The Crime of the Century: Unsolved?

After eleven hours of deliberation, all twelve members of the jury reached a unanimous verdict: guilty. Bruno Richard Hauptmann went to the electric chair at Trenton State Prison on April 2, 1936, continuing to claim his innocence of the crime.

If a man was found guilty, convicted, and executed of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and murder why is this case considered unsolved to this day? Many believe that because Hauptmann was offered life imprisonment if he confessed, he was in fact an innocent man. What guilty man would not confess to save his life?

Other speculations have arisen from several individuals who have come forward claming to be the Lindbergh baby. One man, naming himself Charles Lindbergh III, said that he discovered his true identity through hypnosis and upon visiting the Lindbergh estate, remembered specific details of the kidnapping. After numerous attempts at contact, Anne Morrow Lindbergh refused to meet with the man.

Hauptmann’s Isidor Fisch story of the German fur dealer who left the money in his garage and fled to Germany and subsequently died while abroad, leaves room for one to wonder if he was the actual perpetrator of the crime.

Two law enforcement officials wrote a book in 1994 declaring that Charles Lindbergh himself, dropped the child from the ladder by accident while attempting to play a practical joke on his family. Other theories have involved the older sister of Anne Lindbergh, insane with jealousy over her sister’s marriage to Charles, killed the child.

Anna Hauptmann, the wife of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, fought till her death in 1994 at the age of 95 for her husband’s name to be cleared of the crime. From the moment the police arrested her husband, she declared that the night of the kidnapping he had spent the evening with her in their Bronx home. Unfortunately her alibi was not enough to clear her husband of the crime. Anna’s lawyer Mr. Bryan, whom she had pleaded to for help in 1981 to clear her husbands name, said that “she used to talk about when she died, she would go to be with Richard. But, she said, ‘I have a job to do here first. Once this is done, I'll die and go be with Richard.’ So I have to believe that she is with Richard today.” Anna never remarried and amazingly died on the 69th year anniversary of her marriage.

Whether Bruno Richard Hauptmann was

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