The Lindbergh Case: Your views?

[Bruce Wayne]

Has anyone else seen the NOVA documentary? One theory PBS put forward was that Charles senior was the mastermind because of his belief in eugenics.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That theory's been floating around for a while, but his eugenic beliefs really didn't become prominent until after the kidnapping. He developed these views as a result of his friendship with Dr. Alexis Carrell, but he and Carrell didn't become especially close until after the baby's death -- Lindbergh threw himself into medical research as a result of his personal grief.

The main issue raised by those who argue the crime was eugenically based is the idea that Lindy was trying to conceal the fact that the child had rickets. But if he had masterminded the scheme to conceal this fact, why would he have allowed Anne to publicise the baby's diet -- which included regular doses of vioesterol, a vitamin supplement which was the standard prescription for rickety babies. Any mother and certainly any doctor hearing or reading about this diet would instantly recognize what it was for.

I didn't see a lot of new ground covered in the documentary other than the mathematical parsing of the handwriting evidence. That's a new technique, but I'm not entirely convinced it's any more reliable than the conventional methods of analysis.

As to possible accomplices for Hauptmann, I think there's a lot of deep holes in the idea that this Knoll guy was involved. They made a big deal about the "deformed thumb" visible in the photo of the man, but they didn't note that Dr. Condon had specified that the supposed "fleshy lump" was on the palm, not on the outside of the hand, more like a callus from work and not an actual deformity.

 

[rjb1]

I'm usually a big fan of the "NOVA" series, but this one wasn't that convincing. If you have to speculate on what people were thinking/feeling to make your case, it's not much of a case.
To the extent that I know anything about rickets (not much), I thought it was a diet-deficiency-related ailment, not a genetic issue that would make eugenics relevant to the situation.
It's not relevant to who did the kidnapping, but if the Lindbergh baby did have rickets, that seems odd since (at least in my recollection) it was a disease primarily of poor people, especially in the rural South. Any idea how rich Northerners came to have a baby with rickets?

 

[LizzieMaine]

It's caused by a vitamin-D deficiency. Getting too little sunlight was not an uncommon cause -- the sheltered son of a rich white Northern family might well fall into that category, especially since his parents were away for much of his first year, leaving him in the custody of his governess. And since a lot of that time was spent off the coast of Maine, I can personally vouch for the relative lack of sunlight.

 

[Gingerella72]

Link to the NOVA documentary: http://video.pbs.org/video/2329682404

I watched this and was fascinated; I've never read or seen anything about the case so know almost nothing about it. I thought it interesting that a third suspect that has arisen over the years is John Noles (Knowels?) who one guy is convinced is "Cemetary John" because he fits the police rendering of Condon's description to a tee, plus he had a slightly deformed thumb which was also part of Condon's description.

 

[John in Covina]

The rest of the money did it ever turn up?

 

[LizzieMaine]

A few random bills turned up after Hauptmann's arrest -- one as late as 1946 -- but despite claims and rumors, there's never been a bulk discovery of ransom money other than the one in Hauptmann's garage.

A large number of the bills were $5 and $10 Federal Reserve Notes, which were much easier to pass than gold certificates, and probably disappeared into the banking system without ever being noticed. It's likely too that a lot of the gold notes were redeemed during the mass call-in of gold in 1933 and escaped notice: there was so much gold currency passing thru the banking system at that time that it would be very easy for even tens of thousands of dollars of ransom money to go thru without having the numbers matched against the list.

The serial numbers were printed in a booklet distributed to banks, and theoretically every note coming thru was supposed to be checked against the list -- but obviously, that wasn't going to happen. They later printed the list on a big poster that hung in every tellers' cage in the East, but even that was clumsy to deal with when a teller was handling stacks of notes.

While there still might be ransom bills floating around somewhere, it's likely that most of the money that wasn't in Hauptmann's possession lived out its normal time in circulation without ever being noticed.

One aspect of the money issue that's never been positively explained is a deposit of ransom bills at a New York bank credited to one "J. J. Faulkner." The handwriting on the deposit slip was definitely not that of Hauptmann, nor did it match any other suspect in the case. No actual "J. J. Faulkner" was found to explain the deposit, and there's never been an adequate explanation of who he might have been. Some theorize that Hautpmann might have been using Isidor Fisch to launder the ransom money, selling it off at a fraction on the dollar on the black market, and that "Faulkner" might have been one of the buyers. Fisch was the dodgy sort of character one might imagine being involved in such a scheme, but investigators found nothing to prove that he was anything but a poor fur cutter with a few penny-ante hustles on the side, and found nothing connecting him in any way to "Faulkner."

 

[rjb1]

"It's likely too that a lot of the gold notes were redeemed during the mass call-in of gold in 1933 and escaped notice: there was so much gold currency passing thru the banking system at that time that it would be very easy for even tens of thousands of dollars of ransom money to go thru without having the numbers matched against the list."

After May 1, 1933, the possession of gold notes was going to be illegal, so there was a massive turn-in as Lizzie says. The person using the J.J. Faulkner fake name/address turned in $2850 in gold certificates on May 1, and it didn't cause enough of a stir for anyone to even pay any attention to him. It was all ransom money, but the bank officials didn't catch it until several days later (too late). No one remembered "Faulkner"...

 

[LizzieMaine]

This inattention to the search for ransom currency on the part of bank staff was a real problem thruout the investigation -- at one point Lindbergh himself offered a $2 cash reward for every ransom bill spotted, and that only helped a trickle. There were also problems with the press reporting on ransom bill recoveries -- which investigators didn't want happening, because it would frighten whoever was passing the money into playing it close until the heat was off. After the Faulkner fiasco became known, Walter Winchell further aggravated investigators by declaring on his broadcast that if the bank tellers of New York "weren't such a bunch of saps and yaps" the case would have already been broken.

 

[Uff Da]

Ever since I read The Airman and the Carpenter, I'm pretty convinced that Richard Hauptmann isn't guilty.

 

[Mister Cairo]

Ever since I read the trial decision I've been pretty convinced he is guilty. Main point of evidence: the guilty finding.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I read "Airman and the Carpenter" when it first came out, and thought it made a good case that Fisch was involved in the crime to a greater extent than previously believed, but I thought its arguments that Hauptmann was merely a patsy to be a bit weak. I thought Kennedy's position on the wood evidence was especially dismissive -- if that board did, in fact, come from Hauptmann's attic, Hauptmann had to have been more than a patsy. It *was* dumb and unbelievable that an intelligent man would use wood from such an incriminating source, but since Kennedy wrote his book, there's been further study of the wood that upholds the State's case: it *did* come from the attic.

Why Hauptmann would use this wood still makes little sense -- unless, perhaps, he used the wood for something else before the kidnapping and forgot where it came from. It's been noted that the section of ladder in which that board was used precisely fits the linen closet in Hauptmann's apartment -- thru which one gained access to the attic. What if Hauptmann originally built the ladder, not for kidnapping, but to make it easier to get into the attic without having to bring a stepladder thru the apartment? And when he decided to go forward with the kidnapping it occured to him that rather than build an entire collapsible ladder from scratch, he could use the one he already built for his linen closet out of bits and pieces of scrap wood as the foundation for the kidnap ladder?

There's no way of knowing if this hypothesis is true, but it does offer an explanation of how that traceable board happened to be in the ladder without there having been a vast, dark conspiracy to frame an innocent man.

 

[Mister Cairo]

I'm fascinated by the desire of so many to believe the most implausible, convoluted conspiracy theories in the face of plain, logical evidence of straightforward explanations. The Kennedy assassination, the moon landings, 9/11, and others. All sorts of theories, with little or no actual evidence to support them, only subjective belief that "someone MUST be hiding something!".

WHY?

 

[LizzieMaine]

One word: Watergate. If the government lied about that, what else are they lying about?

 

[rjb1]

Folks reading this section might be interested in the fine details concerning how Arthur Koehler, the government timber expert, tracked the ladder wood to Hauptmann.
He did a detailed examination of the ladder boards and found that they had been planed with an eight-tooth cutter on the top and bottom and a six-tooth cutter on the edges. Of the 1598 lumber mills on the East coast, only twenty five used that particular cutter setup.
He also found that one tooth on one of the eight-tooth cutters was slightly out of adjustment and left a distinctive trace.
Of the possible candidate mills, only one had wood with those distinctive marks. That company, in McCormick, SC, had sold a batch of lumber to National Lumber and Millwork Company in the Bronx.
Hauptmann had bought ten dollars worth of it in December, 1931.
If you put that plot element in a movie, no one would believe it.

 

[Mister Cairo]

One word: Watergate. If the government lied about that, what else are they lying about?

Two or three individuals lied about that, not "the government". How many THOUSANDS of people would have to have lied about the moon landings or 9/11 if the conspiracists are correct?

For some people, there isn't enough tin foil on the planet for their hats...

 

[LizzieMaine]

Indeed. Usually the most reasonable explanation for anything is the most simple one.

There were conspiracy buffs prior to Watergate, of course -- they were common fodder for late night radio talk programs as far back as the UFO craze of the late fifties -- but Watergate really brought them into the mainstream, and the Internet has taken them to a whole new level.

Interestingly, there don't seem to have been all that many conspiracy theories about the Lindbergh case until 1976, when a reporter by the name of Anthony Scaduto capitalized on the post-Watergate mood to publish "Scapegoat," the first book to challenge the verdict. Scaduto didn't just claim that Hauptmann was a fall guy for somebody else, he claimed that *every single piece of evidence* against him was manufactured outright by the prosecution or otherwise tampered with to make Hauptmann look guilty, and that all of the prosecution witnesses committed perjury. He further claimed that the baby wasn't killed at all -- and was alive and well and living as a salesman in Connecticut. Fingerprints proved that this was not the case, but Scaduto's book was the wellspring from which all the modern Lindbergh case conspiracy theories have come.

 

[Mister Cairo]

There is an industry based on conspiracies. People actually make money from it. Mind, gullible people have been handing over money for frauds for years.

This way to the egress....

 

[rjb1]

I think the reason that Watergate helped the "conspiracy industry" so much was that in that case there actually was a conspiracy. My circle of friends at that time were avid "Watergate Wallowers" and the daily revelations of bugging, suitcases full of $100 bills, 18 1/2 minute tape-gaps, indictments of the Attorney General, and all the rest were so morbidly fascinating that normal life almost stopped.
1976 was probably the perfect time for Scaduto's book claiming that all the Lindbergh case material was a hoax and/or a conspiracy. Lindbergh was an important person in his time, but if a sitting President could be impeached and then go on television saying, "I am not a crook.", then almost anything would have been possible (or at least believable) back in the 1930's.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

Today in 1936, Bruno Hauptmann was executed by electric chair for the kidnapping & murder of the Lindburgh's son.