CJR: Do you have an affinity with that era?
RCJR: No, I feel I have an extremely good understanding of the case. I feel I have a good understanding of the era. My father was born in the year of the kidnapping; 1932. His mother told me a lot about the time period. It’s important to know this, because in today’s CSI mentality, you have to look at it how things were investigated back then. You had to get into it to at least that point to understand what they were up against. If this crime had occurred today, it would have been a lot like the O.J. Simpson trial with wall-to-wall media. In this case, the media coverage was worse. Lindbergh’s second son, Jon, was being driven to nursing school with a nursemaid and a driver. A car comes out of nowhere and three men get out, and they whip out cameras, and they had just wanted pictures of the kids and family; that was the type of coverage thy had. It made Lindbergh and his family move to England. In that time, Lindbergh was a national hero; most of the commentary was, “shame on the media,” and that it was a shame he had to leave.
CJR: What was the prevalent belief during the era about the kidnapping?
RCJR: There were different theories. Some police thought it was a gang, some thought it was organized crime, and most thought it was just an amateur who had done it. Even Al Capone, who was in jail at the time, offered his services to determine if it had been organized crime, but they politely declined. The motive was ransom money.
CJR: How much?
RCJR: Asked for $50,000, then for a brief period raised to $70,000. At the scene where they paid the ransom at St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx, the man at the cemetery agreed to accept $50,000. The go-between was named John Condon, a 72-year-old retired educator who lectured part-time at FordhamUniversity. Lindbergh initially chose two low-level gangsters to be go-betweens. The kidnappers rejected him. Condon was a patriot to the extreme — he wrote a letter to the Bronx Home news, and he offered $1,000 of his own money to the kidnapper through a Catholic priest. He reasoned that a priest could never tell his name. Condon was not looking to be involved. He was looking for people to acknowledge he was willing to help, but sometimes life has a way of calling your bluff, and the kidnapper said, “If you want in, you want in.”
CJR: How come the baby was not returned?
RCJR: The baby was dead. He died the night of the kidnapping. Most people believe that when the kidnapper was coming down the ladder, the extra weight of the baby was too much and the ladder broke. The ladder was a homemade ladder so it would collapse on itself and he could bring it along. They were able to prove this — the police built a replica ladder, one of the investigators who weighed 174 pounds, he could go up and down the ladder with no problems. When they gave him a sandbag which weighed about what the baby would have weighed, the ladder broke in almost the exact same spot where the real ladder broke. When that happened, the investigator dropped the sandbag and the sandbag struck the windowsill made of stone. Whether they knew it or not they had likely re-enacted the moment of the baby’s death. The kidnapper went ahead anyway and did the extortion part of the crime, knowing the baby was dead.
The baby’s corpse was found, 4.5 miles away from the house in a wooded area. Two truckers were driving along, and one needed to answer the call of nature, and he found the body. The kidnapper didn’t have a shovel, so he covered it up with sticks and leaves. The body was discovered May 12, 1932. Date of kidnapping was March 1, 1932.
CJR: Then how did the rumors exist the baby was still alive?
RCJR: It was not a theory until a book came out with it in 1976, but even Hauptmann’s defense attorney acknowledged it was the baby’s body.
CJR: Why the Lindberghs?
RCJR: Some people think Hauptmann picked him because he wanted to show that he could conquer the greatest man in the world. Others believe that it was because he had a lot of money. No one knows for sure, because he denied it to the day he died.
CJR: What did Hauptmann do for a living?
RCJR: He was a carpenter who quit his job the day he got the ransom. He could make decent money, but he had to work hard for it. Kidnapping was not a big deal back then. In 1932, in New Jersey, kidnapping was just a misdemeanor. It was very common and a lot done by organized crime, and the person would be returned when the ransom was paid.
CJR: How did it lead back to Hauptmann?
RCJR: $50,000 was total paid, but $36,000 of that was in gold certificates, which looked like regular money with a gold seal on the front. The reason they did that was the Treasury Department was going to issue an executive order to turn in all gold. They knew that the gold certificates would become more easy to spot, and had recorded all the serial numbers. As time went on, the ransom money began to surface. … Then in September 1934, one of the banks turned up a $10 gold certificate, with writing on it that said 4U1331; they traced it back to a gas station in the Bronx and found out that he had written the man’s license plate, not because he thought it was from the kidnapping, because he thought it was counterfeit, so they ran the plate number and it came back to Richard Hauptmann. His real name was Bruno Richard Hauptmann, and not even his own wife knew that. They arrested him and found a bunch of ransom money in the garage. Handwriting experts that concluded he wrote the ransom letter. The biggest piece of evidence determined that one of the side rails came from a board in Hauptmann’s attic, and that’s the one piece of evidence that has never been refuted. Most people who think he did it, think he did it alone; I am not sure. Once the police investigated, they only investigated him. There was no evidence that someone else was at the scene. Maybe they waited in the car. Someone turned in $2,980 of gold certificates. Someone with the name J.J. Faulkner signed the slips, and they never were able to figure out who that was, so it could have been a accomplice after the fact, helping him launder the money, or someone who helped with the kidnapping, like a driver. That’s one area where there’s no conclusive evidence. If there’s anyone out there who says they know everything about it. They are lying. Only person who knows is Hauptmann.
On the one hand, I am much impressed by Cahill’s scholarship and research in producing a book. On the other hand, Hauptman did it… that has been a settled case for decades… that’s a long process, writing a book, to explain what was already know… information to the contrary has to be old, before it was all settled, or just plain foolish and wicked.