Fraud on the Court Read online

  Despite the seeming isolation I endured, what ultimately happened was that the 1970s nearly passed me by. Before I knew it, I had successfully completed two degrees and was happily remarried. Then one day, in 1979, the earth shifted beneath my feet and I realized that I was not content with the limbo where I was existing between two worlds. I had no ties to the family that raised me, and I had no knowledge of the family that had given me life. It was time for things to change.

  The precipitating event was this: I had become a father. In 1979 my first son was born. I was thrilled. It’s a moment like no other. I held the celebratory cigar in my hands and looked at it and thought, there is no one for me to call. My son had no grandparents on my side to spoil him, or to cheer his growth. Now it was not just my own family line that was broken off, but it was this child’s as well. And that was a thought I didn’t lightly bear.

  I did call Joe, of course, even though we talked less frequently now. I told him of my son’s birth and my unpleasant lines of thought on the matter of family, and he confirmed what I already knew.

  “Aunt Boots?” he said. “No, she doesn’t have any interest in you at all. Glenn is the only thing ever on her mind.”

  It was hardly surprising. But it did surprise me that the words fell like more strokes of the switch against my skin.

  * * * * * *

  For almost fifteen long years, my efforts to discover something about my birth family would go completely fruitless. But no matter how many times I met with a dead end, I always found myself trying one more time to see if a new avenue had opened up.

  In 1980, searching for a birth mother in a closed adoption triad was a vastly different experience from searching today. There were no email lists, internet support groups, online genealogical archives or digitized documents. Instead, if you were lucky enough to live in a larger city, what you had were actual in-person support groups that met frequently to share resources and ideas. If you had money, there were private investigators who would work on your behalf and who advertised through the search and reunion groups.

  Generally, though, for anyone to successfully help you with a search, whether a support group volunteer or a paid private investigator, you needed a starting place—a crucial piece of information that assisted you in moving the search forward. For me, that starting place was a long ways off. I began learning about the difficult path ahead by making some new friends at one of these adoption reunion groups in Chicago. The group was known as Truth Seekers in Adoption and is still running strong today. I started attending their weekly meetings. And I began following some of their suggestions.

  I quickly exhausted all of the normally recommended search methods. You see, while above-board and legally finalized adoptions are supposed to follow a rather predictable schedule, many US adoptions are tied up with an underlying deception of one sort or another. In the meetings in Chicago, I met individuals from every part of the adoption triad: birth parents, adoptees, and even adoptive parents. I was shocked by the ways in which many of these individuals shared how the adoption process had been bent, broken and circumvented in the early-to-mid 1900s.

  For instance, many birth mothers revealed that they were pressured, against their will, to relinquish babies whom they desperately desired to raise themselves. Most of these were women who were unwed at the time of their pregnancies. Some were sent by family members to be held captive in so-called Maternity Homes, not to be allowed a return until the baby had been born and relinquished. Without a societal support system for single mothers, 80% of US infants born to them from the 1940s up until the 1970s were given over to the adoption system (as opposed to fewer than 4% relinquishments by 1983). The adoption system, at the time of these record high relinquishments, was almost exclusively closed—meaning the original birth certificates would never be seen by the adult adoptees, and the child’s future status, development and accomplishments would never be known to the mother, a fit punishment for her sins.

  These mothers I met who were involved in the search movement have never lost their deep, primal need to know that their children were safe and well, and to know if that child endured a burning need of his own to discover the missing pieces of his biological history. Unfortunately compounding the search and reunion efforts, many of the so-called adoptions of the 1950s and 1960s were little more than black market transactions facilitated by the maternity homes, the hospitals or the delivering physician. In these cases, a completely fraudulent original birth certificate would have been forged with the adoptive mother listed as the actual biological mother, effectively rendering the true birth mother a non-entity and any future reunion attempts completely hopeless. Frequently the birth mother was unaware that the legal adoption process had never taken place.

  Hard to believe? In the current era of information hyperabundance it takes no more than a quick internet search for the term “Cole babies” to introduce you to the existence of such black market baby rings and their prevalence in the US during the mid 20th century.

  Other methods of circumventing the adoption system also thrived in the atmosphere of legal and social suppression that unmarried women faced in those days. Frequently the infant would be “abducted” by distant family members from out of state, with the blessing of the maternal grandparents, and no involvement of any lawyers or state agencies.

  In some small towns and counties, courts would push through questionable adoption documents and arrangements for reasons related to the social connections of the adoptive parents or the baby broker. Especially when an infant was procured out of state or out of town, falsified names or forged signatures on relinquishments would be difficult to prove if an unscrupulous lawyer, doctor or public notary was involved. It was easier just to sign the adoption decree and let everyone move forward.

  Despite the fact that I met many reunion seekers who had discovered some sort of fraudulent activity in their own adoptions, I had no idea at the time that my own adoption was anything less than legal and above-board. I had a copy of my amended birth certificate that listed the Chaleks as my legal parents. I hired a private detective in Florida (the first of many) to look up my adoption record in Gainesville, in Alachua County. Everything seemed in order, but the details were, of course, sealed.

  Another step I took was to write to the state of Florida, at the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services (HRS) and request non-identifying information on my birth family. This was a legal remedy created to give adoptees access to any pertinent medical information that case workers discovered during the adoption process through interviews with the birth mother. The closed adoption files are kept by a custodian, who interprets and releases the non-identifying information upon proof that it is the actual adoptee who is requesting it.

  This first request I made for non-identifying information resulted in the shortest imaginable letter of response, with details that proved almost useless to my efforts except to say that my birth mother was young and healthy and reported nothing that indicated any genetically related conditions on either side of the family. Despite this obvious dead-end, I wasn’t yet deterred in my first search effort. I called the hospital listed on my birth certificate and had the first lucky break of many over the next two decades. Somehow I convinced the medical records clerk at the hospital to search through the names of all the women who had delivered a white male infant in that hospital on the date of January 25, 1952. There were five. Only one of them did not have a last name that matched the listed birth father’s.

  This woman, who was listed as Faye Barnwell, matched the last name on file for adoption of a Baby Boy Barnwell that the private detective had located in his search of the public records. I felt confident that this, then, was my birth mother. She was listed as sixteen years old. Her name plus the identity of a caseworker named Mrs. Fielding were all the further information I could glean from the records department.

  I wish I had known then what a false trail was ahead of me based on the information this helpful records cl
erk had provided. Let me make it clear that, even then, it was highly unlikely that a hospital employee would provide this type of information due to rules and regulations governing personal medical records. In the current era of HIPAA privacy laws, it would be downright impossible to obtain anything in a similar manner.

  * * * * * *

  Armed with the names of Faye Barnwell, Mrs. Fielding, and Dr. R. A. Schnauss (the ophthalmologist who had delivered me), I began an earnest attempt to contact any one of these individuals in an effort to further my search. I spent even more money on private investigators and on long-distance phone calls. In the end, I met with nothing but disappointment.

  Many of the pitfalls I encountered had to do with the booming search and reunion business that was opening up in the US at this time, as more and more adoptees discovered through family rumor or buried legal papers or simple intuition, that they were not natural born members of their families. To the surprise and discomfort of an entire system, many of the adoptees, no matter how wonderful their adoptive homes might have been, were not content with the answer that their own biological history was none of their legal business. The once powerless infants had grown up and were now full rights-holding, free-thinking citizens of the world’s premier democracy. These adoptees were demanding access to their own genetic information for a myriad of valid personal reasons. And since the US government was not providing fast enough recognition of the adoptees’ legal claims and their demands for information, plenty of businesses sprang up to supply whatever information could be gleaned through alternative channels. It was unregulated capitalism at its finest.

  In the end, some of the investigators and “experts” I hired were well meaning, and some of them were qualified, and few of them were both. In a span of three nearly wasted years I spent ungodly sums of money going down hopeless false trails, all in search of a woman named Faye Barnwell whom I assumed had given birth to me nearly thirty years earlier.

  For the years between 1983 and 1988, nothing of any importance happened to further my quest. Then, in 1988, I made a brief trip to Jacksonville to try and do on my own the tasks the investigators had failed to accomplish.

  During that trip, I went by the hospital from my amended birth certificate, and there I obtained a physical copy of my own hospital medical records. I tracked down a Dr. Schnauss, only to discover that he was not the man who had delivered me, but his son. This younger Dr. Schnauss informed me, furthermore, that all records from his father’s medical practice had been destroyed several years prior. He had known nothing of the deliveries his father had been performing as a side business in the 1950s, especially since it was so removed from the typical services of an eye doctor.

  As a final resort, I appealed to the Chief Judge of Alachua County, the Honorable Chester B. Chance, to inquire if there was any way I might expect some judicial assistance in my quest to reclaim my own personal information. The judge, of course, sent me packing. He informed me that if I seriously wanted to gain access to information about my biological identity, I would be better served by going down to Tallahassee and having a talk with the state legislators. The adoption record, as the law stood, was sealed. There was nothing he could do, even if he had wanted.

  This last trip left me drained, financially and emotionally. For six years, the search stalled. Part of me suspected I might not see a change in adoptee rights in my lifetime. I grieved the loss, both for me and for my children and their own heritage.

  Chapter 3

  By the beginning of 1994 I was still frequently thinking about and grieving the loss of my biological identity, but without any legislative changes at a federal or state level granting me access to a copy of my original birth certificate, I was out of ideas and out of steam. I had returned to live in Florida for work and personal reasons, despite my deep dislike of the South. I kept myself busy with my career and children—two sons—and tried to ignore the gnawing hunger and anger that I felt whenever I dwelt on thoughts of closed adoptions, legal red-tape and a broken sense of self.

  It was then that I received a certified letter in the mail from Glenn. Inside it was a copy of the last will and testament of Alex Chalek. Al had passed away on June 2, 1993 and made Glenn his personal representative. Over six months later, Glenn was in the process of wrapping up the legalities. At the last possible moment, I was informed of not only Al’s death, but of my mention in the will and of the impending discharge of the estate.

  I had not spoken to any of the Chaleks in years. I knew that Adela had preceded her husband in death, although I also heard about her passing many months after the fact. Al’s death was a surprise, of sorts, mostly because I had so completely severed any personal connections that I no longer thought of myself as a part of my adoptive family. Receiving the will in the mail, knowing that I had been mentioned as one of Alex’s heirs, I felt an odd sense of dislocation. For a moment, unwanted memories of childhood clouded my mind and prevented me from reading too deeply into the pages I clutched in my hands.

  Sending these unhappy thoughts packing, I took the letter to a table and began to read. It was clear that the will would not take me long to decipher. It was comprised of only five legal-size pages, two of which were a handwritten codicil (addendum) published quite a few years after the original will. As I read through the document and began to understand how it related to me, I was beset by both sadness and rage at the final blow my adoptive father had dealt me from beyond the grave.

  The original last will and testament of Al D. Chalek was a three page typewritten document that was compiled and signed in November of 1982. At that point in time, I would have been 30 years old and well out of the Chaleks’ lives by my own choice. It made sense, then, painful as it seemed, that Al had failed to mention me in the will at all. He designated Adela as his primary beneficiary and personal representative, with Glenn as a secondary should Adela not survive her husband.

  Again, although it was a painful reminder of my non-existent family ties, the original will could and should have been nothing more than a closing chapter to a very sad story.

  Instead, attached to the original filing was the two page handwritten codicil, dated in 1988, which served the purpose of adding one small paragraph to the original document.

  The Codicil stated (in part):

  This Codicil is to demonstrate that I had not overlooked my adopted son, Michael Edward Chalek. Article II “Distribution” is amended by adding the following paragraph C.

  C. In the event my spouse, Adela, does not survive me, then I devise the sum of One Dollar ($1.00) to my adopted son, Michael Edward Chalek, in that he is self-supporting and for other good reasons known to all of us.

  In a few sentences, Al had uncovered and bloodied all of an adoptee’s most vulnerable places. First, I had been left out of the original will altogether, without a single mention. Glenn was their son, their only son. Painful, but not surprising.

  Second, Al followed up that document by making clear that the only reason he was amending the will was to “demonstrate” that he hadn’t overlooked me, a term which implies a possibility of an accidental omission. In short, he was saying “I did it on purpose.” Now his only reason to mention me at all was to protect the original document from any legal claims against its validity. Summarized further, the statement was indicative of the fact that they were being forced to acknowledge my legal standing as their child and that they felt their “real” son needed protection from me in case I wanted to take away any of his inheritance.

  Third, Al referred to me, not once, but twice as his “adopted” son. Adoptees, regardless of their situations, generally tend to have some level of fear that this second-class status is how their parents view them. Fair? No. Real? Yes.

  Finally, there was the question of the statement Al made about “other good reasons known to all of us.”

  I can’t tell you how long I sat and stared and pondered over that eight word phrase. From my view, what I had done for the Chaleks was to survive
their neglect and abuse for seventeen years, and then do them the favor of disappearing from their lives forever without a single demand for recompense or explanation. What was this inference on Al’s part that I had been the one to commit a wrong that was deserving of punishment?

  As my mind connected the dots, starting with the dates of the two documents, the wording of the codicil, and the fact that I was receiving all of the correspondence at the last possible hour before final discharge of the estate—another indication that my motives were under suspicion—a long denied fury at the injustice of the entire situation began to burn within me.

  I wondered, who were these people? Why had they adopted a child, and how had they managed to convince the system to grant them one? These questions were not going to disappear, and I added them to the list of many others I had regarding my legal and biological histories.

  * * * * * *

  Glenn himself did nothing to improve matters when I finally reached out to him about a subject that had long bothered me. In short, I had spent many years wishing that I could retrieve my personal belongings that had remained behind when I crawled out that bedroom window. I decided it was time to make my request known before a thorough cleaning of the attic took place and any chance I had was gone forever.

  By the time I called Glenn to ask about my school records and awards, the matter of the will had been quickly dispatched. In the spring of 1994 I received a cashier’s check from Al’s estate, in the amount of one dollar. The check was dated March 03, 1994 and listed Glenn as the purchaser. I variously debated shredding, filing, burning or displaying it, until finally I put it in a frame and hung it on my office wall.