Bruno Richard Hauptmann

The backstory

The kidnapping

On the evening of March 1, 1932, Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., a child “less than two years old,” was put to bed at about 8 p.m. in his parents’ home in East Amwell Township, Hunterdon County, near Hopewell, New Jersey.¹ He was the first child of the aviator Charles A. Lindbergh and his wife, Anne.¹⁶ At about 10 p.m. his nurse found him missing, and a ransom note demanding $50,000 was on the nursery window sill, according to the appellate court’s statement of facts.¹ The state’s evidence was that the child was carried out of the second-story window using a ladder, which was found near the house.¹ The court wrote that “Colonel Lindbergh heard the sound of breaking wood that evening, and the ladder was found broken.”¹ Muddy footprints were found on the window sill, on the nursery floor and outside, and a chisel was found at the scene.¹

The ransom

More ransom notes followed, and the child’s sleeping suit was mailed to the parents as proof that the writer had him.¹ On the evening of April 2, 1932, Dr. John F. Condon, acting as the father’s agent, met a man at a cemetery in the Bronx and paid him the ransom, which the court said was paid “in bills capable of later identification.”¹ The money, $50,000, was paid in gold certificates.⁷ Condon testified that the man he paid was Hauptmann.¹

The child’s death

On May 12, 1932, the child’s body was found by accident in a shallow grave in neighboring Mercer County.¹ According to the state’s evidence as the appellate court summarized it, “the autopsy disclosed the baby had suffered three violent fractures of the skull and that death was instantaneous.”¹ The state did not settle on one account of how the child died: its opening statement said the death occurred when the child was being taken down the ladder and the ladder broke, while its closing argument said he was struck in the nursery.¹ The appellate court held that this did not matter, because the case went to the jury on a single theory, a killing in the course of a burglary, and the state did not have to prove where death occurred.¹

The arrest

On Sept. 15, 1934, a gas station attendant received a $10 gold certificate from Hauptmann whose serial number matched the ransom money, and he was arrested at his home in the Bronx four days later.⁷ Bills totaling $14,600 were found hidden in his home, “beneath the floor of the garage, and in the rafters of the dwelling house,” the court wrote; a small revolver was found in a recess in a rafter.¹ He resisted extradition, but New York surrendered him to New Jersey, and a Hunterdon County grand jury indicted him for murder on Oct. 8, 1934.¹

The trial

The trial was held before Justice Thomas W. Trenchard at the Hunterdon County courthouse in Flemington in January and February 1935.⁷⁹ Attorney General David T. Wilentz led the prosecution.¹⁵ The stenographic record, later printed for the appeal, runs to four volumes, the last containing exhibit images.⁵

The state’s case, as the appellate court described it, rested on three “in the main, unrelated” lines of proof: “(a) possession and use of the ransom money; (b) the handwriting of the ransom notes; and (c) the wood used in the construction of the ladder.”¹

The money. According to the court, Hauptmann had been “without funds before the payment of the ransom money, and in comparative poverty,” but afterward “refrained from work entirely and speculated in Wall Street on a comparatively large scale.”¹ As part of the evidence on his use of the ransom money, a movie theater cashier testified about a ticket Hauptmann bought on Nov. 26, 1933.¹

The handwriting. Several handwriting experts for the state testified that Hauptmann wrote all of the ransom notes, and a defense expert disagreed.¹ The court noted “peculiarities of expression and spelling common to all these notes.”¹ On a board in a closet of his house, police found Condon’s address and telephone number in Hauptmann’s handwriting.¹ Asked about the board at trial, Hauptmann said he could not make out the words; asked whether it was Condon’s address, he answered, “I know it now.”⁸

The ladder. Arthur Koehler, a wood expert, traced the wood, or part of it, to a Bronx lumber yard near Hauptmann’s home, and the court wrote that “part of the wood used in the construction of the ladder was taken from Hauptmann’s Bronx home.”¹ Koehler, of the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, matched one ladder rail, known as Rail 16, to floorboards in Hauptmann’s attic, according to later accounts of his testimony.²⁰ The chisel found at the scene was of a size normally found in a carpenter’s chest, and one of that size was missing from Hauptmann’s set, the court wrote.¹

Identification and other evidence. The defense argued that the testimony of three other state witnesses on a “crucial issue” was false; the appellate court said its result would be the same without it.¹ The defense also argued that Charles Lindbergh’s identification of Hauptmann by his voice deserved little weight.¹ The court treated the absence of Hauptmann’s fingerprints as without significance, describing him as a “self-confessed and apparently experienced criminal” who would guard against leaving them.¹

The defense. Hauptmann testified that he was never in Hopewell or in the nursery on March 1, 1932, and that he “never transported a ladder” in his car.⁸ He testified that on March 1 he looked for work in Manhattan and that evening picked up his wife and ate supper with her at a restaurant, and that on April 2 he worked a carpentry job until 5 p.m. and spent the evening at home playing music with a friend.⁸ He testified that the gold certificates came from a shoe box that his business partner, Isidor Fisch, left with him before sailing to Germany in December 1933, where Fisch died; Hauptmann said he found the money in August 1934 after the box got wet.⁸ He said that police beat him at a New York station house and made him write handwriting samples while denying him sleep.⁸ On cross-examination he admitted that he had entered the United States illegally and that he had lied to police about where a $20 bill came from.⁸ He told the jury, “I never got any idea to kidnap any child.”⁸

The verdict

On Feb. 13, 1935, after about 11 hours of deliberation, the jury of eight men and four women found him “guilty of murder in the first degree,” according to a wire report from Flemington.⁹ Justice Trenchard sentenced him to die in the electric chair; the first date set was March 18.⁹ The newspaper reported that his lawyers promised to appeal “to the highest court in the land.”⁹

The appeal

The New Jersey Court of Errors and Appeals, then the state’s highest court, affirmed the conviction on Oct. 9, 1935, in an opinion by Justice Charles W. Parker; 13 judges voted to affirm and none to reverse, with Trenchard, the trial judge, not sitting.¹¹⁰

The court rejected each ground of appeal.¹ It held that the state had proved a common-law burglary, a nighttime breaking and entry of a dwelling with intent to steal, because the child’s sleeping suit was taken and later used as “an initial and probably essential step in the intended extortion of money”; and that a killing during the escape was a killing in the perpetration of that burglary.¹ It held that trial in Hunterdon County was proper even though the body was found in Mercer County.¹ It found no reversible error in the prosecutor’s summation, the judge’s comments on the evidence, the handwriting instructions or the admission of the ladder.¹ It rejected complaints about the courtroom crowds, the press and the jury as unsupported or raised too late.¹ On Hauptmann’s account of the money, it wrote that his “explanation of the source of this money offered by defendant was incredible” and that it was “inconceivable that Fisch, if he had this money, would have left it in defendant’s custody in the manner claimed.”¹ It concluded: “We consider that the weight of evidence was with the state.”¹

In December 1935 the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the case, and on Dec. 13 he was resentenced to die during the week of Jan. 13, 1936.¹¹

Clemency and the execution

Under New Jersey law at the time, the governor could not pardon but could stay an execution for up to 90 days, Time reported.¹¹ Gov. Harold G. Hoffman said that if Hauptmann were executed, “great doubt that the Lindbergh baby murder had been solved completely” would remain in his mind and in the minds of many others.¹¹ The Court of Pardons rejected Hauptmann’s request to commute his sentence to life imprisonment on Jan. 11, 1936.¹³ On Jan. 16, about 29 hours before the scheduled execution, Hoffman granted a 30-day reprieve, which he said was “for divers reasons which I do not care to disclose at this time.”¹² By the time of the reprieve, the U.S. Supreme Court had also refused to consider a habeas corpus petition.¹² In March, Hauptmann asked the Court of Pardons a second time to commute his sentence, and Hoffman said he would grant no further reprieve on his own.¹³

The execution was set again for March 31, 1936, and then postponed by the prison’s principal keeper, Col. Mark O. Kimberling, while a Mercer County grand jury considered charges against a disbarred Trenton lawyer who had confessed to the crime and then said his confession was false and had been forced from him.¹⁴¹⁵ On April 3, 1936, Hauptmann was executed in the electric chair at the state prison in Trenton and was pronounced dead at about 8:47 p.m.¹⁶ A wire report from Trenton said he said nothing in the death chamber: “Not even a murmur passed his lips.”¹⁶ He did not confess.¹⁶³

Later challenges

His widow maintained his innocence and tried for decades to clear his name.⁷ On Oct. 9, 1981, Gov. Brendan Byrne signed Executive Order 110, giving the public conditional access to the state’s Lindbergh case files.³ She sued for the files to prove that her husband was not guilty, and Byrne said at the time that the state would have “a moral responsibility to respond” if she succeeded.¹⁸ She also brought a federal suit against the former prosecutor, Hauptmann v. Wilentz, which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit decided on July 11, 1985.⁴

The case evidence, about 225,000 documents and other materials, is kept by the New Jersey State Police museum at its headquarters in West Trenton.³¹⁷ In 2022 a Princeton researcher sued to have envelopes and stamps tested for DNA; a trial judge dismissed the suit in January 2023, and the Appellate Division affirmed on procedural grounds in December 2024 without reaching the merits.¹⁷³ In April 2025 another group, including a University of Kansas history instructor, sued in Mercer County Superior Court for access to the envelopes for DNA testing.¹⁹ That instructor has said he believes Hauptmann was likely one of several people involved rather than the lone culprit.¹⁹

Personal backstory

Early life

By his own testimony, Hauptmann was born on Nov. 26, 1899, in Saxony, Germany, and grew up in the town of Kamenz.⁸ He testified that he attended public school for eight years and then a trade school for two or three years, studying carpentry and machinery, and began working at 14.⁸

War service

Hauptmann testified that he entered the German army at about 17½, served about a year and three-quarters in the First World War, and was slightly wounded and gassed.⁸ The sources reviewed do not name his unit.

Crimes in Germany

He testified that he was convicted in the spring of 1919, served a sentence in Beuthen and was paroled.⁸ The appellate court wrote that at trial “he admitted a series of crimes, convictions and criminal escapes in Germany.”¹ The sources reviewed do not give the specific offenses.

Coming to America

Hauptmann testified that he was caught twice as a stowaway and returned to Germany, and that he got into the United States on a third attempt.⁸ The appellate court described this as “a third successful attempt to make unlawful entry into this country.”¹ He testified that he first worked as a dishwasher, then as a mechanic, dyer and machinist, and eventually as a carpenter at union wages.⁸

Work and family

He married Anna Schoeffler on Oct. 10, 1925; he testified that she worked, mostly as a waitress, until June 1932.⁸ The couple had a son; in a letter dated March 31, 1936, Hauptmann wrote that thinking of “my wife and my little boy” was breaking his heart.⁶ Hauptmann testified that he began trading stocks around the end of 1929, that much of the money came from Fisch, with whom he also had a fur business, and that he lost money in the market in 1931 and 1932.⁸ On March 1, 1932, by his account, he went to a Manhattan apartment building looking for carpentry work and was told the job had been filled.⁸

In custody

After the appellate decision, Hauptmann told his lawyer, “I never did this and surely they will find that out before it is too late,” according to a wire report.¹⁰ In the days before his execution he wrote to Attorney General Wilentz that he was innocent, and his wife wrote to him, “I love you and I will always love you,” the Michigan Daily reported.¹⁴ On the night of the execution she was in a hotel room about two miles from the prison.¹⁶ He maintained his innocence until his death.³

The sources reviewed contain no statement from the Lindbergh family about the execution.