Speaker 1: Previously on Hello John Doe.
Speaker 2: I think everybody's got an origin, and I would just
Speaker 2: like to know you know where up again. I'm up
Speaker 2: at all sad or disappointed how I grew up, But
Speaker 2: I just I don't know, just it is a big
Speaker 2: deal to me.
Speaker 3: You want to a relationship with her at all? I mean,
Speaker 3: would you like to have that?
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Maybe I could answer that question better once I'll find
Speaker 2: out why she gave me up, if that makes sense.
Speaker 5: So I was in Charlotte, and that's why I met
Speaker 5: Franklin Floyd.
Speaker 4: But I knew hi, Miss Brandon Williams. I loved the
Speaker 4: fact that he was going to.
Speaker 5: Help me get my kids back and take me away
Speaker 5: from the situation. Love him, No, he's creepy. He was
Speaker 5: always creepy.
Speaker 3: At twenty five years old, Sandy spent a month in
Speaker 3: a Dallas jail. She had written a bad check trying
Speaker 3: to get diapers. The days were long and boring, and
Speaker 3: she wasn't allowed outside.
Speaker 6: And scarily to a point that I didn't ever want
Speaker 6: to do anything illegal again as long as I lived.
Speaker 3: It was nineteen seventy five. By then, she was a
Speaker 3: mother of four, and she was afraid of her husband,
Speaker 3: but still when she got out of jail, she wasn't
Speaker 3: prepared for what happened in her absence.
Speaker 5: While I was in jail, and he picked the kids up,
Speaker 5: and he took Allison and Amy to an orphanage and
Speaker 5: left him at the orphanage.
Speaker 3: Her husband, Franklin Floyd, had left town and he had
Speaker 3: forced Suzanne, Sandy's oldest daughter, to leave with him, and.
Speaker 4: That's when he took her. And that was the last time.
Speaker 3: That she was seen. That's Amy Winkles, Sandy's third oldest daughter.
Speaker 3: She was one of the girls Floyd left in an orphanage.
Speaker 3: When Sandy realized what Floyd had done, she went first
Speaker 3: to the Dallas police station. She told him her husband
Speaker 3: had taken Susie. That's what she called.
Speaker 1: Her, Susie.
Speaker 6: And I kept screaming, she's not his child, he's not
Speaker 6: her father, and finally they escorted me out of a
Speaker 6: police station.
Speaker 3: They didn't think there was anything wrong with Floyd taking
Speaker 3: off with his six year old stepdaughter. Lost were looser
Speaker 3: before the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act of nineteen eighty and
Speaker 3: they buried state by state. So Sandy went Defy headquarters
Speaker 3: in Dallas. They didn't help either. She was in such
Speaker 3: a state, desperate, in heartsy, that she went to places
Speaker 3: around town, at the grocery store to see if anyone
Speaker 3: in Saint Floyd.
Speaker 4: When I couldn't find him, I packed. This is really stupid, but.
Speaker 5: I packed everything in a duffel bag, all of the
Speaker 5: girls stuff in a duffel bag, and started. Because somebody
Speaker 5: said he went to Michigan hitshriking sounds STERI well, but
Speaker 5: back then it wasn't like that. I went to a
Speaker 5: truck stop and a truck driver said.
Speaker 4: What are you doing? And I told him what I
Speaker 4: was doing and why I was doing.
Speaker 5: And then I must have been really freaky looking, because
Speaker 5: I don't worried about combing my hair.
Speaker 4: I was just I was going to find her. I
Speaker 4: had to find her.
Speaker 5: One truck driver gave me to another truck driver, to
Speaker 5: another truck that there was no nobody ever said anything
Speaker 5: about sex, nobody ever said anything about money. They put
Speaker 5: the girls in the beds in the back of the truck,
Speaker 5: made sure everybody ate took me where I wanted to go,
Speaker 5: said that there any king can do to help you.
Speaker 3: But there was only so much that they or Sandy
Speaker 3: could do. Here's Sandy's youngest Dorothy, who hadn't been born
Speaker 3: when all this was going on. She's forty two, a
Speaker 3: motorcycling enthusiast with three kids of her own.
Speaker 7: You know, they didn't have the missing children's yet, they
Speaker 7: didn't have none of that stuff. When she was talking
Speaker 7: with the police, as she was going through the different
Speaker 7: states and everything, they were telling her that there was
Speaker 7: nothing that they can do because she was married to him.
Speaker 4: Legally, he had the right to take them.
Speaker 3: At that time, I called the FBI about it. They
Speaker 3: couldn't comment on Susie's case in particular or what law
Speaker 3: should have protected her, but they tell me something incredible.
Speaker 3: They never found a missing person's report for Susy. Authorities
Speaker 3: in North Carolina didn't take one, which is why Susy
Speaker 3: was never in any databasis like NamUs. This was nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy five. It wasn't a crime to take your step
Speaker 3: child away from their biological parent. It wasn't kidnapping. But
Speaker 3: Sandy's instincts told her something was really wrong, so she
Speaker 3: went to the Salvation Army, which has a program that
Speaker 3: reconnects lost relatives.
Speaker 5: I mean when I went to the Salvation Army and
Speaker 5: told them what they said, You know, you were married
Speaker 5: to him. There's nothing we can do to help. And
Speaker 5: they looked at me like, you're a woman, Just get
Speaker 5: on with the program.
Speaker 3: And Sandy said her own flesh and blood barely registered
Speaker 3: that their granddaughter was missing.
Speaker 5: The Tulsa police called my mom and dad, and my
Speaker 5: mom and dad said, oh, well, let her do what
Speaker 5: she wants to do, and that was the end of that.
Speaker 3: Her parents wouldn't come to Oklahoma and help her search.
Speaker 3: Sandy looked everwhere she could think of, but never saw
Speaker 3: her missing husband or her missing daughter.
Speaker 5: Susie never saw him, never saw them, didn't know anything
Speaker 5: about what was going on.
Speaker 3: Eventually, Sandy had to face what she didn't want to face,
Speaker 3: that without the help of authorities, she had an uphill
Speaker 3: battle ahead of her. She couldn't keep hitchhiking forever. She
Speaker 3: had to settle down and make a home for the
Speaker 3: children she still had. That's how it came to me
Speaker 3: that two of Sandy's girls grew up with her in Virginia,
Speaker 3: but Steve and Susie didn't. Sandy tell me some of
Speaker 3: the story on the phone. What did you think could
Speaker 3: have been happening to her. What was your imagination, like,
Speaker 3: what is he doing with this child?
Speaker 6: No? No, at that point, I didn't think he was
Speaker 6: doing anything like that at all. And I think now
Speaker 6: that I look back on it, that was really naive
Speaker 6: on my part, because to him, she was a princess.
Speaker 6: He could do nothing wrong. If she hit Alison or
Speaker 6: hit Amy, it was Alison or Amy's fault, it was
Speaker 6: her faults.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 6: She never did anything wrong.
Speaker 3: Sandy knew him as Brandon Williams, but his real name
Speaker 3: was Franklin Floyd. By this point he had been terrible
Speaker 3: to her. She knew he had a temper, but couldn't
Speaker 3: imagine he had hurt Susie.
Speaker 6: And he just wanted her is what I thought. I
Speaker 6: never thought it would be the nightmare it was.
Speaker 3: My name is Todd Matthews and this is hello John Doe,
Speaker 3: A sleuth, a family, and a serial killer. The story
Speaker 3: of a family torn apart by tragedy, and my quest
Speaker 3: to bring them back together. Chapter four, The Honda. Since
Speaker 3: I started digging into Steve's life, I learned that he
Speaker 3: was living with his adopted parents in North Carolina, not
Speaker 3: that far from where Sandy gave birth to him. But
Speaker 3: Sandy didn't know that because, as it turns out, she
Speaker 3: wasn't working with the same clues I had, And you
Speaker 3: didn't know to find Mary.
Speaker 4: No, I did not know.
Speaker 3: That's because Sandy's recollection of the adoption is pretty different
Speaker 3: than Mary's. Mary said she got Steve from a trailer
Speaker 3: park in nineteen seventy four, just six weeks after he
Speaker 3: was born. The way Sandy remembered it, she had six
Speaker 3: months with Steve before Floyd started talking about moving. They
Speaker 3: were going to pile into his Honda and head to
Speaker 3: Saint Louis.
Speaker 5: And he said, we don't have room for everybody in
Speaker 5: the car. And we drove one night to Mary's house
Speaker 5: and took Steve and left him there. And I cried
Speaker 5: the whole way back, and he said, we'll go back
Speaker 5: and get him.
Speaker 4: We'll go back and get him. We'll go back and
Speaker 4: get him.
Speaker 3: Here's what's weird. Mary and Sandy's story seemed to diverge
Speaker 3: at every turn, but in the then diagram of mary
Speaker 3: Memory and Sandy's, the tiny car was the overlap. Sandy
Speaker 3: said the car was too small to bring everyone, even
Speaker 3: an infant, and Mary remembered a tiny car too. It
Speaker 3: had two doors and a small engine in front. When
Speaker 3: Sandy was handing Steve over to her in the trailer part,
Speaker 3: Mary said she noticed Floyd in the front seat and
Speaker 3: three little ones in the back. I'll admit this tripped
Speaker 3: me up a bed. It made Sandy's story feel more
Speaker 3: true either way. Sandy said she left Steve because she
Speaker 3: thought they would come back and get him. Their separation
Speaker 3: was only temporary.
Speaker 5: He said they were Georgia and Mary Washington, is what
Speaker 5: he told me their names were. And of course I
Speaker 5: was still thinking, I know, I was still not thinking
Speaker 5: real clearly.
Speaker 4: How did you feel when they just dropped him off?
Speaker 5: Oh? I was upset, very upset. But I remember giving
Speaker 5: him to Mary. I remember handing him to Mary and saying,
Speaker 5: Mommy will be back to get you. Just give mommy
Speaker 5: a chance to get where she's going to. Mommy come
Speaker 5: back and get you, and kissing him.
Speaker 3: And they continued on their trip in the Honda that
Speaker 3: apparently didn't have room for four kids.
Speaker 5: Well, when we lived in Saint Louis, we still had
Speaker 5: the Honda and life always.
Speaker 4: You know, we're going this weekend to get Steve. We're
Speaker 4: going this weekend.
Speaker 8: No, no, no, no.
Speaker 4: And then finally he said, you'll never get him back.
Speaker 3: Even when she did look after she went to jail,
Speaker 3: she couldn't find Steve.
Speaker 5: And I couldn't find Mary and George Washington anywhere in
Speaker 5: North Carolina in that area.
Speaker 3: Now it's possible Mary Washington is Mary Patterson. Floyd used
Speaker 3: a ton of alienses. Maybe he changed Mary's last name
Speaker 3: to make her untraceable. Still, the timing doesn't line up.
Speaker 4: But I don't know how he knew Mary. That's what
Speaker 4: I don't understand.
Speaker 3: Maybe from the hospital.
Speaker 5: He wasn't there when I had Steve. I didn't even
Speaker 5: know him when I had Steve. I met him after.
Speaker 4: I had Steve.
Speaker 3: My producer Kate and I sat there with Sandy Parson
Speaker 3: through the past trying to figure out how to square
Speaker 3: Sandy's regulations with Mary's. Sometimes it was frustrating. I felt
Speaker 3: like I'd shown up at Sandy's with a clear mission
Speaker 3: to learn as much about Steve's adoption as I could
Speaker 3: and bring those morsels of information back to him. But
Speaker 3: there were some inconsistencies. Mary says Steve was adopted after
Speaker 3: six weeks. Sandy says six months and the second thing.
Speaker 3: They both remember the handoff happening in a trailer part,
Speaker 3: but Mary thinks it's one in North Carolina, and Sandy
Speaker 3: remembers driving out of state to give Steve up.
Speaker 5: I don't know what I could have done. I really
Speaker 5: don't know what I could have done. And I tried
Speaker 5: everything I could do, but it still wasn't enough. And
Speaker 5: I could understand from his point of view, feeling like,
Speaker 5: why didn't.
Speaker 4: You try hard?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Why didn't you you do more?
Speaker 3: This was nineteen seventy five, around the time the tent
Speaker 3: Girl went missing and my father in law, Wilbur founder
Speaker 3: in Kentucky. Finding missing children was even harder than it
Speaker 3: is today. We used to say it name is that
Speaker 3: children lay fewer clues behind, they leave smaller footprints. It
Speaker 3: was hard. It was hard. We didn't have cell phones,
Speaker 3: we didn't have the internet. It's exactly how he felt.
Speaker 3: He doesn't understand why, because he felt like you knew
Speaker 3: where he was, but you do.
Speaker 4: Know, Oh, I wish I hadn't known where he was.
Speaker 3: What would you say to Steve if you could talk
Speaker 3: to him right now?
Speaker 4: I still love him.
Speaker 5: I still see this little baby, and I'm I'm so.
Speaker 4: Sorry about what I let be done.
Speaker 5: But on the other hand, what was done was a
Speaker 5: blessing because he wasn't a part of all this.
Speaker 3: Sandy didn't know it at the time, but in giving
Speaker 3: Steve away, she shielded him from a serial killer. She
Speaker 3: possibly saved his life. Later on, Sandy shared some of
Speaker 3: Steve's Facebook messages with us. He'd sent them back in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty one. When I read them, my heart just sank.
Speaker 3: He wrote, why did you leave me? You said there
Speaker 3: was an excuse? Was it me? Was I not good enough?
Speaker 3: I am curious? Yet, in her telling, Sandy didn't intend
Speaker 3: to give Steve up permanently, and she did look for
Speaker 3: him in the immediate aftermath, but so many things stood
Speaker 3: in her way, including not knowing Mary's real last name.
Speaker 3: After I got home from my trip to see Sandy,
Speaker 3: my mind kept racing. I had to tell Steve all
Speaker 3: of this. I set up in time to play him
Speaker 3: some of Sandy's interview. At this point that only ever texted.
Speaker 3: They hadn't talked on the phone or met in person,
Speaker 3: but Steve pushing off our meeting until one Saturday he
Speaker 3: said he was ready. Janette, of course, was my side.
Speaker 9: He guys, I would expecting it today, but it's a
Speaker 9: pleasant surprise.
Speaker 1: Okay, are we all here?
Speaker 4: Let me speaker.
Speaker 10: We might walk out to the car and see if
Speaker 10: we could hear better out in the car, because we
Speaker 10: can't really hear you, guys, very good.
Speaker 11: Hold on, I gotta find the keys. I'm not prepared.
Speaker 8: I'm far Linda, we grabbed sleep per second. Thank you, honey.
Speaker 9: I'm a cat person.
Speaker 10: Are you a quieter?
Speaker 11: I promise you that.
Speaker 3: I wanted him to hear what we heard when we
Speaker 3: were with Sandy her side of the story this Saturday
Speaker 3: in June. He was down to listen.
Speaker 9: We're going to let you hear a little bit of
Speaker 9: a tape.
Speaker 3: So I had him listen to her story about the
Speaker 3: tornado and how she started to spiral afterward.
Speaker 5: The girls were traumatized by the tornado because we were
Speaker 5: in the trailer when the tornado hit and we had
Speaker 5: no way out, and I guess I snacked at I
Speaker 5: didn't know what to do.
Speaker 9: What do you think about that?
Speaker 8: All right? All right?
Speaker 3: Steve and Jeanette don't own a computer, so we were
Speaker 3: talking on the phone, not on zoom. They connected the
Speaker 3: phone to the car's bluetost that they could hear us,
Speaker 3: which made Steve feel even farther away. I couldn't see
Speaker 3: his face, but he seemed absent. Sandy says that she
Speaker 3: was suffering from PTSD after a tornado wrecked her house,
Speaker 3: and then she was barely functioning as a mother, and
Speaker 3: she's admitted that. She said that there was a lot
Speaker 3: of things she didn't remember, and she was traumatized, and
Speaker 3: she said she didn't feel like she could take care
Speaker 3: of kids. How seriously, Steve, do you take that Sandy
Speaker 3: claims to have PTSD after a trailer was blown away.
Speaker 11: He still having a hard time.
Speaker 8: Thinking that she is not a terrible person.
Speaker 3: Steve seem excited to get on the phone with us,
Speaker 3: and I know Steve to be a pretty soft spoken dude,
Speaker 3: but by this point in the call, he barely said
Speaker 3: a word, and when he did, his emotions seemed muted.
Speaker 3: I was hopeful they're hearing the tape would change something
Speaker 3: for him. I wanted him to hear Sandy describe the
Speaker 3: impact Franklin Floyd had on her, how he had taken
Speaker 3: over her life.
Speaker 5: He destroyed all my pictures, most of my pictures of
Speaker 5: my children, the girls, so.
Speaker 3: You take everything, every memory everything.
Speaker 1: How does that make you feel?
Speaker 8: He does yeh, he might need to say, okay.
Speaker 1: That's okay, let's take a minute.
Speaker 9: It was a very different memory, you know.
Speaker 10: He he doesn't know about any of the time that
Speaker 10: he was with them, never heard about any of that.
Speaker 1: She doesn't remembered handing you off to Mary, which was
Speaker 1: surprising to me. And I wonder if that's surprising to you, Steve.
Speaker 8: Okay, it's not to me, then why not. I just
Speaker 8: think she's a manipulator.
Speaker 10: And I don't know, I want to I'm the type
Speaker 10: of person that sees the good in anybody that after
Speaker 10: watching how what he's went through, and I just hope
Speaker 10: that she's just not trying to manipulate this as well.
Speaker 9: Well. And there wasn't a lot of resources. Just imagine
Speaker 9: if we had do network or name this.
Speaker 3: Back in see if Y asked you wouldn't let us
Speaker 3: call you a missing person. That we did anyway with
Speaker 3: dot network because it's not regulating by the government, so
Speaker 3: I could do whatever we.
Speaker 8: Wanting, which was a blessing for us.
Speaker 9: So it worked, I mean, it finally worked. It took
Speaker 9: about a half about forty five years, but it finally worked.
Speaker 3: There's no doubt Sandy would have benefited from the dough network.
Speaker 3: Think of all the volunteers who could have helped her
Speaker 3: find clues. By now, Jeanette and I were the only
Speaker 3: ones talking. Something was wrong with Steve. I recognize what
Speaker 3: was happening because I've done it myself. I think Steven
Speaker 3: drunk too much to numb himself. Maybe it's the only
Speaker 3: way he could get on this call with us. There
Speaker 3: was a lot to take in all this time. Steve
Speaker 3: had assumed Sandy didn't want him, but she told us
Speaker 3: that she didn't. We played him to take.
Speaker 5: I honestly thought we were leaving Steve with friends of
Speaker 5: his to come back and get him, like in a week.
Speaker 5: But I remember giving him to Mary. I remember handing
Speaker 5: him to Mary and saying, Mommy will be back to
Speaker 5: get you. Just give mommy a chance to get where
Speaker 5: she's going and Mommy will come back and get you,
Speaker 5: and kissing him.
Speaker 3: It was hard to tell how much of this sunk in.
Speaker 3: He didn't say a thing after replayed him this stunning revelation.
Speaker 3: Sandy or none of them want to force you to
Speaker 3: do anything you don't want to do. But you're practically
Speaker 3: begging have something to do with you. So does that
Speaker 3: do you not feel loved and wanting? I do that
Speaker 3: because you had to hear it with your own ears, right, Yeah?
Speaker 1: Is there a part of that that changed for you?
Speaker 1: Or what? What did anyone say that changed that for you?
Speaker 8: Got this? I want to be warning he wants to
Speaker 8: be wanted.
Speaker 3: After about an hour on the phone with Steve, this
Speaker 3: felt like something. Hearing Sandy's voice yielded a small breakthrough.
Speaker 3: Steve admitted he wants to be wanting. In the weeks
Speaker 3: that followed, I tried calling step again, wanting to update
Speaker 3: him on the other things I'd learned. Sometimes he texted
Speaker 3: me back and returned my calls, but sometimes he didn't.
Speaker 3: I could tell this was hard on him. I think
Speaker 3: he was reluctant to confront this hat on take on
Speaker 3: fifty years of reckoning all at once. I think Steve
Speaker 3: believed that Sandy had deliberately written him and Susie out
Speaker 3: of her life, that once they were gone, they were gone.
Speaker 3: But in talking to her other kids, I soon found
Speaker 3: out that she never forgot about the two she lost,
Speaker 3: even when she didn't always want to talk about it.
Speaker 3: As she entered her late twenties, Sandy's life began to
Speaker 3: fall into place. She went to a mental health group
Speaker 3: where she talked about losing Susie and Steve. She got
Speaker 3: married once more, and then finally to Carson Willett, her
Speaker 3: husband of thirty years.
Speaker 6: My kids at first, believeing my kids. We were living
Speaker 6: in an apartment and we didn't have much. We didn't
Speaker 6: have a TV. The first thing he did was the
Speaker 6: next day he came back and in at te for
Speaker 6: the kids. He said, no kids should be without a TV.
Speaker 3: She had three more children, two boys and one more girl. Dorothy,
Speaker 3: her youngest, told me that present day Sandy might be
Speaker 3: unrecognizable to her younger self.
Speaker 11: She's a caregiver. That's all she is. She's just a caregiver.
Speaker 11: She will give you anything and everything that she If.
Speaker 7: She's got five dollars in her pocketing, you need three
Speaker 7: of it, she's gonna give it to you.
Speaker 11: Yeah, she's always taken care of us kids.
Speaker 3: Dorothy only knows this Sandy. She never knew her mother
Speaker 3: after the tornado, when she was inconsolable, when she could
Speaker 3: barely take care of herself, let alone her children. But
Speaker 3: that doesn't mean, Dorothy doesn't question some of her mom's choices.
Speaker 11: You know, I told my mom. I was like, you're stupid.
Speaker 11: I was like, why don't you call your mom and dad.
Speaker 7: She said that her mom and dad didn't want anything
Speaker 7: to do with her because they thought that she was
Speaker 7: a whore. And my mom was never a whore. She
Speaker 7: drank a lot, but she was never a whore. It's
Speaker 7: not like she didn't look for them.
Speaker 4: She did.
Speaker 11: She was hitchhiking to go find them. It's not like
Speaker 11: she gave.
Speaker 3: Up, Dorothy said. Sandy always lived with hardape. Two of
Speaker 3: her children were gone without a trace, maybe missing, maybe dead,
Speaker 3: and it's the story her surviving five kids came to
Speaker 3: understand too. Here's Amy again. She drives a school bus
Speaker 3: in rural Virginia and it has an infectious belly laughing.
Speaker 12: I remember at one time, I saw a picture once
Speaker 12: of the three of us sitting on Santa Claus's lap,
Speaker 12: and I think I was two. I was really small,
Speaker 12: and then Alison was sitting on one leg and Susan
Speaker 12: was standing beside Allison.
Speaker 8: I think.
Speaker 3: Amy's tried to conjure memories of her big sister. She
Speaker 3: calls her Susan. But Amy was so young.
Speaker 12: I'm gonna have pictures of her now, But that was
Speaker 12: the only picture I'd ever seen, and I tried so
Speaker 12: hard to remember that, and I can't.
Speaker 8: It was that was it.
Speaker 3: In the past, Amy's been frustrated by the holes in
Speaker 3: her mom's memory, just like Steve.
Speaker 12: It's always been an ongoing thing. But when you try
Speaker 12: to talk to her about certain things when we were little,
Speaker 12: she would change the subject real quick, just like, get
Speaker 12: away from that, or tell you that's grown food business
Speaker 12: in stead of grown folk business.
Speaker 3: Sandy doesn't dispute this. When the kids were young, she
Speaker 3: didn't think they were old enough to understand. In fact,
Speaker 3: she said, they wonder why Floyd didn't take them, as
Speaker 3: if Susie was on a permanent vacation or something.
Speaker 6: We never had a lot of money or anything when
Speaker 6: they were growing up, and they thought, I think that
Speaker 6: she had a better life than Nigga, you know, like
Speaker 6: they were kids, like they were missing out on something.
Speaker 3: But by the time Dorothy, the youngest, became an adult,
Speaker 3: she got more of the full story. Because Sandy's way
Speaker 3: of talking about the loss evolved over time, Dorothy knew
Speaker 3: about Susie and Steve, who were gone before she was born.
Speaker 3: She studied the pictures of Susie, trying to figure out
Speaker 3: the whole story. She knew that she had two elder
Speaker 3: siblings that weren't around, but that was it.
Speaker 11: My mom didn't have any baby pictures of them, but.
Speaker 7: I didn't know about Susie. I'm like, Mom, who's this?
Speaker 7: You know, I don't see her. And then she went
Speaker 7: into the long, you know, telling me what happened. And
Speaker 7: then she said that she also had a son too,
Speaker 7: and I was like, okay, I'm like, well, where's he at?
Speaker 11: I thing?
Speaker 7: I was like eight or nine years old when that happened.
Speaker 7: She explained everything to me.
Speaker 3: I don't think Steve's wrong for expressing some skepticism about
Speaker 3: his mom and why she doesn't remember. Even her daughter's
Speaker 3: a little skeptical of their own mom. Dorothy name. You
Speaker 3: lived close to Sandy and see her often. They know
Speaker 3: she feels ashamed. Here's Dorothy again, and.
Speaker 7: Yes, she regrets that she didn't do everything that she could,
Speaker 7: and yes she's putting a lot of the stuff on her,
Speaker 7: the blame on herself. And I'm like, Mom, you know
Speaker 7: it's not just your fault.
Speaker 3: The way Dorothy sees it, there's a lot of blame
Speaker 3: to go around. She also points a finger at Mary,
Speaker 3: Steve's adoptive mom.
Speaker 7: You know, I just I look at things different than
Speaker 7: everybody else does. I guess you know you have my
Speaker 7: brother the whole time, but yet you wouldn't give them
Speaker 7: back to my mom.
Speaker 3: But Sandy didn't have any contact with Mary and Baum.
Speaker 3: It's not like they knew she was looking for Steve.
Speaker 11: You know, I'm not just going to point the finger
Speaker 11: at them.
Speaker 7: A point the finger at Franklin too, you know, And
Speaker 7: I'm pointing the finger at my mom. I don't just
Speaker 7: sit there and single out anybody.
Speaker 3: I can see where she's coming from. Each person played
Speaker 3: a little role at keeping Steve loss for fifty years.
Speaker 3: He grew up without knowing who his people were. But
Speaker 3: in this story, there's only one man that broke up
Speaker 3: this family, one kidnapper, one serial killer. I think he's
Speaker 3: the one that deserves all of the anger and blame.
Speaker 3: Sandy said she never gave up hope.
Speaker 6: I am friends on Facebook with seven Philip Stephen Brandenburg
Speaker 6: because I always thought that one of them might be him.
Speaker 3: Maybe she'd see a little blond boy who kind of
Speaker 3: looked the same and watch him for a second too long,
Speaker 3: wondering who he belonged to. Was he Philip Stephen Brandenburg?
Speaker 3: Or should get a glimpse of a little girl with
Speaker 3: curly hair and sapphire blue eyes at the shopping mall
Speaker 3: and Philip pool is that her? In the early nineteen eighties,
Speaker 3: missing kids became a bigger deal in America. This is
Speaker 3: around the time the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Speaker 3: chill and was founding. There was this campaign get the
Speaker 3: faces of missing kids on the backs of milk cartons.
Speaker 3: The idea was to get the word out.
Speaker 5: If there were faces on milk cartons, I would buy
Speaker 5: everything of milk that they.
Speaker 4: Had to see if it was my kids.
Speaker 5: And at one point my parents told me that they
Speaker 5: knew where Susie was.
Speaker 3: Were they trying to make you feel better?
Speaker 4: Or oh no, trying to make me feel worse.
Speaker 3: And then in twenty nineteen, Steve found her. You know
Speaker 3: the story. He found her on Facebook where she had
Speaker 3: been looking for him.
Speaker 4: I was crying so bad.
Speaker 8: I don't even know.
Speaker 10: One.
Speaker 5: I didn't know how he found me when I couldn't
Speaker 5: find him, because I thought I was doing everything, but
Speaker 5: obviously I wasn't. But that's neither here nor there. And
Speaker 5: I was so excited he was alive and at the
Speaker 5: time he said he had a good life.
Speaker 3: Was emotional. She had to process all of this, that
Speaker 3: her child was alive and that maybe he had a
Speaker 3: better life without her.
Speaker 5: Bittersweet, Yes, I cry a lot anyway, but happy tears
Speaker 5: and sad tears because I missed all those years, but
Speaker 5: happy tears that he was safe and he was happy
Speaker 5: or fairly hey. He said he wasn't super happy, but
Speaker 5: he was fairly happy.
Speaker 3: Steve, for his part, still isn't sure he wants to
Speaker 3: meet Sandy.
Speaker 5: I don't want to push him. It's at this point
Speaker 5: in time, it isn't what I want. It's what he
Speaker 5: wants and what he needs more.
Speaker 4: Than what I need.
Speaker 3: To Sandy, it was a miracle that Steve was alive
Speaker 3: and came back into her life. I think that's part
Speaker 3: of the reason she'd like to know him. She wasn't
Speaker 3: afforded that miracle, was Susy. After she was taking at six,
Speaker 3: Sandy never saw her again. When I was talking to
Speaker 3: Sandy at her house in Virginia, her granddaughter Autumn was
Speaker 3: kind of moving room to room. At this point, she
Speaker 3: was nine months pregnant and ready to pop, starting to
Speaker 3: think about the next generation of her family and the
Speaker 3: stories that would be passed down. It seemed like she
Speaker 3: was listening to our conversation or that she had something
Speaker 3: to ask. Turns out she did.
Speaker 4: Why was it, Susie.
Speaker 3: It's the same question her aunts asked so many years ago.
Speaker 3: Why Susie? Why deployed run away with the oldest?
Speaker 4: Okay, why did he choose her? Okay, I'll start at
Speaker 4: the bottom.
Speaker 5: He didn't choose Amy because he thought Amy was a
Speaker 5: little chubby Amy. Amy's always been, never been skinny of
Speaker 5: day in her life. Not a bad thing, but she
Speaker 5: was a cute, little chubby baby. He did not like
Speaker 5: Amy because she was a hard headed to a herd
Speaker 5: headed two year old. He didn't like it Alison, Alison
Speaker 5: had health problems. Susie, he said, was the perfect child
Speaker 5: sent from God to him. God. She says that God
Speaker 5: gave her to him, That's why he took her.
Speaker 3: Hearing this felt like a real punch in the gut.
Speaker 3: How Sandy remembered exactly the way Floyd talked about her children.
Speaker 3: Susie said her because Bloyd bleded she belonged to him.
Speaker 3: The rest were saved because of their apparent imperfections. It's
Speaker 3: this deranged thinking that would alter everyone's lives forever. Sandy
Speaker 3: would find Steve in twenty nineteen, but Susie stayed missing,
Speaker 3: even though her mother had been real close to finding
Speaker 3: Susie back in her nineteen seventy five hitchhiking trip.
Speaker 5: In fact, I had stopped in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and that's
Speaker 5: where he was.
Speaker 4: With her, but I didn't know he passed right.
Speaker 3: Fine, Yeah, Floyd spent the next twenty years traveling with
Speaker 3: her from state to state under the radar. We need
Speaker 3: to realize that he had a criminal record.
Speaker 6: Maybe back until ten years after he had disappeared.
Speaker 3: He was a fugitive, had been on the run since
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy three, before he had even met Sandy. He
Speaker 3: was avayin charges for kidnapping. This kidnapping wasn't his first
Speaker 3: and it wouldn't be his last. Next time on Hello
Speaker 3: John Doe.
Speaker 13: Just the kidnapping was straightforward, like a lot of kidnapping cases.
Speaker 13: And then when you find out that he kidnapped the
Speaker 13: boy's mother and you find out he killed somebody else
Speaker 13: and he had the evidence. Yeah, they got convoluted.
Speaker 8: Then for sure, people didn't talk about what happened in
Speaker 8: people's houses, so nobody would have thought anything different.
Speaker 3: So after the story came out, it was very eye
Speaker 3: opening for all of us because none of us would
Speaker 3: have ever thought she lived the life she lived. Hello
Speaker 3: John Doe is an original productions by Revelations Entertainment in
Speaker 3: association with First and Last Productions from Revelation. Our executive
Speaker 3: producers are Morgan Freeman and James Younger from First to Last.
Speaker 3: Lindsay Moreno is the executive producer. Our producing partner is
Speaker 3: ne On Hume Media. It was written and produced by
Speaker 3: Kate Michigan. Our editor is Katherine Saint Louis. She is
Speaker 3: also nil On Home Media's executive editor. Our executive producer
Speaker 3: is Sharah Morris. Our development producer is Ian Lindsay. Our
Speaker 3: associate producer is Rufaro Faith Maserua. Sound design and mixing
Speaker 3: by Scott Summerville. Theme and original music composed by Jesse Pearlsting.
Speaker 3: Additional music came from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions.
Speaker 3: Frendall Faulton is our fact checker our production manager is
Speaker 3: Samantha Allison from my Heart Media. Dylan Fagan is our
Speaker 3: executive producer. Special thanks to Adelia Reuben at Nion Hume
Speaker 3: and Carrie Lieberman and Will Pearson at iHeartMedia. I'm Todd Matthews.
Speaker 3: You can learn more about name us at nam us
Speaker 3: dot com. The number for the National Center for Missing
Speaker 3: Exploited Children's Call Center is one eight hundred the loss
Speaker 3: that's one eight hundred, eight four three five six seven eight.
Speaker 3: The National Sexual Assauld Hotline from the Rate Abuse and
Speaker 3: Incest National Network is one eight hundred six five six
Speaker 3: core six seven three. Okay, guys, this is the end
Speaker 3: of the show. If you didn't like it, don't do anything.
Speaker 3: But if you did like it, you make sure that
Speaker 3: you rate and review the show. It helps more people
Speaker 3: to find it and hear this wonderful story. Thanks again
Speaker 3: for listening.