I've certainly heard the theory that Charles Lindbergh faked his son's kidnapping and killed him on accident, but that's always what those theories have suggested: it was an accident. Lindbergh was known for playing practical jokes that were usually only amusing to him. He once hid Little Charlie in a closet and let the frantic household search all over for him, growing increasingly panicked, until he admitted what he had done (a laugh a minute, that Colonel Lindbergh). In fact, when his nanny, Betty Gow, went to check on Charlie at 10 p.m. the night of the kidnapping and found the little boy wasn't in his crib, she went down to the study and accused Lindbergh of taking him as a joke.
Pearlman's theory is much, much darker than a practical joke gone wrong and a hasty fake ransom note to cover up his accidental killing of his son. It seems to fit all the known facts pretty well. Lindbergh was a big believer in eugenics and purity of blood. He made a big deal about finding the right mate to have perfect, healthy children with. So he was probably disappointed that his little namesake, first born son wasn't completely perfect. Charlie had rickets and was on a pretty strong supplement his doctor prescribed to try to correct the issue. He also had a larger than normal, squarish head and might have suffered from hydrocephalus. Of course in the 1930s they didn't have shunts and things like that to drain the buildup in the brain. Nevertheless, there's no evidence that Charlie couldn't have grown into adulthood and lived a long, normal, happy life. Lindbergh was working with a Dr. Carrell, who liked to conduct experiments on living animals, cutting them open and removing organs and seeing how long his subjects would live. Using pumps that Lindbergh helped design, he would see how long he could keep these removed organs viable. So Pearlman's theory is that Lindbergh, seeing himself as a man of science, decided to donate his son to the greater good and faked his kidnapping. He built the ladder, which was never meant to hold anyone (and couldn't--tests showed the rungs would break if more than about 100-125 pounds were placed on it), set it in the mud below his son's nursery window to make the impressions, discarded it in the grass 75 feet from the house, and went inside to stage the kidnapping, which was definitely an inside job. Just looking at the nursery window where the "kidnapper" supposedly entered, there was a big trunk with a suitcase and toys on top of it. You really want us to believe someone from the outside opened the window, climbed into the dark nursery, vaulted over the trunk with everything on it, grabbed the 30 pound nearly two year old, left the note on the window sill, climbed out onto that jenky as hell ladder (that would have broke anyway), closed the window, and made off with the baby? No, of course not. Bruno Richard Hauptmann was completely innocent, and Colonel Lindbergh knew it.
When Charlie's body was found, his face was completely white, despite supposedly lying in the brush for two months. Most of his organs were missing, but there were no animal bite marks on his bones and no vermin or maggots present. When they turned him over and his face got wet, it turned blue. By the time his body made it to the morgue for the cursory autopsy (Lindbergh wouldn't allow a full one and had the body cremated immediately, Anne didn't get to see him even) he'd turned black. Pearlman theorizes that Dr. Carrell put some sort of preserving chemicals on him so he wouldn't decompose before they could get rid of his body. All in all it was a fascinating, well researched book. It's a shame we won't ever know what really happened to the Lindbergh baby, and that Hauptmann was unfairly executed for a crime he had no part in.
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