Video by: Chasing News -- Charles Lindbergh was the most famous American alive in 1932 when his young child was kidnapped from the family home in Hopewell, NJ. Ransom notes were found before the child was found killed near the side of the road a short time later. Bruno Richard Hauptmann was arrested, tried, convicted and executed for his role in the crime, but questions about his guilt or innocence persist to this day.

I wanted to know more, so I went to see Lloyd Gardner, a retired Rutgers professor with an incredible theory: that Charles Lindbergh himself was involved.

"I think it's very possible that he was certainly involved in the planning and execution of what happened that night," Gardner said.

It certainly doesn't mean that if others are guilty, Hauptmann is innocent. Ransom money was found in Hauptmann's Bronx home at the time of his arrest, and authorities were able to match the wood used to build the kidnapper's ladder to scrap in the Hauptmann home.

I decided to find out more, so with retired homicide detective Gary Britton, we went up to the Lindbergh estate in Hopewell. Today it's a home for girls run by the state Juvenile Justice Commission now.

That's the first place where the stories started not to make sense, as did the mystery of where Lindbergh was the day of the crime.

"The timeline is a very strange one," Gardner said.

Tags: Who Killed The Lindbergh Baby Hopewell Nj