Cemetery John: The Undiscovered Mastermind of the Lindbergh Kidnapping is a non-fiction book written by American author Robert Zorn. The books investigates the potential identity of the person who became known as Cemetery John through testimony provided by the author's father. The pseudonym "Cemetery John" was used in the Lindbergh kidnapping case to refer a kidnapper calling himself “John” who collected a $50,000 ransom from a Bronx cemetery on April 2, 1932. A month earlier Charlie Lindbergh, the infant son of world-famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, had been kidnapped from the family home near Hopewell, New Jersey on March 1. However, the body of the 20-month-old boy was discovered in woods about from the Lindbergh estate on May 12.
Summary
The identity of Cemetery John has eluded generations of investigators and researchers of the Lindbergh case. In his book, Robert Zorn contends that a German immigrant previously unknown to history named John Knoll was Cemetery John. Robert Zorn's father, Eugene C. Zorn, Jr., had been the teenage neighbor of John Knoll in the South Bronx at the time of the kidnapping in 1932. By December 1963, Eugene Zorn had become a nationally renowned economist. One day he came across an article about the Lindbergh kidnapping in True magazine while waiting to get a haircut in Dallas. The article contained details about the Lindbergh case with which he had been unfamiliar. These details convinced Eugene Zorn that as a 15-year-old boy, he had unwittingly witnessed his older neighbor John Knoll with his younger brother, Walter Knoll, conspiring at Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey with Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the man who went to the electric chair for the murder of the Lindbergh baby. Eugene Zorn recalled that although the men spoke German, he recognized the words "Bruno" and "Englewood," the suburb where the Lindbergh family lived. Another thing the father remembered was that John Knoll had an interest in stamp collecting, and the ransom note used a variety of odd stamps. Robert Zorn wrote the book using the recollections his father had of John Knoll. In its foreword, retired criminal profilerJohn Douglas, who founded and ran the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit for 25 years, and his frequent co-author, Mark Olshaker, called John and Walter Knoll “the best fit anyone had ever come up with" as suspects in the Lindbergh case. "If this had been an actual police investigation, this is where we would advise them to concentrate their investigative efforts." Former New Jersey GovernorBrendan Byrne, an expert on the case, said, "Based on strong and compelling evidence, Cemetery John identifies the two undiscovered German immigrant brothers who teamed with Bruno Richard Hauptmann to kidnap the Lindbergh baby."
