2023-05-15 08:38:56
- Writing
- BBC News World
image source, Courtesy Donna Freed
Donna Freed now live in London.
Donna Freed was barely 6 years old when her sister revealed to her a secret that her family, who led a peaceful and uneventful Jewish middle-class life in White Plains, a suburb of New York, had kept: both she and her two brothers had been adopted.
“My family…they were like God to me. They were the closest people, the biggest, the best. My whole world revolved around my home and my family,” Donna says.
Her sister’s revelation made her world “end”. “They took me out of these safe walls that surrounded me,” she recalls.
She suspected there was something shameful in her story, but in order not to be disloyal to her adoptive mother, Donna never dared to push too hard with questions regarding her parentage.
And so the issue was never openly discussed within his adoptive family, from whom he obtained very few details regarding the circumstances of his adoption as well as the identity of his biological parents.
It was only when Ruth, her adoptive mother, passed away in 2009, and partly motivated by her son, that Donna began to investigate her past.
Tall, blonde, Swiss and faker of her death
After months of a series of complicated procedures to obtain information, and register in a family reunification registry, they assigned a social worker who promised to submit a report in regarding three months.
Donna had been adopted through the defunct agency Louise Wise Services (the same one involved in the case featured by the Netflix documentary “Three Identical Strangers”).
Meanwhile, he received a letter with the first three details from Mira Lindenmaier, his biological mother.
“My mom he was 27 years old when i was born, She had no other children before me and she was… SwissDonna tells the BBC Outlook programme.
The report came a few months later, and its content, the social worker warned him on the phone, was much more dramatic than what might be deduced from the first information.
Freed was prepared to hear the typical tragic story of addiction problems, family violence and even sexual abuse. What he heard, on the other hand, far exceeded his expectations.
image source, Courtesy Donna Freed
Although Donna found out from her sister that she was adopted as a child, the issue was not openly discussed in the family.
The report “described my mother as having blond hair, very tall, intelligent, working for an agency, and a very good swimmer. She had met my father, who was 13 years her senior (and married and had four children), and there wasn devised a plan to defraud the company insurance“.
The report went on to say that “she had agreed to the plan to maintain the relationship with him and then flee to Spain and raise me there.”
Alvin Brodie – a construction worker, bartender and jazz musician with a long history of scams and an elusive date of birth – had the plan to fake Mira’s accidental death, collect double compensation and flee to Spain.
Donna later learned the details: her mother, father, and an accomplice friend of the couple rented a boat on City Island in the Bronx, and they pretended to have been in an accident in which Mira had drowned.
Meanwhile, pregnant with Donna, Mira moved to White Plains, took refuge under an assumed name in a hotel, and began to earn a living by working as a waitress in a cafe, right next to the local police station.
investigation and arrest
“At first, when (the police) saw that my mother was missing, and when they saw that my mother had changed her insurance policy 39 days before she drowned in favor of her boyfriend, they thought my father had murdered her,” Donna says. .
Those who described Mira said that she was, among other things, a very good swimmer, making the theory that she had drowned very unconvincing.
With these suspicions, the police tapped Alvin’s phone. A few months later, on Thanksgiving Day in November 1996, and to everyone’s surprise, the voice of Mira appeared on one of the recordings.
After keeping her under surveillance for a few weeks, the police arrested her and Mira confessed immediately.
“Everyone had thought, even her parents, that she was dead,” Donna recounts.
image source, Courtesy Donna Freed
Donna tells that her son has the same face as his father, Alvin.
The frustrated plan ended with Alvin in jail and Mira released in custody and headlines of the case on the front page of all the media.
Mira returned to live with her parents, with whom she stayed for years. She never remarried or had children. Alvin returned to his wife following his release from prison and had a fifth child with his wife.
The detail that most moved Donna of all the information she received in one fell swoop, however, was that her mother “had been happy to conceive me,” she tells BBC Outlook in a small voice.
The social worker told me that my mother “was excited to have me in her arms, and that there was wrestled withBetween the decision to surrender (for adoption)”.
the meeting
After hearing the report, the caseworker asked Donna if she wanted to be reunited with her mother (her father had already died).
“Sure! Are you kidding?” Donna replied. “It is true that there is a history of criminality behind it, but she obviously acted like that because she was in love.”
“She was a very shy and reserved person, and when Alvin turned his attention to her, his charms and his love, she had no choice. But I don’t think she invented this plan (to fake her death and run away). to Spain), not in a million years,” says Donna.
Finding her was not easy. She put in months of detective work sifting through files and New York Public Library records until she found herself in a rehab center in Florida. She got her phone number and called her.
“We both started crying and she was screaming, It’s you! It’s you! It’s a miracle!” Donna says.
“He was waiting his whole life to meet me once more. He had no other children.”
image source, Courtesy Donna Freed
The meeting was very moving, relates Donna.
The in-person meeting took place six months following that call, in Florida. Donna bought a blue dress with white polka dots for the occasion and, before seeing her, she recalls that she was “literally shaking like a leaf.”
As soon as they took her to her room and saw her with her thick glasses and her white hair, they both burst into tears.
“That moment was indescribable.”
Donna was finally able to find an answer to all the questions that were going around her head, not only related to the scandal of her mother’s false death, but also regarding her previous life and the circumstances that led her to get involved in this situation.
Mira passed away in August 2020But Donna is still in contact with three of her five half-siblings – four from before Alvin went to prison and one born following his release – who she managed to track down when she compiled information regarding his birth family.
The fascinating details of her story are captured in her autobiography, “Duplicity: My Mother’s Secrets,” published in 2022.
image source, Getty Images
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