Lindbergh: The Crime

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's 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 . (Jan.)

Library Journal

Originally scheduled for August 1993 (see Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/93), this book will now be published in January 1994.

Joe Collins

Behn speculates that the Lone Eagle himself concocted his son's kidnapping scenario and then stood by while an innocent man was electrocuted for the crime. Slowly, the characters are introduced, including Colonel Lindbergh and wife Anne Morrow, Anne's family, and powerful Lindbergh family friends like Colonel Henry Breckinridge. When the police were summoned, the Lindberghs' New Jersey estate became a media hurricane, and Behn adds to the universal criticism of state police chief H. Norman Schwarzkopf (father of the Gulf War general) but doesn't scorn him so much for bungling the investigation as for his total acquiescence to Lindbergh's wishes. The appearance of numerous ransom go-betweens such as the flamboyant Condon, led to the arrest of Bruno Hauptmann, even though all the evidence was strictly circumstantial, and more likely perpetrators such as J. J. Nosovitsky existed. Hauptmann's trial by now is a well-known sham, with defense attorney "Death House" Reilly failing to object to the state's preposterous case. After Hauptmann was convicted and sentenced to die, New Jersey governor Harold Hoffman succeeded in ruining his own political career by trying to prove the innocence of the "most hated man in the world." Behn hints at Lindbergh's involvement for several chapters before finally unveiling his theory that the kidnapping scenario was invented to cover up for something. This is a well-researched book, and the fascinating characters and the twists and turns of the notorious case, coupled with the intriguing conspiracy theory, will help keep it circulating.

Kirkus Reviews

Behn (Seven Silent Men, 1984, etc.) reopens a celebrated criminal case—the kidnap/murder of Charles A. Lindbergh's infant son—and renders plausible if conjectural verdicts startlingly at odds with those on the official record. So far as history is concerned, an illegal German alien named Bruno Richard Hauptmann snatched the revered aviator's firstborn from the family's New Jersey estate on the night of March 1, 1932, and, though he killed the child almost immediately, collected a $50,000 ransom. When arrested in N.Y.C. over two years later, Hauptmann was found to possess much of the ransom; tried and convicted on homicide charges, he was executed on April 3, 1936. But here—drawing on hitherto unknown evidence unearthed by the Garden State's Republican governor (a political foe of Hauptmann's prosecutor) during the appeal process, as well as on government archives and other sources—Behn tells a different story. Toward the close of his inquiry (which provides vividly detailed perspectives on the times as well as the places in which the tragedy unfolded), the author makes a credible case against an individual who had the means, motive, and opportunity to kill the baby three days earlier than the murder was previously believed to have occurred. Prior to this shocker, he identifies the rogue who most likely wrote a series of ransom notes, and makes a fine job of sorting out the roles played by the sordid drama's large supporting cast—including John F. Condon, J. Edgar Hoover, Gaston Means, H. Norman Schwarzkopf (father of the Desert Storm general), et al. Throughout, Behn speculates that Lindbergh himself may have masterminded a sophisticated coverup that threwpolice off the track of the real murderer. At a minimum, the author argues, Hauptmann (whose trial he deems a travesty) was guilty of nothing worse than extortion. While his well-founded suspicions are not beyond all doubt, Behn's conclusions are reasonable and responsible in the circumstances—and are bound to attract considerable attention. True-crime fare, then, of a compellingly high order.