Paul Husted doesn’t go by his old name anymore. He’s had it legally changed to Charles Lindbergh, Jr. The homeless former insurance salesman, who now lives with his wife Adua in an Ocean Street motel room, claims that he is the long lost son of aviator Charles Lindbergh.
Paul Husted doesn’t go by his old name anymore. He’s had it legally changed to Charles Lindbergh, Jr. The homeless former insurance salesman, who now lives with his wife Adua in an Ocean Street motel room, claims that he is the long lost son of aviator Charles Lindbergh.
Back in 1932, the kidnapping of Lindbergh’s infant son was the news story of the decade. In 1936, a German carpenter, Bruno Hauptmann, died in the electric chair for the crime, but there was always some doubt as to whether he actually did it. In fact, New Jersey Governor Harold G. Hoffman, who eventually signed the death warrant, had his doubts about Hauptmann’s guilt.
Junior has no doubt that he was kidnapped, but he has a different account about what happened next. According to him, Lindbergh was unhappy about his child because he was born with a physical deformity—crossed toes. Then the story gets strange. Husted claims that Al Capone offered to help his father get him back if he would, in turn, help Capone get out of jail. Lindbergh responded that he would help him get out of jail if Capone would keep his son away. “My father was a very cold guy.” Over the following years Husted was raised by a succession of foster families, mainly in Kansas.
The truth is that the baby’s corpse has never been conclusively found (a badly decomposed body of an infant was, in fact, found in a ditch in 1932), and that over the years plenty of people have claimed to be the Lindbergh baby—including an African American woman. It’s not just about the fame of being “son of …” either. Estimates are that the real Lindbergh baby would receive about $1 billion dollars from the estate, and that’s a sum the surviving Lindbergh siblings won’t part with easily. Perhaps that’s why they’ve refused to provide their DNA, even though Husted has offered his.
It is obvious that he can use the money. His wife is suffering from lymphoma, and he’s already received or borrowed about $100,000 to cover the cost of her treatments. That has left him penniless, so today he lives in a hotel in Santa Cruz, waiting for one of his alleged siblings to take him up on his challenge and give a sample of their DNA. Read more at the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
