Author Topic: Cemetery John  (Read 9350 times)

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Offline franksolich

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Cemetery John
« on: December 06, 2012, 01:01:28 PM »
Cemetery John: The Undiscovered Mastermind of the Lindbergh Kidnapping [Robert Zorn, 2012, Overlook Press] is about what probably really happened during the kidnapping of the Lindbergh infant way back in 1932.

I found it fascinating because the author and two other investigators used many of the same tricks I've used in the past, to decipher the mystery of what happened to the two princes in the Tower of London in 1483, but of course these guys had more resources than I ever did.  And the event's much more recent, with still-living witnesses.

Contemporary wisdom holds that Bruno Hauptman, later executed for the crime, was the individual responsible for it, but it looks as if there were two others, brothers, the older of which manipulated his younger brother and the hapless Bruno.

It's a good read of detective methods, beginning with a whisp of a memory of the author's father reaching back to when he was a boy during the early 1930s, and goes from there.

The Lindbergh infant died almost immediately upon the kidnapping; apparently he was handed out the window by Bruno to one of the others standing on a ladder.  The infant was inside a burlap bag.  When the other guy went down the ladder, he miscalculated his step, and dropped the bag, the infant crashing to the ground on his head.

This however didn't stop the kidnappers from trying to collect the ransom (which they did) despite that the "goods" were no longer deliverable.
apres moi, le deluge