Lindbergh Baby

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 79, Issue 206, 3 September 1935, Page 7

Lindbergh Baby

HAS CHILD BEEN FOUND? HAUPTMANN COUNSEL’S CLAIM (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) NEW YORK, Sept. 1. A sensational reopening of the Tundbergk baby kidnapping case suddenly occurred with the advancement of a claim by counsel for the Hauptmann defence that he had found a youngster who “might be” the flyer’s child. He is the adopted son of a Now York city family, which received him from a Catholic foundling home where he was left, two months after the kidnapping. Although the New Jersey State police are said to have fingerprints of the Lindbergh baby, which will make possible determination of the truth, considerable popular credence m given to the claim of the Hauptmann defence investigator. Last February Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German carpenter, was sentenced to death for tho murder of the infant child of Colonel and Mrs. Charles. Lindbergh. The child was stolen from its home at Hopewell, New Jersey, on March 1. 1932, a note which was found demanding £10;000 ransom. Tho following day Colonel Lindbergh stated that the ransom would bo paid, and issued a public appeal to the kidnappers. On March 7 he received two notes from the kidnappers, and four days later Dr. John F. Condon, acting for the family, published an advertisement in the Bronx Home News stating that the money was ready. In April ’Colonel Lindbergh announced that contact had been made with the kidnappers and that tho sum of £lO,OOO. in small amounts, had been handed over by Dr. Condon at St. Raymond’s Cemetery in The Bronx; the numbers on the bills had been recorded. Tn May the baby was found dead near its homo. On September 19 last Hauptmann was arrested. Evidence at the trial told of the discovery of ransom money, the similarity of Hauptmann’s handwriting to that of the ransom notes, the fact that the ladder used in the kidnapping was obviously made by a skilled workman and Hauptmann was a carpenter, and other damaging facts. Tho defence, however, contended that tho money had been left iu Hauptmann’s care by someone else, that Violet Sharpe, a maid who committed suicide, had been seen with a child on a New York ferry at midnight on the date of tho kidnapping and that it was Lindbergh’s child.