Charles Lindbergh Kidnapping

Lindbergh Kidnapping
Charles Augustus Lindbergh was one of the most famous aviators in the world. He is most famous for his transatlantic flight from New York to Paris. Lindbergh also achieved fame for going through Latin America on goodwill tours. While in Mexico, he met Anne Spencer Morrow, the daughter of Dwight W. Morrow, the American ambassador there. Lindbergh married Anne Morrow in 1929. Other than politicians and war heroes no one surpassed his fame. He was a genius when it came to aviation and mechanics. He advised the making and design of several planes from ones made of wood and wire to jets. He helped several countries and airlines by giving them advice on their air fleets. Charles Lindbergh was born on February 4, 1902 in Detroit, Michigan. He grew up in Rapid Falls, Minnesota on a family farm. His father’s name was Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Sr. and his mother’s name was Evangeling Land. As a child Lindbergh showed that he had a great deal of mechanical ability. When he was eighteen years old he began attending the University of Wisconsin majoring in mechanical engineering. In 1924, Lindbergh enlisted in the United States Army so that he could be trained as an Army Air Service Reserve pilot.
On March 1, 1932, the Lindberghs' 20-month-old son, Charles Augustus, Jr., was kidnapped from the family home in New Jersey. About ten weeks later, his body was found. In 1934, police arrested a carpenter, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, and charged him with the murder. To convict Hauptmann, they needed to find connections in the ransom notes left, the use of gold certificates for purchases, and also the ladder used to climb up the Lindbergh home. The ladder was made of pine from North Carolina, Douglas fir from the West, birch, and Ponderosa pine. It was traced to a mill in South Carolina and from there to a lumber dealer in the Bronx. The hand-made ladder showed the characteristics of a skilled carpenter. Hauptmann was a carpenter, and had constructed the garage where the ransom currency (gold certificates) was found. The most crucial evidence was the ransom notes themselves. The notes were examined by document specialists who concluded that they came from the same hand. They noted consistent misspellings as well as inversion of letters such as g and h. They also noted peculiarities in the way that x and t were written and the illegibility of the word “the”. The letter o was open, and t's were uncrossed. Using the notes' grammar errors and phrase usage, forensic linguists suggested that the writer was a native German speaker.
The baby’s body was lying in a shallow grave and was covered by a pile of leaves. It was discovered four miles from the Lindbergh’s house in the woods by the home. From an autopsy, it was found that he had died from a skull fracture and, “according to the county physician who examined the body, had probably been dead since the night of the kidnapping. Hauptmann was arrested, and after a six-week trial in Flemington, New Jersey, was found guilty on February 13, 1935.The following year Bruno Richard Hauptmann was executed after a jury found him guilty of the brutal kidnapping and murder of twenty-month-old Charles Lindbergh, Jr., the son of American aviation hero Charles Lindbergh.