Tragically, Missy would not find him again for many, many years, and she cried inconsolably for her lost brother. She was a very pretty little blond child, and her adoptive parents, who lived on a ranch, hadn’t expected the personality problems that soon became apparent. They had older sons and their experience with parenting had been normal and fairly serene, but Missy was excitable and too loud and nervous, and she had a great deal of trouble concentrating.

In desperation, when Missy was ten or eleven, her adoptive parents placed her in the Antonian School for Special Children in Cheney in eastern Washington. It was a Catholic institution whose director was Sister M. Antonia Stare, O.P. The nun’s family owned the land where the school stood.

Missy’s houseparents at the school did their best for the thin, little girl who seemed to bear the weight of the world on her shoulders. She had lost her birth mother, her half sister, and her twin brother. Although she was unaware of it, her mother and father had married and remarried other partners. She had another half sister, her birth father’s daughter by a different woman, but she didn’t know that. In a sense, being at the school, Missy had also lost a real home with her adoptive parents who had tried valiantly but just couldn’t cope with her hyperactivity and mood swings.

Missy did go home on weekends, and she was medicated for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) only on those Saturdays and Sundays when she desperately needed it all the time. But Sister Antonia did not believe that hyperactive children should be treated with pharmacological solutions such as Ritalin, particularly not when they were in school, and so when Missy came back on Sunday night or Monday morning, she literally went through chemical withdrawal, week after week.

One time she came back from a home visit and her housemother found that Missy’s buttocks were slightly bruised. It wasn’t difficult to leave marks on Missy—her fair skin was thin and delicate. She sobbed as Sister Antonia took photos of the bruises. She wasn’t crying because of the pain but because she was afraid she was going to get someone in her family or their friends in trouble.

Missy was pubescent and had begun to develop tiny breasts. She whispered to her housemother, Barbara, at the dinner table that some older boys she encountered had pinched her and teased her about them. “All I could do was tell her that I was sorry,” Barbara recalled, “and that I knew that must have hurt her feelings, and that they shouldn’t have done that to her.”

It may not, however, have been all one-sided. Because she had been so robbed of nurturing up until the age of five, Missy craved physical contact. For most of her life, she was unable to say “no” to boys and men who hugged her and kissed her. She had missed out completely on the normal cuddling all babies need.

One of the saddest nights the housemother could remember was when the school put on a little show. “I don’t think Missy had any hope that her family was going to come, but her adoptive mother did come. Missy was so glad to see her that she was overwhelmed and she started to cry immediately. Poor Missy kept sobbing all through the performance. Later, she was so proud to introduce her mother to the staff. It was obvious that she loved her mother, who was trying hard to deal with the problems that had begun in Missy’s earliest years.”

Despite everything Missy had been through in her short life, she still cared deeply and loved deeply. She was not a hardened little soul unable to bond or form attachments. A volunteer at the school, Thelma “Woody” Johnson, worked one-on-one with Missy, calmly helping her to slow down and speak more quietly.

“Woody was wonderful with Missy,” the little girl’s housemother recalled. “My husband always remembers her as a child with ‘sparkle.’ There was still so much hope and promise there.”

As the months passed, Missy’s emotional problems became more evident, and it was decided that she should be moved to a residential facility where she would be allowed fewer home visits. It was agonizing for Barbara and her husband to see Missy pack up to go and not be able to stop the transfer. She thought that Missy, of all people, needed a place where she felt she had some roots. “After she left, I was allowed to talk to Missy once on the phone,” Barbara said. “I told her I missed her—and I did.”

Years went by without any word from Missy, and then Barbara learned that she had been placed in Echo Glen, a facility near North Bend, Washington, for teenagers who had been in trouble with the law or who needed to be locked away from the world. “We could only imagine what had brought her to that point,” Barbara remembered.

A lot had happened to Missy, and not much of it was good. Besides being hyperactive, she had a learning disorder that made school very difficult for her. She had been in Echo Glen for treatment, and she had also spent some time in the Maple Lane School for Girls. All through her teen years, she kept the dream alive that one day she would find her real mother and father and her brother, and that they would reunite and be a happy family.

Missy grew tougher, at least on the surface, but those who knew her recognized her vulnerability. She had a lot of “substitute” sisters and mothers who gave her somewhere to stay and tried to imbue her with a sense of self-worth. But she was a challenging guest or tenant. A terrible housekeeper, she didn’t clean at all unless she had to find something she needed under a pile of clothes or dirty dishes.

There were too many times when it seemed Missy was fated to die young. She was in a devastating car crash in 1977. Her hip and jaw were broken, and her skull fractured. She had to have a tracheotomy to breathe, but, once again, she survived.

Out of school and more or less on her own, Missy got several tattoos, marks that might have made her identifiable if anything fatal happened to her. She had “Love” on the back of one hand, “Frank” inside one of her arms, a good luck symbol on one of her fingers, and a butterfly on her knee. They were amateur tattoos, either etched there by a friend or by herself. But she had a commercially created tattoo on her right shoulder, a dragon.

Looking for someone she could love, Missy had two children out of wedlock—a little girl, Nicole, in 1976 or 1977, and a boy, Darrell, in 1979. She was not seriously involved with either of the men who fathered her babies, but she loved her children. Even so, she was not emotionally equipped to take care of them. She’d missed out on those desperately important first five years when little girls learn how to be mothers by emulating their own mothers.

Sometimes the children were with her, but, more often, the friends she had cultivated as family took care of Nicole and Darrell. Missy was, after all, only sixteen when she gave birth to her older child, and eighteen when she had Darrell.

If her life had been a television movie, there would have been a happy ending for Missy in 1982. A girl she met on Seattle’s Capitol Hill stared at her and remarked, “You know, you look enough like my boyfriend to be his twin!”

And she was. Missy had found the twin brother she’d lost seventeen years before. He lived in Tacoma and he knew where their father was. His name was Dennis and he was living in Texas. Missy called her father, and he put her in touch with her mother, who had remarried several times and now lived in Reno, Nevada.

When Missy called Patricia, her mother invited her to come down for Christmas. Both of them had high expectations of a sentimental reunion. Instead, it was a disaster. Patricia, who had not taken care of Missy and her twin brother, was raising her boyfriend/husband’s children. Her alcoholism had progressed, and she really wasn’t ready to take on the daughter who’d been out of her life for so many years and now had two children of her own.