"It is one of the most haunting crimes in American history-- the daring kidnapping and tragic death of Charles Lindbergh, Jr., the precious son of America's then-greatest hero." "The kidnapping, the death..." "Americans witnessed something truly awful here." "One man, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, was arrested..." "You took that money from that shoebox tried, and executed." "But was he really guilty?" "Did he have accomplices?" "And could the crime have been masterminded by someone inside the Lindbergh household?" "What we do know for sure is that the baby was put to sleep in that bedroom." "John Douglas, America's leading criminal profiler, is on the hunt for clues that could solve this notorious kidnapping." "Did the police... did they ever do a sketch?" "They did." "And I've shown this to hundreds of people, and they all say the same thing-- "That's the guy."" "Is there a new suspect in this old case?" "And can an amateur sleuth, a forensic pathologist, a handwriting expert, a veteran archivist and a master carpenter help John Douglas finally solve the Crime of the Century?" "We owe it to the victims' families to know that the person who perpetrated this crime didn't get away with it." "Next on NOVA, "Who Killed Lindbergh's Baby?"" "♪ NOVA 40x09 ♪ Building Pharaoh's Chariot Original Air Date on January 31, 2013" "== sync, corrected by elderman ==" "Major funding for NOVA is provided by the following:" "80 years ago, this narrow country lane led to the scene of one of the most perplexing crimes in American history." "And this man wants to solve that crime once and for all." "He's John Douglas-- legendary FBI profiler who pioneered the use of behavioral analysis for tracking down serial killers and other dangerous criminals." "Today he has come to this isolated estate in Hopewell, New Jersey, to try and unravel a mystery as cold as the grave-- the daring kidnapping and tragic death of Charles Lindbergh, Jr., aged 20 months when he was stolen in 1932." "Wow, that's amazing." "After 80 years it still looks the same." "Douglas has worked thousands of cases and helped in the prosecution of violent offenders all over the world." "But this notorious crime still haunts him." "I have been fascinated by this case for years." "There are just too many ered questions about who did it and how it was pulled off." "What we do know for sure is that the baby was put to sleep up there in that bedroom and the rest of the household was awake when he was abducted." "The crime would touch a fear lurking in the heart of every parent-- that somehow, without warning or reason, their child would be taken from them, never to return." "And when you can't solve a crime like that, or come up with satisfactory answers, the case won't go away." "Because with children, it's like we somehow failed to protect them." "Never before had a child this celebrated and adored been so shockingly victimized." "For the first time we all realized that any one of us at any given time can be the victim of a violent crime, because that's exactly what happened here to the most famous family in the world." "With his triumphal solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927," "Charles Augustus Lindbergh instantly became a global icon." "Charles Lindbergh was the hero of the world, not just of the United States." "He seemed to personify the best of an American." "Young, informal." "Very handsome, tall, blue-eyed and a bit shy." "He's irresistible to the world at that moment." "As this 1927 hit song clearly demonstrates." "♪ Lindbergh, oh, what a flying soul was he ♪" "♪ Lindbergh, his name will live in history ♪" "♪ Over the ocean he flew all alone... ♪" "When Lucky Lindy met heiress Anne Morrow, he not only taught her how to fly, he married her." "And when the celebrity couple had their first child, a boy they called Charlie, their charmed lives seemed complete." "♪ ..." "Lucky Lindbergh, the eagle of the USA. ♪" "But their joy lasts less than two years." "Message that shocked the world comes in on the police teletype." "When the Lindbergh baby is reported missing, this country is in a state of shock." "There's a sense of disbelief that this extraordinary royal prince, really, would have been stolen." "The crime was committed by means of a ladder placed against the house." "With no eyewitnesses and few clues other than a homemade ladder left by the kidnappers, the police had a difficult time reconstructing the events of the crime." "What emerged as facts were these." "Sometime between 8:00 and 10:00 p.m. on Tuesday, March 1, 1932, one or more individuals came to the house with a homemade folding ladder that left scrape marks on the wall to the right of the baby's bedroom window." "The kidnappers apparently climbed the ladder and entered the room through the unlocked window." "Once inside, they snatched the sleeping baby from his crib." "They may have silenced him or rendered him unconscious, because no one in the household reported hearing Charlie cry out or struggle as he was taken from his bedroom and whisked away." "The kidnappers left the ladder by a service road and used a car to make their getaway." "They had placed a ransom note on the baby's windowsill demanding $50,000 for his safe return, and warned Lindbergh there would be trouble if he involved the police." "The criminals left no fingerprints or other helpful forensic evidence to guide the investigation." "So where to begin?" "As an investigator, one of the first questions I would ask is, did they have inside help?" "This is the first time the Lindberghs were here on a Tuesday." "The house was not quite finished, so the family only came on weekends." "They spent weekdays at Anne's family estate in Englewood, New Jersey." "But Charlie had a cold, and Anne didn't want him to travel." "So how did the kidnappers even know they'd be here that night?" "John Douglas wants to profile the type of offenders who could have committed this crime." "Were they organized professionals or lucky amateurs?" "One way to answer this question would be to figure out what they intended to do with Charlie." "It takes too much planning and resources to care for a toddler." "It's a whole lot easier to pretend the child is alive, collect the ransom, and be on your way." "And I believe that's what happened here." "At a late night meeting in a Bronx cemetery, the kidnappers did collect the ransom and did get away scot-free." "Dr. John Condon, Lindbergh's emissary, handed over the $50,000 in a wooden box in exchange for a note telling Lindbergh where he could find his baby." "But it was all a ruse." "Two weeks later, a truck driver walking in the woods stumbled upon Charlie's decomposing body, not five miles from his Hopewell home." "And from the state of the corpse, it appeared he died the very night of the kidnapping." "An entire nation mourned Charlie's death as if this child was their very own." "There is a loss of innocence that takes place as a result of this case." "The kidnapping, the death, all of it makes Americans confront the fact that they have witnessed something truly awful here." "The baby had a fractured skull." "And when police found cracks in the ladder, they theorized the breaking ladder startled the kidnapper, who dropped the baby by accident." "But John Douglas disagrees with this scenario." "And so does this man." "He's former North Carolina Chief Medical Examiner" "John Butts, an expert on suspicious child deaths." "It has been proposed that the injuries this child suffered were the result of some type of accident." "This is problematic for me, because while it might explain some of the injuries, it doesn't explain all of them." "On the left side of the child's head there was a fracture line extending from the anterior fontanel, the soft spot in the front top of the head, to back behind the ear." "Now, on the right side of the head he described a rounded approximately half-inch in diameter defect behind the right ear." "To me, this second injury, the one on the right side of the head, is the one that's most intriguing." "Police reports stated that an officer trying to extricate the baby's remains accidentally poked a hole in his skull with a stick and this created the round, impact-like injury on the right side." "But again, Butts is skeptical." "In my opinion, an individual pushing or prodding a body with a stick could not poke a hole through the skull under virtually any circumstance." "So what caused this injury?" "And how did the suffer see to both sides of the skull?" "Butts sees one possible scenario." "And itIt's murder.enta" "If he were lying on his left side head down on a hard surface, and he was then struck a forceful blow on the right side of the head by a hammer or pipe, that would compress the head," "and it might do so with sufficient force that there might be resulting fracture on the left side as well." "Butts's theory supports Douglas's contention that the kidnappers killed Charlie intentionally." "And this helps him build a profile of the type of offenders who could have perpetrated this crime." "What I'm seeing here are ruthless individuals with a violent criminal history." "They're not first-timers." "They are daring enough to kidnap the Lindbergh baby and risk the death penalty if they're apprehended." "These are hardcore guys." "It took the police two and half years to finally corral a suspect through a combination of foresight and luck." "When authorities prepared the original ransom money, they handed out lists of the serial numbers to banks and stores." "They also used gold certificates, a currency that would soon go out of circulation, the idea being that the serial numbers on these old bills would be easier for merchants and bank tellers to spot." "About two and a half years after the kidnapping, a guy pulls into a gas station up in New York and buys about 98 cents worth of gas and pays with a ten-dollar gold certificate." "Now, the gas station attendant is suspicious, but he's not thinking, "Oh, this is Lindbergh ransom money."" "He's thinking, "We're off the gold standard now" ""for about a year or so." "The bank might not take this money."" "So just in case, he writes down the license number of the car on the edge of the bill." "And that license number was Richard Hauptmann's." "When police went to the home of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German immigrant carpenter living in the Bronx, they found $14,000 of the ransom money, a small handgun, and other suspicious evidence." "They arrested him on the spot." "Thousands storm the venerable court at Flemington, New Jersey." "The biggest trial ever seen in America began in Flemington, New Jersey, on Jan 3, 1935." "Thousands of reporters and onlookers descended on the small town, all scrambling for a front row seat." "It was such a mob scene..." "A lot of people were beginning to express doubts about whether justice could be served in the context of this kind of circus." "At the trial, Hauptmann presented himself as an innocent working man who would never commit such a crime." "Absolutely not." "Are you the "Cemetery John" that was in the other cemetery?" "But a closer look at his background calls this assertion into question." "Prior to coming to the United States, he had a criminal record back in Germany." "Mark Falzini is the archivist for the New Jersey State Police Museum." "The museum's trove of case-related documents includes a detailed history of Hauptmann's background in his hometown of Kamenz, where he was arrested for several crimes." "He did use a ladder to climb into the second-story window of the mayor's house and stole some money and watches." "And one other time he worked with an accomplice where they held up two women that were pushing a baby carriage at gunpoint." "To get to the United States," "Hauptmann had to escape from jail, stow away on a steamship and lie his way through American immigration." "So despite his engaging, clean-cut demeanor," "Hauptmann was bold, ruthless and criminally sophisticated-- the very attributes of John Douglas's profile of the Lindbergh kidnappers." "Not to mention his history of using ladders to commit crimes." "Prosecutors claimed he personally built the kidnap ladder." "But Hauptmann denied ever seeing it." "This is the actual kidnap ladder Hauptmann supposedly made in his garage." "This ladder is actually kind of tricky to make." "Kevin Klein, a master carpenter and amateur sleuth, has studied every inch of it." "I think Hauptmann probably found whatever he could and scrounged it up to build this." "The ladder was cleverly designed with three sections that nestled together, making it easier to carry, set up and remove." "After the kidnapping, the police brought the ladder to Arthur Koehler, a wood expert, to see if he could find clues that would lead to the kidnappers." "Koehler numbered each piece of wood and traced its origin." "Probably the most important part of this ladder, or at least in terms of convicting Richard Hauptmann, is rail 16, which is found on the third section here." "This rail was positively ID'd as connecting to a floorboard in Hauptmann's attic." "Rail 16 is made of yellow pine." "When police noticed that Hauptmann's attic contained yellow pine floorboards, they asked Koehler to compare a sawed-off board with Rail 16." "He looked at the grain patterns and drew the conclusion that the two had been connected." "There was a small portion missing, but you could draw the grain figure, and it matched perfectly." "To John Douglas, the wood evidence is conclusive." "If I was working this case and the police found a piece of that ladder matches wood found at that residence," "I would tell the police, "Why am I here?" ""Why did you bring me into the case?" "You got your man."" "Douglas has come to the actual Flemington courtroom where Hauptmann's trial took place." "It took six weeks of grueling testimony, but on February 13, 1935, the jury handed down its verdict." "Guilty as charged, with a sentence of death." "But was Hauptmann the only person involved in the crime?" "As he waited in his cell, prosecutors, convinced he did not act alone, offered him a deal:" "they would spare his life if he named his accomplices." "Yet he never wavered from his claim of innocence, and thereby sealed his fate:" "execution in the electric chair." "Because he chose to die when he could have saved his life, many people began to wonder if Bruno Richard Hauptmann might have been innocent after all." "At the New Jersey State Police Museum in Trenton," "John Douglas studies artifacts from the case and reflects on Hauptmann's claim of innocence." "I've seen a lot of cases where a criminal swore he was innocent, went to his death, and we later found out through DNA or other evidence that he was guilty." "Some criminals just want to try and protect the family name." "Hauptmann had a young son, and I think that's why he claimed he was innocent." "Anna Hauptmann maintained her husband's innocence to her death in 1994." "And a recent German television documentary set in his hometown has again raised questions about his guilt." "So controversy about Hauptmann's conviction lingers on." "But we're left with" "One, that Hauptmann is innocent." "Two, that Hauptmann is guilty and acted alone." "And three, Hauptmann is guilty and had others to help him." "Douglas is convinced Hauptmann is guilty." "And he's equally certain he had accomplices." "One reason is the ransom money." "What's unusual about the ransom money is that one third of the money is in Hauptmann's possession." "Where are the other two thirds?" "Did they go to two other people?" "The other reason is Douglas's experience as a psychological profiler." "I've seen many, many cases like this in my career, and usually what you need is multiple offenders who can reinforce one another psychologically and feed off each other to perpetrate a crime like this." "The night of the kidnapping it was dreary, it was dark, it was muddy." "It was way too risky unless I have criminals around me to hold the ladder, do the surveillance, give me the high sign." "It's not going to be one person perpetrating a crime like that." "So is it two people, three people?" "For sure it is not one person." "But no suspects other than Hauptmann have ever been found, and Douglas wants to know why." "So he asks Mark Falzini, who knbetter than anyone.record" "You know, Mark, as an investigator, the first thing that really kind of strikes me and kind of stands out is that once Hauptmann was arrested, the investigation kind of shut down." "You know, why?" "Why was that?" "It had been a two-and-a-half year investigation at this point, and they were under a lot of pressure to put an end to it." "Remember, Lindbergh was the world's most famous man at this time, and they had to end this thing." "So they just wanted everyone off their backs, I guess." "Exactly, yes." "The police must have interviewed thousands of suspects here." "You have thousands upon thousands of files." "The police did interview quite a few people." "They interviewed people at Lindbergh's house." "They interviewed the staff at the Morrow estate, and all of Hauptmann's friends and associates." "Any good leads?" "There were a few leads, but they all end up going nowhere." "I want to throw a name at you:" "John Knoll." "Does that ring a bell?" "Did that name ever come up in the investigation?" "No." "His name does not appear anywhere in the collection." "So who is John Knoll?" "And why is John Douglas looking for him?" "Douglas's interest in Knoll comes from this man" " Bob Zorn." "Zorn's quest to link John Knoll to the crime goes back to his father, Gene Zorn, who as an adult read an article on the kidnapping that triggered a memory of a dramatic childhood incident-- a memory that put father and son on the trail" "of a lost kidnapper." "This whole story begins in the summer of 1931, when my dad was a 15-year-old boy growing up in a German neighborhood in the South Bronx." "And my father had a neighbor who lived three doors down from him, a German immigrant and a deli clerk named John Knoll, who encouraged my Dad to take up stamp collecting." "And one day in the summer of 1931," "John invited my dad to go to Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey, where they had the world's largest saltwater swimming pool." "And there waiting for John were his younger brother," "Walter, another deli clerk, whom my father knew, and then a third German-speaking man." "Well, my dad heard that these two men," "John and Walter, were calling this third man Bruno." "And the three men were talking about some place called Englewood." "Englewood, New Jersey, was the location of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's family estate." "The Lindberghs stayed there while their Hopewell home was under construction." "Fast forward to December of 1963." "By this point my father is a 47-year-old bank economist living in Dallas." "And he walks into his Dallas barbershop, and he reaches for a magazine called True." "December 1963 issue." "And in it is an article about the Lindbergh kidnapping." "And certain words just seem to jump off the page." "Of course there's Bruno." "Bruno Hauptmann." "My dad had remembered that John and Walter Knoll called this third man Bruno." "And then there's Englewood, where the Lindberghs had been living in 1931." "The author of the article stated that Hauptmann was undoubtedly guilty, but that he had worked with accomplices who could still be at large." "And one of these accomplices was a man calling himself John." ""John" is the name of the kidnapper who was given the ransom at the Bronx cemetery." "And Gene Zorn began to wonder if this "John" could be" "John Knoll, the deli clerk from the Bronx." "After his father's death, Bob Zorn took up his dad's quest to link John Knoll with the kidnapping and made several discoveries." "But he wanted an expert familiar with the case to validate his findings." "That's when he contacted John Douglas to hear him out." "The men went to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, where two critical players make their début in the case." "The first was Dr. John Condon, a retired Bronx schoolteacher." "Condon idolized Lindbergh and placed an ad in a Bronx newspaper volunteering to mediate negotiation between his hero and the kidnappers." "Inexplicably, both parties accepted him." "One of the most infuriating things about the Lindbergh case is that Dr. Condon is the key to the investigation." "He was the one who met with one of the gang members in the cemetery twice." "He was the one who turned over the ransom money." "He was the one receiving all of the ransom notes." "Dr. Condon was also a blowhard." "He liked to embellish things." "I am more than pleased to solve that mystery on which I have been working without cessation." "When you read his statements you don't know what to believe." "You know, you never know what to believe with Dr. Condon." "In Condon's account of his first meeting with the kidnappers, he goes to the cemetery, but at first can't find anyone." "And then after a while, a man who had secreted himself inside the cemetery reached out and started waving a handkerchief to attract Condon's attention." "Is that one of the kidnappers?" "Yes, it was one of the kidnappers." "Did he say anything?" "Well, he had a heavy German accent." "And the first thing he said was, "Have you got it, the money?"" "The man with the German accent says to call him John, and becomes known as Cemetery John." "Condon is the only person ever to see Cemetery John, so his description is critical to Bob Zorn's quest to match him with John Knoll." "He said that he was a guy built about like me" "I'm 5'7", 165-- with a high forehead, large ears, a pointy chin, and then a large lump or fleshy mass at the base of his left thumb." "What do you mean?" "Well, it would appear to be an abnormality." "A photograph I have of John Knoll clearly shows that there was something very abnormal about his left thumb." "This photograph, taken a few years after the kidnapping, is the best view we have of both of Knoll's thumbs." "Hand specialists are divided on whether they reveal a clear abnormality." "But both thumbs are large and discolored, so he might have had some physical anomaly." "And did the police... at any point did they do a police sketch based on the description provided to them?" "They did." "Tell me about that." "Well, the police took the description, and they had a sketch artist do a sketch of him." "I got a photograph of John, and then I set that photograph next to this police sketch, and it was a dead ringer." "And I've shown this to hundreds of people and they all say the same thing" ""That's the guy."" "But at the trial, Condon swears it was Hauptmann he met at the cemetery, and not someone who looked like John Knoll or had a malformed thumb." "So whom did Condon really meet?" "If it was Bruno Hauptmann, then John Knoll is not Cemetery John." "But there might be a more reliable source than Condon to prove Knoll was part of the plot." "The kidnappers communicated with Lindbergh through a series of 15 handwritten ransom notes." "Although some appear as though written by different authors, the prosecution's handwriting experts determined they were penned by one person." "And that writer was Hauptmann." "They compared the notes to letters Hauptmann wrote to a Mrs. Begg." "Just as today, they focused on individual letter shapes, the spacing between words, and the way letter pairs like "th" are made." "In addition to these physical comparisons, they pointed out that the notes were written as if by an immigrant." "This is the first ransom note that was left in the nursery." ""We warn you from making anyding public or for notify the police."" "It's an odd way of writing." "The "Dear Sir" ends with an exclamation point." "The dollar sign is put after the dollar amount, which is a German way of writing the money." "Also there are misspellings of words." "The word "signature" is spelled "singnature"." "But the defense expert, using the same comparisons, said Hauptmann was not the author." "So who is right?" "We might know if we had taken" "Hauptmann's Begg letter envelope, retrieved a DNA sample from the licked flap, and compared it to DNA samples from the ransom note envelopes." "But New Jersey refused our request to do a DNA analysis." "Today handwriting analysis has become more sophisticated." "And besides Hauptmann's writing, Bob Zorn has samples of John Knoll's writing on self-addressed envelopes valued by stamp collectors." "If a modern expert could match Knoll's writing to the ransom notes, this would strongly suggest he was part of the kidnap plot." "So NOVA asked Sargur Srihari, a pioneer in computer-based handwriting analysis, to compare both men's writing with the notes." "A computer can do a lot more than a document examiner can do." "Srihari's pattern recognition software can isolate words and letters from multiple documents and compare them by precisely measuring their slope, height, width and contour." "And we are to do that for every letter of the English alphabet." "Srihari analyzed Hauptmann's writing first, taking the Begg letters and comparing them to six of the ransom notes." "The results of comparison of the ransom notes and Hauptmann writing are shown here at the individual letter pair level and as well as the individual character level." "Each comparison gets a score." "Positive values indicate a higher probability the writing is from the same person." "Negative values, a lower probability." "For instance, the letter pair A-M or AM has a fairly high negative score, indicating that they don't seem to be written by the same individual." "There are some positives as well." "So what matters is the sum total of all of these things." "And that total turns out to be negative, indicating that it is unlikely that Hauptmann wrote the ransom notes." "If Srihari is correct, then Hauptmann did have a coconspirator who wrote the notes." "And could it be John Knoll?" "Srihari's initial analysis of Knoll's writing showed some positives for the word "John."" "But other comparisons did not." "What we did here was to compare pairs of letters such as E-R or an N-O and so on." "And we're also comparing ST, again with a negative value." "The summary of these comparisons is that it is unlikely that John Knoll was the writer of these ransom notes." "Srihari's conclusion does not completely eliminate" "Knoll as a suspect." "But it means John Douglas must dig deeper into Knoll's story to prove he's a lost kidnapper." "John, my dad grew up in this South Bronx neighborhood." "It was a German neighborhood at the time." "does Zorn have evidence" "Knoll and Hauptmann ever met?" "My grandparents rented a third-floor flat in one of the homes and John Knoll lived three doors down in the second floor of an apartment." "He rented a home for ten dollars a month." "Well, it's very interesting." "But how would Knoll and Hauptmann get to know each other?" "What makes you think there's a connection?" "Well, when Hauptmann came to the States in 1923, he immediately started coming and visiting people from his home village of Kamenz." "As it turned out, my grandparents' landlord was from that same home village of Kamenz." "If Zorn is right, Hauptmann would have come to this German neighborhood to meet his hometown friend." "And that friend would have surely introduced him to his German neighbor and drinking buddy John Knoll." "So I think it's very likely that John would have come to know Bruno Hauptmann." "The thing's that's puzzling, though, from an investigative perspective is that nowhere in the police background checks with names, associates of Hauptmann did his name ever come up." "It's possible Hauptmann kept his association with John Knoll secret from his wife, his friends and the police." "But there may be a bigger problem connecting Knoll with Hauptmann and the kidnapping." "Bob Zorn's father remembered that Knoll and his brother called a third man "Bruno."" "But what if this Bruno wasn't Bruno Richard Hauptmann?" "Whenever anyone tells me that they have heard of somebody conspiring with a man named Bruno, my reaction is, well, Hauptmann never went by the name Bruno." "Nobody ever called him Bruno." "That was his given name, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, but he always went by Richard, even back in Germany." "And we have here a schoolbook, an essay book of his from eighth grade, and it's signed Richard Hauptmann." "There's no Bruno to be found." "Could this name issue eliminate John Knoll as a possible suspect?" "Douglas is not sure yet." "But he is sure the kidnappers knew in advance the Lindberghs would be here at Hopewell when they would normally have been in Englewood." "They had to have inside information coming from someone inside this house to know that Lindbergh was going to be here on this particular night." "The police never found that inside source." "But this man believes he knows who it is." "Well, I think that no one's ever going to be satisfied with all the answers, but..." "Lloyd Gardner is a respected Rutgers historian who authored a major book on the kidnapping with a controversial theory about the crime." "So Lloyd, in a nutshell, what do you think really happened?" "What do I think really happened?" "I think that someone on the inside had to have coordinated what happened that night." "And my conclusion is that Charles Lindbergh himself was involved in coordinating the kidnapping." "As shocking as this sounds, questions about Lindbergh's behavior emerged soon after the kidnapping." "He didn't trust the police and used his enormous influence to control them and the investigation." "He even kept the ransom notes and negotiations with the kidnappers secret." "So some people began to wonder if he was hiding something." "But why would he want his own child kidnapped?" "Lindbergh was very much involved in the eugenics movement." "And I think Lindbergh was very afraid that little Charlie was not ever going to be a healthy young man." "Eugenicists believe in creating superior human beings by selectively breeding the smartest and strongest people, those with good genes, and sterilizing the physically and mentally weak." "There were rumors that Charlie had some physical problem." "And if he did, this could be a sign that Lindbergh had inferior genes." "And his feeling about having an imperfect child may have weighed on him very, very heavily." "Is there any evidence that Lindbergh's baby had any of these health problems?" "Yes." "The family doctor noted an enlarged or still open fontanel which should have been closed." "He had difficulty getting the child to stand up straight when he was doing the physical examination." "And children who have this problem are often associated with rickets." "Charlie's physician described him as having a "moderate rickety condition,"" "but not the severe form of rickets that can bring deformed bones and other skeletal issues." "Rickets is caused by a vitamin D deficiency." "So the Lindberghs were giving Charlie vitamin supplements." "But was he seriously affected or mildly compromised?" "According to pathologist John Butts..." "His medical record shows no evidence that he had any significant medical problems." "If he did have rickets, it was a very mild condition for which he was being appropriately treated." "But what if his condition was more serious?" "Do you think that this would be enough motivation to plan a kidnapping and killing of his own child?" "I don't think Lindbergh wanted the child killed." "Obviously something went wrong." "I think Lindbergh's idea, his overriding idea, was to get the child out of the household and into an institution." "This is not unusual for wealthy families to do something with a child who is not quite right." "Gardner believes it was Lindbergh who told the kidnappers when the baby would be at the unguarded Hopewell residence and not at the well-guarded Englewood estate." "Although any staffer could have given the family's location, only Lindbergh knew one thing." "He would be the only person who would know whether he was going to be in Hopewell that night." "That evening Lindbergh had scheduled a speaking engagement in New York." "He was normally punctual, but this time he missed the appointment and returned home." "He claimed he forgot the commitment, but Gardner has a different theory." "The fact that he missed this appointment enabled him to come down to Hopewell and direct the kidnapping from the inside to make sure that there was no interference with it being carried off successfully." "Although the kidnapping may have been successful, little else was." "Charlie ended up dead, and the Lindberghs received new kidnap threats against their second child." "By 1936, they abandoned the Hopewell home and fled to Europe for a three-year exile." "While there, Lindbergh's embrace of eugenics attracted him to the superior race philosophies of the Nazis, who embraced him in return." "After the war, Lindbergh returned to Germany as a consultant for Pan American Airlines and the Air Force." "And by the 1950s he's embarked on an elaborate and shocking scheme." "What finally convinced me that Lindbergh was involved was the evidence that came out about his families in Germany." "Using the assumed identity Careu Kent, starting in 1958," "Lindbergh secretly fathered seven children with three German women." "He swore the families to secrecy and died in 1974, believing his double life would remain hidden." "But in 2003, some of his German children revealed the truth after DNA testing proved Lindbergh's paternity." "Gardner sees Lindbergh's secret life as consistent with his philosophy." "And that is a perfect eugenics kind of experiment." "What he wanted was to spread his sperm around as much as possible in hopes of creating this better race." "Despite Lindbergh's eliefs and secret families, John Douglas does not believe he's also a criminal mastermind." "While he's a schemer, it doesn't make him a killer." "I don't see a violent bone in that man's body, and I don't see him trusting anyone, no one at all, to perpetrate a crime like this, with other people involved." "Why?" "Because it would be a lack of control." "He needed to control every single aspect of his life." "And this would include the investigation itself-- something Lindbergh believed he could handle better than the police." "It was no surprise, at least to me, that Lindbergh wanted to take charge." "Most of the history of kidnapping, certainly up to that point, was about police incompetence and the inability of most police to bring children who had been ransomed back." "So he, who had conquered the Atlantic, imagined that he would be able to conquer this particular situation." "But if Lindbergh was not involved, who supplied the kidnappers with vital inside information?" "Douglas now believes it was Violet Sharp, a servant in the Morrow household, who gave contradictory information to the police." "And when they came to interrogate her for the third time..." "She ran upstairs to her room and she drank silver polish that had potassium cyanide in it." "And within minutes she was dead." "Investigators eventually concluded she was emotionally disturbed and not a conspirator." "Douglas has refined this conclusion." "Perhaps she had guilty feelings because she may have inadvertently provided information to someone who called the Morrow family asking for the whereabouts of the Lindberghs, and she might have said," ""Well, they're not here tonight." "They're over in Hopewell."" "With Lindbergh eliminated, and Sharp as the likely unintentional informer, Douglas turns again to Hauptmann's kidnap partners and decides to look at John Knoll one last time." "He wants to know if Knoll's behavior after the crime reveals anything suspicious." "Bob, why should I look at John Knoll as a suspect in this case?" "Was there any change in his behavior on or about the time of the kidnapping?" "Absolutely." "Three weeks after the ransom was paid," "John suddenly seemed to have a lot of money." "And he started becoming very, very generous to my father in terms of collectibles for my dad's stamp collection." "Did Knoll go anywhere?" "Three weeks before Hauptmann goes on trial on January 2, 1935, I've got this photograph here of him sailing with $700, first class tickets with his wife to Hamburg on the SS Manhattan." "That's expensive, right?" "$700 for two round-trip tickets to Germany." "That was an awful lot of money, the equivalent of about six years' rent for John." "So what do you think?" "I think it's possible it was some of the ransom money." "And then the very day that Hauptmann is convicted," "February 13, 1935, is the day that John leaves Europe to return to the States." "So is John Knoll "Cemetery John" after all," "Hauptmann's long missing partner in crime?" "What I like about Knoll is that the artist's conception drawing, the rendering of Cemetery John, it looks a lot like Knoll." "Also the malformed hand." "That's something that's pretty unique." "What Zorn showed us was that when the monies were paid, we had Knoll going on a spending spree." "Also, when Hauptmann was indicted, he takes off." "He doesn't return to the country until Hauptmann is convicted." "So when you start putting all these things together, all of these bits and pieces, if I was involved in the investigation back then, I would be putting Knoll on the front burner." "Douglas knows there isn't enough evidence to convict John Knoll." "He's a prime suspect, to be sure, but his trail may be too cold now to be certain of his guilt." "And he believes this case may never be completely solved as a result of mistakes Lindbergh himself made." "An ordinary citizen would never be able to take an investigation like this and maintain control over the police, over the overall investigation." "But someone of Lindbergh's status..." "I mean, he was a hero." "People dropped to their knees." ""Whatever you want, Mr. Lindbergh." ""We'll do whatever you say." "Sorry, sir, yes, sir."" "And unfortunately, by him doing that, it pulled the police away from the investigation." "And he was able to basically help the bad guys get away with the crime." "Because Lindbergh feared for Charlie's life, he kept authorities away from the cemetery." "Douglas believes if he had let the police" "to the rest of the gang, he and in a strokethem remove the doubts that have surrounded this tragedy ever since." "The death of Charles Lindbergh, Jr." "triggered an outpouring of grief not felt since the Lincoln assassination, and not felt again until the murder of John F. Kennedy." "But the tragedy would produce changes that would help protect other children." "One of the most concrete legacies of the Lindbergh case is the Lindbergh Law, which is passed by the Congress the day after the kidnapping and which makes, for the first time, kidnapping a federal offense, and it makes it a capital offense" "makes it a very serious crime to kidnap a child, or anybody, for that matter." "Unfortunately, young children remain vulnerable to abductions, primarily by parents in custody disputes and sometimes by sexual predators." "But their kidnapping for ransom is rare in the U.S." "since the Lindbergh Law." "And today, public alert systems have combined with better police work to aid in the arrest and prosecution of all child abductors." "But the ones who got away still haunt John Douglas." "And for the Lindbergh case..." "Bruno Hauptmann, guilty." "John Knoll, intriguing, interesting." "But the one thing we can say for sure is that someone absolutely got away with money and murder." "But why, after so many years, is Douglas still looking for answers?" "When you get a case like this, we refer to it as an old dog kind of case." "I mean, the case now is 80 years of age." "So why do we look at it?" "We look at it for the victims." "That's who we work for." "We work for the victims." "Whether the case is Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson in the OJ Simpson case, whether it's JonBenet Ramsey case that remains unsolved to this day." "But we owe it to the victims' families." "And that's really our mission, to give some type of closure, small closure, so that we know that the person who perpetrated this crime didn't get away with it." "== sync, corrected by elderman =="