Lindbergh
The Crime
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4.2 • 13 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Edgar Award Finalist: This "sensational" and "absolutely compelling" true crime tale finally answers the question: Who really killed the Lindbergh baby? (San Francisco Chronicle).
On the night of March 1, 1932, celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh's infant son was kidnapped from his New Jersey home. The family paid $50,000 to get "Little Lindy" back, but his remains were discovered in a grove of trees four miles from the Lindbergh house. More than two years after the abduction, Bruno Hauptmann, an unemployed carpenter and illegal German immigrant, was caught with $20,000 of the ransom money. He was arrested, tried, and executed for the crime. But did he really do it?
New York Times–bestselling author Noel Behn spent eight years investigating the case, revisiting old evidence, discovering new information, and shining a bright light on the controversial actions of public figures such as New Jersey Governor Harold Hoffman, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, New Jersey State Police Superintendent H. Norman Schwarzkopf, and Charles Lindbergh himself. The result is a fascinating and convincing new theory of the crime that exonerates Hauptmann and names a killer far closer to the Lindbergh family.
A finalist for the Edgar Award, Lindbergh "not only provides answers to the riddles of the 'Crime of the Century,' but hurls us into time past, to a special moment in American history" (Peter Maas, New York Times–bestselling author of Underboss).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Substituting innuendo for logic, Behn ( Big Stick-up at Brink's! ) proposes to identify the ``true'' culprits behind the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the infant Charles Lindbergh Jr., crimes for which Bruno Hauptmann was executed in 1936. While most researchers today doubt that Hauptmann acted alone, Behn maintains Hauptmann's total innocence. The author rehashes a theory that first circulated in the 1930s: that the baby was battered to death by his aunt, Elisabeth Morrow, allegedly an imbalanced young woman driven to insanity when famous aviator Charles Lindbergh married her sister Anne instead of her. The aviator, argues Behn, fabricated the kidnapping to protect the Lindbergh and Morrow families from scandal. The chief sources here are a book hastily assembled in 1932 by reporter Laura Vitray after she was fired from her newspaper, and the author's conversations with a nonagenarian lawyer who claims that a Morrow servant implicated Elisabeth. Behn does not, however, point out that the servant in question was himself a suspect. Aspersions on Lindbergh's character constitute the rest of the ``evidence.'' Those with a serious interest in the subject are advised to read Joyce Milton's recent, assiduously researched Loss of Eden .
