president? Books were written claiming the CIA did it, or the mafia, or that Oswell was a Russian asset, or a Cuban asset.

In 1991, Oliver Stone directed a movie claiming that the Kennedy assassination was a government conspiracy. Average Americans were now more willing to entertain the possibility that the government was lying to them. On the heels of the Kennedy assassination, of course, came the Vietnam War, And then the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. And then Watergate, which really was a conspiracy by the White House, to cover up the burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters. And with every new trauma came a further loss of faith in American institutions. Here's our friend Nick Gillespie.

There was this great and wonderful and horrible unmasking of how rotten most of American authority structures were in business, in family, in politics, you name it. We are left to fend for ourselves because we know that the government is never giving us the full story or law enforcement or a business. Americans were now open to the idea that things were not always as they seemed. In fact, more and more people believe that things were often not as they seemed. And eventually, one of those things was a Lindbergh kidnapping. When writers finally turned their gaze to the Lindbergh kidnapping, they focused primarily on the trial. Reading the trial transcripts was shocking.

It was plain as day that Hauptmann hadn't received a fair shake. The first such book was published in 1976, two years after Watergate and four decades after Hauptmann's execution. It was also two years after Lindberg's death at the age of 72. The book was called scapegoat, and its author was a former tabloid journalist named Anthony Scududo, who had spent years covering the mafia. His primary source was a man who had worked with Ellis Parker, so of course he concluded that Paul Wendell had done it. So in this book, its strongest sections really are about the trial,

and Scududo shows how the evidence had been manipulated, how witnesses had shifted their stories, and how the trial had been less about truth than about something. satisfying a nation desperate for closure. And Anna Hotman, by the way, she was convinced it was Isidore Fish, who died in Germany, and who Houtman blamed the gold notes on. And she really believed it was him who was involved in the kidnapping.

The following year, 1977, a journalist named William Norris released a talent to deceive. Norris went further still. He suggested not simply injustice, but orchestration, the possibility that the kid. kidnapping itself concealed the darker, more intimate truth. The members of the Lindbergh family, though not Lindbergh himself, may have been involved. So he's the one who put forth the theory that Anne Lindbergh's brother may have done it.

Then, in 1985, came the most powerful account yet, when British author Ludovic Kennedy published The Airman and the Carpenter. Kennedy was a serious investigative journalist with the track record of writing about injunctory. in the British criminal justice system. Lindbergh kidnapping was right in his wheelhouse. Anne Lindberg gave him her then unpublished diaries. And she told them that if, in fact, a miscarriage of justice had taken place, quote, it should not be glossed over, end quote, even if it caused her and her family anguish.

So the airman and the carpenter did not propose a theory of who kidnapped Little Lindy. It's one of the only books not to do so. but it did poke a lot of holes and it dismantles the prosecution's case even more rigorously than we'd seen Scuduto doing. And it argues that Helpman's conviction rested on circumstantial evidence, unreliable testimony, witnesses who'd been bribed,

and again, a public who just wanted blood. It became the gold standard for future Lindberg investigators. And here's my thing, Joe. I really think it's no coincidence that Anna, the wife of Helmman, sued the state right around this time. In 1981, 46 years after her husband's execution, Anna Hauptmann filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the state of New Jersey.

She had granted interviews to all the authors investigating the kidnapping, and it seems likely she thought the zeitgeist had changed enough to give her a chance. But it never happened. The case dragged on for years, but was ultimately dismissed in the late 1980s, largely on procedural grounds.

She died in 1994 at the age of 95 after a lifetime devoted to clearing her husband's name. The idea of a wrongful death suit for Houtman just would not have been possible until the 1980s and all these books coming out that had kind of rewritten the narrative. Even though Anna Houtman lost her suit, the Lindberg case had been reopened in the Court of Public Opinion.

Well, that's the thing. Like, if the government could be wrong about Kennedy, why not Lindberg? Or, like, if evidence could be shaped in Dallas, why not in Flemington? And if one national myth, legend, could fracture, perhaps they all could. The Lindbergh kidnapping was the first time

celebrity, media spectacle, national trauma, and state power fused into a single narrative the public was asked to accept. With each successive book, each new documentary, each new theory, Americans with even a passing knowledge of the case, knew that the official version

was no longer the only version. With that in mind, I want to bring us to the present, where, as I've mentioned, lots of authors are claiming that Lindberg did it himself. Like Jim Baum, who believes that Lindberg wanted to ship the baby out of the country because of his physical problems. He didn't pull this theory out of thin air. Rather, it's because of a letter that has been in his father's possession for half a century. I knew he had the letter because when I was a kid, I remember going in his room,

and I don't know what I was doing in there. It was always in his top door of his dresser. So I saw it, and I asked him about it. He said, oh, yeah, a prisoner gave that to me. Jim is a retired school teacher. His father, Nicholas Baum, who died in 1999, spent most of his career driving trucks. But for a brief time, he was a prison guard

at the Trenton State Prison in New Jersey. As a kid, Jim was always bugging his dad to tell him about his prison guard days, and especially about that life. letter. You see, it had been given to him by a prisoner. He was, he kind of blew me off about it, but he kept it, you know, so I would spread it out on the floor and read it, and I did this many times. I was fascinated by the case. The letter was written by a man who said he was a cellmate of Bruno Hauptmann's named Arthur Jones. And this original tattered letter had remained in Jim's dad's possession until he died.

and what it claimed was explosive. My letter says that the baby had weak bones. It was a sickly child that couldn't hear. And then it all said, can anyone verify that the baby talked, that the baby never talked. According to Arthur Jones's letter, Lindberg was the ringleader of the kidnappers.

Haltman was involved, but as part of the group Lindberg had put together. Betty Gow is also involved, the letter said, and Violet Charle in Isid and Isidore Fish. And so the basic premise of why Lindbergh, according to the letter, wanted to move the child out of the country was because the baby was sick.

He had a genetic form of rickets, cranial tubes, which is a brain disorder, apparently, and this is documented too. There's medical records to prove that. And so Lindberg did not want a damaged baby, He's the great aviator and he's friends with Alexis Correll who was the eugenics guy.

The intention was never for the baby to die. But Little Lindy caught pneumonia a few days after the kidnapping. Poppy spoke to Jim Davidson about all of this. The other thing as going for it is why would this guy make it up? I mean, there was no, it seemed genuinely, authentically

like Bruno and him were sitting in prison or death row and you talk and he told him. Yeah, exactly. The guy had nothing to gain. He didn't make any money out of it. He wasn't going to get out of prison by putting it out there. Of the people claiming Lindbergh was involved, there is a primary proponent, a retired judge named Lisa Pearlman, whose book from 2020 is titled, Suspect Number One, The Man Who Got Away. Suspect number one being Lindberg himself. At the time of the kidnapping, Lindberg worked with Alexis Karel, a Nobel Prize-winning vascular surgeon at the Rockefeller Institute.

He was also a raving eugenicist who believed that the West was in trouble because, quote, the white race was drowning in a sea of inferiors, end quote. Why preserve useless human beings, he once wrote? Perlman, who sadly did not respond to our many, many, many efforts to interviewer, speculates that little Lindy had become one of those useless human beings because of his supposed physical problems, rickets, and possibly brain damage caused by the flights Anne took with her husband late in her pregnancy.

She might have suffered from oxygen deprivation and carbon monoxide poisoning. So Lindbergh had the baby kidnapped and taken to Corel's lab where he was, you know, oft. Lindberg's purpose, according to Prolman, was to test a heart machine that he'd invented in Corell's lab and that he hoped would save his sister-in-law's life. Here is Perlman speaking to Ronnell Delmont

on her YouTube channel. So you put it all together, Lindberg may have been motivated by knowing his son had health problems, by being concerned about the publicity that he might garner for having potentially caused those health problems, And there you go.

That just gave Elizabeth's life. And Dr. Correll was looking to experiment more to permit human bypass operations on the heart, which were not yet viable. That Lindberg might be responsible for his son's death is a horrible thought. I asked Nick Gillespie why, beginning in the 1970s, people were willing to assume that Lindberg was somehow involved in his son's kidnapping. Here's what he told me. In the early 70s, he becomes the object of where it's not just that he was a treasonous American who was a eugenicist and wanted the Nazis to win and wanted to keep America out of World War II, et cetera, but that he killed his own child, which is exactly, you know, when you look at one of the metaphors in Vietnam that came out was the idea that the young men in Vietnam were being sacrificed like Isaac by Abraham, you know, that our fathers killed us. So, you know, it makes sense that the trajectory of Lindberg's theories about Lindbergh end with him, not just that, oh, this happened to him, but actually he was the cause.

Although Perlman's book was published six years ago, she has become just as dogged as anyone else we met in Lindbergh conspiracy land, continuing to dig up new facts that she believes support her theory. Last year, Poppy and I wangled our way into a mock trial she organized at the Middlesex County Courthouse in New Brunswick. Most of it was a rehash of information familiar to any self-respecting Lindbergologist, until, at the very end, a pathologist and forensic consultant named Peter Speth took the stand. What I am going to tell you now, in these 90 years or so, has never been addressed by anyone,

he told the room. Despite all the writings and books and documents, no one has ever addressed what I'm going to tell you now. Poppy and I were at the edge of our seat. This guy, Speth, it turns out, is no quack. A former New Jersey assistant medical examiner was over 55 years of experience. He's worked on some high-profile cases, even helping crack down the Golden State killer.

What he then detailed to the crowd were several unusual findings. So what he says is the kidneys had been surgically removed before the body entered the advanced stage of decay, and that was because of the way the clothing had been put back on the body afterwards and other ways in which the incisions were made. He also says there's a really unusual preservation of the face and the right foot.

So while the rest of the extremities were skeletonised, this uneven state of preservation suggests that some form of chemical treatment or environmental factor may have been used. And it is really strange to think about the foot and the face being partially intact. will remember that there was a man who went to pee in the woods who found him, and that was how he described it as well as the autopsy testimonies. So he, Dr. Speth, looked at different substances that could have been involved. He looked at a tannic acid, which is sometimes used in taxidermy, but he thinks that wasn't quite right. And then he looked at a lum, which is a potassium, and it's a compound used in tanning and certain forms of laboratory preservation.

And he sort of concluded that that had maybe been used. he also noted that there was a small round hole behind the right ear of Little Charlie and in addition the findings raised questions about therefore possible links to early experimental transplants and shunt research that was taking place exactly at that time and by Charles Limburg himself. When we called Dr. Speth to ask him to tell us more, he declined. I guess he's waiting for HBO to show up. But here's the thing, Joe, that I come back to a lot.

If any of us had to buy that Charles Lindberg was capable of conducting a possibly painful, certainly fatal experiment on his own son, you really have to believe he was a monster. So was he a monster? In his memoir, Lindberg wrote, life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it, but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance. The truth is, distance has not been especially kind to Lindberg. His Wikipedia page spends as much time on his views about eugenics, his dalliance with the Nazis prior to World War II, and his involvement in the America First isolationist movement

as on his famous flight across the Atlantic. And then, in August 2003, there came a revelation that was truly astonishing. This twist in the tale is just completely bonkers. So a German newspaper comes out and publishes these interviews with a group of adult siblings who had grown up believing their father was a man named Karu Kent, Karao Kent, I don't speak German.

And then they discover letters and faded photographs that pointed to a more shocking reality that it was actually Charles Limburg, who was their father, and that he'd spent the last 17 years of his life weaving a kind of secret existence in Germany and fathering seven kids with three different women, even as he was married to Anne, in total secrecy in a kind of slightly airy and coded way.

Three children were born to Bridget Hesheimer, two to her sister Marietta, and two to his German secretary, Valesca, all born between 1958 and 1967, all kept in silence by secrecy and pseudonyms. Only after the mothers died did the truth surface, and by late November 2003, DNA confirmed that it, at least three of these children were undeniably his.

On a forum called the Lindbergh kidnapping discussion board, one participant wrote, The Secrecy fits in well with Lindbergh's passion for secrecy and deception. Well said, but just how far did his passion for secrecy and deception really go? Next time, in our final episode of the Lindbergh conspiracies,

we give our verdict. So Joe, the time has come. Who do you think did it? Thank you.