Bruno Richard Hauptmann (November 26, 1899 – April 3, 1936) was a German carpenter and former criminal, sentenced to death and executed for the abduction and murder of Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., the 20-month old son of famous pilots Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The Lindbergh kidnapping gained international infamy, and has become known as "The Crime of the Century".

Born in Kamenz, Hauptmann was a soldier in the German army in World War I, seeing combat as a machine gunner in 1918. He was wounded in action and exposed to poison gas during a gas-attack. After the war, he was unable to find work as a carpenter and instead turned to crime. With another veteran, he burglarized three homes and robbed two women at gunpoint. He was caught and sentenced to five years, of which he served four in the prison in Bautzen. Not long after he was released, he was charged with another crime, but escaped from prison simply by walking out an unguarded door.

He illegally tried to enter the U.S. by stowing away on a ship, but was discovered and returned to Germany twice. On his third attempt in November 1923, he used a disguise and a stolen identification card and managed to enter the country. In 1925 he married Anna Schoeffler, a German immigrant he had met in the U.S. The couple lived in a house in the Bronx and had one son. Hauptmann worked as a carpenter and apparently had left his criminal ways behind him.

The kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh Jr. occurred on the evening of 1 March 1932. A $50,000 ransom was paid, but the infant was not returned. A corpse identified as the boy's was found on 12 May 1932 in the woods four miles from the Lindbergh home. The cause of death was listed as a very severe blow to the head.

More than two years later, on 18 September 1934, a gold certificate from the ransom money was discovered; it had a license plate number written on it. Gold certificates were rapidly being withdrawn from circulation; to see one was unusual and in this case, anything, attracted attention. The New York license plate belonged to a dark blue Dodge sedan owned by Hauptmann. Hauptmann was arrested the next day and charged with the murder.

The trial attracted wide media attention and was dubbed the “trial of the century.” The trial was held in Flemington, New Jersey and ran from 2 January to 13 February, 1935. Col. Henry S. Breckinridge was Lindbergh's lawyer throughout the case and acted as intermediary in the ransom negotiations, assisted by Robert H. Thayer. (On discovering his missing child, Lindbergh phoned Breckinridge before calling the police.)

Evidence produced against Hauptmann included over $14,000 in ransom money that was found in his garage, a hand-made ladder supposedly used in the kidnapping (which matched wood and carpentry equipment found in his home), and testimony alleging handwriting and spelling similarities to that found on the ransom notes. Hauptmann was positively identified as the man to whom the ransom money was delivered. Other witnesses testified that it was Hauptmann who had spent some of the Lindbergh gold certificates, that he had been seen in the area of the Hopewell estate on the day of the kidnapping, and that he had been absent from work on the day of the ransom payment. Based on this strong but circumstantial evidence, Hauptmann was convicted and sentenced to death. He denied his guilt to the very end, insisting the box found to contain gold certificates had been left in his garage by a friend, named Isidor Fisch, who had returned to Germany and died there in March 1934.

New Jersey Governor Harold G. Hoffman (who later became infamous for embezzlement) secretly visited Hauptmann in his death row cell on the evening of 16 October 1935 with Anna Bading, a stenographer and fluent speaker of German. Hoffman urged the other members of the New Jersey Court of Errors and Appeals, then the state's highest court, to visit Hauptmann.

Despite Governor Hoffman's evident doubt as to Hauptmann's guilt, Hoffman was unable to convince the other members of the Court of Errors to re-examine the case, and on 3 April 1936 Hauptmann was executed in the electric chair known as Old Smokey. Hauptmann had requested a last meal consisting of celery, olives, chicken, french fries, buttered peas, cherries and cake. Reporters present at the execution reported that he went to the electric chair without saying any last words, but other reports later said that he was vehemently protesting his innocence.

After the execution, Hauptmann's widow, Anna, applied for and received special permission that was required to take her husband's body out of state, so that it could be cremated at the U.S. Crematory, also called the Fresh Pond Crematory, in the Maspeth neighborhood of Queens, New York. The memorial service there was religious (two Lutheran pastors conducted the service in German), and private (under New Jersey law public services were not permitted for felons, and Hauptmann's wife had agreed to this as a condition of receiving her husband's body) and was attended by only six people (the legal limit under New Jersey rules) but a crowd of over 2,000 gathered outside anyway. Hauptmann's widow had planned to return to Germany with the ashes.

In the latter part of the 20th Century, the case against Hauptmann has come under serious scrutiny. For instance, one item of evidence at his trial was a scrawled phone number on a board in his closet, which was the number of the man who delivered the ransom, Dr. Joseph F. Condon. A juror at the trial said this was the one item of evidence that convinced her the most, but a reporter later admitted he had written the number himself. It is also alleged that the eyewitnesses who placed Hauptmann at the Lindbergh estate near the time of the crime were untrustworthy, and that neither Lindbergh nor the go-between who delivered the ransom initially identified Hauptmann as the recipient. It has been alleged that the police beat Hauptmann and intimidated other witnesses, and some claim that the police planted or doctored evidence such as the ladder. There is also proof that the police doctored Hauptmann's time cards and ignored fellow workers who stated that Hauptmann was working the day of the kidnapping. For years after Hauptmann was executed, bills from the ransom money continued to show up in New York and New Jersey. The bills were all collected and destroyed. These and other findings prompted J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI to question the manner in which the investigation and trial were conducted (highly unusual behavior for him). Hauptmann's widow campaigned to have her husband's conviction reversed until the end of her life.

The television show Forensic Files on Court TV asked modern forensic scientists to reexamine two key pieces of evidence against Hauptmann. Kelvin Keraga concluded that the ladder used in the kidnapping was made from wood that had previously been part of Hauptmann's attic. Three forensic document examiners, Grant Sperry, Gideon Epstein, and Peter E. Baier, Ph.D., working independently of each other, all concluded that Hauptmann had written the ransom demand. These results apparently confirmed the conclusions drawn by the original investigators.

Anthony Hopkins played Hauptmann in a 1976 made for TV movie about the trial called The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case. Stephen Rea also played Hauptmann in a 1996 HBO movie entitled Crime of the Century. The Armstrong Kidnapping Case in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express was inspired by the tragedy as well.

* Photographic Evidence from the Hauptmann Case on the New Jersey State Archives Website * Hauptmann Guilty, Sentenced to Death for the Murder of the Lindbergh Baby, NY Times, February 13, 1935 * More about Bruno Hauptmann * The Lindbergh Kidnapping Hoax -- dissenting views on the notorious trial, very anti-Lindbergh * Famous American Trials * Author Jim Fisher's Site on the Hauptmann Case * Site supporting Hauptmann's guilt