The Trail Went Cold - Episode 471 - The Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping, Part 2

The Trail Went Cold

Robin Warder

Tv & Film, True Crime

4.5 • 3.3K Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2026

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

March 1, 1932. East Amwell Township, New Jersey. 20-month old Charles Lindbergh Jr., the son of renowned aviator Charles Lindbergh, is abducted from his crib in the nursery of his home and a note is left behind demanding a $50,000 ransom for the baby’s safe return. Even though the ransom is eventually paid out to an unidentified man at a cemetery in the Bronx, the child is not returned and his body is found in a wooded area located just over four miles from the Lindbergh residence. His cause of death is a fractured skull and it is believed that he was killed on the very same night he was kidnapped. Over two years later, a suspect named Bruno Richard Hauptmann is charged, convicted and executed for the child’s murder. However, some people believe that Hauptmann was railroaded and even though nearly a century has passed, there is still a lot of controversy and debate surrounding one of the most famous cases of all time. To commemorate the milestone of our ten-year anniversary as a podcast, “The Trail Went Cold” will be presenting our very first special four-part episode and exploring the crime known as the “Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping”. This week, on Part Two, we will be chronicling the trial and execution of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, as well as the evidence against him, and Parts Three and Four will be released over the course of the next two weeks. Additional Reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindbergh_kidnapping "Kidnap: The Story of the Lindbergh Case" by George Waller "Scapegoat: The Lonesome Death of Richard Hauptmann" by Anthony Scaduto "The Airman and the Carpenter: The Lindbergh Kidnapping and the Framing of Richard Hauptmann" by Ludovic Kennedy "The Ghosts of Hopewell: Setting the Record Straight in the Lindbergh Case" by Jim Fisher "Crime of the Century: The Lindbergh Kidnapping Hoax" by Gregory Ahlgren & Stephen Monier "The Case That Never Dies: The Lindbergh Kidnapping" by Lloyd Gardner "Hauptmann's Ladder: A Step-by-Step Analysis of the Lindbergh Kidnapping" by Richard Cahill "Master Detective: The Life and Crimes of Ellis Parker, America's Sherlock Holmes" by John Reisinger "Cemetery John: The Undiscovered Mastermind Behind the LIndbergh Kidnapping" by Robert Zorn “The Trail Went Cold” is on Patreon. Visit www.patreon.com/thetrailwentcold to become a patron and gain access to our exclusive bonus content. The Trail Went Cold is produced and edited by Magill Foote. All music is composed by Vince Nitro.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The Hello, everyone, and welcome to part two of our special 10-year anniversary episode of The Trail
0:40.6	Went Cold. I'm your host Robin Warder, and today we're going to be presenting the second of our
0:46.2	four-part series about one of the most infamous crimes of all time, the Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping.
0:52.7	We released part one last week, and if you haven't heard that episode yet,
0:56.6	I suggest you go back and listen to it,
0:58.8	since I shared a lot of information which will be relevant to what we're discussing today.
1:03.2	As a brief recap, back when this crime took place,
1:06.7	Aviator Charles Lindberg was perhaps the most famous individual in the United States after having
1:11.9	completed the world's first solo transatlantic flight from New York to Paris nearly five years earlier.
1:18.4	Charles and his wife Anne Morrill Lindberg were living at their estate in East Amwell Township, New Jersey,
1:23.7	with her 20-month-old son, Charlie Lindberg, but on the evening of March the 1st, 1932,
1:29.8	Charlie was abducted from his second-floor nursery, and a makeshift wooden ladder was found at the
1:34.6	scene, which the kidnapper likely used to enter the nursery and take the child from his crib.
1:40.6	A ransom note was also left behind in which the abductor demanded $50,000 for Charlie's safe return,
1:46.7	and since the note was filled with spelling and grammatical errors,
1:49.8	it was apparent that English was not the author's first language,
1:53.1	and there was a good chance they might have been German.
1:56.0	John Condon, a 71-year-old semi-retired educator from the Bronx,
2:00.2	was a major admirer of Lindberg, who was left
2:03.0	horrified by the kidnapping of his son, so much so that he placed an ad in a Bronx newspaper,
2:09.0	volunteering to function as an intermediary for the Lindberg family, even though he did not
	...

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