Donna Freed was barely six years old when her sister revealed to her a secret that her family, who lived a peaceful and quiet middle-class Jewish life in the New York suburb of White Plains, had kept: both she and her two brothers had accepted.

The news shattered Donna’s world – who is now 56 years old and lives in London.

“My family… they were like God to me. They were the closest people, the greatest, the best. My whole world revolved around my home and my family,” says Donna.

Her sister’s revelation “ended” her world. “They took me out of these safe walls that surrounded me,” he recalls.

She suspected there was something embarrassing in her story, but in order not to be unfaithful to her adoptive mother, Donna never dared push too hard with questions about her parentage.

And so the matter was never openly discussed within his adoptive family, from whom he received very few details about the circumstances of his adoption and the identities of his biological parents.

It wasn’t until Ruth, her adoptive mother, passed away in 2009, and motivated in part by her son, that Donna began to explore her past.

Tall, blond, Swiss and faker of her death

After months of a series of complicated procedures to obtain information and enroll in a family reunification register, they assigned a social worker who promised to file a report within about three months.

Donna was adopted through the defunct Louise Wise Services agency (the same one involved in the case featured in the Netflix documentary “Three Identical Strangers”).

Meanwhile, he received a letter with the first three details from Mira Lindenmaier, his biological mother.

“My mother he was 27 years old when i was born, She had no other children before me and she was… SwissDonna narrates 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 could be deduced from the initial information.

Freed was willing to hear the typical tragic story of addiction problems, domestic violence and even sexual abuse. However, what he heard far exceeded his expectations.

Although Donna learned through her sister that she was adopted as a child, the matter was not openly discussed in the family. Courtesy DONNA FREED

The report “described my mother: she had blond hair, was very tall, intelligent, worked for an advertising agency and could swim very well. She had met my father, who was 13 years her senior (and was married with four children), and they had devised a plan to defraud the insurance company”.

The report went on to say that “she accepted the plan to maintain relations 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 a plan to fake Mira’s accidental death, receive 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 had an accident that left Mira drowned.

Meanwhile, pregnant with Donna, Mira moved to White Plains, took refuge in a hotel under an assumed name, and began earning a living working as a waitress in a cafe, right next to the local police station.

investigation and arrest

“When[the police]saw that my mother was missing, and when they saw that my mother had changed her insurance policy in favor of her boyfriend 39 days before she drowned, they thought at first that my father had killed her,” says Donna. . .

Those who described Mira said that, among other things, she was a very good swimmer, making the theory that she 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 watching her for a few weeks, the police arrested her and Mira immediately confessed.

“Everyone, even her parents, thought she was dead,” Donna says.

Donna says that her son has the same face as his father, Alvin. Courtesy DONNA FREED

The frustrated plan ended with Alvin in jail and Mira released into custody and headlines of the case on the front page of all media outlets.

Mira returned to her parents, with whom she lived for many years. He never remarried and never had children. Alvin returned to his wife after his release from prison and had a fifth child with his wife.

However, the detail that moved Donna most of all the information she received in one fell swoop was that her mother had been “happy to father me,” she tells BBC Outlook in a low voice.

The social worker told me that my mother was “thrilled to have me in her arms, and she was fought the decision to give up on myself (for adoption)”.

the meeting

After hearing the report, the social worker asked Donna if she wanted to be reunited with her mother (her father had already passed away).

“Obviously! Are you kidding?” replied Donna. “It’s true that there’s a history of crime behind it, but she obviously did it 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 came up with this plan (to fake her death and flee to Spain), not in a million years,” says Donna.

Finding her was not easy. It took months of searching through files and archives of the New York Public Library until he found her whereabouts in a Florida drug rehabilitation center. He got her phone number and called her.

“We both started crying and she screamed: It’s you! It’s you! It is a miracle!’ Donna says.

“He waited his whole life to meet me again. He had no other children.”

The meeting was very moving, says Donna. Courtesy DONNA FREED

The face-to-face meeting took place in Florida six months after that conversation. Donna bought a blue dress with white polka dots for the occasion and before seeing her, she remembers “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 answers to all the questions that were running through her mind, not only about the scandal of her mother’s false death, but also about her past life and the circumstances that brought her into this situation.

Mira passed away in August 2020But Donna is still in touch with three of her five half-siblings – four from before Alvin went to prison and one born after his release – whom she tracked down when she gathered information about his birth family.

The fascinating details of her story are captured in her autobiography, “Duplicity: My Mother’s Secrets”, published in 2022.