Lindbergh: The Crime

Substituting innuendo for logic, Behn ( Big Stick-up at Brink's! ) proposes to identify the ``true'' culprits behind the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the infant Charles Lindbergh Jr., crimes for which Bruno Hauptmann was executed in 1936. While most researchers today doubt that Hauptmann acted alone, Behn maintains Hauptmann's total innocence. The author rehashes a theory that first circulated in the 1930s: that the baby was battered to death by his aunt, Elisabeth Morrow, allegedly an imbalanced young woman driven to insanity when famous aviator Charles Lindbergh married her sister Anne instead of her. The aviator, argues Behn, fabricated the kidnapping to protect the Lindbergh and Morrow families from scandal. The chief sources here are a book hastily assembled in 1932 by reporter Laura Vitray after she was fired from her newspaper, and the author's conversations with a nonagenarian lawyer who claims that a Morrow servant implicated Elisabeth. Behn does not, however, point out that the servant in question was himself a suspect. Aspersions on Lindbergh's character constitute the rest of the ``evidence.'' Those with a serious interest in the subject are advised to read Joyce Milton's recent, assiduously researched Loss of Eden . (Jan.)