Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping Poster, 1932

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Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping Poster, 1932

Poster

By: H. Norman Schwarzkopf

Date: March 11, 1932

Source: Bettmann/Corbis

About the Artist: H. Norman Schwarzkopf was the superintendent of the New Jersey Police at the time of the Lindbergh kidnapping. He created the poster dis-played below. The Famous Trials Project, from which the poster is drawn, is a website compiled by Douglas O. Linder, professor of law at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, as an educational resource of law students and scholars.

INTRODUCTION

The kidnapping of the son of famous American aviator Charles A. Lindbergh was, perhaps, one of the most famous cases of the twentieth century. On the night of March 1, 1932, the infant son of Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh and his wife Anne was abducted from the second-floor nursery of his home in Hopewell, New Jersey. In May 1927 Lindbergh had become the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. He was an American hero and the reasons for the kidnapping became clear when a ransom note was found at the scene of the crime. That, and a homemade ladder leading up to the nursery, were the two prime clues in the crime.

On March 5, the kidnapper communicated with the Lindberghs for the first time. Then, John F. Condon, a public school principal, offered a reward for the return of the child, publishing a letter to this effect in the Bronx Home News. The kidnapper responded the next day and the Lindberghs agreed to have Condon act as a mediator. It was at this crucial time that the poster shown below appeared.

PRIMARY SOURCE

LINDBERGH BABY KIDNAPPING POSTER, 1932

See primary source image

SIGNIFICANCE

On March 12, Condon met with the kidnapper and soon after turned over $50,000 in ransom money. He was told that the child could be found on a boat near Martha's Vineyard Island, but it turned out that no such boat existed. The hunt continued and on May 12, the body of the child was found in a woodland near the Lindbergh's home. Forensic evidence pointed to asphyxiation or blunt force injury as the cause of death.

Analysis of the ransom note had suggested a perpetrator of poor education and of German descent. The homemade ladder suggested that the kidnapper was skilled in carpentry. A forensic expert said that four different types of wood—Ponderosa pine, North Carolina pine, birch, and fir—had been used in its construction. The fir was particularly significant and was likely a piece of flooring that had been used to finish off the job when the carpenter ran out of wood. Next, distinctive marks were found on the wood that suggested a planing machine had been used for smoothing the side rails of the ladder.

Planed wood samples from more than 1,500 mills all over the country tracked the material used in the ladder to a company in the Bronx where, coincidentally, many of the ransom notes had turned up. All of this led to the arrest of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German immigrant and carpenter. He was found with some of the ransom money in his possession, although he claimed he was taking care of it for a friend. He had lain low for three years, but the police had meanwhile been tracking the serial numbers of the ransom notes. In Hauptmann's home, police found a missing floorboard that corresponded to the piece used in the construction of the ladder. There was also a defective wood plane that could have been responsible for the marks on the ladder.

Hauptmann's trial for murder and kidnapping began in January 1935; he was convicted and sentenced to death. Two appeals and a stay of execution were turned down and Hauptmann was executed on April 3, 1936. However, his widow Anna continued to protest his innocence and campaigned to clear his name until the mid-1980s.

The Lindbergh case had a lasting effect on U.S. law. In the 1920s, kidnapping had become a major criminal activity in the U.S. The usual way of dealing with it was to pay the ransom and then let the police investigate. Children were not the only victims. Indeed, some gangs would kidnap a rich businessman, which aroused less public hostility. Hauptmann's execution brought an end to the kidnapping "boom" as new legislation known as the "Little Lindbergh" laws came into effect in several states. These laws made it a capital offense to carry out kidnapping if any physical harm came to the victim. Even sending a ransom note might result in a penalty of twenty years imprisonment, a fine of $5,000, or both.