On the evening of March 1, 1932, the toddler son of aviator Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh was abducted from his family home in East Amwell, New Jersey.   Over two months later, his body was discovered a short distance from the Lindberghs' home. A medical examination determined that the toddler died from a "massive fracture of the skull."

After an investigation that lasted more than two years, Bruno Richard Hauptmann was charged with the crime. The trial lasted more than a year, and on Feb. 13, 1935, Hauptmann was found guilty of murder in the first degree and sentenced to die.  Proclaiming his innocence to the end, he was executed by electric chair at the New Jersey State Prison on April 3, 1936. 

Newspaper writer H.L. Mencken called the kidnapping and subsequent trial "the biggest story since the Resurrection." The crime spurred Congress to pass the Federal Kidnapping Act, commonly called the "Lindbergh Law," that made transporting a kidnapping victim across state lines a federal crime.

Forensic Document Examiner Ana Kyle will discuss facets of the Lindbergh case at New Haven Public Library, 133 Elm St., on Wednesday, Sept. 30, at 6pm

Ana Kyle is a court-certified Document Examiner with 36 years of experience in the field of Questioned Documents and psychological profiling through handwriting. She is the author of The Dead Poets Plus One: the Lindbergh Kidnap Case (2004), and Two Men and One Pair of Shoes : The Trial of Richard Hauptmann (2007).