Donna Freed was in her forties when she discovered she was the offspring of the ‘Bonnie and Clyde of 1960s America’. Then she met her biological mother.
The job of telling Donna Freed where she came from, and who she was, fell to a sweet-natured social worker who was obviously nervous. “I need to prepare you for a very dramatic story,” she warned over the phone from the New York adoption service. Freed had been bracing herself for a typically sad tale of tragic circumstances — addiction, abuse, worse still incest or rape. Nothing could have prepared her for the truth: that she was the daughter of an infamous Bonnie and Clyde couple whose outlandish crime made headlines across America while she was in her mother’s womb.
Eleven years later Freed, 55, has written a memoir, Duplicity: My Mothers’ Secrets, revealing the full drama of her adoption, and her pursuit of its hidden details. It is a jaw-dropping tale. In July 1966 her pregnant mother, Mira Lindenmaier, faked her own death. Her married lover, Alvin Brodie, a New York con artist, had talked the besotted young woman into a plot to defraud her life insurance company. He had promised to leave his wife and four children and run away to Spain with Mira, to make a new life with their ill-gotten gains.
The couple rented a boat, with an accomplice, and capsized it in Long Island Sound. A passing off-duty police officer rescued Alvin and the accomplice from the water; search boats and helicopters scoured the sound, and the water was dredged, but no trace of Mira was found.
Detectives were immediately suspicious. The boat was of a type highly unlikely to capsize accidentally and everyone who knew Mira confirmed she was a strong swimmer. Disbelief intensified when they discovered that she had replaced her father with Alvin as the beneficiary of her life insurance policy just 39 days before she vanished. Alvin’s indecently hasty attempt to collect the policy payout, just two months after the “accident”, only further confirmed their suspicions, and police tapped his phone. On Thanksgiving the wiretap picked up the voice of Mira: “When are you coming?”
Police traced the call to a grotty hotel in White Plains, a New York suburb, where she was living in secret under a false name. When the detectives showed her photograph to local investigators, they at once recognised her from a nearby coffee shop. The detectives found her, six months pregnant, waitressing for 87 cents an hour. She served the plain-clothes officers coffee, unaware that they were placing her under surveillance, and three weeks later they arrested her. She confessed immediately.
Freed’s respectable, middle-class Jewish grandparents were reunited with their “dead” daughter at a Bronx courthouse, where she and her lover were charged with fraud. Mira was released into their custody, Alvin was remanded in jail and their names and faces were splashed across front pages all over America. “Police put damper on ‘drowning’ plot; wiretaps bring girl back to life” as one headline put it. “The blanket news coverage was to be her public pillory, her burning shame,” Freed writes.
Both were sentenced to three years in jail. Mira’s sentence was suspended, but Alvin (who preferred to call himself Thane John Stewart Ballancourt, and also went by the names of Brutus Cain and John Scott) served his. On his release he returned to his long-suffering wife, with whom he had a fifth child, before they eventually parted ways.
The social worker feared these revelations would be upsetting for Freed. She could not have been more wrong. She was thrilled.
We feel a very long way from a White Plains dive hotel when I knock on her door in leafy, suburban west London. She cuts a tall, commanding figure, charismatic and confident, her New York accent undimmed after 17 years in London. Married to a British man who works in publishing, she is a presenter on Radio Gorgeous, the UK’s longest-running all-female podcast, and a writer for The Oldie magazine; the couple live in Acton with their 17-year-old son, and literally nothing about Freed or her stylish kitchen contains any discernible clue to the dark drama of her origins.
It had been Freed’s son’s idea to try to find her biological mother. It was early 2011, not long after the death of her adoptive mother, and within four months the adoption agency’s social worker revealed the sensational origins of Freed’s birth. The information had been there on file all along, although her adoptive parents had never been given any of the details and were as in the dark as their daughter. Freed also learnt that her birth mother, Mira, had registered an interest in being reunited with her all the way back in 1993. Then came another bombshell from the social worker: Mira was “proving difficult to locate”.
Months of detective work by Freed and her friends, combing through archives and records in the New York Public Library, tracked Mira down to a nursing home in Florida. Their research also unearthed a clearer picture of the couple’s escapade, described in lurid news coverage.
Mira had been 23 when she fell in love with Freed’s father. A construction worker, bartender and jazz musician, vain and hubristic, Alvin had a pocketful of alias names, a long history of con artistry and a curiously elusive date of birth: police and press reports of his arrest for the fake drowning fraud put his age variously at 34 and 40. Mira met the “debonair flaneur” in a taproom and fell hard for his dangerous charms. She was working as an analyst for a Madison Avenue advertising company and had moved out of the parental home into her own apartment just one year earlier. Press reports cast her as a blonde femme fatale, but Freed says “she struck me as an arrested adolescent — that this caper was quite a teenager-in-love sort of grand, madcap gesture — because she was really quite cocooned and protected. And so this was really her first foray into the world. And it went horribly wrong.”
The fraud plot, Freed is emphatic, “certainly didn’t come from my mother. This was not in her imagination to pretend to be dead and run away to Spain. That was not within her comfort zone. She wouldn’t have come up with that plan unassisted.”
In December 2011 Freed dialled Mira’s direct line at the Florida care home. Her mother answered and within seconds both were in tears.
Mira had decided to give her baby up for adoption when she was eight months pregnant. The social worker had told Freed: “Your maternal grandmother felt strongly that you should be raised in a loving, safe environment, where you could grow up happily. Your mother herself expressed more feelings of ambivalence about planning for adoption; she wanted to raise you, and yet she could not disagree with her mother’s common sense about what was in your best interest.” Seven days after giving birth she said goodbye to her daughter — and knew nothing more about her for 44 years, until she answered that phone call.
In 2012 Freed flew to Florida to meet Mira. “We have the same thumbs!” Freed exclaimed. “I remember holding you,” the 72-year-old marvelled. “And here we are now.”
Until her death nine years later, Mira and Freed were mother and daughter again. Long transatlantic phone calls, visits and family photos filled their lives. “We genuinely liked each other,” Freed writes. Mira proved, however, to be a complicated character. She was evasive about having received a letter from a lawyer, months before Freed called, to say her daughter was looking for her. She pretended her stay at the care home was temporary, when in fact she lived there permanently. She told Freed she had been admitted for back surgery; why she never left, Freed never knew. Not once did she ever phone her daughter. She allowed her to infer that her failing eyesight made it impossible for her to operate a phone; it was years before Freed discovered that this was not true. “She can call you,” puzzled nurses told her. “All she has to do is ask.” Mira never told her sister and niece she had reunited with her daughter. Two years after their reunion, she appointed Freed her power of attorney without even ever telling her.
“How do you explain it all? Well, she was so damaged,” Freed says. “She wasn’t a person who could hold her head up high. She didn’t come back from what happened. She didn’t bounce back.” Bailed to the custody of her parents, Mira was spared jail because her sentence was suspended, but she never married or had more children and remained living with her parents until late in life. The shame of an illegitimate baby with a married man, and the shame of their crime, did for her.
“It was real arrested development,” Freed says. “She was left with nothing. No relationship. No baby. Parents disapproving, a social pariah. I think she was at heart a shy, reserved person. And I think there was an edge that was a little paranoid. She was secretive.”
Freed sees her mother as not unlike Anne Darwin, the wife of the infamous “Canoe Man” who faked his own death, another naive woman in thrall to a manipulative man. “I did ask her gently, you know, ‘Do you think you would’ve run away to Spain together?’ Because I was thinking, he was not giving you that money. Even if that money came through, he was not picking you up in White Plains and taking you wherever he went. He wasn’t, was he? But she said ‘Yes’. And after she said that I just left it alone. Because I think she needed to tell herself that. She had to, otherwise what was it for? Otherwise she had destroyed everything — she was just a bit on the side and a patsy. She was a fool — and her foolishness exposed for all and forever.”
Freed never got to meet her father. Alvin had died in New York’s East Village in 2004, aged 72 and in a wheelchair. In 2019 she tracked down his sons, her half-brothers, who were unexpectedly warm and friendly, and full of hair-raising tales of their father’s escapades. He used to forge travellers’ cheques and flew them to Puerto Rico on plane tickets he hadn’t paid for and weren’t in their name; a cheque he wrote for one son on his wedding day bounced; he missed a graduation because he was arrested at the airport. Even in later life he would use his wheelchair to stash stolen goods.
I ask her if she ever worries, rationally or otherwise, about the notion of a criminal bloodline. Does she look at her son and wonder what genetic disposition he might have inherited? Her eyes widen and a hand flies to her throat, but she is smiling. “OK. So the picture of my father [on the courthouse steps, in handcuffs], that’s a dead spit for my son.” Whenever Dexter gets caught “pulling” anything, she volunteers, beginning to laugh, he tells her, “That’s the Alvin in me!”
Learning the unusual details surrounding her birth is not, for Freed, the headline event of her adoption story. The single most important and defining moment came at the age of six, when her big sister stood in her bedroom doorway and casually announced, “You know, we were all adopted.”
She was left with nothing. No relationship. No baby. Parents disapproving, a social pariah.
Her adoptive parents were a civil engineer and a mother with a doctorate in psychology but who was chiefly a homemaker in White Plains, New York. She had an older sister and brother, and “my family was my world, my religion, and I exalted the people in it to the status of gods”, Freed writes. Until that moment she had no clue that they were not related to one another. She was dumbstruck.
In hindsight, one clue had been her mother’s vagueness on the matter of genetic inheritance. When Freed had remarked that she had her father’s blond hair and blue eyes, her mother had replied, with a dismissive shrug, “OK, have it your way.” Freed writes: “There was no ‘you have my mother’s nose and your dad’s ears but my fingers’. Just a shrug. Of course I didn’t know anything was missing, until I did, and then the glaring and compounded lies sprang from all sides.”
She didn’t tell her parents she had learnt the truth. At 18 she would discover her mother had always known that “the cat” as she put it, had been let “out of the bag” 12 years earlier, but had never thought this shattering revelation merited so much as a mention, let alone a conversation.
“To go through this kind of life-changing traumatic moment and you don’t talk to anybody about it. Yeah, that will shape you,” Freed says. “It felt like a signifier of your unimportance. How you hear something will affect how you feel about it.”
She thinks her parents’ secrecy about adoption stemmed from a sense of shame about infertility — and from their silence Freed in turn inferred and internalised her own sense of shame. “If somebody tells you like it’s negative, and then nobody follows that up, you are going to draw your own six-year-old conclusions, left to one’s own devices.”
Freed’s memoir is every bit as riveting in its account of her adoptive family life as in its outlandish tales of her birth parents. Superficially a safe pair of professional, middle-class hands, her adoptive parents were in fact decidedly maverick. Freed suspects her mother was suffering from depression during much of her childhood, to which she attributes some highly unorthodox parenting techniques.
Her mother spent a great deal of Freed’s childhood in bed. “A clear rule was to never call attention to my mother’s housekeeping in any way.” Meals were routinely served with inadvertent “added ingredients, whether it was Mom’s hair, mould or spider eggs”, she writes. “Don’t think, choke it down!” Her mother “was a ‘prepper’ long before preparing for the apocalypse was a thing, even before it was called hoarding”. She dressed Freed in her brother’s hand-me-down Y-fronts with the hole sewn up, and sent her to school with her lunch wrapped in the plastic lining of a cereal box. She made her daughter wear plasters on all 10 fingers and thumbs, to break her nail-biting habit; when this strategy failed Freed was punished with the cancellation of her birthday. After school the children were locked out of the house, granted access only to the basement until their parents got home.
I could read about Freed’s adoptive family forever. Adoption stories have a unique fascination — Freed often references Jeanette Winterson’s memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, as well as the hit TV show Long Lost Family — so I ask her why she thinks we find them so compelling. “Because we’re tribal. And they speak to a deep, survival, tribal thing.”
I wonder if writing the book was a way for Freed to situate herself publicly in her tribe; to create a concrete public record of a family history she was denied for most of her life. She thinks for a moment. “No, I think I inherited my birth mother’s and ingested my adopted mother’s shame. Which was also unnecessary in their lives too, which makes me really sad for them. And I am no longer swallowing that. It’s not mine. It’s not my shame to swallow. That took a long time to realise.”
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of her book is its total absence of anger towards any of the four parents who in their different ways all let her down. She was an exemplary daughter to both her mothers until their dying days — attentive, solicitous, selfless, endlessly forgiving. When I ask why she wasn’t angry with them, her eyes fill with tears.
“It’s still — I’m sorry,” she breaks off, dabbing her cheeks and taking deep breaths. “But it’s still hard, I think, to admit to the hurt and the anger, to admit to the core of what you felt — that you were so unlovable. And if you’ve built back from that and say, ‘F*** you. I am lovable’ — well, that has always been what has spurred my anger. ‘F*** you. I am lovable, and I’m not going to swallow this shit.’ But in doing that, I have huge amounts of compassion in me too. And huge amounts of forgiveness. Because, you know, those drivers of shame that both my mothers felt in their life drove directly down into me. And that anger that I’ve had has spilt over in my mothering.”
She offers a knowing, mea culpa grin. “And we’re all assholes, you know. And no one makes all the right decisions.”
It took no psychological self-discipline on her part, however, to be thrilled by the discovery of her birth parents’ extraordinary crime. “Oh my God, totally. I mean, before I did have that same fear that Jeanette Winterson had, that it was going to be all the things that lead people to give a child up for adoption. Boring is the best-case scenario. You know, an affair with the boss. But often it’s rape, violence, addiction, incest, all those things that could be tawdry, horrible, violent. And when you find out you’re related to that, you’re going to have to own that. You don’t get any fantasy any more. So then I get this and I was, like, thank you!”
There was another reason for her delight, though. She thought the drowning plot had been precipitated by Mira’s pregnancy; that it was a ruse forged in love between a couple plotting a new life with their baby. “I was so excited, because at least it was about me! At least I thought I was the centre of the story.
“When you’re adopted, it’s the worst day of somebody’s life and then the best day of somebody else’s life. But you, yourself, any day in your life has no consideration for anybody in that scenario at all. You are just passed from one to the other. But at least, I thought, with this I was at the heart of things. I was the cause of the plot.”
There was one final, shattering discovery to be made. Her mother was one month pregnant when she faked her own death — but when she had named Alvin as the beneficiary on her life insurance policy, she was not. Freed’s conception had not been the catalyst for the plot after all. It had been hatched before she ever existed. “I only found that out in writing the book.”
A great gust of wry, philosophical laughter erupts from her.
“And by that time, you know, I was, like, oh my God, that’s just genius. Of course it had to be that way.”
Mira pleaded guilty two weeks before my birth
After I googled the words “Lindenmaier”, “defraud” and “insurance” the articles cascaded down the page. I read out loud from the first one. “A 27-year-old woman research analyst, reported dead five months ago, has been found alive in what authorities describe as a bizarre plot by her and two male companions to defraud two insurance companies by staging her accidental drowning. “Dr and Mrs Werner A Lindenmaier of Upper Montclair, NJ …”
I know people who live in Upper Montclair!
“… had not known that their daughter, Miriam, was alive until they were reunited with her Tuesday in the Bronx county courthouse. “Miss Lindenmaier was found working as a waitress in a restaurant in White Plains, NY …”
I grew up in White Plains!
“She was arrested Tuesday in her hotel room. One of the accused men, Alvin Brodie, 40, a construction worker named by authorities as the father of Miss Lindenmaier’s unborn child, was alleged to have promised her that they could go to Spain with the $36,000 in insurance money … Roberts said Miss Lindenmaier, a 5ft 6in blonde is six months pregnant.”
With me!
“Brodie was arraigned Tuesday night in Bronx criminal court and charged with attempted grand larceny and conspiracy by ‘staging the accidental death’ of Miss Lindenmaier last July 9 in Long Island Sound. Miss Lindenmaier was paroled in custody of her parents. Brodie was ordered held on $7,500 bail.”
There were scores of column inches devoted to the story in The New York Times and all the national papers as well as the local papers in each state. It made international news in Canada, Australia and Spain.
In a photograph from The New York Times the swell of me is visible beneath Miriam’s thick coat. Her parents, Braina and Werner, look shocked, rigid in their courtroom seats, fixed in an aspic of grief and wonder at their daughter’s spectacular and very public return from the dead. Photos show my bespectacled mother on the steps of the Bronx county courthouse, carefully picking her myopic way down the stairs, a policewoman at her side.
I gasped at the next photo, unable to tell whether I was looking at the past or my future. Alvin Brodie, sporting a goatee, is handsome and collected in a pristine camel-hair overcoat, his arms pinned behind him as he is led down the same steps by two schlumpy-looking detectives in creased trousers and rumpled shirts.
He is my son, Dexter, with a beard, or will be or could be. Our faces leapfrog through the generations.
The reports state that on the morning of December 13, 1966, detectives arrested Miriam Lindenmaier, also known as Mira. She immediately confessed. The court records show that on March 15, 1967, she and her two male accomplices were indicted and pleaded guilty, two weeks before Miriam gave birth to me.
© Donna Freed 2022. Extracted from Duplicity: My Mothers’ Secrets by Donna Freed, to be published on Thursday by Muswell Press
Written by: Decca Aitkenhead
© The Times of London
