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It’s been 91 years since celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby was kidnapped, a crime that plunged the nation into a paroxysm of anguish that ended with the capture of a German immigrant named Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Prosecutors at the time said he snatched the child to squeeze a $50,000 ransom from the family, but to the day he was executed in the electric chair, Hauptmann insisted he was innocent.
Questions about Hauptmann’s guilt have swirled ever since his death, and now respected Bay Area historians are proposing a new, macabre theory about the case: that Lindbergh offered up his child as a subject for medical experiments and faked the kidnapping to cover up the child’s death.
That’s what an author and retired judge in Oakland says, and she is joined by a growing chorus of supporters who say her theory is worth investigating, including the former vice mayor of Tiburon, the co-founder of the Innocence Project and Hauptmann’s descendants.
Back in March 1932, when 20-month-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. was snatched from his New Jersey home in...