Note:

It should be noted that anybody wishing to frame Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the Lindbergh Baby Kidnaping had to have him lined up from the very beginning, i.e., before the kidnaping and before the death of the child, all planned as one operation. They had to have a criminal lined up whose handwriting and spelling they could imitate, raid his house, plant the money, fake and plant the ladder evidence, and get him to admit to possession of the money, with a lot of obvious lies, two and half years later. Does anyone believe this?
Alternatively, they had to trick a criminal into trying to collect the ransom money even though he had nothing to do with the kidnaping (which would have been very easy), arrest him, plant the evidence, plant the money, and then, by some strange coincidence, his handwriting and spelling just happen to resemble that of the notes! Does anyone believe that? There were 15 notes. Hauptmann made the same spelling mistakes under cross-examination at trial and in his letters to the Governor of New Jersey petitioning for clemency.

-C.P.

PS. As far as I can tell, not all the ransom money was ever recovered. About a third of it was missing. Surely if Hauptmann had been innocent, or even if he had had accomplices, some of the money would have been spent after his arrest (probably exchanged at race tracks and places like that). Yet to my knowledge not one dollar of it has ever been found, and approximately one third of it remains unaccounted for.

The Lindbergh baby died of a serious skull fracture to the base of the skull. Most writers (all I have read so far) speculate that the child died when the kidnapper's ladder broke on the way down, with the added weight of the child (who was one year old). A moment's thought shows that this is most implausible. No stranger can pick up a baby without being recognized as a stranger. What's going to happen? The baby will cry. No stranger can climb into a warm nursery, pick up a strange child, climb out an open window, into a cold, wet night, without the child crying. No kidnapper desperate enough to climb into a second story window (in Europe this would be called the "first floor" window), in an occupied house, at 10:00 o'clock at night, when all the occupants are awake, is going to risk getting trapped in the bedroom or on the ladder with a crying child. It is obvious to me that the kidnapper placed his hand over the child's nose and mouth to suffocate him, then turned him over onto the pillow and struck him on the back of the head with a blunt object to make sure he was dead. This is inevitable given the nature of the situation.
Hauptmann was an ex-machine gunner, a mass killer, with two criminal convictions in Germany: one, for burglary, for using a ladder to climb into the "first floor" window (in European parlance) of a house; and two, for armed robbery, for using a knife to threaten a woman pushing a baby carriage.
He was also an illegal immigrant.

-C.P.
November 22, 2008