KU professor joins lawsuit to pressure New Jersey to allow DNA testing of Lindbergh evidence
TOPEKA — An assistant professor at the University of Kansas is a plaintiff in a New Jersey lawsuit seeking modern DNA testing of state archive materials tied to the kidnapping and murder of the infant son of trans-Atlantic aviator Charles Lindbergh.
The 200-page Mercer County Superior Court suit was filed amid controversy about decisions by New Jersey State Police to block access to the case archive. The plaintiffs — KU historian Jonathan Hagel, author Catherine Read and retired teacher Michele Downie — said their Open Public Records Act request related the 1932 kidnapping was rejected.
Hagel, a New Jersey native who has studied the Lindbergh case, said DNA analysis of ransom notes or envelopes could contribute to understanding whether Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who was executed in 1936 after convicted of first-degree murder, acted alone in the high-profile crime. It is among questions that have riveted scholars and investigators since Hauptmann's trial.
'There were more than a dozen ransom letters overall, and they were sent through the post,' said Hagel, a New Jersey native who has studied the Lindbergh case. 'If Hauptmann's DNA is on it, then he definitely is not innocent of being involved. But, if there is other DNA, that would confirm other people's involvement.'
Twenty-month-old Charles Lindbergh Jr. was abducted from the family estate near Hopewell, New Jersey. The family was contacted through ransom notes and parcels, and a demand for $50,000 was paid. The toddler's remains were subsequently discovered adjacent to a roadside several miles from the Lindbergh home.
'There are those who think we're likely to find Charles Lindbergh's DNA on the materials,' Hagel said. 'They believe there was some kind of accident, and he orchestrated this as a way to deflect responsibility.'
At least one previous lawsuit unsuccessfully sought to compel New Jersey to allow DNA testing of documents associated with the case. A state appellate court said New Jersey law didn't guarantee a public right to physically examine archive materials. In 2023, the State Police said access was restricted to preserve contents of case files.
'My take is that states or police organizations, like any bureaucracy, just like to protect their stuff,' Hagel said. 'There are others who think the state police are embarrassed they may have botched it quite badly and been involved in a railroading.'
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National Geographic
a day ago
- National Geographic
Charles Lindbergh was a Nazi puppet—and his famous flight was overrated. Here's why.
Charles Lindbergh standing in front of his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, which he used on his transatlantic flight. Photograph by Bridgeman Images The aviator was so impressed by German propaganda that he grossly overestimated Hitler's airpower. I have to declare a personal stake that shapes my opinion as I write this story. It has its origins in 1940, 85 years ago this month. I was seven years old, living near London. I watched the choreography of a great battle underway, etched in vapor trails high above in the crisp blue sky of summer, the combat that became known as the Battle of Britain. I wasn't scared. I watched with the detached excitement of a child unaware of how perilous those days were for us. That understanding would come later, from my work as a journalist, spending years discovering how closely fought that famous victory was. Had that battle been lost it is doubtful that Britain, then alone as most of Western Europe fell to Hitler, could have survived, as it did, until Pearl Harbor made American intervention inevitable. As things have turned out, one of my most unsettling discoveries has been that a man long hailed as an American legend, Charles Lindbergh, worked avidly with the Germans to undermine the chances of a British victory. Much has long been known about Lindbergh's alliance with American fascists between 1939 and 1941, and particularly his speech in Des Moines, Iowa in September 1941, in which he blamed three groups—the Roosevelt administration, the British and the Jews—for pressing the nation to confront Hitler. Much less known is the role Lindbergh played in England during the 1930s as Hitler's useful idiot, spreading the idea that Nazi Germany had become an invincible air power. The first Nazi to spot and exploit Lindbergh as an effective agent of German disinformation was Hermann Goering, Hitler's deputy and head of his air force, the Luftwaffe. Goering recognized that Lindbergh's celebrity gave him oracular authority on aviation—whether justified or not. Portrait of Charles Lindbergh Photograph by The Stapleton Collection, Bridgeman Images A decade after Lindbergh's epic solo flight across the Atlantic, on October 16, 1937, the Nazis made their master move, allowing him into their secret test field at Rechlin, near the Baltic coast. Virtually all the Luftwaffe's future aircraft were revealed to him. Credulous and convinced that no other European power rivaled Germany in the air, Lindbergh thereafter became a powerful influence on the 'peace at any price' factions in Britain and France. Lindbergh had no background in military aviation, but when he spoke on the subject of anything with wings, a lot of important people listened. There were numerous reports of Lindbergh pressing his views on leading European politicians, some of whom found them unnerving and demoralizing. For example, the British military attaché in Paris, seeing how rattled the French were by Lindbergh's assessments, reported to London, '…the Fuhrer found a most convenient ambassador in Colonel Lindbergh.' Limited Time: Bonus Issue Offer Subscribe now and gift up to 4 bonus issues—starting at $34/year. Lindbergh's impact in Britain was equally effective. In a single meeting he could turn a stern patriot into an abject appeaser. In 1938 a highly influential Tory, Thomas Jones, noted in his diary that before listening to Lindbergh he had been for standing up against Hitler but: 'Since my talk with Lindbergh I've sided with those working for peace at any cost in humiliation, because of the picture of our relative unpreparedness in the air…' (How the Battle of Britain changed the war—and the world—forever) Lindbergh also had a willing ear in the American ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy. In 1938 he told Kennedy that Germany was then able to produce 20,000 military airplanes a year and gave a dark prediction of likely British defeat in the air. (In October 1938 Goering, on behalf of Hitler, awarded Lindbergh the Service Cross of the German Eagle.) In fact, Lindbergh's numbers were absurdly inflated. They were, literally, being used by the Nazis as a force multiplier. Moreover, Lindbergh's propaganda had masked a systemic weakness in the organization of German aircraft production. It was far from being a model of Teutonic efficiency. Production was dispersed among many manufacturers competing for resources and slowed by supply chain bottlenecks. In contrast, British aircraft production was far more rigorously directed and resourced from a central command. Charles Lindbergh receiving the Service Cross of the German Eagle from Hermann Goering on behalf of Adolf Hitler Photograph by SZ Photo/Scherl, Bridgeman Images More crucially, Lindbergh had no inkling of a game-changing technical leap in the deployment of air power that the British pioneered, the world's most advanced radar-based early warning system. Incoming waves of bombers could be pinpointed and tracked before they reached the British coast. Their size, direction and altitude were precisely plotted on a map in a central operations room, enabling the Royal Air Force (R.A.F) to deploy its precious hundreds of advanced fighters and pilots sparingly in the most efficient and deadly way. Britain's 'finest hour' At the outbreak of war, in September 1939, Germany did have a clear lead in numbers: 2,893 available front-line airplanes versus 1,600 in Britain. But by July, 1940, when the Battle of Britain began, the difference had narrowed. Britain had 644 front-line fighters to 725 German (with their time over England critically limited by fuel). By the end of September, when the RAF's famous victory was achieved, they had 732 fighters available while the Luftwaffe was reduced to 438. Weeks before the battle in the air began, Britain's expeditionary army in France had been nearly wiped out, saved only by the evacuation at Dunkirk. Few foresaw that its air force, the most scientifically advanced of its forces, was actually capable of saving the day. But—a point mostly overlooked by historians—Prime Minister Winston Churchill, fighting off a last-ditch resistance by appeasers, made his confidence in the R.A.F's strengths the bulwark of his case for carrying on the war. (Searching for the remains of two early transatlantic pilots) This is testament to Churchill's remarkable openness, at the age of 65, to technical transformation: As a young man he had served in the army, and had then twice served as First Lord of the Admiralty, in 1911 and 1939, running the Royal Navy. But, as much as he loved Britain's imperial-scale navy, he understood in 1940, ahead of many others, that the island nation's last line of defense was now in the air. On June 18, 1940, in one of his greatest speeches, Churchill warned, 'The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us…if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age.' Yet, if Britain prevailed, the world would say, 'This was their finest hour.' The battle engaged remarkably low numbers of men in combat, only a few hundred on each side, almost like medieval knights, each alone in a cockpit. When it was over, Churchill made the indelible tribute to his airmen: 'Never in the history of human conflict have so many owed so much to so few.' Victory in the air ended any chance of Hitler carrying out Operation Sea Lion, his planned invasion of Britain. And it finally laid bare the pernicious extent of the disinformation spread by Lindbergh—swallowed whole by many, including Ambassador Kennedy. Even then, Kennedy, a hardened isolationist, had learned nothing. Unmoved by the victory, he said, 'The British have had it. They can't stop the Germans and the best thing for them is to learn to live with them.' (Charles Lindbergh's wife was a record-breaking aviator in her own right) It's important to note that Lindbergh's crossing of the Atlantic in 1927 was an act of superb airmanship—particularly of navigation—but it did nothing to advance the science of aviation. His airplane, the Spirit of St. Louis, was a one-off bespoke model built for only one purpose: for one man to safely cross the Atlantic. It was not in any way a precursor. The science necessary to carry passengers safely across any ocean was an American achievement, developed mainly in a wind tunnel at Caltech in California, where two companies, Boeing and Douglas, created the first twin-engine all-metal airliners. In fact, the need for a larger, twin-engine airplane to cross oceans was foretold by two British military aviators, Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown, who were the first to actually fly across the Atlantic, 1,890 miles, from Newfoundland to Ireland, in 1919, in a converted World War I bomber. They landed, unheralded, in a field and came to rest, nose down, in a bog, not like Lindbergh on a floodlit runway with the whole world listening on radio. As a result, to this day few people realize who was first. It will fall to President Donald Trump to decide how the nation will mark the centennial of Lindbergh's 1927 flight from Long Island, New York, to Paris. This will confront America with a challenging moral judgment: Can a legendary human endeavor ever be celebrated if the 'hero' turns out to have been so deeply flawed?
Boston Globe
2 days ago
- Boston Globe
Trump's imaginary numbers, from $1.99 gas to 1,500 percent price cuts
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'I don't think you can use the way he uses numbers as an example for how other politicians might effectively use numbers. I will simply say that accurate numbers are a lot more compelling than inaccurate numbers.' To Trump's critics, his looseness with numbers dates to his long career as a developer and real estate mogul, when he specialized in touting his properties and, they say, often exaggerating their value and features. Advertisement In February 2024, Trump was found guilty in a civil fraud case after the New York attorney general said he had inflated his net worth by as much as $2.2 billion annually. The judge found, for example, that Trump described his luxury apartment as being 30,000 square feet when it was actually 10,996. He has appealed the verdict. Other presidents, including Joe Biden, have also been less than precise with their math on occasion, though Biden's misstatements tended to involve his personal history rather than the country's condition. He said repeatedly that he had traveled 17,000 miles with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, for example; The Washington Post Fact Checker found that figure misleading at best. Most presidents have worried that tossing out demonstrably incorrect facts or figures would hurt their credibility, Rowland, the communications professor, said. 'I was reading Reagan's speeches where he personally made notations,' Rowland said. 'You will occasionally see him write in, 'Check this data.' That is the norm for presidents … That is the opposite of what is happening now.'
Miami Herald
14-07-2025
- Miami Herald
Good Samaritans help rescue five from ‘swamped' boat off NJ coast, officials say
Five people were rescued from a 'swamped' boat off the New Jersey coast when Good Samaritans stepped in to help, officials said. The boaters were found sitting on top of the hull of their vessel as it took on water about 3 miles east from Elberon, about a 50-mile drive south from New York City, the U.S. Coast Guard Mid-Atlantic said in a July 14 Facebook post. A good Samaritan brought one of the boaters onto their vessel, and another good Samaritan on a different vessel helped rescue the other four before the Coast Guard sent a small crew out, officials said. Then, the crew and a New Jersey State Police boat brought all five people back to shore, according to officials. 'When it comes to search and rescue teamwork is key,' the Coast Guard said in the post.
