After Two Years, Kidnaped Baby Back With Family

BERLIN — Wilbert Grusser, a jolly and energetic toddler, is busily at play in a strange house, with strange people--his parents. Two years after he was stolen, Wilbert is back home.

His kidnaper, it seems, treated him with the love of a mother.

The story made headlines Friday in Germany, a tale of a child who grew to know, and perhaps love, strangers as if they were his own parents. Now, after two years of police searches and TV appeals, he is truly home for Christmas.

On Nov. 12, 1991, Susann Grusser left 3-month-old Wilbert alone in his carriage under a staircase while visiting a municipal office in Dessau, an eastern German city of 103,000 people.

She didn’t want to wake the infant, she later said.

It was quite common to leave a baby alone, though more so in eastern Germany than in the West. Child abduction was all but unheard of in East Germany and is rare in Germany as a whole.

In the weeks following Wilbert’s disappearance, police found not a trace of the Grussers’ only child. Susann Grusser, now 29, appeared on television with a tearful plea: “Please give us back our Wilbert.”

The city’s chief criminal inspector, Frank Becker, on Friday recalled the countless tips that led to dead ends--until last month.

A woman in the Ruhr Valley city of Duisburg saw a report on the case on a fact-based television crime program called “Without a Trace.” She was suspicious of a neighbor who, in 1991, suddenly started to be seen with a child.

“She saw that this woman was so happy, and the woman herself had gone to police and told them she got the child from a Polish woman,” Becker said. “And it all seemed a little too unreal.”

Sure enough, the child was stolen. And on Tuesday, police brought Wilbert home.