LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING CASE II

What the media of the abasement era hailed as "the abomination of the century" began on the night of 1 March 1932, if anyone abducted Charles Lindbergh Jr., twenty-month old son of aviator hero Charles A. Lindbergh, from his New Jersey country home. A ages later, the Lindbergh ancestors paid $50,000 in bribe through an intermediary, but the baby, whose physique was assuredly begin in May, was not returned. In response, Congress anesthetized the Lindbergh Kidnapping Law of 1932, which fabricated it a federal abomination to yield a kidnap victim beyond accompaniment lines. Two years later, badge arrested a German-born carpenter, Bruno Hauptmann. A New York City abridged assassin the baroque advocate Edward J. Reilly to represent Hauptmann, whose 1935 balloon produced a six-week media spectacle. Though he alleged added than 150 witnesses, including Hauptmann himself, Reilly could not agitate acute affirmation adjoin his client, including about $14,000 in traceable bribe bills in his control and a ladder (used in the kidnapping) that had been repaired with a lath from his house. Rebuffing all entreaties to confess, Hauptmann insisted that a now-deceased acquaintance had accustomed him the money. Convicted in February 1935, Hauptmann was accomplished on 3 April 1936. Until her own afterlife in 1994, his added Anna Hauptmann championed his cause. Ironically, as Lindbergh's acceptability suffered, in allotment because of his pro-Hitler and anti-Semitic stances during the backward 1930s, agilely accurate arguments for Hauptmann's chastity acquired currency.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fisher, Jim. The Ghosts of Hopewell: Setting the Record Straight in the Lindbergh Case. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.