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![]() The Assassination of JFK: Who shot JFK? Most people accepted the answer. Spurred on by anti-German sentiment and major hero worship for Lindbergh, the police, the media and, ultimately, a jury (that for the most part probably thought it was doing the right thing) joined forces to bring Hauptmann down, with even those higher-ups who believed in his innocence not being able to reverse the course of a system not interested in alternative theories. The kidnapping terrified a nation, and newspapers pretty much flayed Hauptmann alive before he was even convicted. So not only is this crime possibly still unsolved, but the government may have put an innocent man to death. His wife, Anna Hauptmann, spent the rest of her life trying to clear his name, alleging at one point that her husband had been "framed from beginning to end" by police desperate to close the case. Multiple books written in the 84 years since the kidnapping contend that Hauptmann-whose status as a working-class immigrant, particularly from Germany in the days leading up to World War II, did him no favors with the American criminal justice system-was innocent. Two years later, German-born carpenter Bruno Richard Hauptmann was arrested for the crime, tried, convicted and subsequently executed on April 3, 1996, having insisted all the while that he was innocent. was found two months later in a field not far from the family's New Jersey home. Despite the family having every resource at their disposal, the body of 20-month-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. The Kidnapping of the Lindbergh Baby: The original "Crime of the Century." News of aviation hero Charles Lindbergh's son being snatched from his crib in the middle of the night was about as scary as it got in 1932. Here are 13 of those crimes, ones that left a forever mark: Whether it was the ax murders of Lizzie Borden's parents inspiring a morbid nursery rhyme or Jack the Ripper stalking prostitutes on the streets of White Chapel, some form of media has always been there to put a salacious spin on the scariest tales of the day.Īnd while crime is often just so much more fodder for the 11 o'clock news mill, certain crimes have had lasting impact, whether by inspiring ever more copious means of absorbing information, prompting policy that we may take for granted today or, in some cases, by altering our perspectives, affecting the way we view the world altogether. While the doings of daily life tend to be on the dull side and always have been, the media in general have always sensationalized anything ripe for the picking-and crime is always ripe for the picking. Not only is it endlessly fascinating to probe the human condition, trying to figure out not just how, but why something happened, but perhaps in some ways learning all there is to know about a crime makes us feel like we're building a fortress of information that will help prevent anything of that sort from happening to us.Īnd it isn't just online media, which operate at fever pitch 24/7, that have deposited us in the current state of true-crime-junkie nirvana in which we find ourselves today. Rather, the existence of crime is a scary, often uncontrollable part of life. And it can seem like an even bigger part of life because we tend to be a society that demands all the details, anytime something tragic or shocking happens, no matter how-or perhaps because of how-far removed the situation may be from our personal experience of the world. ![]() ![]() We don't mean that in a make-America-great again kind of way. Crime happens every day, all over the world. ![]()
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