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On This Day: Bruno Hauptmann found guilty of kidnap and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s son
FEBRUARY 14, 1935: A German immigrant was found guilty of the 'crime of the century' - the kidnap and murder of flight pioneer Charles Lindbergh’s son - on this day in 1935.
Bruno Hauptmann was sentenced to death and later executed by electric chair - while maintaining his innocence to the end - after one of America’s most sensational trials.
A British Pathé newsreel shows the 35-year-old defendant being forced to admit he lied while being cross-examined at the closing stages of the trial.
People around the world had been captivated by the abduction of 20-month-old Charles Lindbergh Jr from the family home in March 1932.
His father, who was at the time considered the most famous man in America, paid a ransom of $50,000 – worth $840,000 today – after a mysterious note was sent to him.
But young Chas would never return alive – his body was found two months later near the Lindbergh’s home at Amwell, New Jersey.
Hauptmann was arrested more than two years later when, in September 1934, a $10 note used by him to pay for petrol was traced back to the ransom money.
But he pleaded not guilty, which triggered a hearing that was dubbed the 'trial of the century' and attended by reporters from all over the world.
People watched in astonishment as Lindbergh, who was the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1927, attended hearings to give testimony.
Scottish nurse Betty Gow, who had put Chas to bed the night he disappeared, was also forced to take the stand.
Ultimately, Hauptmann was executed by electric chair on April 3, 1936.
Doubts over his guilt have since emerged, including a claim that the ransom deliverer John Condon’s phone number had been planted on Hauptmann’s cupboard.
Also, Condon, a teacher who claimed he had randomly received a message from the kidnappers and wanted to help young Chas, didn’t recognise the German in a lineup.
Furthermore, other eyewitnesses – inlcuding a legally blind man – were found to be unreliable.
Lindbergh, the son of a Swedish immigrant and prominent U.S. politician, was so haunted by the death and public hysteria that he left America in December 1935.
He and wife Ann Morrow, who bore him six children (although it is claimed he secretly fathered seven more with other women), settled in a Kent village.
[On This Day: Aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh dies from cancer]
In 1938, they moved to a French island off the Breton coast that Lindbergh had purchased.
Lindbergh, who was a suspected Nazi sympathiser and anti-Semite, had also shown interest in moving to Germany.
But he turned down an offer for the Hitler’s chief architect Albert Speer to build the family a home anywhere he wanted.
However, with war in Europe brewing, the family returned to America in April 1939 and Lindbergh joined the U.S. Army Air Force.
Like his congressman father of the same name, who opposed American entry in World War I, Lindbergh campaigned against the U.S. fighting German for a second time.
Yet he flew many combat missions in the Pacific after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
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He flew as a civilian because President Franklin Roosevelt, who believed the aviator supported the Nazis, refused to reinstate his Army Air Corps colonel's commission that he had resigned in April 1941.
Lindbergh, who letter settled in Hawaii and became deeply reclusive, died aged 72 in 1974 just days after finishing his autobiography.
