Popular Mechanics
BY TIM NEWCOMB
PUBLISHED: JAN 19, 2024 3:59 PM EST
On April 3, 1936, Bruno Richard Hauptmann went to the electric chair proclaiming his innocence in the most famous kidnapping case in the history of the United States. Nearly a century later, a new, startling theory about the crime for which the German immigrant was convicted and executed—the March 1932 abduction and killing of “the Lindbergh Baby,” a.k.a. Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., the toddler son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh—is catching on. And it may just change everything we thought we knew about the case.