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A woman's blood type made it biologically impossible for her to be Amy's mother · Family Secrets Revealed

0:03
Speaker 1: The envelope had been sitting in Heather Powell's garage for
0:06
Speaker 1: forty two years. On the front, in careful handwriting, someone
0:10
Speaker 1: had written for Amy, when the time is right. Inside
0:15
Speaker 1: was a hospital intake form, and that form made it
0:18
Speaker 1: biologically impossible for Amy Duncan's mother to be her mother
0:21
Speaker 1: at all. A retired postal worker named Scott Russo found
0:24
Speaker 1: it in January of twenty twenty three while clearing out
0:28
Speaker 1: the garage of an eighty two year old woman who
0:30
Speaker 1: had just died. He almost set it aside with the
0:33
Speaker 1: other paperwork. He didn't what He handed it to. Amy
0:36
Speaker 1: Duncan that week would unravel forty two years of family
0:40
Speaker 1: history in under thirty days. There are two facts at
0:43
Speaker 1: the center of this story. The first is a blood type.
0:47
Speaker 1: The second is a yellow receiving blanket that two different
0:50
Speaker 1: women kept for four decades without knowing the other existed.
0:54
Speaker 1: By the time those two facts connected, Amy Duncan would
0:58
Speaker 1: discover she had a biology mother she had never met
1:02
Speaker 1: and a biological sister she never knew she had. Neither
1:05
Speaker 1: answer came from a confession. They came from a sealed
1:08
Speaker 1: envelope that one woman had never been able to mail
1:11
Speaker 1: and never been able to destroy. Amy Duncan was forty
1:15
Speaker 1: two years old and living in Dellvue, Ohio when the
1:18
Speaker 1: envelope arrived. She worked as a dental hygienist. She was
1:23
Speaker 1: practical by nature and deliberate by habit. The garden behind
1:27
Speaker 1: her house ran in four straight rows. Neighbors described it
1:31
Speaker 1: as the tidiest plot on the block. That detail matters
1:37
Speaker 1: because what was about to happen to Amy was the
1:39
Speaker 1: opposite of tidy. She had grown up as the first
1:43
Speaker 1: child of Jeanne and Robert Duncan. Robert was quiet and steady,
1:48
Speaker 1: the kind of man who fixed things on week ends,
1:50
Speaker 1: and died of a stroke around two thousand thirteen without
1:54
Speaker 1: much fuss. Jean was the one who shaped the household.
1:58
Speaker 1: Jean cooked, organized, remembered birthdays, and kept the cedar chest
2:02
Speaker 1: in the bedroom locked except when she opened it to
2:05
Speaker 1: add something or take something out. Amy had a younger brother, Paul,
2:10
Speaker 1: who moved to Columbus after school. She stayed in Delvue.
2:15
Speaker 1: She had no particular reason to leave. Her mother was there.
2:19
Speaker 1: Jean Duncan born Jean Mabury, died in March of twenty
2:23
Speaker 1: twenty two. She was seventy one ovarian cancer. The death
2:27
Speaker 1: was not sudden, but it was still a rupture. Amy
2:31
Speaker 1: handled the estate with the same precisions she brought to
2:34
Speaker 1: her garden Rose. There were no surprises in the paperwork.
2:38
Speaker 1: There was nothing, as far as Amy could tell, that
2:41
Speaker 1: Jean had left unresolved. The woman Amy called her godmother
2:45
Speaker 1: was Heather Powell. Heather was eighty two, a church bookkeeper
2:50
Speaker 1: at Saint Clement's Lutheran for most of her adult life.
2:54
Speaker 1: She and Jean had known each other for decades. After
2:57
Speaker 1: Jean died, Heather's health decay. She died in January of
3:01
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three, less than a year after Jeane. Amy
3:06
Speaker 1: attended the small memorial. She helped where she could, and
3:09
Speaker 1: that is how Scott Russo, a retired postal worker volunteering
3:13
Speaker 1: to clear Heather's property, ended up placing an old, sealed
3:17
Speaker 1: envelope in Amy's hands. The label stopped her for Amy,
3:21
Speaker 1: when the time is right. It was Heather's handwriting. It
3:25
Speaker 1: was addressed to no one else. Amy took it home,
3:29
Speaker 1: set it on the kitchen table, and opened it that
3:32
Speaker 1: same evening. Inside was a single document, a hospital intake
3:36
Speaker 1: form from Dellvue General dated January fourteenth, nineteen eighty one.
3:41
Speaker 1: The patient name was Jean Mabury. The blood type listed
3:45
Speaker 1: was AB negative. The discharge summary noted one healthy girl,
3:49
Speaker 1: and the birth certificate attached carried one name, Amy. Amy
3:54
Speaker 1: read it twice. Then she walked to the bathroom and
3:57
Speaker 1: pulled open the cabinet under the sink. So somewhere in
4:00
Speaker 1: this house, and a folder she had kept since childhood
4:04
Speaker 1: was a pediatric record from a dog bite she had
4:06
Speaker 1: suffered in nineteen eighty six. The treating physician had noted
4:11
Speaker 1: her blood type at the time, OH positive. She stood
4:14
Speaker 1: in the bathroom for a long moment. An AB negative
4:18
Speaker 1: parent cannot produce an O positive child. It is not
4:22
Speaker 1: a gray area in biology. It is not a clerical
4:25
Speaker 1: error that explains itself. The intake form said gene was
4:30
Speaker 1: AB negative, Amy was OH positive. Those two facts cannot
4:35
Speaker 1: coexist in a mother and daughter relationship. She told herself
4:38
Speaker 1: it was a hospital error. She told herself that for
4:41
Speaker 1: four days. Then she ordered a DNA test. The DNA
4:45
Speaker 1: results arrived on February second, twenty twenty three. Amy opened
4:51
Speaker 1: the email on her phone, standing at the kitchen counter
4:54
Speaker 1: where she had left the intake form four days earlier,
4:57
Speaker 1: the consumer genealogy service had flagged to match the designation
5:01
Speaker 1: read half sibling or aunt. The account holder's name was
5:06
Speaker 1: Connie Obert Morganfield, Kentucky. Amy did not recognize the name.
5:12
Speaker 1: She had never heard it from Jean. She had never
5:15
Speaker 1: heard it from Heather. She sat down and stared at
5:18
Speaker 1: the screen for a long time, and then she did
5:20
Speaker 1: what anyone does when the ground moves. She started looking
5:24
Speaker 1: for something solid to stand on. She requested her full
5:27
Speaker 1: birth record from Dellvue General. What came back confirmed the
5:31
Speaker 1: intake form admitted January fourteenth, nineteen eighty one, patient gene
5:37
Speaker 1: Maybury blood type AB negative. Discharge summary one healthy girl,
5:44
Speaker 1: birth certificate, name Amy. The hospital had no second admission.
5:49
Speaker 1: The hospital had no private clinic in its network. The
5:53
Speaker 1: record was clean, coherent, and in light of the OH
5:57
Speaker 1: positive blood type from nineteen eighty six, biologically impossible. There
6:03
Speaker 1: is something specific about the date on that form, January fourteenth,
6:08
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty one, three days after Amy's birthday. Amy had
6:12
Speaker 1: always believed she was born on January eleventh. Jean had
6:16
Speaker 1: baked a cake every January eleventh for thirty eight years,
6:20
Speaker 1: But the hospital record said Jean was admitted on January fourteenth,
6:25
Speaker 1: not the eleventh. That is a three day gap with
6:28
Speaker 1: no document, no notation, no explanation sitting inside the official record.
6:33
Speaker 1: Three days an a B negative mother, an O positive child,
6:37
Speaker 1: and now a stranger in Kentucky flagged his family. Amy
6:41
Speaker 1: wrote to Connie Obert that same night. She kept the
6:45
Speaker 1: message short. She explained what the DNA service had shown.
6:49
Speaker 1: She said she was trying to understand what it meant.
6:51
Speaker 1: She asked if Connie had any information that might help.
6:54
Speaker 1: Connie wrote back within hours. She had been searching for
6:58
Speaker 1: her biological family for twelve years. She knew she had
7:01
Speaker 1: been adopted at birth. What she knew about her birth
7:04
Speaker 1: was thin. She had been born in Ohio, placed immediately,
7:09
Speaker 1: and her Kentucky birth record had been filed by her
7:12
Speaker 1: adoptive family within days. She had always assumed her biological
7:16
Speaker 1: mother was from Ohio. She had not expected to find
7:19
Speaker 1: a sister, but the DNA numbers did not lie. Connie
7:23
Speaker 1: was not Amy's full sibling. The match was closer to
7:27
Speaker 1: a half sibling, or, in certain configurations, an aunt. They
7:32
Speaker 1: shared enough genetic material to be connected by blood, they
7:35
Speaker 1: did not share enough to have the same two parents.
7:39
Speaker 1: That result carried its own weight. If Amy and Connie
7:42
Speaker 1: were half siblings, they shared one biological parent. The most
7:46
Speaker 1: likely candidate was a mother. And if that mother was
7:48
Speaker 1: Jean Duncan, which the intake form and Connie's Ohio birth
7:53
Speaker 1: origin seemed to support, then John had given birth to
7:56
Speaker 1: a biological daughter on January fourteenth, nineteen eighty one. That
8:02
Speaker 1: daughter had been placed for adoption the same day, and
8:05
Speaker 1: three days earlier, some one else had delivered a girl
8:08
Speaker 1: at a private clinic outside Delvue. That girl had been
8:11
Speaker 1: wrapped in a yellow blanket and placed with Jean and
8:14
Speaker 1: Robert Duncan as Amy. Two babies three days apart, one
8:20
Speaker 1: name on the birth certificate, one family, one secret that
8:24
Speaker 1: held for forty two years. Here is where the shape
8:27
Speaker 1: of the whole arrangement comes into focus. Connie Obert had
8:30
Speaker 1: spent twelve years searching for a biological family that had
8:34
Speaker 1: been on paper right there in Delvue. John Duncan, who
8:38
Speaker 1: died in March of two thousand twenty two, was Connie's
8:41
Speaker 1: biological mother. John had carried Connie to term. John had
8:45
Speaker 1: given birth to her at Dellvue General on January fourteenth,
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Speaker 1: nineteen eighty one, and John had let Heather Powell drive
8:53
Speaker 1: her new born daughter to Kentucky that same day. John
8:56
Speaker 1: had done this while Amy, three days old, born at
8:59
Speaker 1: a private clinic, not Jean's biological child, was already home.
9:04
Speaker 1: The question that had no clean answer was the one
9:07
Speaker 1: that preceded everything else. December nineteen eighty Jean had miscarried
9:12
Speaker 1: at thirty one weeks. The record did not say how
9:15
Speaker 1: many people knew. What is documented is this, she told
9:20
Speaker 1: no one outside the household, and within weeks an arrangement
9:25
Speaker 1: was in place. Terry Log, twenty two years old, was pregnant.
9:31
Speaker 1: Heather Powell was the connection point. The private clinic outside
9:34
Speaker 1: Dellvue was not part of the hospital network. The birth
9:38
Speaker 1: would not generate a public record linking the baby to Terry.
9:42
Speaker 1: On January eleventh, nineteen eighty one, Terry delivered a girl.
9:47
Speaker 1: Heather was there. The baby was wrapped in a yellow blanket.
9:51
Speaker 1: She went home with Jean and Robert Duncan that day.
9:53
Speaker 1: Three days later, Jean gave birth to her own biological
9:57
Speaker 1: daughter at Dellvue General. She had been and admitted as
10:00
Speaker 1: herself Jean Maybray. The intake form recorded her blood type accurately,
10:05
Speaker 1: a B negative. The discharged summary noted one healthy girl.
10:10
Speaker 1: The birth certificate filed that day carried the name Amy.
10:14
Speaker 1: It was not attached to the baby Terry had delivered
10:16
Speaker 1: on the eleventh. It was attached to the baby Jean
10:19
Speaker 1: delivered on the fourteenth. Heather drove Connie, Jeanne's biological daughter,
10:24
Speaker 1: to Kentucky the same day. The document that had been
10:27
Speaker 1: sealed in Heather's envelope for forty two years was not
10:31
Speaker 1: a record of Amy's birth. It was a record of Connie's.
10:35
Speaker 1: The birth certificate with Amy's name had been applied to
10:38
Speaker 1: Jean's biological child. Then that child was placed for adoption.
10:43
Speaker 1: The girl, already living with John and Robert, the one
10:46
Speaker 1: Terry had delivered three days earlier, continued as Amy Duncan,
10:50
Speaker 1: with no corresponding hospital record. The envelope sat in Heather's
10:54
Speaker 1: garage for forty two years. Heather never mailed it, she
10:58
Speaker 1: never destroyed it. The label she wrote for Amy when
11:01
Speaker 1: the time is Right suggests she always intended for Amy
11:04
Speaker 1: to know. She simply never found the moment. She died
11:07
Speaker 1: in January of two thousand twenty three at eighty two,
11:11
Speaker 1: and the moment passed without her. Picture a church bookkeeper
11:15
Speaker 1: sitting alone with a sealed envelope sometime in the nineteen eighties.
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Speaker 1: She has written the label. She has not sent it.
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Speaker 1: She could drive to John's house, she could mail it,
11:25
Speaker 1: she could slide it under a door. She does none
11:28
Speaker 1: of these things. She puts it in a cabinet and
11:31
Speaker 1: closes the drawer. If Heather's reason for keeping the envelope
11:35
Speaker 1: was protection of Jane, of Amy, of the arrangement, then
11:40
Speaker 1: the story holds together. Simply Jean had miscarried, two families
11:44
Speaker 1: had a need. Heather was the bridge. She kept the
11:47
Speaker 1: record because destroying it felt wrong and sending it felt dangerous,
11:51
Speaker 1: especially while Jean was alive. That version is coherent. It
11:56
Speaker 1: accounts for the forty two year silence, the sealed label,
12:00
Speaker 1: and the fact that the envelope went to Amy and
12:02
Speaker 1: not to any one else. But that version requires accepting
12:06
Speaker 1: that Jean raised a child she knew was not biologically
12:09
Speaker 1: hers and chose never to say so. And there is
12:13
Speaker 1: one detail that complicates the idea that this was purely practical.
12:18
Speaker 1: John kept the yellow blanket. She called it Amy's coming
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Speaker 1: home blanket. She kept it folded in a cedar chest
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Speaker 1: for forty two years. She did not put it in
12:27
Speaker 1: a donation box. After a year, she did not discard it.
12:30
Speaker 1: When Amy left for college. She took it out at
12:33
Speaker 1: some point and put it back. That is not the
12:36
Speaker 1: behavior of a woman who is indifferent to what the
12:38
Speaker 1: blanket represented. The blanket is the detail that does not
12:42
Speaker 1: let the story close at convenience. It points towards something
12:45
Speaker 1: more complicated than a transaction. Jean knew where Amy had
12:49
Speaker 1: come from. She knew about the yellow blanket. She kept it.
12:53
Speaker 1: That is a form of acknowledgment, even if it was
12:56
Speaker 1: never spoken. Now walk the same scene forward to late
12:59
Speaker 1: Febuary of two thousand twenty three. Amy drives to a
13:03
Speaker 1: Cincinnati suburb. She meets Terry Logue for the first time.
13:07
Speaker 1: Terry is sixty four. She has kept one polaroid for
13:11
Speaker 1: forty two years. It shows her holding a newborn and
13:14
Speaker 1: on the white border in her own handwriting is the
13:17
Speaker 1: date January eleventh, nineteen eighty one. Amy looks at the photograph,
13:23
Speaker 1: and then she looks at the yellow blanket that Terry
13:25
Speaker 1: has also brought. It is the same blanket that was
13:28
Speaker 1: folded in John's cedar chest. It is the blanket Terry
13:32
Speaker 1: wrapped her daughter in at the private clinic. It is
13:36
Speaker 1: the blanket Jane called the coming home blanket and kept
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Speaker 1: for four decades without ever explaining why. Jean had kept
13:42
Speaker 1: the one physical object that connected Amy to the woman
13:45
Speaker 1: who had given birth to her. She had kept it visible, named,
13:49
Speaker 1: and close. Whatever Jane could not say aloud, she had
13:53
Speaker 1: preserved in fabric. Three people now hold the shape of
13:56
Speaker 1: what happened in January of nineteen eighty one. Each of
14:00
Speaker 1: them holds a different piece. None of them holds all
14:03
Speaker 1: of it. Amy Duncan drove back to Delvue after meeting
14:08
Speaker 1: Terry Loag in late February of two thousand twenty three.
14:11
Speaker 1: She had the DNA confirmation from February second, She had
14:15
Speaker 1: the polaroids she had seen in Terry's hands. She had
14:19
Speaker 1: the blanket. In March, she sat down with her brother
14:22
Speaker 1: Paul in Columbus and told him everything. The records do
14:27
Speaker 1: not indicate whether Paul had any reason to suspect something
14:30
Speaker 1: was wrong before that conversation. What the record shows is
14:34
Speaker 1: that Amy chose to tell him herself on her own
14:37
Speaker 1: time line before anything else could reach him From the outside.
14:41
Speaker 1: In April, Amy met Connie Obert in person for the
14:44
Speaker 1: first time. They chose a diner in Columbus. Connie is
14:49
Speaker 1: in her late fifties. She had been searching for her
14:51
Speaker 1: biological family for twelve years before the DNA system flagged
14:56
Speaker 1: a match and pointed her toward Amy. Twelve years is
15:00
Speaker 1: a long time to look for something without knowing whether
15:04
Speaker 1: it exists. Connie has said, according to available accounts, that
15:08
Speaker 1: she mostly wanted to know she had existed, to some
15:12
Speaker 1: one that the search was less about information and more
15:16
Speaker 1: about confirmation. What Connie found when the results came back
15:21
Speaker 1: was not what she had been looking for. She had
15:23
Speaker 1: not been searching for Amy. She had been searching for John,
15:27
Speaker 1: and John had been dead for nearly two years by
15:29
Speaker 1: the time Connie got close enough to reach her. That
15:32
Speaker 1: is the part of this story that does not resolve cleanly.
15:36
Speaker 1: Connie is Jeanne's biological daughter. John carried her and delivered
15:41
Speaker 1: her at Dellvue General on January fourteenth, nineteen eighty one.
15:45
Speaker 1: The same day, Heather Powell drove Connie across a state
15:48
Speaker 1: line to the family waiting in Kentucky. Jean kept the
15:52
Speaker 1: biological child she had just delivered. For a matter of hours,
15:56
Speaker 1: she raised the child she had received three days earlier.
15:59
Speaker 1: For the rest of her life, Connie never knew Jean existed.
16:03
Speaker 1: Jean never reached out. Whatever Jean felt about that, she
16:07
Speaker 1: did not leave a record of it. Terry Log and
16:10
Speaker 1: Connie Obert have not met in person as of the
16:13
Speaker 1: point this account was compiled. They were in written contact.
16:17
Speaker 1: Only two women connected by a single transaction in nineteen
16:20
Speaker 1: eighty one, both of them on the outside of the
16:23
Speaker 1: family that transaction created, both of them trying to understand
16:27
Speaker 1: what they are to each other now. Heather Powell left
16:30
Speaker 1: one piece of paper and one label the envelope. The
16:34
Speaker 1: envelope said for Amy, when the time is right. She
16:37
Speaker 1: died in January of twenty twenty three without having mailed it.
16:41
Speaker 1: The question of why she waited forty two years and
16:45
Speaker 1: what she believed the right time would look like has
16:48
Speaker 1: no recorded answer. She left no written explanation beyond the
16:52
Speaker 1: label itself, no letter inside the envelope, no separate note
16:56
Speaker 1: found in her effects. The intake form was the message.
17:00
Speaker 1: The label was the only interpretation she offered. There are
17:05
Speaker 1: no criminal proceedings, No law enforcement investigation was opened. Heather
17:10
Speaker 1: Powell orchestrated an arrangement that existed at the margins of
17:13
Speaker 1: formal adoption law, but she died before any of its surfaced,
17:18
Speaker 1: and the people most affected have not described it in
17:21
Speaker 1: legal terms. What Amy has described in the months following
17:25
Speaker 1: the discovery is closer to grief than to grievance. In
17:29
Speaker 1: June of twenty twenty three, Amy met Connie a second time.
17:34
Speaker 1: After she returned home to Dellvue. She went out to
17:37
Speaker 1: her garden. She added a fifth row. A sealed envelope
17:41
Speaker 1: sat in a garage in Delvue for forty two years.
17:45
Speaker 1: The woman who kept it could not destroy it and
17:48
Speaker 1: could not send it when she died. A retired postal
17:51
Speaker 1: worker found it while clearing the shelves, and the decision
17:55
Speaker 1: Heather Powell had deferred for four decades was made by
17:59
Speaker 1: accident by a stranger in an afternoon. That is how
18:04
Speaker 1: this story broke open, not through a court order or
18:07
Speaker 1: a confrontation, through an unlocked garage and a man who
18:11
Speaker 1: did not know what he was holding. The facts of
18:14
Speaker 1: January nineteen eighty one are now documented. A woman named
18:19
Speaker 1: Terry Low gave birth to a girl on January eleventh
18:22
Speaker 1: at a private clinic. Three days later, a woman named
18:26
Speaker 1: Jean Mabury gave birth to another girl at Dellvue General
18:30
Speaker 1: and went home without her. The girl from the clinic
18:33
Speaker 1: was raised as Amy Duncan. The girl from the hospital
18:36
Speaker 1: was raised as Connie Obert. For forty two years, those
18:40
Speaker 1: two lines ran parallel and never touched. What remains uncertain
18:45
Speaker 1: is interior. No one can say what Jean understood the
18:49
Speaker 1: arrangement to mean for the rest of her life. No
18:52
Speaker 1: one can say whether Robert Duncan knew the full story.
18:55
Speaker 1: No one can say what Heather believed she was protecting
18:58
Speaker 1: or who she believed she was pret detecting it for
19:01
Speaker 1: when she wrote that label and sealed the envelope and
19:03
Speaker 1: put it on a shelf. What the record does show
19:06
Speaker 1: is this John kept the yellow blanket. She called it
19:11
Speaker 1: Amy's coming home blanket. She did not explain it, she
19:14
Speaker 1: did not discard it. She folded it and kept it
19:17
Speaker 1: in cedar for four decades, and when Amy opened that
19:20
Speaker 1: chest after Jeane's death, the blanket was still there. Some
19:24
Speaker 1: acknowledgments are made in objects because they cannot be made
19:27
Speaker 1: in words. That is not resolution, but it is something
19:31
Speaker 1: Amy Duncan is forty two years old. She lives in Delvue.
19:35
Speaker 1: She is a dental hygienist with a garden that now
19:38
Speaker 1: has five rows. She has a biological mother she has
19:41
Speaker 1: met once in Cincinnati. She has a half sister she
19:44
Speaker 1: has met twice in Columbus. She has a brother named Paul,
19:48
Speaker 1: who is navigating the same redrawn map. She has forty
19:51
Speaker 1: two years of memory with a woman who was not
19:53
Speaker 1: her biological mother, and who kept without explanation, the one
19:58
Speaker 1: object that proved she always knew it. The time was
20:01
Speaker 1: never right for Heather, it turned out not to matter.
20:05
Speaker 1: The envelope found its way to Amy regardless, and Amy,
20:09
Speaker 1: by all available accounts, is still here, Still in Dellvue,
20:14
Speaker 1: still in the garden that is where things stand. This
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Speaker 1: show is made by Obo Media