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The Photograph That Rewrote Two Lives - Missing Man Returns After 38 Years · Adoption Reunion Stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: A photograph sits on a library's lost and found shelf
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: in Thornfield, Minnesota. It shows a young woman standing on
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: the deck of a ferry, smiling into bright Aegean sun.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: On the back, in her own handwriting, I thought you
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: were gone too. The woman has no memory of writing
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: those words, and the boy who took the picture had
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: been listed as dead for 38 years. The ferry was
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: called the Aeolus Star. It went down in September of 1981,
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: 12 nautical miles north of the island of Lesbos. 38
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: years later, a photograph from its deck turned up inside
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: a donated library book in a small Minnesota town, and
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: two people who had each spent decades believing the other
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: was gone were about to find out the truth. This
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: is the story of Gail Adams and Tom Keeler. In
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: September of 2019, Gail Adams was 57 years old and
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: had lived in a rental duplex on the east side
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: of Thornfield, Minnesota, for 11 years. She worked as a transcriptionist,
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: starting at 4 in the morning and finishing by noon.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: The hours suited her. She had built a life that
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: was quiet by design, not by default. Every September, without fail,
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: she planted garlic. Her neighbor Diane Chu once asked her
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: why garlic specifically and why always in September. Gail told
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: her that she needed her hands to be doing something
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: in September. She did not say more than that, and
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: Diane did not press. In September of 1981, Gail had
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: been 19 years old, and aboard a cargo ferry in
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: the Aegean Sea. She was pulled from the water after
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: the Eola Star foundered. She had a concussion, two cracked ribs,
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: and a broken wrist. She was alive. At the hospital
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: on Lesbos, someone told her that the American students she
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: had been traveling near, a young man named Tom Keeler,
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: had not made it. She carried that for 38 years.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: By 2019, Tom Keeler was a marine biologist working for
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: a fisheries consortium in Bergen, Norway. He had built his
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: career around the sea, which is either the most natural
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: thing in the world for a wreck survivor or the
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: least obvious, depending on how you look at it. He
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: had been a marine biology student in 1981 when he
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: boarded the Aeola Star. He was pulled from the debris
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: by a fishing vessel at the same hospital on Lesbos
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: through the same interpreter Tom was told he was the
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: sole American survivor. Both of them left that island believing
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: the other was dead. Both of them were wrong. And
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: the interpreter who delivered those messages, working with approximate English,
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: had in a single afternoon written two people out of
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: each other's lives for nearly four decades. In 2017, Killer
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: self-published a short memoir. He called it Adrift, Notes on
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: Water and Survival. Fewer than 300 copies existed. It was
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: not reviewed. It was not carried by any library. In it,
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: he referred to a fellow passenger from the wreck only
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: as G. In 1994, Gale had published a three-page essay
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: in a small Minnesota literary magazine. She called it September Water.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: The magazine listed her city, but no contact information. It
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: ceased publication in 2001. Back issues sat in a university
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: archive in St. Paul, undigitized. Two people. Two small texts.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: Neither one knew the other had written anything at all.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: That would not last. Brian Peterson was 51 years old
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: and had spent two decades cataloging the dead. Not out
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: of morbidity. Peterson was a maritime historian. Based in Duluth
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: and casualty records were his materials. the formal language of
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: ships that went down and people who didn't come back up.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: He published a newsletter to roughly 800 subscribers. He corresponded
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: with retired mariners. He read obscure memoirs that no one
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: else had ordered. In August of 2019, a retired Norwegian-American
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: merchant mariner named Carl Hedstrom mentioned something in a letter.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: Hedstrom had written his own memoir, 18 Hours Later. Back
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: in 1996, about 2,400 copies sold. In the letter, he
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: mentioned a newer book, a self-published thing, fewer than 300 copies,
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: by a marine biologist in Bergen named Tom Keeler. Peterson
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: ordered it. And in the same session, the same afternoon,
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: according to his own account, Peterson searched the name Aeola Starr.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: and found a three-page essay in a literary magazine from 1994.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: The magazine had ceased publication in 2001. Back Issues sat
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: in a university archive in St. Paul, undigitized. The essay
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: was called September Water. The author was listed with a city,
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: but no contact information, two documents. Found within hours of
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: each other, Neither author knew the other had written anything.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: Peterson sat with that for a moment. Here is what
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: he had in front of him, a memoir in which
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: a man named Killer referred throughout to a fellow passenger
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: he called Only G, a woman who had written a
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: three-page essay about surviving a ferry wreck in the Aegean
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: in September of 1981, the same ferry, the same September,
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: and both of them in their respective texts, writing about
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: a person they believed had died in that water. Peterson
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: did not rush. He confirmed the overlap in the records.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: He found Gail Adams in Thornfield, Minnesota. She had lived
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: in the same rental duplex on the east side of
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: town for 11 years. He found a current email address
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: for Tom Keeler at his fisheries consortium in Bergen. Then
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: he wrote Gail a letter, not an email. A letter,
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: by hand, mailed first week of September 2019. He included
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: two photocopied pages from Keeler's memoir. He included a handwritten
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: note that said, according to his later account, he is alive.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: He is in Bergen. I have his email address if
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: you want it. That letter sat in Gail Adams's mailbox.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: Gail Adams received the letter on a Thursday. She was
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: 57 years old. She worked as a transcriptionist, four in
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: the morning until noon, which meant her afternoons were long
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: and often quiet. She had lived in Thornfield for 11 years.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: She had been married once to a man named Jeff Adams,
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: the marriage lasting about six years, ending without bitterness, the
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: surname staying. She planted garlic every September. Her neighbour Diane
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: Chu knew why. She read the letter six times. Then
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: she went bowling. She scored 128. Then she got in
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: her car, drove out of town and pulled over on
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: a county road. She sat in the dark for 20 minutes.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: Then she drove home and emailed Brian Peterson asking for
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: Tom Keeler's address. There is something in that sequence worth
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: pausing over. The bowling, the county road, The 20 minutes.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: This was not a woman falling apart. This was a
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: woman who had, for 38 years, kept a proportionate relationship
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: with something unresolvable. She had written about the wreck once,
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: in 1994. She had written twice to the Greek Coast Guard,
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: once in 1993 and again in 2004, asking for the
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: survivalist by name. Both times she received only a confirmation
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: of the number. 33 recovered alive, no names. She had
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: set a limit and held to it, and now the
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: limit no longer applied. Four days of email passed between
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: Gail and Tom, cautious at first, then less cautious. The
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: record of those emails is private, but both have described them,
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: in separate accounts, as strange and careful, and then suddenly
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: not careful at all. In the third week of September 2019,
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: Tom Keeler flew from Bergen to Minneapolis. They met at
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: the airport. They talked for six hours. There is still
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: one thing that has not been resolved, and it changes
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: how you read everything that came before it. Walk back
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: to September of 2019, a few weeks before Peterson's letter arrived.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: a 16-year-old named Gloria Walker was doing outreach deliveries for
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: the Thornfield Public Library. She was loading or unloading returned
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: materials when a photograph slipped from a returned canvas bag
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: onto her passenger seat. She looked at it, a woman
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: on the deck of a boat, clear sky, before any storm.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: On the back, in what Gail Adams would later confess,
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: was her own handwriting. I thought you were gone too.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: Gloria Walker didn't know whose photograph it was. She put
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: it on the library's lost and found shelf. The book
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: the photograph had been tucked inside was a library copy
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: of Carl Hedstrom's 18 Hours, the memoir published in 1996.
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: The same memoir Carl Hedstrom had written. The same Carl
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: Hedstrom who had, in a letter to Brian Peterson, mentioned
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: Tom Keeler's name, the library's acquisition record for that copy
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: listed the source as Donor Unknown. Donated before 2010. Picture
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: what that means for a moment. a photograph of Gail
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: Adams on the deck of the Eyeless Star, taken by
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: Tom Kaler, a boy who would be listed as dead
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: within weeks, found inside a book written by a man
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: whose correspondence would, in the summer of 2019, set everything
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: in motion. The photograph arrived at the Thornfield Public Library.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: in the same small town where Gale had lived for
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: 11 years before 2010. Years before Peterson found either text,
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: years before Keeler published his memoir, everything pointed toward coincidence.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: An extraordinary architectural coincidence, object and person and city aligned
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: before anyone was looking. But that version has a seam
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: in it because the photograph had something written on the back.
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: In Gail's handwriting, I thought you were gone too. She
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: has no memory of writing it. She doesn't dispute that
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: the handwriting is hers. She simply cannot account for the
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: moment it was written or where the photograph went afterward.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: Brian Peterson published a theory with an explicit caveat that
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: it was unconfirmed. He proposed that in the mid-1990s, not
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: long after September Water was published, Gail may have mailed
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: the photograph to Hedstrom's publisher, a letter accompanying it that
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: did not survive. The photograph may have entered a review
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: copy or a donated copy. Travelled through hands, Peterson cannot trace,
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: and eventually been given to the Thornfield Public Library by
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: an unknown donor sometime before 2010. It is a credible sequence.
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: Every step in it is possible. Gail Adams has neither
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: confirmed nor denied it. What she has said on the
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: record is that the photograph is now on her kitchen table,
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: that Tom Killer has seen it, that he cried, and
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: that the question of how it traveled from a boat
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: deck in 1981 to a library shelf in Thornfield, Minnesota,
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: passing through the hands of the one person whose memoir
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: would eventually connect two survivors, may simply never have a
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: clean answer. There are reunions that resolve everything neatly. This
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: is not one of them. The photograph is real. The
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: handwriting is real. The chain of paper and memory and
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: quiet searching, the small texts that almost no one read,
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: all of it converged in a town in Minnesota in
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: September of 2019, 38 years after the water. The third
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: week of September 2019, Tom Killer flew from Bergen to Minneapolis.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: He had spent four days exchanging emails with a woman
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: he last saw on a ferry deck in 1981. The
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: emails started carefully. They became less careful. He booked the
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: flight on the second day. Gail Adams drove to the airport.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: She has not said what she wore or what she
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: told herself on the way. What she has said is
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: that she recognized him immediately. She has not elaborated on
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: what that felt like. They sat at a bar near
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: the departures level and talked for six hours. Neither of
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: them has characterized that conversation as easy or as what
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: they expected. Killer has said it was strange. Gail has
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: used the same word. Strange, they both said, and not disappointing.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: That combination is worth sitting with for a moment. because
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: strange and not disappointing is a different thing from wonderful,
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: and it is almost certainly more honest. At some point,
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: a television above the bar was showing wildlife footage. Killer,
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: the marine biologist who had spent his adult life cataloguing
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: species in Norwegian waters, looked up and misidentified a bird
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: on the screen. Gail laughed until she covered her face.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: That detail has no evidentiary weight. It does not resolve
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: the question of the photograph or the interpreter or the
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: eight people who did not come back from the Iola Star.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: But it is the detail that survives. Everything else, a
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: man who studies the ocean for a living, getting a
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: bird wrong, in an airport in Minnesota, while a woman
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: who planted garlic every September, so her hands would have
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: something to do, watched him and laughed. 38 years compressed
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: into one wrong answer. The reunion did not produce a
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: clean narrative arc. There was no ceremony, no journalists, no
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: cameras that anyone has confirmed. Two survivors at an airport bar,
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: talking for six hours, and then one of them flew home.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: What happened next was quieter. The Saturday after the reunion,
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: Gail Adams went out to her East Thornfield Gardens, and
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: planted garlic in row seven. She has told her neighbor
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: Diane Chu, and she has said it on the record,
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: that it was the first time in 38 Septembers that
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: she did not need her hands to be busy. She
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: planted the garlic anyway. The row still needed doing, but
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: the urgency was gone. That is the whole of it.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: In terms of confirmed facts about what followed, there is
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: no indication of ongoing contact that has been made public.
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: There is no indication of its absence either. The reunion happened.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: It was strange and not disappointing. Killer flew home. Gail
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: planted garlic without grief in it. The photograph remains on
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: her kitchen table. Tom Killer has seen it. He cried
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: when he did. Who carried that photograph from a boat
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: deck in the Aegean to a library shelf in Minnesota?
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: Through Hedstrom's publisher or through some path, Peterson cannot yet
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: reconstruct anything. has not been established. Peterson published his theory
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: with a caveat and has not updated it. The Thornfield
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: Public Library's acquisition record for the Hedstrom memoir says only,
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: donor unknown before 2010. The library's lost and found shelf,
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: where 16-year-old Gloria Walker placed the photograph after it slid
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: from a returned canvas bag onto her car seat. no
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: longer has anything to tell. The back of the photograph
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: still reads, in Gail's handwriting, I thought you were gone too.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: She still does not remember writing it. There is a
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: version of this story that is about luck. Two survivors
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: who happen to write small things down. A maritime historian
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: who happened to read, both in the same afternoon, a
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: book donated to a library before anyone knew it mattered.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: a photograph that travelled through hands no one can name
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: and arrived, somehow, in the right county, in the right year,
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: that version is true. Every piece of it holds. But
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: there is something underneath the luck that is harder to name.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: Gail Adams wrote an essay in 1994 and put her
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: city in the byline, even though the magazine gave her
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: no contact line. Tom Keeler published a memoir in 2017,
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: that fewer than 300 people read. And in it, he
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: called her G. And the searching was there on every
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: page for anyone who looked. Brian Peterson spent 20 years
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: with casualty ledgers that most people considered closed. None of
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: them announced what they were doing. None of them expected
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: it to converge. The photograph is the piece that refuses
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: to settle. It is a real object on a real
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: kitchen table. The handwriting on the back is confirmed. The
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: chain that carried it from a clear day on the
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: Aegean to a lost and found shelf in Minnesota is
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: real in outline and unverifiable in detail. Gail has neither
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: confirmed nor denied that she sent it. The question is
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: still open. That is the honest close. Not every thread
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: comes back tied. What came back was the person. Tom
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: Keeler is 60 years old. He works at a fisheries
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: consortium in Bergen. He misidentifies birds. He was listed among
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: the dead for 38 years because one interpreter on the
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: island of Lesbos had approximate English and a hospital administrator
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: wrote down what he heard, and no one caught it.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: Eight people from that ferry did not come home. He did, eventually,
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: in the only way that was still available to him,
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: through a letter from a stranger and four careful emails,
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: and a six-hour conversation at an airport bar in a
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: city he had never been to before. Gail Adams is 57.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: She transcribes four in the morning until noon. She lives
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: in a rental duplex in East Thornfield. Every September for
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: 38 years she planted garlic in row seven and her
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: hands were busy and that was enough and then one
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: September it wasn't necessary anymore. The photograph sits on her
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: kitchen table between whatever else is there, the coffee, the mail,
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: the ordinary objects of an ordinary morning. In 1981, on
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: a clear day before the storm, a young man pointed
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: a camera at a 19-year-old woman standing on the deck
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: of a ferry in the Aegean Sea, and she stood there,
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: and he took the picture, and neither of them knew
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: what was coming. The picture survived, so did they. This
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: show is made by Oba Media.