BBC Documentaries

Who Killed the Lindbergh Baby? (1982x8)

Air date: Oct 12, 1982

On March 1932, the baby son of American aviator Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped from his home near Hopewell, New Jersey. Four years later a German immigrant carpenter, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, was convicted of the murder of the baby and died in the electric chair. The Lindbergh Kidnapping was at the time the ‘Trial of the Century’, a worldwide sensation that inspired many films and books over the years, including Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. But doubts have existed from the beginning about the guilt of Hauptmann. In 1982, with new evidence, his 83-year-old widow reopened the case and sued the State of New Jersey for the wrongful execution of her husband, but her claim was dismissed. Ludovic Kennedy looks at the evidence only recently made public and shows that doubts are now more than ever justified.