h had been drawn up of the suspect based on the ransom notes and the character of the crime. He was a carpenter, with access to tools that precisely matched the marks on the home built ladder found by the Lindbergh house. His handwriting matched that of the ransom notes. Above all, of course, he had been found in possession of a substantial part of the ransom money.
The trial was conducted in an atmosphere that can only be called a media circus. This writer recalls that his first exposure to the Lindbergh kidnapping story was on a television special he saw years ago as a child. What was most striking was footage of hucksters selling models of the kidnap ladder, crying out "get your Little Lindy ladders here!" to the crowd.
Hauptmann was found guilty. The jury returned a verdict of first degree murder, and declined its option to recommend life imprisonment; in accordance with New Jersey law at the time, presiding Judge Thomas W. Trenchard sentenced Hauptmann to death. State and federal appeals were turned down, and Bruno Hauptmannwas executed in the electric chair at the New Jersey state death house on April 3, 1936, four years, one month, and one day after the kidnap murder.
At the time, most of the press greeted the arrest, conviction, and execution of Bruno Hauptmann with enthusiasm, and an acceptance of police and other official statements that strikes us today as tame and almost touchingly naive. This was still the heyday of a sensationalist mass press, and it approached this celebrity kidnap murder case in a fashion closer to that of today's tabloid TV "reality" shows than what we have come to expect from the print press.
Then and ever since, however, there has been a thread of minority opinion that questioned the Hauptmann verdict, and indeed the entire investigation that led to Bruno Hauptmann's arrest, conviction, and execution. In its most dramatic form as presented, for examp...