Connecting with the Woman Who Found Her

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We're drinking tea and going over a memory from when we were kids. It's something we've been through so many times over the years. We were like, Why did you stop? Because she was driving. We said, Why did you s what made you stop to to look what it was? You see, this is a story my family can never quite put to rest. Maybe every family has one of these. It's that thing that always comes up when you're together. The story gets told and retold, details are debated, bits get embellished, and over time, it becomes family folklore. We talk about it over the years and be like, it's so weird and we used to guess where it was on that road. Wait, oh you did you know what you I mean But the thing is this isn't our story. It belongs to someone else the six pound three and a half ounce baby is doing well in hospital after being dumped in an orange and white plastic bag around mid-morning yesterday A baby girl who appears from nowhere on Tuesday the 6th of October 1987 lying on a patch of damp grass beside a remote country lane in Suffolk. She's lying half wrapped in a Sainsbury supermarket bag, like a makeshift plastic cradle . Late that morning, a passing driver spots the baby. She's picked up, wrapped in a jumper, and taken to hospital. A small miracle . For years I've thought about that day and wondered about the baby and the mother who left her there. Because right from the start, there were questions. We lived nearby. I was just eight at the time. But even at that young age, we knew that this real life mystery happening on our doorstep was a big deal. I can still remember where I was when I was told about the abandoned baby. I can see myself now I'm walking out of the black school gates, the sun's on my face. Our nanny's come to pick me up , and she's standing there in the car park. You won't believe what happened today, she says. And what she recounts, the lane, the baby, the passing driver, it feels like a scene from a film . Except it's a film that to this day my sisters and I still can't quite make sense of. When we got older, we were like, she found a baby. She what? How do you find a baby? Good evening. That evening we watch the six o'clock Anglian News. Our big boxy telly lived on a tall chest of drawers, and I had to crane my neck a bit to see it. Very happy. It was gurgling, smiling. So what did you do after you got into the car ? Um Um well I dropped my jump around it by this point 'cause I knew that you had to keep babies w you know, keep them warm. Drive had drove down all the way down the road again just to turn round and sort of sped back and thought the gardener's going to be at home. He'll know what to do because I didn't know where to go next. And uh the newsreader tells us that the midwives at the hospital give the baby a name, Heather . For years we foc us on that day, that grassy verge, the baby . Over time, the story of the Suffolk Foundling is rubbed so smooth by years of retelling, I can no longer get a firm grip on it. A newborn believed to have been delivered in the last 24 hours has been abandoned outside South Tugranong Fire Station in Canberra. And every so often, stories about babies being abandoned crop up. A woman has been arrested after a newborn baby was found dead in a plastic bag in London last week. Abandoned or dead within the last month here in the world. Each time it happens, I think of that Suffolk baby. Whose was she? What happened to her? And occasionally, when I search online for child abandonment, I find there's very little to explain what happens to the babies who are left. And there's even less about their mothers. I've spent decades as a radio producer researching true stories, and yet So I make a decision to go back. Back to the Suffolk of 1987 , to try and answer the questions that have gnawed at me for years. What happened to that baby? What does it do to you to know that you were left abandoned? And perhaps even more intriguing for me are the questions about her mother . Who would carry a beautiful, healthy baby girl to a lonely country lane and just dump her there in a plastic trauma and loss. But what I've uncovered over the last year is a story which is much more troubling than anything we dreamt up as children . It's about family. I think I'll always be angry because you're constantly thinking could it have ended differently had things been different. About motherhood. I st I don't think I've still fully accepted it to be honest. There's still a part of me that thinks this can't be happening, it's not real. And about how secrets can in the end bubble up and destroy things. Lies always come out, don't they? Skeletons are always gonna come out eventually. I'm Lucy Greenwell and from Tortoise Investigates and the Observer, this is Foundling . Episode 1 On the Verge Did you sort of start imagining who your mum and dad might be? Did you have any f did you build up for little fantasies about the kind of people they might have been at any stage? You always hope that it was this lovely love story that they just couldn't be together. Any family and any anyone from any adoptive background, you always hop Whenever I tell this story to friends and I explain that I've tracked down the abandoned baby, they're amazed. I've got this huge mass of curly hair, and that's always been in the back of my mind. I instantly thought I'd have someone at the end of, you know, if I ever did find them, that would have a huge mass of curly hair. Over the years we referred to the baby as Heather, the name she was given by midwives. But when I start asking around in the local area, it turns out a few people know her new name, and it doesn't take too much detective work to track her down. So meet that abandoned baby girl, Jess. She's now thirty eight years old, has big eyes, a huge smile, and that distinctive curly hair . So these are the news paper cuttings that I wasn't the prettiest of babies, but there's little crocheted dress with crocheted booties. Oh, there you are. When I first got into hospital. Looking quite alert. Yes. It's just a photo and underneath it says baby Heather. Will she ever know her mother's identity? And then this one's a bab abandoned baby Heather So Heather had been transferred into a a loving home just days after being left beside a lonely Suffolk Road, so that's obviously where I went into foster care. So that's about a week after. These articles lay out what happened to baby Jess after she's handed to the nurses . Reading them, it's clear to me the midwifes, social workers, the police, and the press are all desperately trying to persuade Jess's mother to come forward. Despite these repeated appeals, no one does. Jess is placed in foster care, and after three months, she's matched with a Suffolk couple who already have one adopted daughter. After this dramatic start, Jess tells me her life was pretty happy. Actually, what she describes is an idyllic childhood. We had the park across the road, my best friends were in the village next door. Yeah, we'd be playing outside all day every day and then come in for a home cooked meal at five on the dot every day. And always a dessert, which my friends always thought was amazing 'cause they didn't have dessert. You know, there was lots of jelly, there was lots of angel delight, lots of crumbles and app le pies and trifles. She says there were aunts, uncles and grandparents living on the same street. Jess and her sister Laura roam free, surrounded by love and affection. Jess has always known that she's adopted, but she tells me that until she's eleven, she never really thought to question why . Until this one day. For her birthday her parents had given her a TV for her bedroom, but the screen kept going fuzzy, so she and her dad are out shopping for a new aerial . There they are, just parking up outside BQ. And then I just kind of said, Oh, I wonder I did wonder a little bit about my adoption, um as Laura knows about hers now. Laura is Jess's older and also adopted sister . A few weeks earlier, Laura had found out about her own birth parents . And um dad being dad just naturally said in a suffoc accent, oh bloody hell, he said I always hoped that your mum would be here when you asked that question, 'cause it's not so straightforward as your sister. Then and there in the car he tells her that she was found abandoned, and that no one knows who her birth parents are . And then we kind of sat there in the car, in the car park of being Q , and um I just sat sobbing. I didn't think well you wouldn't. But n it didn't ever cross my mind it would be something like that. And I instantly felt very little again. I felt really young. Um, because it felt like it was too much information . Most of us have an origin story. How we arrived into the world, who was there, what was said. Jess has assumed that she has one too, just like her sister, Laura. But from this moment on, she's aware of a void, a complete blank where her beginning should be. And that not knowing it's tough . I instantly felt well you do you just instantly feel rejected. Like you feel that you can't th that you're not really wanted. Although I've had this incredible upbringing where I was so wanted, so loved. Why didn't that person want me? And I felt like I I didn't even want to know any more because it kind of ruined Yeah. That that perfect childhood sud suddenly had something else laced in it. Yeah . Yeah . Um pause for a bit. Sorry . Um for me, it kind of it did it broke my little world. You know, constantly trying to tell me, you know, you're you're a good person, you you know, and as much as anyone tells you that, you don't feel like you are. Like you feel like your roots your roots are bad. You're like rotten . Um you've come from someone that can discard a baby and have no thoughts or feelings about that . As a teenager, Jess says she tells her friends that she was found and they tell their friends, and the story sort of takes on a life of its own. It was it was a big deal for my friends and stuff. And it was just the that whole constant of why do you not want to know? Why are you not gonna find out? For years she just didn't. But slowly that changes. And by the time she's in her early twenties, she's intrigued by the mystery of her beginning. And I actually felt a little bit excited about it because I wanted to get to the bottom of it, just the whole Sherlock Holmes situation of it all. I wanted to figure it all out. From the very first time I call her, Jess is really open with me, because let's be honest , a total stranger calling you up and telling you that they're obsessed with your origin story must be a bit weird. But you seem to get it, why the mystery of who she is and the questions around it are in some way bigger than just her. And so she's happy to humour me and let me play homes to her Sherlock. But when I first meet her, there really isn't all that much that she can tell me. In the UK, all adopted children have the right to find out where they come from. It's been enshrined in law since the mid-70s. The UN also recognizes that children have a right to an identity to know as far as possible who their parents are . But if you start out as a foundling, a lone baby with no backstory, this basic right is denied. There's no official record for foundlings to uncover. No paper trail. When she's 22, Jess decides she wants to see the place where she was found, so she sets off with a friend, armed with those. She tells me she remembers feeling intrigue, but also dread, because until now it's all felt very abstract. But by going to the spot where she was left, she's hoping she might glimpse some clue, something that might explain why she was abandoned . So we can't have just drove round looking for little lanes. In the cuttings it's variously described as the side of a quiet road, a lonely roadside verge, or the side of a lane near Ipswich. One article gives a more detailed description of how the lane runs between two small villages and how there's a field on one side and a wood on the other . But it's hard to be certain where the place is. There are just so many back lanes nearby, so many fields, so many clumps of woodland, and with no other distinguishing features to go on. They don't manage it. They can't quite figure it out. But by now they've got the bit between their teeth. They spot a bungalow nearby, set back behind a thick privet hedge, and they knock on the door. This lovely little lady who'd lived in the village all her life instantly welcomed us in with a cup of tea and a piece of cake . There are a lot of what-ifs in this stor y, and this is one of them. What if Jess hadn't knocked on this particular door where a woman called Jean lived? Because with Jean, Jess had struck gold. And she couldn't be more excited because she just remembers every last detail. She said it was such a hoo-ha , you know, there was so many police around in the village and, then there obviously the rumours start flying around that there was a baby left down this road, and we all couldn't believe it. We just couldn't believe it. Afterwards and that there were a few theories circulating about who the baby's mother was. She said it has to be someone local because no one would have known about that lane. So instantly that's where my mind went Jean takes Jess into her back garden. And she said, You nearly got the right lane. She said, It's that one down there. And she pointed. Um, she said, Shall we have a drive down there? Should we have a look? I said, Yeah, all right then. So she got in my car and um she was so excited, it was brilliant really. She made me excited about it. It was a different feeling altogether. At this point, Jess tells me she feels like an old-fashioned sleuth. Yeah, we jumped in my car and she went, take the next right. And she said, I know exact spot where it was. They drive about half a mile to a passing place on the lane. And she said that's where you were. Right there . Jess has quite strong feelings about the verge . You know when you see flowers on a roadside marking the place where someone's died in a car crash? Well, for Jess, it's the exact opposite, the mirror image, in fact. She almost memorializes this verge because it's the place where she believes her life begins. She once sent me a photo of it with a heart emoji, the fact that it's beautiful, and it really is, it matters to her . But being at the verge that day has another effect. It alters how she feels about the fact that she was abandoned. It makes her feel something more like anger . Of all the places you could have left me, you've left me somewhere that nobody goes, like unless you were local to that village, like nobody goes down that lane. Why would you think anyone would have picked me up from there? She's thinking perhaps you ever left her there And for the first time in all these years, she says it strikes her that if she hadn't been picked up that morning, she might not have survived. As Jess leaves the verge and says goodbye to Jean, Jean repeats her theory that only someone local could have known about that lane. And then she drops one more vital clue. She said, I've got my suspicions. And she said, Well, there was a couple of nannies in the village. She said, and they they weren't from around here. She said, No, I'm sure one of them has to something to do with it . For the police, this is an old case, long forgotten, and largely mothballed after Jess was adopted back in 1988 . But I reckon there must still be a case file somewhere. I begin making some inquiries of my own, and I send off a request to Suffolk Constabulary asking to see any paperwork they have about the investigation . And while I wait, I try to track down the police officers who are involved . Their names aren't on social media, so I trawl the electoral register looking for addresses. It seems they all still live in Suffolk, and I end up driving round the county, parking in unfamiliar streets and posting letters through front doors . I assume it's going to be straightforward that they'll be amused , flattered even to dust off an old and puzzling case. But I'm wrong about that . The detective who's in charge of the case doesn't want to talk about it, and neither do the two other retired officers who also worked on it . I'm struck by this wariness I've touched on for something that happened so long ago. It's only when I start to dig into the la ws around child abandonment that I begin to see things more clearly . Now, I know this might sound simplistic, but I simply hadn't thought of this story as a crime. For us as kids, any police involvement was just about helping to reconnect mother and baby, almost like a missing person case . And the police were keen to find the missing mother, but Jess's abandonment was still investigated as a crime. The roadside verge was treated like a crime scene. You see, it's an offense to abandon a child under two if it endangers their life or causes them harm. That's punishable by up to five years in prison . Then there's a broader offense of cruelty to a person under 16, including neglect, ill treatment, or abandonment, and for that you could get 10 years. And because we don't, in the UK, have a statute of limit ations for serious crimes, someone can be prosecuted today for abandoning a baby back in 1987 . This case was never actually solved, so new information , fresh evidence, or a recent forensic technology like DNA, could open it up again. You and I know that we don't want that's absolutely not the motivation. Exactly. I know you don't. Neither of us wants that. Yet several former police officers seem genuinely concerned that my report was I check in with Jess. And to try and find answers to the questions she's been asking for years . While every other channel is fighting for the customer's attention, podcasts are where they've already given it. No one accidentally listens to a podcast for 45 minutes. They choose to be here. They trust the voice if it is , and when that voice talks about your brand, it doesn't sound like advertising, it sounds like a recommendation from a friend. Ac ast gives you that trust at scale, digital precision, host red authenticity and performance data that proves it worked. Don't fight for attention. Buy it with ACAST. Learn more by visiting acast.com/slash advertise . I write again to all the retired police officers, assuring them that neither Jess nor I are looking to reopen the case, that we're not seeking new evidence but they don't change their minds . Eventually I find a fourth former police officer. Initially he says no, but after thinking it over, he agrees to talk because he tells me Jessica deserves some answers . In his retirement, Aldwyn Jones sits on the committee of a village hall, and so we meet there. He's a former detective chief inspector at Ipswich Police Station. He's a tall, polite man with glasses and salt and pepper hair. Happens very rarely in Suffolk. In in my experience, unfortunately, the baby is more likely to have been found dead than alive. It was a rarity to find the baby alive. Babies are abandoned intermittently, but more often than not, it's their lifeless bodies that are later found. Of the four babies abandoned in Suffolk in nineteen eighty seven, Jess was the only one found alive. What would you have been looking for when you went to the verge? Well obvious things to get the feel of the place where it's been left and trying to weigh it up, but why would you leave a baby there? It's always good practice to go and visit the scene of any major crime. But there would there could be things forensically that may be inavailable, such as tire tracks or footprints. And had you found a footprint or a tire mark, what would you have done? Well it they could take a cast. That was how they used to do it in those days. Take a cast and then you can identify the tyre and then you could up for example identify the tyre and then they could tell you the make. And it gives you a lead, but there was nothing from memory that I can remember like that being found. He tells me that any potential leads had been washed away. One thing I'd remember about that day was the rain . And as we went up to it there was a torrential downpour. And I couldn't help but think that if this had happened an hour or two ago, the consequences were the baby who had been exposed In the first week, around twenty officers were on the case, doing house-to-house calls, manning the verge, running vehicle checks , and monitoring a dedicated phone line. Meanwhile, police have set up an incident room where relatives, friends, or anyone with information can talk to a woman police constable. If you can help, ring Ipswich, that's O four seven three six one oh five seven eight. It's the nineteen eighties, remember. So the officers are working without any help from CCTV, computers or mobile phone records. And investig ations using DNA were in their infancy . When the case paperwork arrives from Suffolk Police, it paints a picture of a pretty analogue investigation . There's the appeal poster that was pinned up on notice boards across the county. It carries a photo of Jess, taken in hospital when she's a day or so old. She's wearing a pale crochet dress, and next to her is a picture of the vest she was found in, with an Adams label showing. Adams was a popular kids' clothing brand at the time. I'm also sent two hand drawn maps with a small cross marking the spot that made in the days after . There's something else that arrives with the documents, some new press cuttings. These ones were written by a young reporter just starting out on the local paper. I'm Terry Hunt. I was the editor of the East Anglian Daily Times newspaper between 199 6 and 2017 . When the baby was found in 1987, I was working in the newsroom at the newspaper. Terry Hunt still remembers the call coming in. I looked around the newsroom and the newsroom was empty. Even in 1987, we didn't run on lots of staff. I didn't have any option really we had to go out. So I I I grabbed a photographer and we headed out. I think there was one one policeman standing there. How would you describe what it looked like that place. Just very, very lonely. Very lonely. Even for Suffolk, very lonely. Which made me think it was strange. There was a bit of muddled thinking on behalf of who whoeeverver left it there. That's that was my initial thought that I'd I don't know what's what the thinking is. Why didn't the person who left it leave it somewhere where they knew it was gonna be found . Everyone, the journalists, the police, even us young kids, though we can't quite put our finger on why, we all think there's something strange about this story. Most babies are abandoned often in places where they can be found readily. Public toilets, public libraries, hospitals, near police stations, that's all that's been the pattern of abandoned babies. That's interesting. So there was something unusual from the get-go . Probably, yes, yeah . The police did receive some tip-offs. There was a green Austin car seen parked nearby at a crossroad local a woman with a local accent a suffoc accent saying words to the effect of I didn't mean it a week later a parcel of clothes was sent anonymously to the hospital address was quoted in the press saying The mother is probably tired, exhausted, he says, she's at risk of hemorrhage and infection. At risk of infection, tired and exhausted. Aged eight, my focus had been firmly on the infant. I couldn't have fathomed the emotional cost of carrying a baby for nine months, feeling it flutter and kick, and then giving birth. There can't be many lonier situations. I hadn't considered what those final moments must have felt like dressing the baby, travelling to the verge, laying it down, and walking away Sometimes I would cut through that little lane and I would always slow down and kind of try to remember where the baby was was left . And then I'd think I wonder what happened to that that little baby . In 2010, after Jess visits The Verge and gets that tip-off from Jean about the local nannies, she tells me she gets in touch with the police. One of the detectives agrees to meet her in a supermarket cafe. He tells her everything he can remember: the car sightings, the strange phone calls, door-to-door inquiries, much of the information I've seen in the police files. He tells her about the frustration they all felt when they got nowhere . This detective, he's one of the former police officers who didn't want to do an interview for the podcast. But he does send me a note about one other She should try and trace the young lady that found her that morning . It chimes with what Jess has already heard from Jean. He's telling Jess that if she wants to know more about what happened that day, she should try and find this former nanny. And he tells me he hands her something. That she had the young lady's details. Jess tells me she's never seen this particular press cutting before. It's new to her. It's the interview which Terry Hunt did when he spoke to the young nanny who found Jess, and it includes a photograph of her And then underneath it said her name, her full name Armed with a name, Jess and her sister Laura go online. Laura posts a message on a family reunion site. Does anyone remember an 18-year-old nanny who found a baby in Suffolk in 87 and Jess turns to Facebook I just bombarded every single one I came across with the same name, roughly the same age , with the same message. It was a copy and paste scenario. I think at least 20 people got that message with the same name and surname. She says she keeps it simple. She names the village where she was found and asks them, Did you ever live there? Most never reply. A few get back to her saying no, sorry, they've never even been to Suffolk, but then two, days later, a message pings in. It reads, Yes, I did live there. I was in annie there. Does that help? Jennifer. I I then replied and said, Thanks for reply ing. Did you find a baby abandoned in the village by any chance? Jess. Yes. Why? That's a long time ago. Jess explains that she is that baby and, that she's looking for information about her birth, that she wants to find out more. Jennifer replies, Oh gosh, I'm so very glad you're okay. Last I knew you were called Heather . On the grass verge. There you were wrapped in a blanket or sheet sorry I can't remember exactly. With a a bag of some sort under you . You were taken to the hospital and I never saw you again , I'm afraid. I did a TV appeal for your mum to come forward, but I was never kept in the loop as to what happened. Jess writes back. She's certainly doing fine, she types. I've been trying to track you down for quite some time, just to say thanks really, and that you saved my life. I'm very lucky to be here. She goes on to ask. I have a newspaper article with a picture of you on the front. Did you get questioned by the police a lot? I've met one of them and they said they spoke to you. Thanks so much, Jess. Oh, you're so very welcome. Right time, right place . The police were a bit of full on to begin with. It was a big thing in a little rural area . I'm glad to have been one of the first people to have met you . If I'd been asked, I would have called you Rebecca. Heather never seemed you . When I read that out loud to my mum and dad, we all just went that is such an odd thing to say . Because why would you say that? I think I've got it here. You got it. Yeah. If I had been asked. If I had been asked. I would have called you Rebecca. Yeah. Two exclamation marks. Heather never seemed you. Heather never seemed me. See that I think that's even weirder. That she's got a version of you in her mind. Never never seemed you. Like never seemed me. Like you don't know me. If you just found me, you don't know me then do you? I then replied and said a lot of people in the village still think you have something to do with it for some reason . Next time on Foundling . If I if I'd have known it was going to be as traumatic as it has been, I probably wouldn't have carried on digging. Do you really mean that you turn the clock? Absolutely. You turn back the clock. Yeah . And I dug a little bit, not realiz ing that tiny little bit of a digging would turn into this huge pit of problems and And a spindle of lies