It may be the most notorious kidnapping case in American history: the baby of famous aviator Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped nearly 100 years ago in a story so sensational that it led Congress to make kidnapping across state lines a federal crime. A German-born carpenter was charged, convicted and executed for the boy’s murder.  But a retired California judge now says the criminal justice system got it wrong.

Lindbergh is a man with a complex tagline – an accomplished aviator who lost his son to the “crime of the century” but fell from grace for his antisemitism and advocacy for eugenics.  He grew to fame in 1927 upon completing the first solo, nonstop flight across the Atlantic. His 33.5-hour flight from New York to Paris aboard the single-engine Spirit of St. Louis led to many awards, medals and parades, but tragedy afflicted TIME’s first Man of the Year when his son, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., age 20 months, was kidnapped from his New Jersey home in March 1932. Eventually, his body was “accidentally found, partly buried, and badly decomposed, about four and a half miles southeast of the Lindbergh home” in May 1932. A coroner determined the boy was killed by a blow to the head and had been dead for about two months.

After about two years of investigation, a 35-year-old suspect named Bruno Richard Hauptmann was indicted on charges of extortion and murder. Prosecutors alleged he used a ladder to climb to the second-story nursery for the abduction and was motivated by money, adding that his goal was to earn a hefty ransom from the Lindbergh family. From his apprehension to his eventual execution, Hauptmann maintained his innocence.

“The trial of Hauptmann began on January 3, 1935, at Flemington, New Jersey, and lasted five weeks,” according to an official FBI website. “The case against him was based on circumstantial evidence. Tool marks on the ladder matched tools owned by Hauptmann. Wood in the ladder was found to match wood used as flooring in his attic. Dr. Condon’s telephone number and address were found scrawled on a door frame inside a closet. Handwriting on the ransom notes matched samples of Hauptmann’s handwriting.”

(Dr. John Condon was a concerned citizen who’d written an open letter to the kidnapper, offering to be an intermediary.)

A jury found Hauptmann was guilty of murder in the first degree on February 13, 1935, and he was electrocuted on April 3, 1936.

But 88 years later, Lise Pearlman – a retired judge, filmmaker and award-winning true crime author – says Hauptmann paid for a crime he didn’t commit. Her theory is that Lindbergh actually offered his son up to the Nobel Prize-winning French surgeon and biologist, Alexis Carrel, for experimentation.

“A lot of leads weren’t followed, about a dozen state witnesses likely committed perjury, and the prosecution had 90,000 pages of investigation they didn’t let Hauptmann or his defense see,” Ms. Pearlman told the San Francisco Chronicle. “The wrong man was executed, and my hope is that Hauptmann will be posthumously exonerated. And I am certainly not the only one who wants that.”

Ms. Pearlman’s theory is based upon medical reports on the dead baby’s body, police files, and papers written by Lindbergh and Carrel. The goal of the alleged experimentation was to see if living organs could be preserved outside of the body long enough to be transplanted. When the organ removal went badly wrong, Lindbergh staged a kidnapping to cover up his tracks, according to Ms. Pearlman.

“My theory is that the child was operated on,” Ms. Pearlman explained. “We think at the very least that his carotid and probably his thyroid were taken out and kept viable for 30 days. We think he died on the operating table. 

“And I think Carrel conducted the operation with Lindbergh’s permission — and Lindbergh was likely present at the operation.”

Lindbergh and Carrel together would go on to invent the “perfusion pump,” a device that helped keep organs viable outside the body while they awaited transplantation. But was this enough motivation for a father to put his son’s life at risk for the sake of science? Ms. Pearlman says we must consider how Lindbergh, along with Carrel, was a known advocate of eugenics – the  “theory that humans can be improved through selective breeding of populations.”  Today, eugenics has been entirely discredited, but in the 1930s it still had currency, especially with the Nazis who were secretly euthanizing children with severe mental and developmental disabilities. Lindbergh has long been suspected of being a Nazi sympathizer, though to this day the matter remains in dispute.

Ms. Pearlman thinks Lindbergh might have been willing to get rid of his son because the baby was known to be sickly and had an abnormally large head.

“The more I looked into Lindbergh, the more my suspicions were raised about his involvement and the fact that he wasn’t treated as a suspect,” she said. “He was home when it happened. He should have been a suspect.”

Hauptmann’s involvement, according to Ms. Pearlman, was simply circumstantial. He was only apprehended after spending some of the ransom money at a gas station, and Hauptmann always said he only had the money after a friend gifted it to him.

Plausible or not, Ms. Pearlmann’s theory has gained quite a bit of traction. One supporter of a reopening of the case is Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project. After reading her 2020 book about the theory called “The Lindbergh Kidnapping Suspect No. 1, The Man Who Got Away,” Mr. Scheck called it a “fascinating read with surprising conclusions.”

Whether or not the case will officially be reopened is still up in the air, but a researcher in New Jersey filed a lawsuit aimed at releasing evidence from the New Jersey State Police that would, in his eyes, clear Hauptmann’s name. Even the American Academy of Forensic Sciences has effectively gotten involved after publishing Ms. Pearlman’s assertions.

“I do think Lise Pearlman has a point,” the attorney handling the lawsuit said, adding that other theories could also be plausible. “I don’t think anybody knows what happened, and we have an opportunity to get some answers, but the state of New Jersey is refusing to let us look at the evidence. I don’t really understand why.”

If Ms. Pearlman has her way, further DNA testing will be done on things like a ransom note and the ladder used to get into the nursery. She already had swabs of DNA that can be used for comparison from Hauptmann’s distant family – a great-great niece and her aunt.

“It’s amazing, the research Lise has done; phenomenal,” the great-great niece, Cezanne Love, said. “Her medical theory? I totally believe that. Only God and Richard [Hauptmann] know for sure, but from everything I’ve heard, he sounds innocent. And Lindbergh didn’t sound like a nice person.”