GO HERE - http://www.stlnet.com - Use the SEARCH facility and type in Lindbergh for complete story http://www.stlnet.com/postnet/stories.nsf/ByDocID/D907F5FF74CCCB6C8625692100 2C3BC5 COPIED FROM: ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH Posted: Wednesday, July 19, 2000 | 3:03 a.m. E-mail this Story to a friend Is he the Lindbergh baby? By Mark J. Price The Akron Beacon Journal * A 68-year-old Ohio retiree who looks like the famed aviator wonders about a great-aunt's allegation that his mother switched her sickly son in 1932 for the child kidnapped in New Jersey. It's a far-fetched story that won't die because of amazing circumstances. Robert Dolfen's story is so fantastic that sometimes he doesn't seem to believe it himself. But then he remembers the unusual circumstances, the amazing coincidences and the unanswered questions, and he begins to suspect that the improbable could be true. The 68-year-old resident of Norton, Ohio, 15 miles southwest of Akron, has always maintained silence about his family's secret. His friends don't know. Nor do his neighbors. Nor do other retirees from PPG Industries. "You don't run around telling people 'I was the Lindbergh baby back in 1936,' " Dolfen explains. Yes, the Lindbergh baby -- Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., the kidnapped son of aviator Charles Lindbergh and author Anne Morrow Lindbergh. History books record that the 20-month-old boy was stolen from his crib March 1, 1932, from the second-story nursery of the Lindberghs' home near Hopewell, N.J. Although the Lindberghs paid a $50,000 ransom, the toddler's body was found May 12 in a wooded area a few miles from the family home. Or was it? Great-aunt squawks Some began to have doubts when 4-year-old Bobby Dolfen of Akron was thrown into the international spotlight in January 1936. Sheriff's deputies in Summit County, Ohio, and federal agents found themselves investigating a wild rumor that Bobby was really the Lindbergh boy. Bobby's great-aunt, then 60 and living in Barberton, next door to Norton, told authorities that the boy's mother, Glendora "Dorry" Dolfen, was involved in a 1932 conspiracy to substitute her sickly son for the Lindberghs' son. Dorry Dolfen was unable to defend herself from the claim. She had died in December 1934 of complications from childbirth. Officers scoffed at the allegation but dutifully checked it out. When witnesses began to corroborate the far-fetched tale, the story took on a life of its own. Bobby was living with his aunt and uncle, Thelma and Clifford Miller, when a caravan of deputies, newspaper reporters and photographers arrived unannounced at their home on Oakwood Drive in Ellet, a few miles southeast of Akron. "I can remember when the detectives come (sic) up . . . guys in suits and topcoats," Dolfen says. "I was out in the back playing." Officers did a double take when they spotted Bobby. He fit the Lindbergh boy's description: blue eyes, curly blond hair, dimpled chin. In a bizarre coincidence, the boy was wearing an aviator's helmet and goggles -- just like Charles Lindbergh wore on his solo flight across the Atlantic in May 1927. "There was a guy with a big camera come around there and he took a big flash," Dolfen recalls. "Well, that scares the hell out of you when you see a big flash in the daylight. I didn't know what was going on. "My aunt come out and asked them what was going on and then she took me in the house." Akron's media circus had begun. Local newspapers published photos and articles about "Lindy's double." The news spread to the Associated Press and United Press, which transmitted stories around the world. "The pictures of this Ohio youngster, Robert Dolfen, so resemble Mr. and Mrs. Lindbergh that I honestly believe the boy is the Lindbergh baby," Chicago housewife Marie A. Marten wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, after seeing a Chicago newspaper article. "The lips, the mouth, the nose, the shape of the cheek and the chin ... I think that child should be investigated further." Reporters camped out at the tiny home in Ellet. "They stayed there day and night," Dolfen says. "They kept walking around the house, trying to get a peek in there and take more pictures." Aunt Thelma told the officers that there had been a mistake: The boy was her nephew Bobby, not the Lindbergh baby. She stayed awake at night with a shotgun in her lap, fearing that someone might try to break in and kidnap the boy. "There probably is only one chance in a million that Robert Dolfen might be the missing Lindbergh baby," Sheriff James Flower told the Akron Times-Press. "But that one chance must be checked out." Bobby was taken to the Akron police station to have ink fingerprints and footprints made. When he took off his shoes, it was noted that he had an overlapping toe on his right foot - just as the Lindbergh baby had. "I gave 'em hell when they got my feet all dirty with those footprints," Dolfen says. "It took awhile to come off. They took a wet rag and it didn't do nothing." The conspiracy theory Meanwhile, details emerged that backed up the great-aunt's conspiracy theory. Detectives learned that Dorry Dolfen, a New Jersey native, had taken Bobby, her son, to her home state only days before the Lindbergh kidnapping. She said she was going to visit a sick uncle. When she returned two weeks later, she was carrying a large wad of money, and witnesses swore later that her son didn't look the same. Ira Myer, an Akron auto mechanic, told detectives in 1936 that he had driven "the real Bobby" to Children's Hospital in early 1932 for a hernia operation. "The baby was very ill at the time and lay limp in my arms when I took him into the hospital," Myer told the Beacon Journal in 1936. Myer didn't see Dorry Dolfen again until she returned from New Jersey about a month later. He stopped by the Dolfen house one day, and she offered to reimburse him for the gas he used driving her around town. "She took out a roll of bills and gave me some," Myer said. "Then she said, 'Have you seen Bobby?' I was amazed to see that the child was a third larger than the other Bobby had been. Also, he had curly hair where the original Bobby had had one little tuft of straight hair. "I took one look at the child and I said, 'Why, that's not Bobby, Dorry.' I'll never forget how she stood there a minute, thinking, and then she suddenly admitted it. 'No, you're right,' she said. 'That's not Bobby.' She didn't say any more and I didn't press her. I figured her own baby had died, though I had never seen the death notice, and that she had adopted a child. I never thought of the Lindbergh child at that time." Esther Ebert, who had worked for the Dolfens, gave a similar account: "I was there when they took Bobby to the hospital," she said. "Mrs. Dolfen then told me that she was going to New Jersey to see a sick uncle. When she returned in about two weeks, I was called back to the house. There was a child there but it was not Bobby. I said to her: 'Why, Mrs. Dolfen, that is not Bobby.' "Oh, yes it is," she said, "Only they fed him up at the hospital and he got bigger and his hair got curly."' Strangest of all, Bobby's father began to have doubts. "I was summoned home from a trip I made to St. Louis when my child was a baby," Andrew Dolfen, an Akron bus driver, told police. "They informed me my son was very ill. When I arrived home, I found a perfectly healthy child who didn't resemble my baby at all. "I said to my wife at that time, 'This is not our child. Our child did not have curly hair.' Later, I noticed that my wife had plenty of money. I saw $600 in $20 bills in her possession at one time. She could not seem to explain to me where she got it. Off and on, I would say to her 'This is not our boy.'" Violet Sharpe's connection Bobby's great-aunt (not identified by name) told detectives that Dorry Dolfen knew Violet Sharpe, a maid who worked for Anne Lindbergh's mother, Elizabeth Morrow, at the Morrows' estate in Englewood, N.J. (Anne's father, Dwight W. Morrow, had been a Wall Street financier, ambassador to Mexico and a senator from New Jersey.) During the kidnapping investigation, police suspected that Sharpe might know more about the crime than she was telling. They grilled her repeatedly, wanting to know her whereabouts during the kidnapping. Sharpe committed suicide June 10, 1932, rather than face a fifth round of police interrogation. Conspiracy theorists say the suicide proves that Sharpe played a role in the kidnapping, but skeptics say the maid killed herself to avoid having to reveal that she had been cheating on her fiance. Bruno Richard Hauptmann, an illegal immigrant from Germany who was living in the Bronx and working as a carpenter, was charged with murder in September 1934 after passing some of the marked ransom money in New York City. Officers searched his home and found $13,760 in ransom bills hidden in his garage. Hauptmann told officers that the money belonged to his business partner, Isidor Fisch, who had died a few months earlier. He said he spent some of it because Fisch owed him $7,000. "Trial of the Century" Bobby Dolfen's great-aunt told investigators that Fisch had visited Akron in the early 1930s and was in league with a gang in Barberton that had planned the Lindbergh kidnapping. "Bruno Hauptmann has nothing to do with the kidnapping of the Lindbergh child," the great-aunt told police. "They planted the money on him one time when he and his wife were away." Hauptmann was convicted of murder on Feb. 13, 1935, in a circus-like proceeding that became known as "the Trial of the Century." Although circumstantial, the evidence was compelling: * Ransom money was hidden in Hauptmann's garage. * Handwriting experts agreed he wrote the ransom notes. * Wood from a homemade ladder used in the kidnapping was traced to a Bronx lumberyard near the carpenter's home. * Telltale marks on the ladder matched Hauptmann's tools. * A board used to make the ladder had been sawed out of Hauptmann's attic floor. Hauptmann went to the electric chair April 3, 1936, proclaiming his innocence. He refused to confess to the crime, even when the New Jersey governor offered to change the death sentence to life in prison. Bobby Dolfen's great-aunt may have been trying to save Hauptmann from execution by giving police the baby-switch story. Whatever the case, the tale began to unravel. It was learned that the great-aunt had been committed to Massillon State Hospital in 1924 because of "hallucinations that her family was persecuting her." Andrew Dolfen, who earlier said he doubted his son's identity, backed down from his claims. He told the Akron Times-Press: "All I said was that he didn't look very sick after the operation. I never said he didn't look like the same child." The Bobby Dolfen investigation screeched to a halt when Akron officials heard from Col. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, superintendent of the New Jersey State Police and father of the future Gulf War general. Schwarzkopf said Bobby's fingerprints had been compared to latent prints taken from one of the Lindbergh baby's toys. The prints didn't match. Not at all. Dolfen wants DNA tests More than 60 years later, an Akron journalist tracked down Robert Dolfen in Norton after rediscovering 1936 files about the baby-switch allegations. For the first time, Dolfen decided to talk about the case that has haunted him all his life. Dolfen still has doubts about his identity. He's been thinking a lot lately about exhuming his mother's body at Old Tallmadge Cemetery to do a DNA test. He wants to know for sure. Over the years, dozens of people have claimed to be the Lindbergh baby. Many of their tales have been outrageous, including that of a black woman from Oklahoma who said she was Charles Lindbergh Jr. until someone changed her sex and dyed her skin. As far as Robert Dolfen knows, he's really Robert Dolfen. He's the guy who worked 41 years at PPG and spent seven years in the National Guard. He's the guy who graduated from Norton High School in 1950. And he's the guy who was born to Andrew and Dorry Dolfen on Aug. 24, 1931. "You only know what you've been told, and what I've been told is, I'm me," he says. "I don't have anything to dispute that. But you wonder." He looks like Lindy He keeps thinking about the family legends. About his mother knowing the maid who committed suicide. About Bobby Dolfen being in New Jersey the week of the kidnapping. About the small fortune his mother brought back from her trip. About the neighbors saying the boy was someone else. "You know, the more similarities you run onto, it puts maybe a little more doubt in your mind," he says. It would be easier to dismiss the baby-switch theory if Dolfen didn't so resemble Charles Lindbergh. Photos of the American icon, who died in 1974, bear an eerie likeness to Dolfen: the receding hairline, the piercing eyes, the wide nose, the prominent ears. Even though it would cost thousands of dollars to exhume his mother's body for DNA testing, it would be the best way for Dolfen to prove he's really a Dolfen. That's why he's been thinking lately about his mother's unmarked grave. Still, he says, "I don't like that idea of digging anybody up." <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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