"I am the Lindbergh baby," man says
March 5, 1998
BY RENÉE KIRILIK-HILL
Hunterdon County Democrat
The Lindbergh baby came home on Monday, 66 years and a day after history says he was kidnapped and murdered there by Bruno Richard Hauptmann.
Or did he?
It was a bittersweet homecoming for the man whose legal name is Charles A. Lindbergh III. Two days earlier, in Darien, Conn., he was rebuffed in his efforts to meet Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the woman he calls mother.
Her husband, the famous airman, died in 1974. After the March 1, 1932 kidnapping the Lindberghs never returned to Highfields, their Hunterdon County estate. Instead they donated it to the state of New Jersey, to help boys with heart problems. In the early 1950s it became a state rehabilitation center for juvenile boys.
But on Monday the man who says he is the famous baby toured Highfields with his third wife, Adua, and a few guests.
"I've yearned for years to visit this house," said Mr. Lindbergh, whose gray hair is edging out the sandy blond. He is one of several men in recent years who have claimed to be the Lindbergh baby. Over the years, scores of such claims have been made.
In addition to refuting history's reports of his death, Mr. Lindbergh (his legal name since 1985) said he wasn't carried through his nursery window and down the infamous ladder. He thinks nursemaid Betty Gow was a party to the kidnapping; that she carried the 20-month-old child down the main staircase and handed him over to "a man with a mustache and a woman."
Slowly mounting those steps to that nursery, whose hearth retains its original Delft tiles, Mr. Lindbergh said Monday, "I went down this staircase. So help me God, be my witness."
He said this memory emerged during 112 hours of hypnosis. He said he has "passed" polygraph tests and is seeking "covert 1969 FBI spectrophysics" test results as proof that he is who he says. He said he plans to sue his siblings and some law-enforcement officials for violating his rights, specifically by "suppressing evidence" of the kidnapping and his identity.
Because it was unusual for the Lindberghs to be at their country home on a Tuesday night in 1932, when the kidnapping occurred, police at first suspected the household staff.
Mr. Lindbergh said Monday that his efforts to contact Betty Gow before her death three years ago were unsuccessful. Miss Gow testified at Hauptmann's 1935 trial that she "might" have told her boyfriend "Red" Johnson about the family's extended stay. For a while police also suspected Johnson.
Col. Lindbergh and Miss Gow separately identified a body found in a shallow grave in May, 1932 as the missing child. The body was found in woods near St. Michael's Orphanage, in Hopewell Township, a few miles from Highfields. While an autopsy was performed and the orphanage said it wasn't one of its children, Col. Lindbergh had the body cremated immediately, raising suspicions ever since.
Reflecting on his fate after the kidnapping, Mr. Lindbergh said, "I vividly remember being in Queens." He recalled being told in Sicilian, "I'm going to kill you," before being shuttled off to a Chicago home of a relative of crime boss Al Capone.
He said that the motive for his kidnapping was revenge, because his father would spot bootleggers' stills from the air (this during Prohibition) and report them to authorities.
Wayne Sparks, a friend who travels with Mr. and Mrs. Lindbergh as a bodyguard and witness, said the kidnapping was "just meant to scare" the aviator but "it got out of proportion."
While still a young child, Mr. Lindbergh said, he lived with bootleggers in Kansas. He "vividly" recalls his father and mother (Charles and Anne Lindbergh) flying into a Wichita airport in 1935, and hearing his captors exclaim that the couple was "headed this way looking for their kid." It was one of many times, he said, that he was referred to as a Lindbergh.
He said his Kansas captors kept his blond curls long and dressed him like a girl. About 12 years after the kidnapping, he said he went to live with a family in California, to continue a childhood marred by abuse.
Out west, he "still had a struggle every time I wrote my name on a school paper," sometimes signing "Lindbergh" instead of the name he used then, Paul Husted. He used the name Paul DiAnelli before becoming Charles A. Lindbergh III.
Through the years, he said he has been under surveillance by the FBI and his birth family, and has been dogged by the Mafia. He said he met Col. Lindbergh and Jon Lindbergh in 1969, but he won't discuss that session. He wants to save some surprises for his book, due out in June.
Except for motive, Mr. Lindbergh had few theories about the famous crime. He didn't know what Mr. Hauptmann's role was, didn't know why the family's high-strung dog didn't bark, and couldn't guess whose body was found near the orphanage. He claimed to remember the Highfields library, which was gutted by fire 20 years ago. He said that as a child he sketched Col. Lindbergh and later sketched an English cradle identical to the one the Lindbergh baby slept in.
He said he recalls his mother's face and her hairline, and his father's stern disposition. He doesn't read about the kidnapping, he said, so as not to confuse his memories.
Adua stopped to gaze at framed copies of old news clippings on the walls at Highfields, including a photo of Anne Lindbergh and her child.
Adua said her husband cries every Mother's Day. "He says, 'If she loved me she should have looked for me.' I have to show him this picture. Look at the way she's holding him, with such love and tenderness. She loved him! Look at this nose, he looks the same!"