The Free Press Investigates

In the decades after the trial, a conclusion that once seemed certain begins to collapse. As Charles Lindbergh’s legacy darkens and a postwar America grows more suspicious of official narratives, new theories arise about what really happened—and who really killed the Lindbergh baby.
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If the kidnapping was the Crime of the Century, then the trial that followed was the Trial of the Century. At the center of it all stands the accused—a man who insists on the stand that he is innocent. Nearly a hundred years later, we ask: Could he have been telling the truth?
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The investigation closes in on a German immigrant carpenter from the Bronx. When a chunk of the ransom money is discovered at his home, investigators think they’ve found a “smoking gun.” But is the evidence as airtight as it seems? Or is it a sign of a wider conspiracy that was never fully exposed?

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Charles Lindbergh is not just the father of a kidnapped child—he is the most celebrated man on Earth, and increasingly the one shaping how the investigation unfolds. But behind the heroic image is a more complicated figure: both controlling and naive, and willing to overrule the police entrusted with finding his son. Does Lindbergh’s strange behavior hold any clues to the mystery?
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One night in March 1932, the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh is taken from his nursery. A warped window, a ladder, and a ransom note mark the beginning of a case that will grip the world and launch a hundred conspiracy theories. Ninety-four years later, we return to the scene of the crime to ask: What really happened that night?
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