10 Murder Trials That Shocked The World

4. Bruno Richard Hauptmann (1935) - The Infamous Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping

The so-called "Crime of the Century", Bruno Richard Hauptmann abducted and murdered the 20-month-old son of Charles Lindbergh - the first person to make a solo transatlantic airline flight. Due to Lindbergh's celebrity status, and the prolonged nature of the trial, this case shocked the world and drew instant fascination.

On March 1, 1932, Charles Lindbergh Jr was kidnapped from his home in East Amwell, New Jersey - with only a note demanding a ransom of $50,000 left behind. Two months later, a corpse of the Lindbergh baby with a blow to its head was found in woods a few miles from the family home.

Two years passed without any progress in the case, which continued to dominate headlines worldwide, and eventually Hauptmann was arrested - and dubbed "The Most Hated Man in the World".

Tried in Flemington, New Jersey, between January and February 1935, Hauptmann was convicted and sentenced to death - even though much of the evidence appeared contradictory, circumstantial and contentious. New Jersey Governor Harold G Hoffman even admitted in 1936 that this kidnapping could not have been a "one-person" job, but when the press got wind of the fact he was considering a reprieve of the death penalty, he was forced to withdraw it.

As a result, Hauptmann was executed by electric chair at the New Jersey State Prison on April 3, 1936 - although the German protested his innocence right until the very end, shouting in the chamber "I am absolutely innocent of the crime with which I am burdened".

As well as the trial shocking the world at the time, subsequent suggestions that Hauptmann was innocent has called into further question capital punishment. In particular, a scrawled phone number on a board in Hauptmann's closest convinced one juror to convict him, although a journalist later admitted he had written this himself. The case of the Lindbergh kidnapping remains, decades later, potentially unsolved.