Crime Stories of the Century
The awful acts of the past 100 years forced America to look at itself in the mirror
Until then, the country romanticized gangsters. The massacre on Clark Street changed that. People were shocked by the brutality. President Herbert Hoover wanted Capone behind bars. It took a few years, but the feds finally nailed him--not for bootlegging or murder but on a tax beef. Scarface wound up doing 11 years.
THE 1930S
The Lindbergh baby
On March 1, 1932, Charles Lindbergh Jr., the beloved 20-month-old son of the flying ace, was put to bed, as usual, at 7:30 p.m. But when a nurse checked on the blond, curly-haired boy at 10 p.m., his crib was empty, the window to his second-floor bedroom open. Police found a ransom note on the sill. Whoever took the child wanted $50,000 to bring him back.
The kidnapping took place during a bleak time. The country was broke. People peddled apples in the streets. Bread lines sprang up. So hated were the banks that stickup men like John Dillinger were admired. There was no sympathy for a greedy kidnapper, though. What kind of person would steal away in the night with a baby?
Charles Lindbergh paid the $50,000 ransom, the money delivered in marked bills. In return he received a note: The baby was on a boat near Martha's Vineyard. That was a lie. On May 12, the baby's body was found in the woods less than 5 miles from the Lindbergh house. He had a fractured skull and a hole in his forehead the size of a quarter. Police believe the boy died the night he was kidnapped.
It would take time--more than two years--but eventually the marked bills turned up. Detectives arrested a Bronx carpenter, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, in September 1934. When they searched the German immigrant's modest house, they found thousands of dollars in the marked bills. After a circuslike trial, Hauptmann was found guilty. On April 3, 1936, he was sent to the electric chair at the state prison in Trenton, N.J., and was executed.
THE 1940S
The Rosenberg spy case
Well before Joe McCarthy, but after Winston Churchill christened the Cold War, America was aflame with talk of spies. The Soviet Union was gobbling up Europe. Moscow and Washington were on pins and needles. In the summer of 1949, the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb. A year later, communist North Korea stormed into South Korea. America, once again, was at war.
And then the Rosenbergs were arrested. Julius was an engineer by training who ran a struggling small machine shop in New York City with his brother-in-law, David Greenglass; Ethel cared for their two sons, 3 and 7. The Rosenbergs were tripped up by others' arrests, but their chief accuser was Greenglass, a small-fish spy who worked on the American atomic bomb project at Los Alamos and fingered his relatives to save himself. Greenglass claimed Julius Rosenberg, a Communist, had recruited him to gather atomic secrets.
The FBI arrested Julius in July 1950; Ethel was arrested a month later. Their trial began on March 6, 1951. The Rosenbergs insisted they were innocent--although government documents declassified in 1995 would confirm Julius was indeed a Soviet spy. In the end, both were found guilty and sentenced to death, a severe punishment for espionage, especially since the Soviet Union had been a wartime ally. The Rosenbergs were Jewish, and there was speculation that the presiding judge and a prosecutor, also both Jewish, went overboard to prove Jews were as patriotic and anti-Communist as the rest of the country. Cries for mercy poured in from around the world; the nation split between those pleading for their lives and those desperate to see the Rosenbergs die for treason. Many believed the sentence was particularly harsh for Ethel, against whom there was scant evidence. There were demonstrations right up until the moment that the Rosenbergs were executed at Sing Sing Prison on June 19, 1953. She was 37; he was 35. Greenglass got 15 years in prison.
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