16. One of the biggest stories of the 1930s, the kidnapping of the son of Charles Lindbergh spawned numerous conspiracy theories
The twenty-month-old son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, on March 1, 1932, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. was abducted from his crib on the upper floor of the family home in East Amwell, New Jersey. Discovered on May 12, the infant’s decomposing corpse was found by a truck diver at the side of a nearby road having died soon after his kidnapping on March 2. Following a series of poorly sourced leads and employing excessive and questionable police tactics, in September 1934 Richard Hauptmann, a German immigrant carpenter, was arrested for the crime. Found guilty of first-degree murder, Hauptmann was sentenced to death despite his protestations of innocence.
Largely spurred by the policing errors surrounding the Lindbergh case, questions have persistently endured concerning the accuracy of the official account. Generating conspiracy theories involving a coverup, after independent analysis of the ladder allegedly used by Hauptmann failed to find his fingerprints, the ladder was sanitized and erased of all forensic evidence. Becoming a common trope of these unsubstantiated theories is the supposed culpability of the elder Lindbergh himself, with considerations ranging from a prank gone terribly wrong to a desperate bid for attention given his dwindling fame and status with the ascendancy of other rival aviators.