A family scandal straight out of a Hollywood film noir

In 1973, in White Plains, New York, Donna Freed was told, in a ‘shroud of shame’ and without any soothing explanations, that she was adopted. The six-year-old’s life was plunged into a dark hinterland of anxiety. Freed spent the next 38 years fearful that the discovery of her birth mother would reveal ‘a terrible or seedy story, tragic circumstances, terror, violence, incest or rape’.

In fact the truth awaiting her was a sensation straight out of a Hollywood film noir: a scandalous tale of dirty glamour, passion and pseudocide. Her parents were in fact embroiled in one of the juiciest death fraud cases of 1960s America.

Duplicity is a Janus memoir, part adoption story, part true crime history. As the subtitle suggests, Freed has had to unearth what both her mothers, adoptive and biological, concealed. The former, Ruth, was so wracked by her inability to conceive that the subject was mentioned only twice by the time Freed was 21: ‘Her shame, tangible and malodorous, billowed up and mushroomed above us.’ Little Donna learnt not to challenge anything, even if her afterschool snack was accidentally garnished with ‘Mum’s hair, mould or spider eggs’. Ruth was so deep in denial and depression (Freed surmises) that when little tooth marks were found on bars of soap, rather than addressing their evident mice infestation or her own ‘lackadaisical’ housekeeping, she blamed Donna. 

It was only when Ruth died that Donna felt free to find out who her birth mother was. The skeletal records she first received said that she was ‘27 years’ and ‘Swiss’. When Donna was surprised, her husband joked: ‘Is Swiss a bit too dull for you?’ It turned out that her genesis was anything but dull. In July 1966, Donna’s birth mother Mira Lindenmaier was reported missing after going on a swimming trip to Long Island Sound with her lover Alvin Brodie and their friend Thomas Martin.