0:00 On May 13th, 1932, President Herbert Hoover ordered the FBI to serve as a clearinghouse for the Lindbergh kidnapping investigation.0:10 This order was necessary because, at the time, the FBI had absolutely NO jurisdiction over the case.0:18 Last week, we saw how the case of Dollree Mapp ultimately forced the Supreme Court to put new LIMITS on police power.0:27 This week is the story of a crime so shocking it did the exact opposite — a crime that forced the federal government to claim new authority it never had before.0:40 It began on the night of March 1st, 1932.0:43 Charles Lindbergh, the most famous man in America, and his wife Anne, were at their home in Hopewell, New Jersey.0:52 Their twenty-month-old son, Charles Junior, was asleep in his nursery.0:58 When a nurse checked on him at ten p.m., the crib was empty.1:02 On the windowsill was a crudely written ransom note, demanding fifty thousand dollars.1:09 The note was filled with misspellings and signed with a strange symbol.1:15 The crime was unthinkable.1:17 The response was immediate and overwhelming.1:20 But as the investigation began, a shocking reality became clear.1:25 In 1932, kidnapping was a state crime.1:28 If the abductors crossed the state line from New Jersey into Pennsylvania or New York, they would effectively escape the jurisdiction of the primary investigators.1:41 The FBI, the nation's premier law enforcement agency, could only watch from the sidelines.1:48 The Lindberghs, desperate, agreed to pay.1:52 A retired schoolteacher named John Condon acted as an intermediary, communicating with a mysterious figure who called himself "Graveyard John." On April 2nd, Condon delivered the fifty thousand dollars in gold certificates to a man in a Bronx cemetery.2:12 But the child was not returned.2:14 Then, on May 12th, the search ended in the worst possible way.2:19 The body of Charles Lindbergh Junior was found in the woods, less than five miles from his home.2:27 He had been killed by a blow to the head, likely on the night he was taken.2:33 The investigation shifted from kidnapping to murder, and the entire country demanded justice.2:40 For two years, the trail went cold.2:43 The only real leads were the marked ransom bills, slowly trickling into circulation.2:49 Then, in September 1934, a gas station attendant in New York received a ten-dollar gold certificate.2:57 Wary of the bill, he jotted down the license plate of the car.3:02 That plate led police to Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German immigrant and carpenter.3:09 In his garage, they found over fourteen thousand dollars of the ransom money.3:15 The case against him was entirely circumstantial, but it was damning.3:20 Wood from a ladder found at the crime scene was matched to floorboards in Hauptmann's attic.3:28 Handwriting experts testified that he wrote the ransom notes.3:33 His tools matched the marks on the ladder.3:36 The press dubbed it the "Trial of the Century," and after five weeks, the jury delivered its verdict: guilty.3:45 Hauptmann was sentenced to death and executed on April 3rd, 1936, proclaiming his innocence to the end.3:53 So what does it all add up to?3:55 The public, and Congress, drew one immediate conclusion from the chaos of the investigation.4:02 The fact that a kidnapper could evade federal pursuit simply by driving across a state line was an intolerable weakness in the law.4:13 In the months following the initial crime, Congress acted with stunning speed.4:19 They passed the Federal Kidnapping Act, universally known as the "Lindbergh Law." The change was simple, but profound.4:28 It made transporting a kidnapping victim across state lines a federal crime.4:34 It gave the FBI the authority to lead these investigations, to pursue criminals anywhere in the country, and to bring the full weight of the federal government to bear.4:48 It closed the loophole that the Lindbergh case had so tragically exposed.4:54 The Lindbergh Law didn't just give the FBI a new mandate.4:58 It established a new principle in American law: that some crimes are so heinous, they are an offense not just against a state, but against the nation itself.
