Eighty-nine years ago this month, a man named Bruno Richard Hauptmann was executed by the state of New Jersey for what the press at the time called “the crime of the century.” He stood accused of kidnapping and murdering Charles Lindbergh Jr., the 20-month-old son of the most admired man in America, the aviator who’d become famous for making the world’s first transatlantic flight in 1927.
There have long been questions about whether Hauptmann was, in fact, the kidnapper—questions that could be easily answered with DNA testing, but which the state of New Jersey has long resisted. On Friday, a lawyer named Kurt Perhach, representing a handful of modern-day Lindbergh researchers, filed a lawsuit to compel the state to allow forensic scientists to do that testing. If he succeeds, the case of the century might finally be solved, once and for all.