The 1932 kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s 20-month-old son was called the “crime of the century” at the time, and has inspired more and less plausible theories about what really happened ever since. The San Francisco Chronicle has recently covered a new wave of interest in the case, based on retired judge Lise Pearlman’s 2020 book that builds on a theory that’s been around for decades: that the celebrity aviator himself was implicated, and the man executed for the crime was in fact innocent.
Pearlman proposes what the San Francisco Chronicle calls “a new, macabre theory about the case: that Lindbergh offered up his child as a subject for medical experiments and faked the kidnapping to cover up the child’s death.” Given evidence that the boy was “known to be sickly and to have an abnormally large head,” she argues that Charles Lindbergh allowed him to be used for medical experimentation by his close colleague, fellow eugenicist and Nobel Prize-winning French biologist Alexis Carrel. Lindbergh was working with Carrel in research on techniques for organ transplants (underlying this work was Carrel’s desire to preserve the “white race” from “less intelligent stock” – see Marcy Darnovsky’s 2010 post to go down Carrel’s rabbit hole).
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So could a father have offered up his own son to be a medical guinea pig, resulting in the child’s death, and then staged an elaborate cover up? Absolutely.
