Who Trolled Amber? - Lost | Foundling Ep 6
Episode Date: April 28, 2026Jess gets some surprising visitors and Lucy receives a call from Jess’s birth father.Foundling is a 6 part original series from Tortoise Investigates and The Observer** If you have questions about t...he series, we will be publishing a subscriber only bonus episode. You can email your questions to foundling@observer.co.uk To binge listen to all episodes today, ad-free, subscribe to The Observer and use the code AUDIO50 to get 50% off your annual subscription.You'll get access to:This series and all our podcasts before anyone elseAd-free listeningPremium newslettersPuzzles from the inventors of the cryptic crosswordExclusive offers from our partners including Mubi and iescapeTickets to join Observer events in our newsroom or onlineOr subscribe to Observer+ on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to listen to all our podcasts, including this one, without any ads.Reporter - Lucy GreenwellProducer - Katie GunningOriginal theme music - Tom KinsellaSound design and additional music - Rowan BishopPodcast artwork - Blythe Walker SibthorpNarrative editor - Gary Marshall Editor - Jasper Corbett Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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Tortus Investigates.
Hello, it's Lucy.
Before we get into episode six, the final part of our story,
I just wanted to say a huge thank you for listening.
We're so glad you've enjoyed the series.
Because we've had such an overwhelming response,
we're planning a special bonus episode
for observer subscribers to try and answer some of the questions
we know you still have.
Katie and I will be sitting down with Jess
and putting some of your questions directly to her.
So if there's anything you'd like to ask us about the investigation,
the DNA search or Jess's journey,
please send us an email or a voice note to foundling at observer.com.uk.
We can't wait to hear from you.
Now on to episode six.
In late October last year, two men turn up on Jess's doorstep.
Jess isn't at home.
But the smartly dress middle-aged men are spotted by some builders.
And they tell Jess they looked just like coppers.
But when Jess calls the local force, they don't know anything about the visit.
So if they aren't police, who are they?
Jess spends an anxious week thinking about this.
She becomes slightly paranoid and tries to avoid being at home on her own.
The men return a week later.
And they seem friendly.
and Jess is her usual warm welcoming self.
I said, do you want a cup of tea?
Yeah, we'll have a cup of tea.
But she can't contain her nerves.
She can't help worrying that she must have done something wrong
because the two men, they are from the police,
just not from the regular force.
I said, actually, before I boil the kettle,
can you just tell me what the hell this is about
because you're making me panic so bad?
And he was like, oh, we're from the cold cases team
and it's about you as a founding.
Fine.
For years, Jess has been the one asking the questions.
Since she was a teenager, she's been the one trying to unearth hidden things.
Now, all of a sudden, the tables have turned.
Two professional investigators are asking Jess questions about being a foundling.
Oh, God.
I was like, what the hell is going on?
Oddly, apart from the TV producers who made the Long Loss family episode and then me,
no one's really asked Jess about the events at the start of her life.
Her friends have, sure, but never anyone official.
The police investigation into her abandonment ended years ago when she was still tiny.
There were no answers then, and the case was shelved.
And then last year, I started asking questions
and trying to speak to officers who worked on the investigation back in 1987.
And that seems to have set off a chain reaction.
I was setting up the mics to interview Oldwyn Jones,
the original detective on the case,
who we heard from at the start of the series.
And he asked me something I wasn't quite prepared for.
Are you going to do anything with the mother or not?
I'm going to ask her. I've written to her.
Now, in an investigation like this,
you tread quite carefully with the information you're gathering.
You don't go around telling everyone everything.
But when a senior policeman, even one who's...
retired, asked you for the answer to a mystery he and his team didn't manage to crack.
Well, you feel a bit of pressure.
Can I ask you if she's been, I don't know her name, I'm guessing, of course.
Um, you, I wonder if you, who is your suspicion about who it was?
In the moment, I'm buying time and I'm thinking, this isn't my information to share.
Is there any way I can not tell him?
the person who found the body,
some connection either with her or her.
Is that right?
Yes.
That is right.
One or the other.
Is she the mother or the connected?
He's not giving up,
and I can't see a way not to answer him.
I end up confirming a suspicion
he's obviously had all along.
She's the mother.
Mm, all right.
And it turns out
he shared that crucial piece of information
with some of his former colleagues.
Once a copper, always a copper, right?
And that's led here to a pair of cold case officers
drinking tea on Jess's sofa.
So I was trying to get all the timeline together
for them to write it down.
My questions had set something in motion
that I hadn't anticipated.
Remember how Oldwyn had said
that baby Jess was lucky to be alive,
how a lot of babies who are abandoned don't survive.
The plain-closed police officers tell Jess about two babies who were found dead in 1984.
The very matter-of-fact about it all and laid out the facts that, you know,
they were looking at these two other cases of babies being abandoned
and they had to investigate them because it was in a certain mile radius of where I was left
and these babies weren't far away.
They say that one of the babies.
bodies is being exhumed so that DNA samples can be taken.
The officers are here because they want to take a saliva swap from Jess.
They need her DNA because they want to rule out any connection to Jennifer.
I'm Lucy Greenwell and from Tortoise Investigates and the Observer, this is Foundling.
Episode 6. Lost.
So I'd always kind of found it difficult to manage the relationships on that side.
It's been two and a half years since Jess completed her family jigsaw.
And in a way, Jess feels like she has three families.
There's her own family unit with Jamie and the kids.
There's Kim on her father's side.
And then there's her birth mother's family too.
It's a lot.
Because obviously I chose not to have a relationship with my biological.
mum, it was always going to be difficult.
So to have a relationship with my nan and granddad, my aunts and uncles.
On her mother's side of the family, everyone tiptoes round the central issue
that Jennifer and Jess don't have a relationship, have never met.
There was always that slight pressure of, oh, you know, why don't you meet your other siblings
or, you know, your biological mum's only around the corner, why don't you go and see her?
And it's, I didn't, I hated that.
hate every part of that.
You don't get to pressurise me into that decision.
And I did say numerous times, it's just not what I want.
But for a while, they sort of make it work.
There's a fragile sense of family.
They muddle on, as families do.
But a couple of years after they all first meet in early 2025,
Jennifer's dad, Jess's granddad, falls ill,
and everything begins to change.
He and Jess had grown close.
The last time she saw him, they'd gone for a walk together.
He'd said lovely things to her about what she meant to him,
and it felt genuinely special.
But now, when he's really sick, there's a closing of the ranks.
They kept saying that he hasn't got long, he hasn't got long at all.
And I said, well, can I come up?
But like, even if it's for an hour and then I'll drive back home.
Her granddad's immediate family tell her again and again,
And don't worry, there's really no point coming to visit at this stage.
It's not for you to decide that I have had all these years of not knowing him
and I'm not even allowed to say goodbye.
I felt very pushed out, very unwanted again, very rejected.
And I wanted to just be able to say thanks to him because he was lovely.
I kept explaining my reasons why I wanted to go and say goodbye.
But they just didn't seem to get it.
She thinks about ignoring their messages, just jumping in her car.
But she doesn't want to tread on toes, so she stays at home.
Jess only finds out that her new grandfather has died
when one of her cousins posts about it on Facebook.
It was devastating because again it's another kick in the teeth of the,
you're not that important.
You're not seen as one of us.
It's that...
It just takes you back to feeling like you're nothing.
Jess hatches a plan to pay her respects at his funeral.
Her dad offers to drive her north
and she decides she'll slip in at the back
and disappear home before the wake.
But then she gets a message saying the funeral is for close family only.
She'd missed out on Chloe's funeral.
and now she's not welcome at this one.
She's always one step removed from these newfound families
at these critical emotional moments,
like she's the disruptor, a needless distraction.
Look at it from Jennifer's point of view.
She's never been in the same room as her long ago abandoned daughter.
To risk coming face to face for the very first time
at her own father's funeral,
well, that would add a heavy emotional burden to an already difficult day.
I can see why Jennifer and her mother wanted to avoid that.
But for Jess, this funeral decision is the final straw.
She makes a choice to distance herself from the mall.
So I just kind of said, I can't do this anymore.
I'm finding, like managing everything and everyone too much.
It's too painful.
And this has really hurt my feelings more than anything.
and I wish you all the best
and I hope everything goes okay tomorrow
and just kind of signed off from that.
This message sent the day before the funeral
causes its own hurt,
a hardening of attitudes towards Jess.
For a while, Jess feels like her life is a bit simpler again,
without them all.
No more visits, no more birthday cards,
no more diplomatically dividing her time
between different family members
But then a few months later, we start recording this podcast.
So this was after I had written to various people,
like inviting them to tell their side of the story
or to contribute to this podcast.
Like I'm some sort of enemy and I'm up against them
and it's just not the truth at all.
Listen to what this is actually about.
It's not putting shade on them as a family.
It's just telling my story and getting their side of the story.
So what happened?
You just went on one more.
Like, what did you notice first?
I noticed that Rachel had defended me.
Rachel is her aunt, Jennifer's sister.
I looked on a profile and I was like, oh, I'm not friends of her anymore.
What on earth's happened here?
Like, what?
And then I thought, oh, surely not.
So then I checked the rest of them.
And lo and behold, I think Sam had then got rid of me off Instagram.
And then...
The other sibling from Jennifer, who I'd never met, she'd got rid of me.
But then I noticed they'd all started locking down their profiles a lot more so you couldn't see anything.
Okay, something's obviously happened.
There's this happening with the podcast and we need to protect ourselves.
Let's all come together. Let's all get rid.
And just wipe it out, you know.
It's so hard for me to understand who's rejecting who.
Yeah.
Because you signed off.
you said signed off from them.
It's too painful.
Yeah.
But at the same time, it hurt your feelings when they rejected you from, like, unfriended you or.
Because I hadn't rejected them fully, but they took that drastic action of, that's it, we're done and wipe you out completely like you never existed.
And that's what it just felt really drastic, especially when I'd already said, you know, we can still keep in touch.
It just won't be the same as it was.
and the fact that they all done it
that was like the worst part
for some months
whenever Jess and I speak
she's upset
I can hear them talking
she just wants the attention
I'd love to be able to just take a pill
and then forget that they even existed
I don't care at this point
those months of phone calls
are hard
Jess is upset
and I'm part of the reason
things have deteriorated with Jennifer's family
It's brought up emotions I didn't realise I'd had
or I thought I'd got rid of
but it, yeah, it didn't think that there would be this huge fallout.
She imagines them all condemning her
and she hates it.
She feels like they think she's gone rogue.
I tell her I get where they're coming from
because going public with something this private
must feel like a betrayal to them.
And that's why Jennifer's family,
her parents, her siblings, have closed ranks
around her. Whatever confusion or embarrassment they feel about how Jennifer's handled things,
however baffled they are by how she's reacted to Jess, she's still theirs.
Jess has been cut loose again. For her whole life, Jess's story has belonged to other people,
to the police who investigated, to the journalists who wrote about her, the social workers
who placed her with a family, and crucially, to Jennifer, who had bettered her.
the story. Now, Jess, by speaking publicly, is the one who's deciding what gets said and when.
It feels to me like an ongoing battle for control over her own story. Ultimately, I was the one
that chose to not have anything to do with them anymore. But it's the hurt that they've got
no fight in there for me at all. When I started on this investigation, I was trying to understand
Jennifer, what she did and why. But the longer I've spent with Jess, the more I've realised
her choices also matter. Why does someone take the story of their abandonment and their search
for answers, this painful, private thing, and decide to tell it? It has helped me work through
emotions that I'd buried pretty deep, I think. It's worked through the story and actually
dug up bits that I'd forgotten. But ultimately it's all for my kids. Like their mum's story,
ultimately my story is a crazy one. It's an incredible one and it's really interesting. And they're
going to have that for the rest of their lives. They have their mum telling that. But it is very
public as well and I'm trying to understand a bit more about like what your hopes were, what it felt
like for you to tell your story in this way. It is mostly for me. It's getting it down because like the
timeline is so crazy and there's so much happened in a number of years. It's just nice to be
able to be heard and make sense of it a bit more. A way of being heard, sure, but maybe it's
more than that, a way of trying to get her new family to see all of this through her eyes.
I think not even just Jennifer, like all of them. I don't think they've ever really understood
from my perspective and how things feel from me.
Jess says she doesn't want a relationship with her birth mother.
She's not angry, she says.
But there's something she keeps coming back to.
If you do something wrong in life, you have to confront it eventually.
Like one way or another, it's not very often that you can get away with it
for the rest of your life and not confront it and not own it and not talk about it.
So how much does it irk you that she's never had any consequences to this?
That annoys me the most part.
Just own it.
This idea of Jennifer owning her own story comes up again and again.
Jess has been told that when Jennifer admitted to her family
that she was Jess's mother, nothing happened.
The story didn't spill out.
There was no release of long-held secrets.
And since then, as far as Jess knows, Jennifer said nothing more.
And without hard facts or reasons,
Jess still clings to the story of her being found.
For a long time though, that verge was very much part of your origin story.
It's all you had was the verge, essentially.
For years, years and years, that one little lane was all I had.
I have to take my story as face value, what I know,
that I was left on the side of the road.
And the poignant part of it all is that she lied and said that she found me.
The fact that she was happy to have her face in the newspaper.
I've grew up with all my life looking at them newspapers
with her face in it, not knowing that that was her.
That is horrendous.
And then when you find out that bit of information,
you re-look at them pieces of newspaper.
And it is sickening to the bottom of your stomach
that you've stared at that all your life.
But does it make a difference to think
that perhaps she gave birth to you somewhere,
held you in her arms,
wrapped you in that 12 to 18 month old vest
and handed you to the gardener
or the policeman.
Does that change the feeling about what happened
if it was that?
No, not really.
I think...
There's more compassion or more love there, isn't there,
to do that rather than leave you for...
Yeah, but then I think to...
I think that I would feel that more
if she hadn't have then gone and done it a second time.
If it was just me,
and it was literally a case,
that she gave birth, held me, passed me over to the police.
That I can understand.
There's a lot more love.
There's a lot more compassion and understanding.
But then to go and get pregnant
and then do it a second time
and leave them somewhere completely different again,
that's where I lose all of that.
The anger that comes through
that Jess always insists she doesn't feel towards her birth mother,
it conceals something simpler,
a question that never goes away.
All any adopted person, foundling,
wants is just that explanation of why, why couldn't you keep me? For what reason? If there's a
good reason, most normal human beings will completely understand that. I think this is key to
understanding Jess. As she sees it, the loving thing to do would have been to just tell her the facts.
The ongoing secrecy feels like a lack of respect, a lack of care. It eats away at her.
I really do understand this. The facts would have helped her.
fill an enormous void in her life.
Also, for what it's worth, having spent this much time with Jess,
I think she'd have found it within herself to understand.
I think she could have forgiven Jennifer if Jennifer had ever told her the truth.
It's the lying of finding me.
That's what the issue is for me.
But what was she supposed to do?
I mean, she's 18.
She really doesn't want to, she's hidden the pregnancy.
She's hidden, she doesn't want to be busted.
now. So what could she do? She had to pretend to have found you, otherwise you were clearly her baby.
But then she had nine months to think of a good story.
Hello. Hello. Hi.
Hello, Lucy.
Hello. Sorry, the line's not very good. Sorry.
As I'm writing this episode, my phone lights up.
Oh, great. Is that Lewis?
It is, yeah.
It's Lewis, Jess's biological father.
Yeah, I want to say I'm very well.
about this to be quite frank.
I've wanted to speak to him for ages about Jennifer, about Jess,
about why he allowed his daughter Chloe
to be counselled by someone he'd had a relationship with.
And we've spoken once before very briefly.
I then wrote to him with a long list of questions.
Now he's calling me to set the record straight.
We get talking and we go all the way back to the 1980s
when he was with his partner, Debbie,
but having an affair with Jennifer.
Well, she were an affable, bubbly, friendly sort of character.
She knew a lot of people, and she were friendly with a lot of people.
He says he knew that Jennifer was in love with him,
but after a few months he decided to call time on their relationship,
out on the town on Friday or Saturday night,
in what would have been around May 1987.
And I just told her I wanted to make a go of the relationship.
Debbie and I'd got two sons
and I just wanted to do a right thing really
and try and make a go of it and
you know, pick a family home and I'm
for the stuff.
He tells me he didn't notice Jennifer was pregnant.
By my reckoning, she would have been about four months.
How should I put it politely?
She was never a very thin woman, if you know what I mean.
And so it's difficult to tell when...
I mean, obviously, I mean, it sounds awful this, but I don't mean it to be.
I press him.
He may not have noticed, but did she honestly not mention it?
They had no idea.
No idea.
He says he didn't know anything about a pregnancy or a baby
until just turned up in 2022, age 34.
So her parents and siblings didn't know.
Her husband didn't know.
Lewis didn't know.
It seems certain now that Jennifer carried the knowledge of what she did all alone for more than 30 years.
So Lewis hadn't known about their baby, but he knew Jennifer really well.
So perhaps he can shed light on why Jennifer had a baby in secret and then pretended to find her.
I'd ask somebody to try and explain it to me.
Because it happened in once.
It's a shocker, but for it's at the same time, well, it defies explanation, really.
She must have been under great strain to do it, not once but twice.
There must have been something not quite.
We know that Jennifer and Lewis have seen each other since her relationship ended in 1987.
In the NHS clinic, of course, but also at her home when he delivered.
her a Christmas card. And speaking to Lewis, I get the sense that they've definitely stayed in touch.
How often would you see her in the intervening years, roughly?
I didn't see a lot on her, basically. You know, it weren't like I saw her every week or
every month or whatever. It would have been in touch, but there were no mention, no mention
of Jess. She had plenty of opportunity, really, didn't she to tell me? And she never did.
So what's your feelings about the fact that she didn't?
Well, obviously I'm absolutely shattered and gutted by it.
It really knocked me duck off.
It really knocked my head off.
And what bothers me more than anything is that it's caused so much trauma and upset to my family.
Even if there'd been no baby, no Jess, his ex-girlfriend, counselling his daughter, Chloe,
it's still a conflict of interest.
Think of it from Chloe's point of view.
Were you concerned about the impact it might be?
have had on Chloe if she was to have found out about your previous relationship with her counsellor.
Did that cross your mind?
Well, it did, but I wanted all the help I could possibly get for her,
and I didn't think a conflict of interest would bear on a relationship that had gone a long, long time ago, really.
And I just wanted it best for Chloe, all help that she could possibly get.
that were basically it really perhaps it were naive on my part
did you ever go into the counselling room did you i know debby did
yeah yeah
he tells me something else about those times at the n hs clinic
that he actually sat in on a session with chloe and jennifer
yeah i seem to recall
yeah i think there was an occasion when i were in the same room
perhaps another occasion when i were in waiting room
I asked Debbie about this, but she doesn't recall Lewis ever joining one of Chloe's sessions.
Still, I can't get my head around it, that he thought it was okay for Jennifer to be involved in Chloe's care in any way.
But even more that Jennifer did, an expert on this stuff.
I tell him I'm sorry for his loss and that Chloe sounded like a great person.
She was a lovely Lucy.
Yeah.
You feel such a failure.
You feel such an absolute failure.
Yeah.
They sat me down with the newspaper articles
and this is what we know, this is what we don't know.
This is Janet Barnacote.
She's another foundling who lives in North Dakota.
Her story is remarkably similar to Jess's
and I've been wondering if any of this gets easier.
Whether there's a point when a foundling makes peace
with what's happened to them.
So I suggest the two of them speak.
Jess is a bit wary at first.
I'm not sure she wants to see herself reflected back,
but she goes along with it.
They showed me all the newspaper clippings,
which as a 13-year-old you can imagine is hard to sort of understand.
I didn't expect anything like that.
It's just not something you'd contemplate, is it?
Is you a similar age or like how did yours come about?
Same age. Same age.
Really?
Always knew I was adopted.
That wasn't a...
a secret or anything.
Like Jess, Janet was a teenager
when her adoptive parents decided
it was time to tell her the full story
that she was found in California in 1981.
My story was, oh, you were left in a paper bag
in an alley, buy a dumpster.
When she learns the details,
she's angry at her mother,
says she feels she's been tossed aside.
Then she has kids,
and just like for Jess,
it gets even harder.
She's thinking,
why didn't my mother love me
like I love my kids?
For years, she presumes
she'll just never know.
But like Jess,
at a certain point,
she can no longer live with the blanks.
In 2013, when Janet's 32,
she tries to find the person
who spotted her and who called the police.
A woman who now be in her late 50s or early 60s.
I made a sign that said,
Hey, I'm looking for this lady, Joanne Hauser.
She found me as a newborn.
Janet holds her sign up in front of the camera,
and she posts the photo on Facebook.
Within days, Janet's meeting Joanne Hauser.
A friend videos their meeting.
It's emotional.
Janet's so grateful for the fragments Joanne remembers about that day,
but Joanne's got no idea about who Janet's mother might be.
A year later,
Janet does what Jess did, a DNA test.
And just like Jess, up pings a close DNA match.
It's a brother, Dean.
And it turns out he's also a foundling.
But that's not all.
A third sibling crops up shortly afterwards, also a foundling.
So three babies, same mother, all abandoned within hours of their births.
When the three of them appear on TV, a professional.
genealogist gets in touch and offers to help, the same way Michelle did with Jess's DNA results.
She pieces together the wider family jigsaw and delivers extraordinary news, that Joanne Hauser,
the woman who found Janet, is either the three siblings' aunt or their mother.
Janet and her adoptive mother look back at the video her friend filmed, footage of the moment she met the woman.
who had found her.
And my mom re-watched the video and she goes,
that's your mom.
That's exactly what my mom done.
She said, there's no way that that woman can't be your mother.
Look at how she's looking at you.
Look at how she's holding you and just soaking everything in about you.
I was like, hey, like, just come clean.
This is where the similarities end.
I've been living with the guilt for so long.
The big reveal for Janet happens in front of the cameras,
and it later goes out on a popular American TV show.
But yeah, I do give birth to you.
I know it.
Joanne admits it all to Janet.
She apologizes, and she goes on to tell Janet about her birth.
I was terrified.
I remember it was around 4 o'clock in the morning,
and I did it by myself.
She was perfect, just tiny little thing.
I felt if someone else had her,
they could give her a better life than I could.
It's not a complete explanation,
but for Janet, it's a reason, and that's enough.
Now 10 years on from that emotional reunion,
Janet feels sorry for the young woman her birth mom was back then.
She was divorced, had two children,
on welfare, no job.
And then all of a sudden,
you have something traumatic happened to you
and you pop up pregnant,
you have no way of taking care of a child, you know?
Here's how Janet sees it.
It wasn't that her birth mother didn't love her.
It's that the circumstances somehow short-circuited
her maternal instinct.
I have six siblings altogether.
Do I talk to all of them?
No.
And I only talked to my birth.
brother Dean and I'm okay with that. I have that one person. I have an amazing brother that I just
adore. I always text them. I'm like, I just love you. Janet's no longer in touch with her birth
mother or most of her siblings. She has just one meaningful relationship. It's with her brother,
Dean. Jess listens to this and I wonder if it resonates. She has Kim, her half sister on her father's
one person out of all of it.
Answers were what was needed and I got those and I can move on.
Do you think time's been a good part of that?
Like it's given you however many years now, hasn't it?
What, 10 years or shy of?
And so like, because I feel like mine's still quite fresh.
It's still sort of bringing up bits here and there.
And like you say earlier, like little bits of salt to the wounds every now and then.
And it just reinvigorates all of them feelings and, like, it's horrible.
For this situation, I am at peace.
For me, the chapter's closed.
As a roadmap, like, meet once, conversation and then go separate ways.
I feel like that would damage me more doing that.
It's not a done deal for me.
It is very much for her.
She's a totally different place in comparison to me.
and I feel like I'm still working through it,
I'm still trying to understand my own emotions.
This story starts and finishes with Jennifer.
And over time, the image I have of her has changed.
When I first realised who she was,
the nanny from my childhood,
the woman who'd pulled this off and fooled everyone,
I felt shock.
And then sympathy, she must have been through hell.
When I found out about the second baby,
I filled in the gaps myself,
I imagine someone permanently weakened by it all, worn down, shuffling through a quiet, damaged life.
But that's not what Jennifer's life looks like, from the outside at least.
Her internal life, whether there's regret or shame, whether she thinks about Jess, we can't know.
Those who are close to her, they say if she does feel these things, it's not obvious.
Despite repeated efforts to talk to her, she doesn't want to take part.
The cold case officers, who turned up on Jess's doorstep in the autumn,
get back in touch with her a few weeks later.
There's no match with her DNA.
The exhumed baby and Jennifer aren't connected.
It was always a far-fetched idea that a crime from 1984 would have anything to do with Jennifer.
She would have been just 15 at the time, at school, in another part of the country.
But whenever I think about those officers turning up on Jess's doorstep,
I think about how it makes the chance of Jennifer ever speaking freely even more remote.
In America, DNA is being used to prosecute mothers
who have abandoned their babies in some instances decades ago.
I do wonder, though, if this makes it harder to reach the truth
or to understand why it happens.
I wanted to paint a portrait of a human being.
I wanted to understand Jennifer, but the truth is, she didn't want to be found.
A sociologist who studied child abandonment tells me that mothers who leave their children find it almost impossible to talk about.
I've spent a lot of time looking for other mother's tales of child abandonment, but there are vanishingly few out there.
This is one of the most subversive human behaviours, and it's as if the explanation for it is unprintable.
unspeakable. Jess's husband Jamie said something to her the other day. He said that she hasn't been
the same person since her search for answers began. The joy has gone from her, he said. So now
she wants to find her way back to her old self, to look to the future. I can't see a world
where things would shift for now. You can never say never. My three kids, that is ultimately their
biological grandmother, and I'd have to jump that hurdle if it came to it, like if they wanted
to meet her or something.
Jess is still scared of coming face to face with Jennifer.
What would you be worried about saying in the rooms of her, like, forgiving her?
Yeah, and poo-poo in it and just going, yeah, it's okay.
I forgive you, I love you, it's okay, let's hug it out.
Like, I don't want to do that because it's not like I don't forgive you.
I just don't want any part of that.
And what you done was wrong.
That's the end of it.
Jess says she's chosen not to have a relationship with her mother.
But truthfully, I feel that's only because her mother doesn't appear
to have made any space for Jess in her life.
Not at the start of Jess's life and not now either.
Foundling is reported by me, Lucy Greenwell.
It's written by me and Katie Gunning, who's also the series producer.
The theme music was composed by Tom Kinsella.
Sound design and additional music was by Rowan Bishop.
Podcast artwork is by Blythe Walker Sibthorpe.
The development producer was Jess Swinburne.
The narrative was Gary Marshall.
The editor is Jasper Corbett.
Thank you for listening to Foundling.
You can listen to more of our investigations right here on Tortoise Investigates from The Observer.
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