Excerpt from Chapter 9

When Lorraine contacted us, her expectations were remarkably modest compared with other clients. From the Non-Identifying Information provided by the adoption agency, Lorraine was already equipped with the knowledge that her birthmother had lived a hard life and died a terrible death. Lorraine simply wanted to know her birthmother’s real name, where she was buried, and the circumstances of her death. We were determined to do what we could for her.

Lorraine was 42 years of age when she came to us upon the referral of Kristen’s childhood friend. A pretty woman, with a head full of blond curls, she was married with small children and living in Eureka, California. The information Lorraine gave us came directly from the county adoption agency in San Francisco that had placed her with a foster family soon after her birth in the early 1950s. This information was rather general, as it often is with adoption agencies. In our many years of investigative work, we’ve seen how agencies hold back facts, making decisions about what to record and what not to divulge in order to protect the identity, privacy and even the feelings of the individuals involved, be it the birthparents or the adoptees. Thankfully, this agency didn’t hold back anything - they told it like it was.

Here are the two short paragraphs in the agency’s report that we had to go on:

Birthmother was slender and attractive with bright blue eys, wavy blond hair and a fair complexion. She worked as a cook and waitress. However, since 1946 she had worked as a prostitute. She had a police record in Nevada for using narcotics. She reported that she used morphine, not heroin.

She died in 1956 in Wyoming. She was found frozen to death by the side of the highway. Autopsy revealed that she was under the influence of narcotics. They thought that her car stalled and she tried to walk for help. She lay down beside the road and froze to death. She left an adopted son born in 1953 who lived with his adoptive family in Wyoming.

We began the search in 1997. We were looking for a nameless woman that had died in 1956, somewhere in Wyoming. Our first task was to determine if there were any old records regarding a lady that froze to death in Wyoming in this time period. We felt that when we found this information, we would know Lorraine’s birthmother’s name, and where she had lived, worked, and died. We started out looking for news articles in Wyoming for 1956 that might have reported such a death. During our initial discussions, we had a slight edge because Ava had once lived in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1950’s. She remembered that the newspapers often published articles about the prostitutes who would travel and work between San Francisco, Reno and Cheyenne, Wyoming. We got out a map of the U.S and began studying the towns, roads and highways between and within the three states. Ava intuitively picked a central point along the route, and we thought it was as good a starting point as any. . .