This Week in History: Lindbergh baby kidnapping makes headlines in Vancouver
Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., the Lindbergh baby, was kidnapped from his crib on March 2, 1932
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It’s every parent’s nightmare, one from which even being rich and famous doesn’t protect you.
Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., the Lindbergh baby, was kidnapped on March 2, 1932, taken from his crib on the second floor of the family home in Englewood, N.J.
It had been five years since Charles Lindbergh, nicknamed Lone Eagle, completed the world’s first non-stop solo Atlantic air crossing. By the time of the kidnapping, he was worth US$5 million, or US$110 million in 2025 dollars.
The ransom demand was US$50,000, or about $1.5 million in 2025.
“After 2-4 days we will inform you were to deliver the mony,” a badly written ransom note pinned to the wall in the baby’s nursery said. “We warn you for making anyding public or for notify the Police the child is in gut care.”
Described as blond and chubby-cheeked, the baby was 20 months old when he was taken.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the child’s mother and a pilot herself, was pregnant with the couple’s second child. Jon Lindbergh, who went on to become a U.S. navy underwater demolition expert, was born on Aug. 16, 1932.
Not only had her first child been kidnapped, but the baby had been sick.
“Mrs. Lindbergh … was inconsolable today and aside from the grief at having the baby kidnapped she was additionally anxious because of its illness,” the front page of The Vancouver Sun said.
She had tucked in her baby at 7:30 p.m., tried “vainly to fasten a loose, warped screen in the nursery,” and kissed Charles Jr. good night. At around 10 p.m. the child’s nursemaid, Betty Gow, peeked in to make sure her little charge was sleeping soundly.
“She found his crib empty. She thought at first he might have fallen or crawled out. But a search of the room soon showed her that he had been stolen.
“She screamed to the Lindberghs.”
Five days after the kidnapping, Lindbergh said he would negotiate with the kidnappers through “underworld characters,” while across the United States church congregations prayed for the baby’s recovery.
On April 9, Lindbergh announced he’d paid the ransom six days previously but the baby had not been returned the next day, as promised.
The kidnapping had caught everyone’s attention: Al Capone even “made a fervent plea to be released from jail so that he could use his influence to get the baby back.” It was front-page news around the world, including in Vancouver newspapers.
On May 12, a truck driver discovered the boy’s decomposed body partly buried near the side of a road, a few kilometres from the Lindbergh home. The body had head wounds.
At the Lindberghs’ request, their son was cremated.
Two years later, tracked down and surveilled after spending some of the ransom money, Richard Hauptmann, a carpenter from The Bronx who had immigrated from Germany, was arrested on Sept. 19, 1934. He was electrocuted in 1936.
Today, with influencers infesting social media like grasshoppers to grain, it’s hard to fathom just how famous Lindbergh was from the moment he landed at Le Bourget in suburban Paris on May 21, 1927. It was the first time he’d ever been abroad.
His biographer, A. Scott Berg, said people behaved as though Lindbergh “had walked on water, not flown over it.”
His international celebrity status inspired marriage proposals, thousands of gifts, poems, endorsement requests, 100,000 celebratory telegrams, and 300 songs, including the smash hit Lucky Lindy, a foxtrot (“Lucky Lindy, up in the sky, fair or windy, he’s flying high”).
The world’s attention was rapt as, departing New York on May 20, 1927, Lindbergh flew 5,800 kilometres. It took him 33½ hours, flying alone in his custom-built, single-engine plane, the Spirit of St. Louis.
Touchdown came with a US$25,000 purse, the first of the riches that would henceforth come Lindbergh’s way (he even invented a perfusion pump in collaboration with Nobel Prize-winning scientist Alexis Carrel).
Lindbergh died at 72 of lymphoma on Aug. 26, 1974, on Maui, where he was buried on the grounds of Palapala Ho’omau Church — far from the Atlantic Ocean he’d once crossed for the first time, the ocean over which he’d spread his baby’s ashes.
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