✍ Scribed by Behn, Noel
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
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 ).
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Whereas Ludovic Kennedy's account of the Lindbergh kidnapping/murder case ( Crime of the Century ) strips the drama down to a few key players, Lindbergh: The Crime is just the opposite: it is an explosion of minor characters and a baffling array of subplots. Most Lindbergh books do not describe, for example, the multiple parties who met with Charles Lindbergh and his allies, who were trusted with large sums of money, and made supposed negotiations with kidnappers. Noel Behn ambitiously tries to cram in as many details as he can about the events following the kidnapping, and to a large extent succeeds in convincing readers that an elaborate subterfuge was engineered by the Lindbergh camp. His proposed solution to the mystery is well researched, cogent, and fascinating. Behn's writing style makes for slow reading, though, so Lindbergh: The Crime is best read by someone who is already familiar with the case. The book includes 50 pages of footnotes, bibliography, and index. It was a 1994 finalist for an Edgar Award in fact crime.
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 .
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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