'The most amazing and remarkable story' Today Show, NBC
'A family scandal straight out of a Hollywood film noir...what a story
it is. I look forward to seeing it on Netflix' Spectator
Adoption, Family and Fraud...
Donna was six years old when her sister casually told her that she and
her siblings were all adopted. It was a revelation that fractured her
sense of identity but remained one of those things left unsaid within
the family. Later, when her complicated and unconventional adoptive
mother died, Donna was left feeling exposed, her life un-witnessed
without a mother to look over her.
So, she decided to investigate her origins and began the search for her
birth mother. Trawling through records she discovered that she had been
adopted through the notorious Louise Wise Adoption Service based in
Manhattan and since exposed as corrupt and unethical, but that was just
the beginning. As she dug deeper she discovered that her birth parents
had been involved in an explosive and salacious story, one of the
biggest true crime stories to grip the USA in the late 1960s.
Previously redacted records from the infamous adoption agency revealed
that Donna's mother (27, Jewish and single), her father (40, Catholic,
married with 4 children), had hatched a plan to defraud an insurance
company and run off to Spain to raise Donna. Further investigation
revealed that in 1967, Donna's mother, Mira Lindenmaier, faked her own
death in a drowning accident off City Island in the Bronx for the double
indemnity insurance money.
