I'm Roberta Glass, and you're listening to my true crime report.

On the evening of March 1st, 1932, aviator Charles Lindbergh's 20-month-old son was abducted from his crib

on the second floor of the Lindbergh's Hopewell, New Jersey estate. The kidnapper left a note in the baby's room demanding

$50,000. With the help of an eccentric retired schoolteacher named John F. Condon who acted as a go-between

for Charles Lindberg and his wife Anne Morrow, the ransom money was paid off.

Unfortunately, the baby was never returned, and on May 12th, a truck driver discovered the remains

of Charles Lindberg Jr. on the side of the road several miles from the Lindbergh Sowerland estate.

In 1934, the ransom money was traced back to an illegal immigrant, one Bruno Richard Hoffman,

a carpenter who was living in the Bronx. He was tried and convicted in what was called the trial of the century in 1935,

and after unsuccessful appeals on April 3, 1936,

Bruno Richard Hoffman was executed in the electric chair.

And to speak with me about this case is Richard T. C. Hill, author of the excellent book Hoffman's Ladder, which is published by Kent University Press.

Cahill holds a BA in history and political science from Mount St. Mary College, as well as a JD from Albany Law School.

As a lawyer, he has practiced both civil and criminal law, with experience both as an assistant

DA working for the state and a criminal defense attorney. Welcome, Richard T. Cahill.

Go right ahead. Thank you. How did you get interested in the

Lindbergh case? Well, as I actually put right at the beginning of the book in the introduction,

it started in my freshman year of college. My English 101 professor assigned us a research paper.

So I figured, well, no problem. I'd read some about the Lincoln conspiracy.

I'd write about that. But the professor was smarter than that. He made it clear that the rules were that it had to be something you'd never read about before. And I considered pretending I'd never read about it, but I figured out what the heck, let's follow the rules. So I went to the library at college, and I found this small book that had a series of like two, maybe three-page articles,

and they were the types of things like, did Billy the Kid die the way history records?

You know, was John Wilkes Booth killed at Garrett's Barn and so forth? And one of them was,

...