Is This Man the Lindbergh Baby?

Retired psychologist Mylen Fitzwater answers the doorbell in less than 30 seconds, but he keeps the screen door closed. I explain that I’ve come to his quiet cul-de-sac in the central California city of Merced to research an article about one of his former patients.

“It’s that guy standing behind me,” I say, nodding toward the old man in a dark blue suit who stands blinking in the sunlight. “The one who thinks he was the Lindbergh baby.”

“Oh, yes,” says Fitzwater, who at 83 is a bit stooped and completely bald. “I certainly remember him. Come on in.”

Once we are inside, Fitzwater recalls the exact years--1978-1980--when he worked with this patient who calls himself Charles Lindbergh Jr. Back then he was called Loren Paul Husted. He suffered from big gaps in his childhood memories and hoped that the doctor could help him reconstruct his past under hypnosis, a controversial process that is still widely used.

In more than 100 sessions, Fitzwater’s patient developed a complex story that explained his lifelong identity conflict. Almost every detail supported the idea that he had been the baby stolen from the world famous aviator’s home in 1932. In its time, the kidnapping was considered the “Crime of the Century.”

“Didn’t you think that maybe he was delusional, or paranoid?” I ask. “Didn’t you give him a diagnosis that would explain this?” Charlie might be a charming, persuasive fellow, I continued, whose difficult life led him to create an alternative identity.

“I wasn’t asked to give a diagnosis,” Fitzwater answers. “But I’ll tell you, I didn’t think he had a serious problem. He was functioning in his life. He wasn’t depressed or psychotic in any way. He was just a fellow who had this story he wanted to get out.”

“But do you think it’s true? Do you think he was the Lindbergh baby?”

“I can’t say for sure. But he honestly believed it was the truth. He was very consistent in what he said under hypnosis, and he had a lot of very interesting details.”

The details and the consistency are persuasive to other people who hear Charlie, 74, tell his tale. But nothing in what he says, or how he says it, is as powerful as the photos he keeps in a bulging manila envelope. The pictures show Charlie and members of the Lindbergh clan. The similarities--the strong chin, broad nose, distinctive mouth and even the hairline--are uncanny.

For decades Charlie has believed that these pictures should be enough to win him at least a hearing from the Lindbergh family. They have rebuffed him. But last fall, when two men and one woman in Germany used old love letters and DNA to prove that Charles Lindbergh had been their father, Charlie became more determined to press his case publicly. Of course, nothing short of a DNA test, which the Lindberghs have so far refused to support, will establish his lineage for certain. But even without a definitive answer, the mystery of this man is compelling.

No matter who Charlie is, his story forces us to consider matters that most of us take for granted, questions about the veracity of history, the nature of identity and the fuzzy line that separates fantasy and reality. It’s easy to dismiss someone like Charlie as delusional. But every once in a while--for example, the case of those who claimed to be used as human guinea pigs in Cold War government experiments--fantastic claims made by seemingly obsessed and troubled people turn out to be true. Even if he’s wrong, Charlie’s struggle tugs at the heart. When I was introduced to Charlie by a movie agent working with a documentary filmmaker interested in the tale, I thought about how I might feel if I believed I was the lost son of an American icon. I would hope someone would help me find the truth.

Reality has a tendency to become warped whenever a famous and beloved figure suffers a violent end--consider John F. Kennedy and Princess Diana. No matter what the evidence shows, many people will never accept that a case is closed. In its time, the Lindbergh kidnapping was this kind of crime. With his solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927, Col. Charles Lindbergh became the first modern super-celebrity. (The power of his persona and story remain so strong that Philip Roth’s next novel imagines him as an American president.) Lindy’s first-born child, Charles Jr., was celebrated as the “Eaglet,” a prince of the age. His kidnapping captured worldwide attention. Subsequent news coverage turned the case into the first modern celebrity crime saga

The 20-month-old child’s disappearance from the Lindberghs’ New Jersey home on March 1, 1932 was followed by weeks of fevered investigation and a nationwide manhunt. Thousands of leads were offered, many by people who merely wanted attention. One after another, suspects rose in prominence only to be discounted. At one point an intermediary paid part of a ransom, but the baby was never produced.

Finally, on May 12, a disfigured child’s corpse was found less than five miles from the Lindbergh home, and Col. Lindbergh and the boy’s nurse identified the body as Charles Jr. An autopsy was performed by a coroner who was not a physician, and skeptics could question the findings. Afterward, the body was immediately cremated. Since this all occurred before the discovery of DNA, no definitive biological evidence was preserved.

A shelf-load of books has been written about Lindbergh and the kidnapping. Some conclude that the case was solved with the arrest, conviction and execution of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, an immigrant carpenter who was found with some of the ransom money. Others support Hauptmann’s claim of innocence, which he maintained until he was executed in 1936. Those who believe that Hauptmann was innocent offer a host of theories about the fate of the Lindbergh child. In the scenario that Charles and his attorney favor, the enormous pressure applied by law enforcement agencies forced the kidnappers to abandon their scheme. They dug up a recently deceased child, dressed him as the Lindbergh baby and left him where he could be found. With this, the theory goes, the kidnappers threw investigators off their trail and escaped capture, trial and punishment.

A judge and jury did find there was enough evidence to prove that the body found near the Lindbergh estate was the colonel’s son, and that Hauptmann had killed him. But while the resolution of the case was widely accepted, the historical record is not seamless. The body was identified by just two people. Its quick cremation seems suspicious to some. And then there was Hauptmann’s refusal to confess, even when the governor of New Jersey offered him life in prison in exchange if he did.

Charlie insists that with Fitzwater’s help he has gone beyond mere belief to build a credible challenge to the conclusions reached by authorities in 1936. As we speed down the rural highway that connects Merced with San Jose, where Charlie lives, he launches the tale that emerged in those hypnosis sessions.

The story begins with flashes of memory of speeding cars, strange people and homes in New York, Chicago, Florida and Arizona. For the first few years of his life, says Charlie, he was kept hidden indoors by an ever-changing cast of characters who dressed him as a girl and refused to call him by name. As an adult he came to believe that some of the people in those homes were high-level members of Al Capone’s Chicago mob. (During the furor, Capone had said he could find the kidnappers.) Others, he claims, were low-echelon players in the crime syndicate’s network for distributing illegal whiskey.

In 1934, two years after the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped, Charlie, then age 2, was living in Kansas, in a family that he says included bootleggers and oil-drilling wildcatters. He has photos of himself from that time. He says he heard frequent arguments about what should be done with the “Lindbergh kid.” He eventually received a name--Loren Paul Husted--and was told that he was the son of an itinerant preacher named Don Husted and his wife, Viola. But the Husteds did not treat him like a son, but rather as a cursed burden. Whenever Don Husted beat him, which was often, he muttered, “You’re not part of this family.”

The Husteds moved among various homes in Kansas and California. In each place Don Husted worked as a preacher, businessman and thief. Charlie says he was also the subject of surveillance by men he later came to believe were FBI agents. He also believes that he heard members of the Husted clan and law enforcement officers quietly call him “the Lindbergh kid.” When he was a teenager, his boss at a restaurant in San Luis Obispo took him to a coffee shop so that a group of men who were seated together could look at him from across the room. He overheard his boss talk about how the FBI suspected that Paul was the “Lindbergh boy.”

In 1951, Charlie broke with the Husteds, running away to escape the arguments and fights that were constants in the family’s life. He and his second wife, Kay, had a son named Kevin and established a home in San Jose.

Charlie says he might have concluded that he simply came from a run-of-the-mill dysfunctional family if other people hadn’t continued to keep the mystery boiling. When he asked older, distant relatives about his identity, they told him, “That’s not for you to know.” And then there were the FBI agents and police officers--most of whom are now dead--who he says always seemed to be monitoring him. Sometimes they told him that they knew his true identity and it would soon be revealed, he says. At others times they tried to scare him into silence.

The most frightening of these encounters occurred in the mid-1960s when, according to Charlie, he was slipped a drug at a coffee shop and experienced what sounds like a very bad LSD trip. This is one case where Charlie has a supporting witness. His ex-wife Kay recalls that men who identified themselves as FBI agents, flashing their credentials, followed Charlie home from the coffee shop and told her he would be all right. Kay helped him through terrifying hallucinations and months of recovery. But eventually the strain of living with a man who didn’t know who he was led her to file for divorce. Kevin, Charlie’s son, has also suffered because of his father’s lifelong identity crisis. As a child he feared the Husteds and the FBI. As an adult there have been times he has been so sick of the Lindbergh issue that he has refused to discuss it.

Today Kevin says he has gained a perspective that allows him to talk about the Lindbergh claim without becoming upset. Kay regards Charlie with affection, but says she is grateful to be free of the strain. Though she has spent countless hours listening to him and considering the facts, she hasn’t reached a conclusion. She is weary of the whole thing, and prefers to call him by the name he used when they were married, Paul Husted, rather than the name he adopted in the 1980s, Charles Lindbergh Jr. When she has to introduce him, she simply calls him “Kevin’s father.”

Kay’s inability to accept that her ex-husband is Charles Lindbergh Jr. is easy to understand. Most of the stories Charlie tells to support his claim are so old, and so many of those involved have died, that anyone trying to check them quickly runs into dead ends. Besides the alleged drugging by the FBI, Charlie can point to just one other strange incident that might be confirmed by a witness. In early 1969, he noticed a clutch of people who seemed to be observing him and his son as they hit golf balls at a driving range in San Jose. He thought he saw Col. Lindbergh among the observers. Charlie managed to get the business card of one of the observers. The daughter of that man, a woman named Leslie Ann Baltz, is still alive. Charlie claims she approached him later that day in a hotel lobby and gave him her address in Santa Clara.

“She can confirm what was going on then,” says Charlie as we speak on the phone. “I’ve got her father’s business card right here, laminated and everything. I kept it all these years. Thank God.”

Leslie baltz duenas (her married name) has not returned our phone calls, and so Charlie and I show up at her house on a chilly, rainy winter day in the Northern California community of Newark. He waits in the car while I ring the bell and talk my way into the living room with a spiel that begins, “You’re not going to believe this but . . . “

A patient, middle-aged woman with light hair and an easy smile, Leslie is intrigued, but unlike Dr. Fitzwater, she has no recollection of Charlie, and no confidence that she can help us at all. “I think I would have remembered something like this,” she says. However, she is moved by Charlie’s story and goes out in the pelting rain to invite him inside.

Once inside, Charlie talks about how Leslie’s father, William Baltz, had been part of a crowd of people watching him at the driving range. “Your father came over and introduced himself,” he says.

Little of what Charlie says sounds familiar to Leslie. However she confirms that she was living in Santa Clara at the time, the late ‘60s, and that it was possible that her parents knew the Lindberghs when they lived near Darien, Conn. They might have encountered them at social events, and her mother had Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s books around the house. “But I don’t think my father would have been part of some investigation like this,” she adds.

Then Charlie opens his wallet and fishes out the business card that William Baltz, who was in advertising, gave him 34 years ago. He hands it to Leslie, whose eyes mist over as she smiles and nods. “Yes, it’s my father’s card.” She then turns it over and reads the address written on the back. She had lived at that address, she says. With this evidence she has to reconsider her initial reaction to Charlie’s story. Maybe they did meet. Maybe her father was in San Jose at that time.

Unfortunately, her father and mother are dead, she says, but she will contact other family members to see if they knew anything. (Nothing comes of this effort.)

Something in Charlie makes people want to help him. He carries a weary, wounded look in his eyes, and his voice sounds both pleading and honest. But he has other ways to draw you in. He requires that people call him by his adopted name, Charles Lindbergh. And he is very good at making friends. A visit to his humble apartment in San Jose brings his current wife, Adua, scurrying with refreshments and a camera so she can photograph the occasion. Charlie hails you as a great new friend, and you start to worry that you’ll break his heart if you say you don’t believe him. Charlie truly believes that he is the Lindbergh baby, and a lie detector test has proven his sincerity. The polygraph expert who examined him at his own request found “no deception” and offered the opinion that Charlie “is the son who was kidnapped” from the Lindbergh family in 1932.

Vladimir Kovalik did not need a polygraph exam to convince him. In fact, Kovalik didn’t even need to hear Charlie’s story. All he had to do was look at him as he walked across the parking lot of a restaurant where they met in 1997.

“I saw him walking toward us from a distance and I immediately thought, ‘This is a Lindbergh.’ It’s not just the way he looks, which is just like the rest of them,” says Kovalik. “It’s the way he walks, the expression on his face, and the way that he talks. I won’t say that 100% he’s one of them, but the resemblance is there, no doubt.” (Beyond these obvious similarities, Charlie says he also shares the slightly deformed fingernails and toes of the Lindberghs.)

Kovalik is in a good position to judge Charlie’s appearance. He has been a close friend of Jon Lindbergh, the colonel’s second-born son, ever since they lived together during their days at Stanford University. The relationship has lasted more than 40 years, adds Kovalik. In that time he has met the extended Lindbergh family.

Kovalik says that Charlie shares so many elements of their physical appearance, mannerisms and speech patterns, that he has urged Jon to consider the possibility that the child’s body discovered in Hopewell in 1932 was misidentified. So far, Jon has deferred to his sister Reeve, and she will not entertain Charlie’s claim. In a memoir, she mentions him along with others who have come out over the years with wild stories.

We meet at Kovalik’s home outside Portland, Ore., where he operates a small business that consults on technology and development projects. A physicist by training, it’s in his nature to solve problems by testing theories. Charlie’s case has been a source of frustration.

Others who know the Lindberghs and have met Charlie suspect that he may be related in some way. Recent revelations that the colonel secretly fathered three children in Germany support those who believe that intrigue and deception mark the Lindbergh family and that Charlie has good reason to demand a hearing. With this in mind, Kovalik has offered to serve as a go-between, to resolve the matter through DNA testing,

“I would take Charlie’s DNA to Germany to test against the children there, or maybe I could get some cooperation from Jon’s son,” says Kovalik of Morgan Lindbergh, who provided the DNA used in the tests of the three Germans. Charlie and his lawyer, Robert Damir, claim they have not received this proposal directly. But they want to test only the other full Lindbergh siblings because of concerns that the tests yield less accurate results the more remote the relative. Their position, Kovalik says, “makes me ask if Charlie really wants to resolve this.”

It is a reasonable question. For most of his life Paul/Charlie has dreamed of being reunited with a family that would embrace him and erase all the pain, doubt and loss. This reunion would prove to the world that he was someone important who has a real claim to the Lindbergh family’s wealth and status. But even without settling the issue, Charlie has gotten many benefits from the mystery. Once he changed his name, people began treating him with deference. Hollywood showed some interest in his story. Kevin Costner even flew him to Los Angeles for a meeting.

Beyond getting more attention than he would otherwise enjoy, Charlie has turned the mystery of his origins into a compelling adventure. He has spent many of his days conducting research and piecing together his story. He has won the help, without compensation, of a team of volunteers that includes a devoted and sympathetic lawyer, a researcher who scours the Internet and other sources for information, and a San Francisco-based documentarian working on a film about the case. Now he has a reporter willing to devote days to the story. In the end, being the man who claims to be the Lindbergh baby has been so exciting, why would he risk losing it all to a DNA test that might not come back the way he hopes?

Charlie and I get a taste of the excitement his mystery creates when we go searching for a retired FBI agent who, according to him, knows the truth about his identity. The bureau figures heavily in Charlie’s stories as it was involved in the kidnapping case and may have an interest in defending the investigation that put Hauptmann in the electric chair. (Charlie says that the scandal that would have attended an admission that he was the long-lost baby kept Col. Lindbergh from embracing him.)

According to Charlie, the retired agent had been his contact at the San Jose field office. At various times the agent had dropped hints about Charlie’s identity, saying things like, “I hope you understand who you really are.” But in the end Charlie had come to see him as part of a cover-up, one that sacrificed him and the truth in the name of protecting the bureau’s reputation.

Like Leslie Baltz Duenas, the FBI retiree never answers my phone calls, so we set out to find his house. During the drive Charlie speaks in such anxious, fearful terms that we are both on edge by the time we find the right address. I’m a little afraid of what might happen it I catch the former agent at home. No one answers the door. But as we drive away, an older man passes us in a Mercedes.

“Is that him?” I ask Charlie.

He turns, cranes his neck and says excitedly, “It sure is!”

After a quick U-turn I park the car behind a tree to hide Charlie from view and run up the sidewalk to catch the ex-agent in his garage. To my surprise, he agrees to talk. His only condition is that I not publish his name.

While Charlie waits nervously in the car, I listen to the 83-year-old former agent describe him as “one of the nuts they get at every field office.” It had been his bad luck to be the one assigned to humor him. He says that as far as he knows, the FBI had no interest in Charlie and no evidence that he was a Lindbergh. Before I leave, he warns me that Charlie is an “opportunist, a gun nut and an old John Bircher” and that I better be careful.

When I return to the car, Charlie is calm about most of the retired FBI man’s statements. But he gets upset about the suggestion that he might be dangerous. Though he attended a couple of John Birch meetings in the early 1960s at the request of an old acquaintance, he considered Birchers to be right-wing extremists. When they asked him to build some bombs to use against liberal politicians, he broke from them. And the charge of opportunism is simply wrong, he says, insisting that he just wants the truth. If that happens to bring him fortune and fame, it would be rightly his. That’s not opportunism, he argues, it’s justice.

As sincere as he may be, Charlie has an eye on the windfall he might realize as a Lindbergh, and he understands the potential value of his story. (For decades a woman who called herself Anna Anderson gathered attention and support with the claim--eventually proven false--that she was Anastasia, the lost daughter of Russia’s last czar.)

In the hours we spend together, he often wonders aloud about the fortune he might gain from his tale. For many decades the Lindbergh kidnapping stood as the story of the century. Millions of dollars have been made by writers who have exploited the crime and the colonel’s name. If true, Charlie’s story might be even bigger, because it tacks an unimaginable ending onto the Lindbergh myth.

Even if his claim fails, the story of Charlie’s life might still be worth a considerable sum to publishers and moviemakers: a hard-luck character, raised among outlaws, who is consumed with the belief that he’s actually the heir to fortune and fame. Charlie has witnessed more and struggled more than 10 ordinary people put together. A disappointment at the end of the tale wouldn’t make his life story any less compelling.

Hollywood agents who met with Charlie last year recognized that his tale might be valuable no matter how it ends. Over the years, Charlie has been able to leverage his story to borrow more than $500,000 from people he describes as “investors,” who receive a written promise that they will be repaid out of any money he receives for the rights to his story.

The loans have enabled Charlie to pay the rent when he has been unable to find a decent job in the insurance field, where he once made a living. It’s quite possible that Charlie’s Lindbergh obsession has had something to do with his career troubles. He suspects that the FBI, in an effort to make him seem less credible, has been behind some of the problems he’s had with employers.

Anyone who has been around people who are paranoid and delusional knows that the FBI, along with the CIA, the police and other imposing organizations, are common obsessions. On the other hand, even paranoid people have enemies, and powerful agencies can sometimes do great damage to the innocent. Crime labs have falsified evidence. Defense agencies have conducted experiments on unwitting human subjects. These truths provide just enough evidence to keep conspiracy fantasies alive.

In an effort to sort out Charlie’s concerns, his attorney used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the FBI file on him. The bureau withheld pages, claiming that their release would violate the privacy of others, but forwarded letters that Charlie had written to the FBI, some personal correspondence, and notes he had sent to media companies and an attorney. Just how the latter wound up in the FBI file remains a mystery. Perhaps the bureau was monitoring him, or maybe the recipients were concerned about the tone of those messages and passed them on to authorities.

In the end, the file is just one more bit of inconclusive evidence. The ultimate answer can only be found in the DNA of Col. Lindbergh’s survivors. Charlie has rejected the idea of obtaining the Lindbergh siblings’ DNA surreptitiously, and to date they have refused to consider his claim. Family members turned down requests to comment for this article. It’s easy to understand why. Other men have come forward with similar claims. At least one had his own telling photographs, although he also had a history of hospitalizations for psychiatric care. How many others might come forward if they drop their guard and submit to DNA testing for Charlie? And what assurance do they have that Charlie will accept the results if he doesn’t like the findings?

One expert on issues of identity and “biographical psychology” says that the tight construction of Charlie’s story suggests that too much effort has been put into its development. “When everything lines up, when there is so much evidence pieced together so solidly, it makes you suspicious,” says Dan McAdams, professor of psychology at Northwestern University. “Real life stories are more loose-ended.” McAdams has spent more than a decade studying the tales people tell about their lives. It’s possible the story is true, he says. However, it’s also possible that Charlie has developed “a redemptive story” that predicts an eventual reward to compensate for his lifelong suffering.

“A clinician hearing a story like this would zero in not on the facts, but on the purpose of the story,” adds McAdams. “They would ask, ‘What goal does this story serve? What would be the reason to tell it?’ ”

Charlie’s goal, whether he acknowledges it or not, may be to erase his painful past. He may well be a troubled soul whose real life was so hard that he wants to believe he’s someone else. It would make sense then that he dream of being a famous person. The deluded are always abandoned princes, forgotten heroes and disowned heirs to great fortunes. No one imagines himself a nobody.

But just when you think you can dismiss Charlie’s claims, he asks you to look at his face and compare it with the photos of the Lindberghs. He looks very much like Jon and Reeve. He is about the right age to be their older brother. And he is a dead ringer for the late Dwight Morrow, the ambassador, U.S. senator and father of Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

The photos, and simple compassion, seem to require that Charlie get an answer to the mystery of his identity. As risky as cooperating with Charlie might seem to the family, he is actually putting more on the line. For all his adult life he has claimed to be a long-lost historical figure. If a DNA test determines that he is not a Lindbergh, Charlie will not only lose his bid to join a famous family, he will have to face the fact that he has been living a delusion for decades. He will have to accept that the peculiarities, fears and strange ideas he has expressed are not the result of tragic fate but the product of a fractured psyche.

If Charlie is brave enough to face this possible outcome, and he is, then maybe the Lindberghs owe him their cooperation. He stands to lose much more than they ever could.