The Lindbergh Baby

What I knew: I recognized the name and knew it was a famous mystery. So, pretty much nothing.

What I learned: It was a U.S. case that happened in the 1930s, which explains a lot of my ignorance of it. The son of Charles Lindbergh, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic ocean, and widely regarded as a hero had been kidnapped in 1932.

The kidnapper left no fingerprints but left a note demanding a $50k ransom. A media circus ensued and the public followed the story with great interest. The baby was never seen alive again and his corpse was allegedly found about 2 months later. There hasn't been medical evidence to prove this, though.

Over 2 years later, an illegal German immigrant by the name of Bruno Hauptmann was jailed for the crime, after the marked ransom money was discovered in his garage and it had been found he'd used some of it. Hauptmann pleaded innocent, but was convicted and executed for the crime anyway. He received 2 offers to confess, both of which he declined. The first was $90,000 from a newspaper - the money could've helped his wife and child. The second was a last minute offer to change his sentence to a life sentence instead of an execution.

The main questions still remaining are whether Hauptmann was actually guilty and whether the corpse found was of the Lindbergh baby. There is a lot of evidence to show that the investigation was badly handled, by the authorities and by Charles Lindbergh himself.

This material is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses some information from NJ.com: The Lindbergh Trial and the Wikipedia article "Lindbergh kidnapping". Its list of authors can be found here.