LINDBERGH BABY

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22615, 31 December 1936, Page 9

LINDBERGH BABY

MEW VERSION OF MURDER SWEDISH PAINTER'S STORY LONDON, Dec. 21 Information which, if true, would exonerate Bruno Richard Hauptmann as the murderer of the Lindbergh baby, has been given to the United States Consul at Stockholm, says the Gothenburg correspondent of the Daily Express, The informant is a Swedish house painter named Gunnar Svedberg. Hiis statement has been forwarded to the police authorities of New Jersey, where Hauptmann was executed for the crime on April 4. Svedberg's story is that five men and a woman took part jn the kidnapping of the baby on March 2, 1932, and that they gave it drugs, from which it did. not recover. It was then struck with a hammer. Svedberg says he went to the United States in 1929, and lived with a fellotvSwede, whom he suspected of being a gangster, as he went out at night with woollen stockings pulled over his shoes. Two months before the child was kidnapped, Svedberg says he found a plan, presumably of the Lindberghs' house, in New Jersey in a wardrobe at his lodgings. A week after the kidnapping he heard his compatriot talking to some others about the deed. He learned later that a footpriut left by someone wearing a woollen stocking had been discovered in the Lindberghs' garden. Svedberg insists that Hauptmann was not present at the murder, but that he assisted in blackmailing .those who had committed the crime for a share of the £12,000 rausom money.

The child, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, was 19 months old when it was taken from its nursery at the New Jersey home of Colonel and Mrs. Lindbergh. It was found dead in some bushes in the locality after a search which had extended throughout tha United States.