The day I was adopted.

The things that I know were that Diane went into labor, was taken to the hospital.

I was told that there was a huge media frenzy outside.

So once I was born, I was told that she did not hold me.

But the way that she tells it is that she spent hours with me in the hospital holding me as a baby.

So I'm not really sure which is the right.

You know, I don't know which is true.

I'm trying to think of the word that I wanted to say, but I don't know.

An officer took me out the back to hide from the media and rushed me over to a hotel nearby.

That's where my parents were waiting.

Did your adoptive parents know who you were related to?

Yes, my adoptive parents didn't know.

My mom even told me that, you know, she had or her and my father had gone to my grandfather and was like, you know, we've got this child.

We're very excited about it.

But you know, she is Diane Down's daughter.

How do you feel?

And you know he just said she's a babcock.

You know, it doesn't matter where she came from, she's ours, you know, in some in a roundabout way.

My mom did tell me a little bit about the day I was born, and that they were waiting at that hotel room and the officer coming through the door holding the little baby girl, and she said that she looked down at me and that I was perfect.

You know, that didn't matter where I came from, you know, because I'm her daughter, and to her, I was perfect.

Dana Timms was able to confirm some of what Becky had heard about the day she was born.

I was told that the day that I was born, that Diane held me for a very long time, for a couple of hours.

Then I was also told that I had to be snuck out the back of the hospital by authorities because of the media that was out front covering the story.

Do you know anything about that?

That's probably true, although it was you were born ten days after her conviction, so I'm not sure that.

I mean, certainly, the Lane Kenny sheriffs didn't alert the press to say, hey, Diane's been taken to the hospital, so if they took you out the back, it would have been as a precaution, not that there was a row of TV camera set up there.

Okay, but yeah, I think she held you for maybe even longer than two hours, and she let Doug Welch, one of the Lenkheady Sheriff's detectives, hold you also.

I'll say also that during the trial, as she was sort of continuing to get fuller, as her pregnancy was moving along, she was constantly it was hands on her belly, and it was sort of like she had a little partner every day who was helping bring her strength in a tough situation.

Definitely got the feeling that she was holding you all that time.

The idea of Diane's court room pregnancy and subsequent birth after conviction were perhaps an important part of Becky's own experience to come.

She experienced pregnancy and her teens, and the experience wasn't easy.

Yeah, And I begged them, I said, please don't tell my dad, you know, he can't let me at least tell him that I'm pregnant, you know.

And they ended up telling him.

And I talked to my dad later about it.

I was like, I asked them not to tell you.

He's like, you're a minor, like so, and that's how I phrased it.

I knew something was wrong.

There was a reason you were not at boot camp, you know.

And so he's like, that's how we found out.

You must have been going through so many emotions.

Oh my gosh.

I remember I was just crying and it got to the point where nobody was telling me anything.

At MEP's in Portland, I just left.

I was like, I'm not going to boot camp obviously, I can't just sit here and do nothing.

And I left and I went back to where I was staying, and I, you know, sat down on the couch next to Christians biological father and sat there for a while in silence.

Then I looked over at him and I'm like, I'm pregnant.

He says, I know.

That was it.

We sat there for like an hour, just silent, and later on I asked him, I'm like, what do you mean, how did you know?

He's like, because you're back.

Becky's second pregnancy was initially planned with her then boyfriend, a different man from her first pregnancy.

She loved him and they wanted a child together.

Unfortunately, things began to fall apart and the situation became difficult.

It was a high risk of pregnancy.

I was bedridden for most of it.

I didn't want to give up on our family.

So I ended up staying in a homeless shelter because they couldn't work, and he went back to his ex and they just they were awful.

They just kept telling me, you know, that they were going to take him from me, or they were going to have the state take him from me, and it's all these horrible things things whereas I'm here in Clement Falls trying to make our family work, and it didn't.

So I called my parents, you know, and I asked for help.

Becky's parents agreed to take her in and help take care of her during the pregnancy, but on the condition that she consider adoption.

So I didn't decide until I was eight months pregnant that adoption was what was going to be best.

I fought it, I really, I tried so hard to get everything right in my life just so that I could keep him.

But in about eight months I had to just accept that I couldn't.

And so we got a hold of the adoption agency and they brought all these folders of families, just family after family after family, and I just remember going through the pages and just thinking, like these people cannot raise my child.

Is you know, this isn't the right place for him.

I had to pick somewhere that was perfect.

And in one of the very last folders that I got were the ones they had already had a son and they just couldn't have children together.

So that was who I chose, and you know, I met them and they they were just amazing.

Letting go wasn't easy for Becky.

In many ways, giving up her second child mirror Diane's own experience with her, but Becky was able to control the narrative.

As difficult as the situation was, she was able to ensure that he went to a family who would love him.

I didn't even hold him for very long, and they just had to take him because I didn't let go.

So they took him and the family was in a room close by, and they spent those first two days in the hospital with them.

You know how mom stays in the first.

Day ought to do that.

I had to go home and recover, And two days later I get a call from the hospital.

They forgot to have me sign the adoption baby.

They left those parts out, so I actually had to go back into the hospital and see them and see the baby and sign over my rights.

Right then, after two days of just misery because I gave my child away.

It was the hardest moment of my life.

But he is with an amazing family.

He's doing so great.

I get pictures every year on his birthday, and you know, it's an open adoption.

But at this point, I feel that I'm gonna wait until he's ready to find me.

I don't want to push myself into his life.

And they didn't hide that he was adopted, so you know, I'm sure when he's ready, or if he's ever ready, he'll find me.

Perhaps thinking back on her own situation and her curiosity about her own biological parents that could consider whether or not the son she gave up for adoption would one day wonder about her and who she was, so she made sure he would have the answers if he ever wanted them.

Of course, I wrote him a letter and gave it to the parents to give him when he was old enough to just.

I remember writing it when I had decided to put him up when I get my apartment, and I just I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, and the thing probably was ten pages long, and and I just realized that I need to, you know, short and sweet, just just a letter to know, let him know that I loved him, and then I was really doing what I thought was best.

I'm terrified that he may think bad of me, that he thinks that he was unloved, or that he was unwanted or didn't have that connection, because you know, he was part of my heart.

Shortly after this difficult experience, Becky reached out to Diane for the first time.

Do you remember what you wrote, did Diane?

I think it was pretty general.

The first letter, you know, said that I think I'm a near biological daughter.

Here's my day to birth time, and here's what I look like, just all the basics.

And then when you reached out to her, this was only because you just had your son up for adoption.

He he is now in the picture of with another family.

Is that correct correct?

We've spoken about the nature of their correspondence in an earlier episode, but the letters immediately devolved into Diane attacking Becky for wanting to know about her biological father, and over the years, Diane has continued to deny that Becky is her daughter.

Diane recently went so far as to claim that Becky could be a disinherited niece out to con Diane out of Amy's inheritance.

I've corresponded with Diane through emails, and she is somehow has flipped it to that you're not her biological daughter.

Amy is somewhere out there and she hasn't reconnected with Amy, and she only uses Amy as the name of that little girl, which is you.

How does that make you feel?

Hearing the name Aim?

How does that make you feel?

Uh?

Is about the same as hearing the Hungry like Wolf song.

It just kind of sense chills up your spine a little bit.

I don't identify with it because I don't.

It doesn't fit me.

I don't feel like it's my name.

Yeah.

In the letters, when she started with her conspiracy theories and you know, really getting into stories that I just didn't want to hear, and I asked her to stop writing me.

Is when she decided that I wasn't her daughter, I am assuming because I rejected her.

I asked her to stop writing me.

And at that point then I was the enemy as well, and she decided that I was the one who was after her, and I didn't want to feed into that, so I didn't continue conversating.

There's quite a bit of anecdotal evidence to suggest that Becky is Diane's daughter, but the only way to remove any lingering doubts Becky might is through DNA.

For this, we check back in with Michelle Leonard, the DNA detective.

With both Becky as well as Diane's brother James, having submitted samples, Michelle is finally able to start putting together the pieces of the larger puzzle.

So with Becky's ancestry results, you get two main components.

You get an ethnicity estimate, and you get the DNA match list.

And I'm sitting here looking at Becky's results page at the moment, and I'm going to open up her ethnicity estimate and I'm going to go through what that tells us.

So first up, so it's telling us that Becky is forty six percent Germanic Europe, forty two percent England, Wales and Northwestern Europe, five percent Eastern Europe and Russia four percent Norway three percent Baltics.

That makes sense.

I was told that I have Danish ancestry.

One of the other things I've done in preparation for the case is I've built a tree out for your maternal side, but your Frederickson line goes back to Denmark came over to the United States after your great great grandfather, Christian Peter Fredrickson, who was born in eighteen sixty seven, So he was the immigrant who came to the United States and died in South Dakota.

What I think is interesting, just right off the top, is you said Frederickson line that confirms that Becky is in fact the biological daughter of Diane.

Downs absolutely one.

Yeah, there's there's no doubt about that whatsoever.

That is definite, especially since Diane's brother has also taken a test and Becky matches him exactly as you would expect for an uncle niece relationship, So there's no mystery as to the maternal side.

Becky, how do you feel about that, because there has been speculation and doubt, especially from Diane herself, saying that you weren't her daughter.

Like you said, Diane has denied I'm her biological daughter for a really long time.

In her very first letter, she was excited to have me as her daughter, but then you know, it quickly went to I was not her daughter, and ever since then she has believed that I'm not her biological daughter.

So I mean those results are super huge for me.

That's every emotion you can think of is what I feel.

I have seen my adopted birth certificate, but I've never had this kind of proof, like this is zero doubt I am her biological daughter, and there's been a lot of stipulation out there and people weren't quite sure if I was that child that you know, she was pregnant with when she was on trial, So I don't know.

It just kind of shows that it's real.

Zecky's maternal line established and having finally received confirmation that she is in fact Diane's biological daughter, Becky's next question, and perhaps to her, the most important, is to begin tracing the paternal line.

In order to do that, Michelle has to begin by building a family tree.

I want to know who your maternal ancestors are because that helps me with eliminating DNA matches that result from your maternal side.

So that's why I've built out a maternal tree to help me with doing that, and basically with outside of the Danish ancestors, that just shows that your maternal ancestry has been in the United States in general, in most lines for a number of generations.

The longer that the lines have been in the United States, the more DNA matches you tend to get to them, which is another thing that is important to know about when you're trying to work out the DNA.

So if we go back to the ethnicity side of things, we've obviously got this forty six percent Germanic Europe showing up and this little bit Eastern Europe and Russia.

The little bit that's categorizes Norway might well be the Danish the Germanic Europe.

If you can look at the map, it covers quite a large area which takes in the likes of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands.

So it's quite clear you have some strong and a large amount of ancestry from this part of Europe.

From your ethnicity estimate.

Well that makes sense.

I mean I'm five nine and blonde hair, green eyes, and yeah, yeah, like I'm from that region.

As Michean Packspecky's estimated ethnicities, she warns that they're accurate to some extent, but they don't give much detail at a micro level.

It does make sense in those terms, yes, and the looking down the rest of it obviously there's the forty two percent England, Wales and northwestern Europe.

I suspect that quite a lot of that is your maternal side, those American lines that have maybe come over from England, Wales, et cetera further back in time.

I always say, don't read too much into the ethnicity estimate as a whole.

It's very interesting to see, especially when you have one side of your ancestry that's unknown.

It can really give you a clue as to the direction to look in, but it's never going to solve the case, and there's always going to be, you know, things that aren't quite right with ethnicity estimates as well.

I say, they're generally accurate to the continental level, but when you try to drill them down further to country level, it's much more difficult to do, and they have to be taken with a bit of a pinch of salt.

At the same time, Michelle believes that even with the information she has currently and with a few more database emissions, she will be able to trace Becky's paternity.

So do you think we're going to be able to solve the mystery?

I really do think we are the key, However, to solving the mystery.

Isn't the ethnicity estimate.

Like I say, it can give us a clue, and that bit about the Germanic Europe is interesting, but it's not going to tell us who your biological father is.

The key are the DNA matches.

His DNA is not on file, then he's not submitted.

No, you don't have a parent match, which is, as I say, not at all unusual.

The vast majority of people looking for a birth parent when they take a DNA test will not find that birth parent has already tested.

If you will, and they're very lucky.

If they do it easier, it does make it easier, but most don't.

So Obviously, your top match is your maternal uncle, and you're sharing a lot of DNA with him, nearly seventeen hundred centi morgans as we call it.

And that's a really significant amount of DNA, exactly the right amount to be sharing with a full uncle.

But it turns out that James isn't Becky's only high level match.

However, with that amount of DNA, there are a number of different relationships that you could have with someone, and your second highest match is sharing We are fifteen hundred cent of Morgans with you.

So, so what is that?

That another and her uncle?

So this is a female match.

This person is either a grandmother, a full aunt, or a half sibling.

She is one of those three relationships.

Now at this point we don't know which.

But she's what I call a jackpop match, and she does not match your maternal uncle.

Therefore, given the size of the match, and given how closely related he is to you, she is most definitely a paternal match.

Either a paternal grandmother, a paternal aunt, or a paternal half sibling, half sister.

She's one of those.

It is.

It's very exciting.

There are caveats though.

Even though there is a high level match, there are obstacles in the way.

Not all users on DNA databases, even those that appear to be relatives as matches, are easy to track down, nor do they always want to be.

She has no tree, and she has a user name that is quite privatized.

And I have tried everything I could think of to see if this concoction of letters and numbers has been used by somebody somewhere that I could identify who this person is, and it hasn't.

They've been very smart and maintaining their privacy on the site with the name that they've used.

The one thing that I can tell from it is that she is not a grandmother.

She's not your paternal grandmother, simply because I'm able to look at all of the matches that she has and she's clearly matching to, you know, both sides of your paternal ancestry, and not just one.

So that suggests to me that we can narrow her down to being either your paternal aunt or half sister.

So she's one of those two relationships with you.

Michall also cautions against the natural tendency that many of us would have in the situation.

A lot of people when they see such a jackpot match, the very first thing they're going to want to do is fire off a message to that person.

It's human nature, and it's normal to want to do that, and in many cases it's the right thing to do, and then some it's not.

At this point in time, we don't know if she's a paternal aunt, we don't know if she's a paternal half sister, and contact is the most delicate thing that we're going to be doing with this situation.

It could be that she is your birth father's daughter.

It could be she's his sister, but either way, we're not going straight to the source.

If we message her and we give her this information and then she goes to him, whether he's her brother or he's her father, and says, dad or brother, what's this?

Who's this person?

What do you know?

And maybe nothing, and maybe he knows something, and maybe that puts him in a very difficult situation, and that makes him less likely to want to have contact because we've gone through his family and not given him the opportunity to tell them himself, if you know what I mean.

There have been some speculation that Becky's father may not know his identity, but there are a number of things that indicate that he very likely does, in fact know that Becky exists.

So I think that it's best to hang back from making that contact with her at this point in time until I've at least until I've done a full evaluation.

I might be able to identify her through her more distant relatives.

I might be able to identify who her father or her brother is.

And if that's possible, then you always want to go straight to the birth person, the birth parents, if at all possible, because that gives them the opportunity then to tell their family if they want to do that.

Of course, it might be that we'd no, we get to that point and we get no reply, and then we can always go back and try contacting her at that point.

That's one thing that I'm a little bit nervous about is the contact if he is alive, because I've been public with my story for ten years and he has not contacted me.

I'm worried that he may not want to contact me, he may not know he's my biological father, or he's deceased.

So it's I am very nervous about that first contact.

I think with you, Becky, I've been thinking about that as well, how public you've been over the last ten years.

And then also as I was digging in a little bit more about what Anne Rule has reported on.

Her contact with your birth father.

If that's in fact true, I don't have any reason to doubt she's lying.

But if it is true that she did have contact.

With your birth father and she made a deal with.

Him, he would know then that Diane Brown's you know, obviously had a child and that he has a child with her, you know, I'm not a man, so I don't know if there's shame that he We don't know the circumstances how he came into the position of being with Diane intimately, if that was as it's been quoted in books and resources, is that he was duped into this affair or whether he went into it willingly.

But I could imagine this is somewhat shameful to know that he he had sex with a convicted child killer.

It's just the same as it's shameful to be the daughter.

You know.

Several names have floated for who Becky's father might be, but with annerl's use him in alias, his real name may have died with her.

No one else seems to know exactly who he might be.

So what's interesting, Michelle, is that everybody has a theory who Becky's father is, So any theories.

Yeah, so I spoke to the nanny.

She had the theory it was a defense attorney, which is ruled out, so that's not the case.

But everybody speculates who had this access on a daily basis with Diane that could be potentially the father based on what I have researched and Rull gave the statement that she made a deal that she would use his story in the book but change his name, you know, make a pen name for him, and then also changes profession, which she changes profession in the book to teacher.

But then interesting enough, when we.

Talked to reporters, they all said, we heard it was a local reporter.

And there's so many people who are attached to this case that want to know the results and are curious in a different fashion to Becky.

I mean, I always say the proof is in the DNA.

Yeah.

The problem with what you've got You've got a jackpop match, and at the same time you you've got the unlucky status of being from almost certainly from very recent immigrants, which means that there are less DNA matches to work with.

Like I said, the vast majority of your matches are maternal.

That you know, sort of issue of oh, we've got fewer matches to work with, yet at the same time we've got the jackpot match.

Michelle plans to die far beyond the DNA results and using whatever name she's able to find, she'll build a paternal family tree bit by bit until she's able to solidify the identities of Becky's closest relatives on her father's side.

And next, what I want to do is a full evaluation of the paternal matches that she does have.

I want to build their trees.

I want to try and find their connections, and of course the fact that it is recent immigration from countries like Poland and the Ukraine does make that more difficult.

But I will try my very best to build these people back to their ancestors and see if I can find connections.

And if I can do that, I might be able to solve it through these more distant matches.

It just depends how lucky we are with them and how possible it is to build the trees back and find the connections, and at that point we can make a decision on contacting the jackpot match, or if I've been lucky, that maybe contacting the birth father himself.

So that's why I'm saying, hold off on any contact with the high match at the moment until I've done this.

Having been through this scenario many times with others, there's an approach Michelle recommends for those who may be contacting possible family members for the first time.

I say, you know, you have to do it.

Very cautiously.

You don't want to barrel in there telling them your life story.

In a first message.

You have to gauge what they may know and what they may be willing to how you know, when you make a first contact, you have to make it short.

You want to say, you know, hey, we have a close match, but you don't want to say, oh, I think I'm your daughter, or I think I'm your sister, or you know, you don't want to go into that detail, just you know, are you know, are you interested in exploring our match?

Is there anything you could tell me about your ancestry?

General questions?

You know.

I think one of the worst mistakes is if you're looking for a birth parent and you instantly see you have half siblings, or you have aunts or you know, first cousins, people that are close to that man, and you know you've worked out who he is, but you instead go on Facebook and message his daughter, because then you might be opening up a can of worms that leads you to alienating the person that you're trying to get in contact with before you've even managed to speak to them.

And going about these things the right way doesn't always result in a positive outcome.

If you can possibly get to the birth parent themselves.

Always you want to do that.

I'm just thinking it's funny that all of your don't do is when contacting is exactly what I did.

When I contacted i Am, I said, I think I'm weird daughter.

I told her my entire life story, and I think I overwhelmed her.

You know, it was just like I was.

I was kind of excited to contact her, which is weird, I know, but you know, it's still where I come from.

And so I got a little over excited when I wrote my letter.

And it's it's It's natural, isn't it to get over excited contacting someone who's so closely related to you, And what's right for one person isn't right for another.

And I always say keep the first, you know, contact sure and gender.

But when they if they come back and they're super interested and they're telling you their life story, you know, then get into it because you know obviously there's they want to hear it.

And of course I'm talking from the perspective of finding people as a DNA match and not from having adoption papers and the like, and knowing this person is supposedly your birth parent.

My first thought isn't let's fire off a message to her straight away.

I want to do some more digging and find out if I can work out who she is and maybe work from her to get to your birth parent.

With the Jackpop match of Becky's paternal side, discovering the identity of Becky's father seems likely in many ways.

Finding out would be the culmination of her journey and the reconciliation and acceptance of who she is.

The question is whether or not her biological father will feel the same.

On the next episode of Happy Face Presents Two Face, in a bizarre letter from Diane Downs to her post conviction attorney, she completely changes her version of the events that took place that night of the shooting and what happens when Diana escapes from prison.

Ben Bolan is our executive producer, Melissa Moore is our co executive producer.

Maya Cole is our primary producer, Paul Dekant is our supervising producer, Sam T.

Garnian is our researcher, and Matt Riddle is our story editor.

Featured music by dream Tent.

Happy Phase Presents Two Phase is a production of iHeartRadio