Posted on 08/15/2003 6:49:03 PM PDT by sjersey
BERLIN (Reuters) - A U.S. grandson of Charles Lindbergh said Friday it was possible three Germans who say the aviator was their father were telling the truth because in photographs they "look hauntingly familiar."
Morgan Lindbergh, 36, said in a telephone call to Reuters that he wanted to take the Germans up on their offer to submit to DNA tests to resolve the question of whether Lindbergh was their father and that he would also take a DNA test himself.
"I'm not speaking for the Lindbergh family but only for myself -- I believe it is possible (they are Lindbergh children)," said Morgan Lindbergh, whose father Jon, 71, was the second child of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
"They look hauntingly familiar," he said when asked what he thought of photographs of the three Germans, aged 36 to 45, taken at a news conference in Munich Thursday. The Germans told reporters they were willing to submit to genetic testing.
"I would like to have this go forward with DNA testing," he added in a telephone interview from his home in Olympia, Washington. "I would like to, as soon as possible, confirm that or find out the truth. They say they are willing to take DNA tests. I'd be willing to do one in response to compare it."
Charles Lindbergh, the Germans said, led a secretive dual life, raising a clandestine family with a young German woman in Munich for 17 years even though he was married and had six children with his wife in Connecticut. Their first child, a boy, was famously murdered as a baby in 1932.
Dyrk Hesshaimer, 45, Astrid Bouteuil, 42, and David Hesshaimer, 36, said they went public with the family secret now, two years after their mother died, only because they wanted to be recognized as Lindbergh's children -- and erase a blemish of having "father unknown" on their birth certificates.
LOVE LETTERS
They insist they have no interest in his estate nor in tarnishing the legacy of the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic in a daring 33-hour flight from New York to Paris in 1927. They said their motives are to set the record straight.
As evidence, they produced 112 love letters they said were from Lindbergh to their mother written between 1957 and his death in 1974, pictures of Lindbergh with his second family, and their own faces that bear an unmistakable likeness to the famed pilot.
They portrayed Lindbergh as a loving father who generously supported them with trust funds and helped buy a house for them in Munich even though they knew him only as "Mr. Careu Kent." He came to Germany for up to three visits each year, staying between five to 14 days.
The executive director of the Lindbergh Foundation in the United States has said the family would have no comment.
Lindbergh biographer A. Scott Berg said the Germans' story was feasible, because Lindbergh spent a lot of time traveling in Europe, but unlikely because it seemed out of character.
Morgan Lindbergh, a neuroscience student who has five brothers and sisters and two half sisters, said he was 7 years old when his grandfather died. He said he remembered going on hikes with the famed aviator and riding on his shoulders.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.