In February 2017 a man Maximus Sego had known his whole life sent him a text message. It said that his mother was not his mother.

In February 2017, a man I had known my whole life sent me a text message. It said my mother was not my mother.

I was forty years old.

The woman who raised me was my grandmother. Her name was Beryl Jean Taylor. She took me when I was three months old, wrote her own name on my birth certificate as my mother, and never filed an adoption anywhere in the state of Utah.

My real mother lived about thirty minutes away for thirty-seven years. She died in 2013, four years before I found out who she was. I knew her my whole life. I never once knew her as my mother.

My whole family knew. Two of them tried to tell me over the years, and both of them were called liars for it. One of them was my aunt Kathy. She said it for forty years and nobody believed her, including me.

I called her in the spring of 2017. She gave me my mother’s name and my father’s name in the first five minutes. She was dead by August.

So I started recording. Twenty-one phone calls with people who were actually in the room. And I started ordering paper.

A marriage certificate from Washoe County, Nevada. Divorce filings from the Third District Court in Salt Lake. A 1960 case where she swore to a judge she was too poor to pay a filing fee. A newspaper court column from Longview, Washington.

Almost every page of this book is either on tape or on paper. Where it is not, I say so.

And there is a little girl in it. Her name was Becky. She was a foster child in that house at the end of the nineteen seventies, and she was about eight years old when she died.

My brother Earl wrote down what he saw. He was five or six.

“When I was five or six years old, I watched my grandparents murder a little girl.”

I am not a writer. I am a journeyman lineman. I live in Arizona with my wife and two kids.

I wrote this because everybody who could have told me is either dead or is not going to. The book is what I found and how I found it. If you have ever been told something about your own life that turned out not to be true, you already know why I could not leave it alone.