Along Came a Spider

Charles Lindbergh was a pilot who made the first solo transatlantic flight in his plane, Spirit of St. Louis. Two years later, Lindbergh married Anne Morrow, the daughter of Dwight Morrow, a partner at J. P. Morgan and Co. and Lindbergh’s financial advisor. A year later, the couple welcomed a son, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr.

On the night of March 1, 1932, Charles Jr. was sleeping in his nursery on the second floor of the Lindberghs’ home in Hopewell, New Jersey. At approximately 10:00 p.m., the child’s nurse found him missing. A ransom note was found on the windowsill that demanded $50,000; muddy footprints were found but could not be measured, and no fingerprints were found. The kidnapper used a two-section ladder that broke near the connection at some point during the crime.

Former school principal Dr. John F. Condon acted as a go-between for the kidnapper and delivered the ransom on April 2, 1932, to a man who also called himself John. Condon received instructions to retrieve Charles Jr. from a boat named Nellie near Martha’s Vineyard, but the baby was not found. On May 12, 1932, roughly four miles from the Lindbergh home, the body of a baby, later identified as Charles Jr., was found. The cause of death was a blow to the head.

The ransom included gold notes that could be traced: There were several deposits made in the following year and a half, but the depositor could not be identified. On September 18, 1934, a bank recognized one of the bills and informed the FBI that it had come from a gas station in New York City. When the FBI visited the gas station, they learned the attendant had been suspicious of the certificate, so he wrote the customer’s license plate number on it. This led the FBI to Bruno Hauptmann. Upon searching Hauptmann’s home, police found money hidden in the garage that matched the ransom, Dr. John F. Condon’s phone number and address written on the wall of a closet, and wood that matched the ladder used in the kidnapping in Hauptmann’s attic.

On January 3, 1935, Hauptmann went on trial and was found guilty, receiving the death penalty. He was offered several opportunities to have his sentence changed if he confessed to the kidnapping, but he refused. He claimed his innocence, insisting the money came from a friend who returned to Germany and the other evidence was coincidental. Despite this, Hauptmann was executed on April 3, 1936. Hauptmann’s wife, Anna, fought to clear his name until her death in 1994.

In the context of Along Came a Spider, the kidnapping of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr. is referenced to set up the story as one involving child kidnapping—with the kidnapper, Gary Soneji/Murphy, using the real-life kidnapping as a source of inspiration. This inclusion of a real-life kidnapping grounds the novel, which is often critical to evoking fear and raising stakes in psychological thrillers.