Bruno Richard Hauptmann was a German-born carpenter who had lived in the Bronx for nearly a decade when, in September 1934, the New York police arrested him with money traced to a ransom paid two and a half years earlier. A grand jury in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, indicted him for murder. After a six-week trial at Flemington that the press of the day treated as the event of the decade, a jury found him guilty on February 13, 1935, of murder in the first degree without recommendation of life imprisonment, and the court sentenced him to death.
He never admitted anything. From his arrest to the last hours of his life he said he had never been at the scene, knew nothing of the crime and had nothing to do with it. New Jersey's Court of Errors and Appeals rejected every point of his appeal by a vote of 13 to none. The Supreme Court of the United States declined to review the case. The state's Court of Pardons twice refused clemency. The governor of New Jersey, who doubted that the whole truth had been found, granted a reprieve and then concluded that the law allowed him no second one. Hauptmann was executed in Trenton on April 3, 1936. The case has never fully left the courts: papers and exhibits from it were still the subject of litigation in New Jersey nearly ninety years later.
Hauptmann was born in 1899 in Kamenz, a town in Saxony. He had eight years of general schooling and two years of trade school, where he trained in carpentry and machinery, and he served as a teenager in the German army on the Western Front in the First World War.
His record in Germany followed him to America. In 1919 a German court sentenced him to five years for theft. He was released in 1923, arrested again on a new theft charge, and escaped from custody while awaiting trial. That same year he tried to reach the United States as a stowaway. He was caught and sent back. A second attempt also failed. On the third, late in 1923, he got ashore without papers. At his trial he admitted the German convictions, the escapes and all three attempts at unlawful entry, and the appeal court later listed them when it explained why a hard cross-examination had been justified.
In America he worked as a carpenter in New Jersey and New York. He married in 1925. By the early 1930s he and his wife were living in the Bronx. Neighbors knew him as thrifty and quiet. After 1932, the period that later mattered so much, he had no regular work but seemed to have money; he told neighbors he traded in furs and had done well on Wall Street. The appeal court would later treat that change as part of the proof against him: before the ransom was paid, it said, he had been in comparative poverty, and afterward he stopped working and speculated in the stock market on a comparatively large scale.
The child at the center of the case was Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. His father's solo transatlantic flight in 1927 had made the family one of the most famous in the world, and in January 1932 the family had moved to East Amwell Township, in Hunterdon County.
On the night of March 1, 1932, the child was taken in East Amwell Township and a ransom of $50,000 was demanded. On May 12, 1932, his death was confirmed in neighboring Mercer County. The indictment laid the date of the crime as March 1, 1932, and at the trial the identity of the dead child was expressly admitted by the defense.
The New Jersey State Police took charge of the investigation, with the help of the federal Bureau of Investigation. The superintendent of the state police was in command, and the governor who later reprieved Hauptmann would accuse him of bungling the original investigation.
Within days the family began receiving notes from a person who claimed to hold the child. On March 8 a retired Bronx teacher published an open letter offering to serve as a go-between, the writer answered him the next day, and on March 10 the family accepted him as intermediary. He met the man he dealt with, whom he knew only as "John," in the Bronx on March 12. Further notes followed. On the evening of April 2, 1932, the intermediary paid the $50,000 to the same man in the Bronx. The child was never returned.
The ransom had been paid largely in gold certificates, and their serial numbers had been recorded in advance. That decision gave the case its only lasting thread. Ransom bills turned up in New York over the next two years. In 1933 the federal government called in gold certificates, setting May 1, 1933, as the deadline for exchanging them, and from then on every ransom note that passed through a bank stood out. A few days before the deadline someone exchanged close to $3,000 of the ransom money; the deposit slip carried the name "J. J. Faulkner," in handwriting that was conceded at trial not to be Hauptmann's. Investigators also traced timber from the scene to a Bronx lumberyard months before they had any suspect.
In September 1934 a ransom gold certificate was traced to Hauptmann, and on September 19 the New York City Police Department arrested him in the Bronx. Two days later, acting under a warrant, officers recovered ransom money, a total later put in court at $14,600. He told the police the money belonged to a former business partner, I.F., who had sailed for Germany at the end of 1933 and died there in March 1934. He said I.F. had left a package with him before the voyage and that he had found the money in it only later.
The police held him for more than a day while they built their case and questioned him for long stretches. His wife hired a lawyer for him. Federal investigators were inclined to see the crime as the work of one man, though there was talk in the first weeks of others being sought.
New York moved first, because the ransom had been paid there. On September 24, 1934, Hauptmann was arraigned before a New York magistrate on a charge of extortion, and he pleaded not guilty in the Bronx County Court to extorting $50,000 for the child's return. On September 26 he gave a statement at the office of the Bronx District Attorney, and the same day a Bronx grand jury indicted him for extortion. A radiogram from Dresden setting out his German criminal record and a letter from the American consulate in Leipzig about I.F. reached the Bronx file within days.
New Jersey wanted him for murder. A Hunterdon County grand jury returned an indictment on October 8, 1934. Hauptmann fought extradition, but the New York authorities surrendered him, and on October 19, 1934, he was transferred to New Jersey for trial. The New York extortion indictment was left in place; the Bronx District Attorney formally dismissed it in April 1936, giving the execution as the reason.
The trial opened on January 2, 1935, in the Court of Oyer and Terminer of Hunterdon County, sitting in the county courthouse at Flemington. A Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court presided. The state's Attorney General led the prosecution in person. Hauptmann's lead counsel was a New York trial lawyer, and four lawyers in all appeared for him.
Jury selection took less than two days. Sixty-five residents of Hunterdon County were questioned and twelve were seated, eight men and four women with an average age of 44. Each swore that he or she had formed no opinion of the case. The jurors were kept together for the six weeks that followed, lodged on the third floor of a hotel across from the courthouse and guarded by four constables.
The prosecution opened by tracing the case from the night of March 1, 1932, to the confirmation of the child's death on May 12, and asked for a verdict of murder in the first degree. Its theory was the one the law of New Jersey made capital: that the death had come in the course of a burglary, a breaking and entering at night with intent to commit a felony. The case was put to the jury on that theory and no other.
The child's mother testified for about forty minutes about the events of March 1. The intermediary, then 74, identified Hauptmann as "John," the man to whom he had paid the money. The child's father testified that he recognized Hauptmann's voice as one he had heard on the night of the payment. Numerous handwriting experts called by the state compared the ransom notes with Hauptmann's own writing, and the senior of them told the jury that the conclusion that Hauptmann wrote all of them was "irresistible, unanswerable and overwhelming." A federal wood technologist testified that part of the timber in an exhibit found at the scene matched wood traced to Hauptmann himself. An Internal Revenue agent traced $18,580 of the ransom money, $14,600 of it directly to Hauptmann. A Manhattan cinema cashier testified that in November 1933 he had paid for a ticket with a ransom bill.
The defense attacked each line. It challenged the reliability of witnesses who placed Hauptmann near Hopewell, and exposed contradictions in one elderly witness's account of whether he had discussed his evidence with New Jersey officials. It pointed out that much of the ransom money had never been accounted for. It called its own handwriting expert, who said Hauptmann had not written the notes. Its lead counsel had promised to name a group of men and women who had planned the crime; he never did.
Hauptmann testified in his own defense. He denied writing the notes and denied ever being at the scene. He offered an alibi for the night of the crime and for the night of the payment. He repeated his account of I.F. and the package, and said he had kept the gold certificates rather than turn them in because he was in the country unlawfully and feared deportation. Under cross-examination he admitted false statements made in the New York proceedings and the long German record.
The summations ran to 100 printed pages for the defense and 135 for the state. The judge charged the jury on the morning of February 13, 1935, and the jury retired at 11:23 a.m. It returned later the same day with a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree without recommendation of life imprisonment. Under New Jersey law that verdict carried death, and the court sentenced Hauptmann accordingly.
Hauptmann's lawyers brought a writ of error to the Court of Errors and Appeals, then New Jersey's court of last resort. Argument was put off until June 20, 1935, at the defense's request, to allow time to print the ten-volume record of the trial. The brief grouped the complaints under sixteen points.
The court decided the case on October 9, 1935, in an opinion by one of its Justices for a unanimous bench of thirteen. It took the points in order.
The summation came first. The defense argued that the Attorney General had expressed his personal belief in Hauptmann's guilt and had described him in abusive terms. The court found that defense counsel had objected only once during the whole summation, and never asked for any remark to be struck. Under the settled New Jersey rule, it held, such remarks gave no ground for review without an objection and a motion to expunge, and it distinguished a recent Supreme Court reversal on the ground that the case there had been weak on the evidence. It also rejected a claim that the Attorney General had bullied Hauptmann in cross-examination, saying a rigid cross-examination was fully warranted.
The defense said the state had shifted its theory of how and where the child died between its opening and its closing. The court held that the case had gone to the jury on one theory only, homicide in the perpetration of a burglary, and that any variance could have made no difference to a defense that rested on alibi. It found nothing in the federal claim under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Venue drew the longest argument. The child had been taken in Hunterdon County, and his death was confirmed in Mercer, so the defense said any indictment belonged in Mercer. The court pointed to section 59 of the Criminal Procedure Act, which allowed an indictment in either county where the fatal act occurred in one and death in the other, and held that the jury was entitled to find that the fatal act had been committed in Hunterdon.
On the felony itself, the court held that the state had proved common-law burglary and that the trial judge's charge, if anything, had been too favorable to the defense. The intent element was met by larceny: property taken on the night of the crime and handed over later only to open the ransom negotiations was, the court said, taken with the intent larceny requires. It also held that a burglary may be technically complete and yet a death caused within its course still counts as murder in its perpetration.
The judge's comments on the evidence were within his rights, the court said, so long as the final decision on the facts was plainly left to the jury, and it held that he had done so. It upheld his refusal of the defense requests to tell the jury that handwriting comparison was "proof of low degree," noting that numerous experts had testified for the state and only one for the defense. It approved the exclusion of a defense witness offered to impeach the cinema cashier, the refusal to strike the testimony of two state witnesses, and the admission of the timber exhibit, whose history from the night of the crime it found sufficiently accounted for.
Then it turned to the weight of the evidence. Three different and largely unrelated lines of proof, the court said, pointed "unerringly to guilt": his possession and use of the ransom money, the handwriting of the ransom notes, and the wood. It added the intermediary's address and telephone number, found written in Hauptmann's hand among his belongings. Its conclusion was that the verdict was "not only not contrary to the weight of the evidence, but one to which the evidence inescapably led."
Finally the court dealt with complaints about the setting of the trial. The defense had asked leave to take depositions on the daily presence of the child's father and other prominent people in court, outbursts from spectators, the running of press messengers, newspaper and radio coverage before the trial, and the lodging of the jury. The court refused. None of it had been raised at trial, it said, and if newspaper stories and radio broadcasts could undo an important murder verdict, few convictions would stand. The judgment was affirmed.
On October 15, 1935, the defense took the case to the Supreme Court of the United States. On the night of October 17 the governor of New Jersey visited Hauptmann in Trenton and talked with him for more than an hour. Soon afterward he said publicly that he doubted Hauptmann had acted alone, and he began his own inquiry through a county detective, while criticizing the state police for the original investigation and accusing the prosecution of bias.
On December 9, 1935, the Supreme Court declined to review the case. On December 13 Hauptmann was resentenced to die during the week of January 13, 1936. The governor could not pardon on his own; clemency belonged to the Court of Pardons, and his own power was limited to staying an execution for up to ninety days. On January 11, 1936, the Court of Pardons denied clemency, and a federal Circuit Court of Appeals refused relief as well.
On January 16, about thirty hours before the scheduled hour, the governor granted a reprieve of thirty days "for divers reasons," and ordered the state police to reopen the investigation. He hinted at important new evidence. None was produced.
The final weeks turned on a confession. Members of the Court of Pardons received a 25-page document in which a Trenton man, P.W., claimed responsibility for the crime. He was held in Mercer County on a murder charge, but he repudiated the confession, saying it had been forced from him by men who had seized him in Brooklyn and held him for a week. The trial judge refused to stay the execution on the strength of it. On March 30, 1936, the Court of Pardons heard Hauptmann's case a second time, with the governor arguing in a long closed session for commutation, and again denied clemency.
Hauptmann's execution was then postponed once more, not by the governor but by the warden, who agreed at the request of the Mercer County grand jury to wait at least 48 hours while it considered the charge against P.W. On April 3 the governor called in the Attorney General, who insisted that the law gave the governor no power to issue a second reprieve. At 7:30 that evening the governor announced that there would be none. Bruno Richard Hauptmann was executed in Trenton that night, April 3, 1936, still maintaining his innocence.
Three pieces of New Jersey law decided the shape of Hauptmann's case. The first was the felony-murder rule in sections 106 and 107 of the Crimes Act, under which a killing committed in the perpetration of a burglary was murder in the first degree without any proof of premeditation. That is why the state had to prove a burglary, why the burglary had to rest on an intended felony, and why the appeal court spent pages on the old common-law definition of larceny. Under section 36 of the Criminal Procedure Act a murder indictment did not have to specify the degree. A jury that convicted in the first degree could recommend life imprisonment; without that recommendation the sentence was death.
The second was the venue statute, section 59 of the Criminal Procedure Act, which allowed a murder to be tried in the county where the fatal act occurred even if death came in another. It kept the case in Hunterdon County, before a Hunterdon jury, at Flemington.
The third was the system of review. The Court of Errors and Appeals was the state's highest court; in Hauptmann's case its bench of thirteen was made up of the Chancellor, the Chief Justice, seven Justices and four further judges, all of whom voted to affirm. Section 136 of the Criminal Procedure Act let a defendant bring up the whole record for review, but a conviction could be reversed only for an error that had prejudiced the defense on the merits, and the question on the weight of the evidence was not whether a reasonable doubt existed but whether the verdict was so clearly against the evidence as to suggest mistake, passion, prejudice or partiality. Clemency lay with the Court of Pardons, not the governor alone.
The trial itself changed the profession's rules. In January 1936 the American Bar Association appointed a committee of lawyers, which met with committees of editors and publishers, to study the conduct of the press and the bar at Flemington. Its report, taken up at the association's 1937 convention, did not name the trial but addressed what had happened there: seats sold to reporters, courtroom passes given out as favors, lawyers briefing the press nightly, a hidden newsreel camera in the gallery, and jurors offered stage work after the verdict. It recommended limiting attendance to the seating, barring lawyers' argumentative press statements and requiring a trial judge's approval for cameras in court.
The appeal court thought the evidence left no room for doubt, and the jury's verdict and every later court's ruling stand. The conviction has nonetheless been contested from the day it was returned.
The case was circumstantial. The defense maintained that the witnesses who placed him near Hopewell were false or unreliable; the appeal court answered that the result would be the same without them. The defense argued that the father's identification of his voice deserved little weight. The handwriting and wood evidence were disputed by the defense, which called the wood expert's testimony unworthy of credit in an issue so grave. The deposit under the name "J. J. Faulkner," in a hand that was not his, was never explained at trial.
Whether he acted alone was an open question from the beginning. Federal investigators leaned toward a lone offender in the first weeks after his arrest, but the governor said publicly that he doubted Hauptmann's sole guilt, and his reprieve rested on that doubt. The confession of P.W. was repudiated, and P.W. was never convicted of any part of the crime.
The physical evidence remained in New Jersey's keeping. In 1981 the governor of New Jersey issued an executive order declaring the case evidence historical and opening it to the public, and it has since been held at the New Jersey State Police Museum in Ewing. Beginning in 2022, a Princeton researcher went to the Superior Court in Mercer County seeking laboratory testing of the stamps and envelopes from the ransom letters. In January 2023 the judge dismissed the claim, ruling that the state's public records law did not entitle a citizen to take historical artifacts from a museum for testing that could permanently alter them. As of March 2024 an appeal from that ruling was pending.
1899: Bruno Richard Hauptmann is born in Kamenz, Saxony.
1919: A German court sentences him to five years for theft.
1923: After release and a fresh arrest, he escapes custody; he enters the United States without papers on his third attempt.
1925: He marries.
March 1, 1932: The child is taken in East Amwell Township, Hunterdon County, New Jersey; a ransom of $50,000 is demanded.
March 10, 1932: A retired Bronx teacher is accepted as intermediary.
April 2, 1932: The ransom is paid in the Bronx in recorded gold certificates.
May 12, 1932: The child's death is confirmed in Mercer County.
May 1, 1933: The federal deadline for exchanging gold certificates.
September 19, 1934: Hauptmann is arrested in the Bronx.
September 26, 1934: A Bronx grand jury indicts him for extortion.
October 8, 1934: A Hunterdon County grand jury indicts him for murder.
October 19, 1934: He is transferred to New Jersey.
January 2, 1935: The trial opens at Flemington.
February 13, 1935: He is convicted of murder in the first degree without recommendation of life imprisonment and sentenced to death.
June 20, 1935: The Court of Errors and Appeals hears argument.
October 9, 1935: The Court of Errors and Appeals affirms, 13 to none.
October 17, 1935: The governor of New Jersey visits him in Trenton.
December 9, 1935: The U.S. Supreme Court declines to review the case.
December 13, 1935: He is resentenced to die during the week of January 13, 1936.
January 11, 1936: The Court of Pardons denies clemency.
January 16, 1936: The governor grants a thirty-day reprieve.
March 30, 1936: The Court of Pardons denies clemency a second time.
April 3, 1936: Hauptmann is executed in Trenton.
April 1936: The Bronx extortion case is formally dismissed.
1937: An American Bar Association report on trial publicity, prompted by Flemington, is taken up at the association's convention.
1981: An executive order opens the case evidence to the public.
January 2023: A Mercer County judge refuses a request for laboratory testing of ransom envelopes and stamps.
March 2024: An appeal from that ruling is pending.