Lindbergh Kidnapping Case

Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

             On March 1, 1932, Bruno Richard Hauptmann leaned a ladder he had made against the Lindbergh house near Hopewell, New Jersey; climbed into the nursery, and made off with the 20-month-old son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh. In explaining the loot, Hauptmann came up with the so-called Fisch Story involving a business partner named Isadore Fisch who had supposedly left the money with Hauptmann for safekeeping a month before Hauptmann’s arrest. About the time Albert S. Osborn reported that Hauptmann was the writer of the ransom documents, police found a gap in Hauptmann’s attic floor that had once been filled by a plank used in the construction of the kidnap ladder. To counter the prosecutions powerful documents case, Hauptmanns lead defense attorney spoke to a dozen or so possible handwriting witnesses, two of whom refused to testify for the defense because it looked to them that Hauptmann had written the ransom notes. Portraying the prosecutions document examiners as a bunch of lying old fogies, Kennedy cites a leading British handwriting expert who has concluded that Hauptmann had not written any of the ransom documents.