The timeline
11 April 1961
A Utah court terminates Beryl Jean Taylor's parental rights and records her as an unfit mother.
August 1976
Susan Lee Thomas gives birth to a son. She is unmarried. Jean puts her own name on the birth certificate as his mother.
2 October 1976
She marries Denver Strickling at Elko, Nevada, eight weeks after the birth.
November 1976
Susan moves out and cannot take him. The document has already been done. At three months old the child goes to his grandmother, and no adoption is ever filed, in Utah or anywhere else.
The late nineteen seventies
Three foster children are placed in that house. What is done to one of them, a girl called Becky, is done there. She is carried out by ambulance and dies at the hospital. No police come. No file has ever been found.
1976 to 2017
Forty years. The record is never corrected. Everyone who tries to tell him is called a liar.
31 March 2013
His mother dies, thirty minutes away. Her obituary names her children. He is not among them.
February 2017
A text message. Your mother is not your mother.
Spring 2017
Kathy tells him the truth. She is dead by August.
2019
His father adopts him. Forty-three years late.
2023
Beryl Jean Taylor dies.