Presenting the Lindbergh Conspiracies

0:00I would stake my entire professional career on the fact that Brigitte Macron, 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? Pizzagate 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.

0:41Conspiracies 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. Clusters 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 upended. Conspiracies are now part of American life, of course.

1:28The 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 airtight. And the official explanation of how he pulled it off was so unsatisfying satisfying that people have been filling the void with their own theories ever since.

2:25Some 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 Lindbergh baby case?

2:52I'm Joe Nocero, and from the Free Press, this is The Lindbergh Conspiracies. Episode 1, The Broken Window.

3:08I'm going to start with that execution I mentioned. It's the night of April 3rd, 1936. 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 Lindbergh, 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.

3:58I got interested in the Lindbergh kidnapping from listening to my parents talk about growing up in Trenton and going to a Holtman execution party at the Hotel Hildebreck, where the execution was broadcast live.

4:19There go the witnesses into the New Jersey State Prison at Trenton who are to see Bruno Richard Holtman die for the kidnapping of a Lindbergh baby. And so, silent and stolid, Holtman 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.

5:05Bruno is dead.

5:10The 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 Haltman 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.

5:58I 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. I have over 1 ,000 original pictures of the trial and kidnapping. Just by chance, I ended up buying a house that was directly across from the Lindbergh driveway. And then there's Robert Zorn, who says he knows who really kidnapped the Lindbergh 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.

6:49They 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 Ronnell Delmont, who used to run the popular website The Lindbergh 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 Lindbergh 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 Lindbergh through it all, you inevitably start asking yourself, what really happened?

7:40In 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 Hauptmann 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 closed. But the book, it will never close. He was right.

8:19The 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 Lindbergh 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, it is trees walling each side.

8:48Joe Nocera: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 Lindbergh chose the spot. Ever since he flew across the Atlantic in 1927, the first person to ever do 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.

9:32But what you need to know is that pick a celebrity. Taylor Swift, George Clooney, the Beatles. They all look like nobodies 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. Lindbergh'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. Lindbergh'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 Ollie Waitley, their butler.

10:24Get out of here before I call the police! Yet, when a writer for the Saturday Evening Post visited Lindbergh 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, Lindbergh was supposed to make a speech in New York, but he never showed up.

11:14No one knows why. March 1 was also a Tuesday. Ever since the family had begun using the house, they'd always return to Lindbergh'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 Lindberghs 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 Lindberghs in Hopewell that night? Well, for the most ordinary of reasons. Charlie had had a cold and Anne had caught the cold.

11:58She was also pregnant at the time. And she says, I'm exhausted. We're staying put. Mariah Fredericks wrote a fine novel called The Lindbergh Nanny, a reimagining of the Lindbergh kidnapping through the eyes of Betty Gao, 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 Ann start putting him to bed.

12:39They put him in his little sleepy 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 Gao, the Lindbergh's nursemaid, and Anne Marle Lindbergh, the baby's mother, were trying to pull them shut on the knife and they couldn't do it. They both tried, but her failure to close that shutter will come back. to haunt her. She then goes downstairs and has dinner with Elsie Waitley, who is the cook for the Lindberghs.

13:25The baby falls quickly asleep. Soon, Charles Lindbergh returns home. Or does he? At eight, 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 Lindbergh 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, like the slats on orange crates, I believe is the way he referred to it.

14:14Strangely, no one else in the house ever reports hearing that sound. Nor does Lindbergh get up 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 Ann Lindberg to see if she had taken the child, and she hadn't. Ann 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.

14:53And then she went downstairs to see Charles, who was down in the study, and she said, you know, Mr. Lindberg, 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, Anne, 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 Bucks Brothers three-quarters wood chisel. They didn't know if it belonged to a carpenter there who was used to try to pry the window open. So, clue one, chisel.

15:36Underneath 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 a 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.

16:18And 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. Ransom. Ransom note. They found a ransom note up in my baby's room. The ransom note was simple in its demands. Give us$50 ,000 and you'll get your baby back.

16:59This was the Great Depression, and the Lindberghs 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 Ann Lindbergh 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 windowsill, 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?

17:48Also, kind of curious, Lindbergh didn't open the envelope to read the ransom demand. He waited for the police to arrive.

18:01Outside, 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.

18:48And 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. Not 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 Lindberghs sell the family out to make some money? When the Lindberghs were away during the week, Ollie Waitley, the butler, sometimes gave tours of the house to strangers who showed up wanting to get a peek of the famous family.

19:40Had 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 and said 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.

20:20I mean, otherwise, why wouldn't Betty Gall's fingerprints be on the crib, or the mother's, or the father's, or anybody? The bureau, the crib, the window, the window sill, 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.

20:55Anne Morrow 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 reread the letter 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?

21:38That 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 It was, I think, poor speculation But they speculated earlier 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.

22:19Whose book on the kidnapping is titled Houtman's Ladder As long as you followed 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.

22:34Joe Nocera:In your book, you talk a little bit about how the press covered the Lindbergh 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 Lindbergh home. That's Candace Fleming. She wrote a young adult book about Lindbergh. 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.

23:13And you think about that, the first time I read it made me sick, because I thought, all that evidence, right? That no one had gone out into the woods yet. Here's Richard Cahill again. One of the things that happened is somehow, nobody knows for sure, It could have been an operator. It could have been someone in law enforcement. This got leaked on the night of the kidnapping to the 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.

23:42But 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,

24:04A Hearst reporter named Adela Rogers wrote,

24:17And the humorist, Will Rogers.

24:25The competition was fierce, with the relatively new medium of radio competing with newspapers 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 at 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.