This is Jeffrey Roberts with 2020. For more than four decades, 2020 has brought you an incredible variety of compelling stories. Well, now we're going to bring you back to some of the most heart-stopping ones from the 2020 True Crime Vault, and we're going to give you updates on what happened to the people involved. Thanks for listening.

Coming up. Desperate People in the search of a lifetime.

How do you leave your child in a paper bag in an alleyway?

Just hours old, she was left by a dumpster for a stranger to find. He was left on a front doorstep.

As a baby, this is where I was abandoned. Why did you choose this house?

She was left outside a grocery store, the Happy Market.

She left me right next to the newspapers.

Who's abandoning newborns in paper bags all in a one square mile? And what do they have in common?

It just blew my mind.

The news story that exploded...

Both abandoned at birth.

Into a national mystery and took 30 years to solve.

I definitely want to get my fingers into that case.

A dogged detective connecting the dots and the DNA to discover their secret bond.

Give me a hug. You guys are so cute.

We're there every step of the way as they search for answers, good news or bad.

Do you think you can handle it?

I can handle it. It just breaks my heart.

And the final twist no one sees coming.

The three babies have grown up and are finding each other and are going to find you.

Since the day I was born. I'm John Quineones. Three foundlings, babies abandoned at birth, born within blocks of each other, five years apart. The only records of their arrivals, news reports chronicling the sad stories of being left alone in the middle of the night. Well, 30 years later, now adults, those three were still searching for answers, but nothing could prepare them for the story that would unfold. A common bond, a shared hunt for the truth, and a birth mother hiding in plain sight. Watching and terrified, they were about to unmask her. As Elizabeth Vargas first As reported in 2016, this story began so long ago with a baby's cry.

I think if it was Saturday morning, I ran around the corner to get some milk.

A last minute bike ride at dawn. 26-year-old mother of two, Joanne Hauzer, runs out to grab milk for that morning's breakfast.

I went by the same way I usually go, and I thought I heard something like a cat.

She detours from her morning errands, noticing a paper bag next to a dumpster. She moves in for a closer look.

So I went over and I looked into this bag and there was a baby in the bag.

A baby, astonishingly naked with the umbilical cord still attached, wrapped only in a towel, someone had left her there. No note, no identification. Nothing.

I picked up the bag and I rode back, lickety- Split to my house, and I dialed 911.

The local television station, K-A-B-C, captures this video of baby Jane Doe, a newborn just hours old, in an incubator at the hospital, where the nurses hang a sign on her cradle, I know I'm Somebody. The local newspaper hails the woman on the bicycle as an angel of mercy see. Joanne, the Good Samaritan, stops by the hospital every day for a week, checking up on the beautiful abandoned baby.

She looked like a little doll. A little tiny doll. Just perfect.

The nurses nicknamed the baby Lady Diana, after the princess who got married as the world watched four days earlier.

So London now sees for the first time.

It was 1981. Foreigners urgent was tearing up the charts. Big hair and big money became emblematic of the gogo '80s. Greed was good. But there are no gilded mansions in this unassuming working-class community of Lawndale, California, clustered in the shadow of Los Angeles, where liquor stores dot the Thurroffairs and Hathorn Boulevard, where Baby Doe was found, held a gritty distinction back then. What's its reputation? Prostitution. Cee Cee Moore is a genetic genealogist whose specialty is Foundlings, the name for abandoned babies.

Initially, I thought perhaps the mother was a prostitute that was working on Hathorn Boulevard and really didn't have a lot of options.

No options because in 1981, there were no safe haven laws which allow parents to hand over a baby to law enforcement or hospitals. No questions asked. So who abandoned that baby? One of those Was it a girl's call girls? Or was it a teenager from the local high school just down the street? No one ever claims Laundale's Baby Doe. Fast forward 34 years, that baby is now all grown up.

You take this one, Anna.

Janet Barnacote lives north of Los Angeles, about 100 miles from where she was found.

This is my dad.

After a year in foster care, Janet got lucky. She was adopted. Tell me about your adoptive parents.

They found out they couldn't have children, so they started to do the adoption process.

Janet has an idyllic childhood, boisterous birthday parties, dance lessons, and even her own pony named Crocodile Dundee. Around the time Janet entered Junior High School, she started to pepper her parents with questions about her past.

I have siblings who are my parents. Why was I adopted? Why didn't they want me?

The Barnacote sat her down for a candid conversation.

I just remember sitting at the kitchen table, and they had pulled out the newspaper articles about the lady who found me riding her bike.

Janet always knew she was adopted, but when she found out she was abandoned, she was shaken to the core.

I got really mad and angry, and I held on to that for quite a long time.Mad.

And angry at?At.

My birth mother for It felt like she tossed me away. It was tearing me up inside, and I couldn't handle that anymore. Then you're going to go, Gee, rest.

Janet is now mother to her five children.

Once upon a time, and I love- once having my own children, you figure out what that natural true love is. And I just couldn't understand how she didn't have that for me.

Because Janet is a foundling, she has no identifying information, no medical records, no birth certificate.

It's a total blank slate. As far as identity, there's no history, there's no roots.

Desperate for any clues, Janet turned to that 34-year-old newspaper article and comes up with a name. That Good Samaritan who found her in the paper bag, Joanne Hauzer.

She was my last connection to my birth mother.

She uploaded a picture of herself holding a sign, looking for that woman on the bike.

I'm so excited. Hi. Hi.

Oh, my. And that led to this emotional, heartfelt reunion with her Guardian angel in 2013, all captured on video by a friend.

She told me that I wasn't crying, more of a wimper.

I imagine you also must have thanked her that day.

Oh, I did. Yes. She could have just kept going, and I wouldn't be sitting here today.

They became Facebook friends and agreed to stay in touch. But in terms of Janet's family tree, Joanne is a dead end, offering no clues about Janet's mysterious abandonment.

The only other way that they can learn about their heritage and their birth families is DNA.

She sends a saliva sample to ancestry. Com, and almost immediately, Baby Doe hits Pay Dirt, a notification she has a match.

I was like, What? Wait a minute.

But not just any match, a match on her maternal side. It's a brother sharing the same mother, his name, Dean Hundorf. Elated, Janet looks him up on Facebook, and staring back at her is a mirror image of herself.

I was like, Oh, my goodness. It's a boy version of me.

Well, that must have been a Thunderbolt. I mean, to think all your life, I will never know anything about my biological family. Now, boom.

It was amazing. It was so great.

When we come back, what's the bombshell about that brother's past that could be the biggest clue yet? It's an extraordinary thing for a mother to abandon one baby, but to abandon two. Stay with us.

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It is Christmas time, 1986, in Lawndale, California. The town doesn't know it yet, but someone is abandoning newborn babies. Here on 149th Street, a completely different nativity scene. No manger, just a doorstep. No swattling clothes for this baby. In fact, in this 47 degree weather, no clothes at all. Just a brown paper bag.

I brought the dog out.

When Danny Huerta takes his dog for a late night walk, he stumbles on a package left on his doorstep.

My foot hit something right here, and I reached down, and it was a bag, and I picked it up, and it felt heavy.

Something's in here, and there was a baby in there.

Baby boy. Just like Janet Barnacoat, this baby boy is only hours old. The umbilical cord still attached, also left in a paper bag. Where to his house is just more than a mile away from the alley where Janet Barnacoat was found as a baby five years earlier. Once again, a local news crew captures the footage of Deputy Timothy Cain arriving on the scene, carrying the little bundle to a nearby hospital. 29 years later, he remembers it like it was yesterday.

It was extremely dark that night. It was cold.

He appeared to be 2-3 hours old.

It's just a young baby, and nobody there to take care of it.

You wonder how somebody could leave a baby in a bag. Flash forward 29 years. Oh, wow. Look at it. There it goes. That baby is a grown-up father with his own baby boy. Peek-a-boo. Dean Hundorf lives with his wife, Adrienne, in Wisconsin. He's the long-lost brother Janet has found through DNA. Like his sister, Dean was also adopted by a loving family. Lots of kids who are adopted grow up with lots of questions. Absolutely. What were yours?

I can remember one major thing that sticks out in my mind, what my ethnicity was. I was a big kid growing up, so my friends thought maybe I was Samoan or something like that.

Trips to the beach, happy Christmas mornings, Little League games. Dean had a childhood to be envied, but nevertheless, he felt incomplete.

I always was wondering where I came from. My parents were I maybe tried to push it aside just to forget about it, but it was always there.

When Janet and Dean begin to compare notes online, they realize not only are they both adoptees, but unbelievably, they discover they were both both abandoned by the same mother.

I said, Yeah, I was abandoned at birth, and I don't have any information about any of my family. And then that's when she said, Well, the same thing had happened to her. I imagine she did the same thing I did and was like, Whoa, what's going on?

A DNA detective for 16 years, genealogist Cee C. Moore, says the story of Janet and Dean may be a first.

At that point, I had never seen it before.

It's an extraordinary thing for a mother to abandon one baby, but to abandon two.

Yeah, it's hard to imagine what her circumstances must have been.

Dean flies 2,000 miles to Los Angeles to meet Janet for the first time. It is so extraordinary for two foundlings to be related and then find each other. The local news is there to cover it. Oh my God, I love you. What was that like to put your arms around your sister for the first time in your life?

It was like we had known each other forever, and There was never... We never skipped a beat. It was a brother hug. I love you. Oh my God.

Once again, Janet's on Facebook celebrating the new bond forged by blood. But that vexing question remains. What mother abandons not one but two babies just five years apart and a mile away from each other?

In a case like this that's really unique, I definitely want to get my fingers into that case and try to do some detective work to see what I can find.

Meanwhile, Dean is doing some detective work of his own. Just like Janet, Dean feels the need to go back to the people who found him. He lands on that doorstep once again, where he was orphaned. And there, another lucky break.I'm Danny.Danie.Hi.I'm Dean. The same family still lives there. Come on in. It's good to see you. As he 29 years ago on this stoop, Danny Huerta takes Dean into his arms. Danny also spent the last three decades wondering what happened to that baby.

This is the baby you and dad found.

Inside, Dean is introduced to Danny's family.Thank.

You so much.I always wondered, Where's that baby, pop?

And I said, Can't we keep them?

They just, No, honey. I had a good life, but just recently, I wanted to get some answers.

An In his honor, they have a warm surprise.

We thought about you all your birthdays. We didn't forget.

But as meaningful as it is to reconnect with the people from his past, none of them can provide any clues to Dean to how or why or who abandoned him at birth. Once again, Janet and Dean have hit a brick wall. The hunt for the biological mother became the priority. How did you help them make their first breakthrough?

So when When I work with people of unknown parentage, one of the most important things is that they utilize all the resources.

Cee Cee knows finding their birth mother is a long shot. She believes the only way they might do it is to widen the DNA net. So in addition to Ancestry. Com, she adds their DNA to databases 23andMe and FamilyTreeDNA.

That widens our pool from about a million people to about two and a half million. We call it fishing in three ponds.

And sure enough, they get a bite.

Wow.

Only not the bite they were expecting.

I saw that they had another really close match.

It's yet another sibling, a sister neither of them knew they had.

I was like, Holy cow. Are you serious?

Surely this sister has answers. She must know who their mother is. No one abandons three babies, or do they?

When I saw that in the middle of the night, I just was knocked off my chair. I mean, literally.

The wheels instantly started turning. What's going on here?

Stay with us.

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So I went into the California birth index, put her her date of birth, and someone came up. Her name was Julie Christine Doe. That's what they use for a foundling.

What went through your head?

I I could not believe it. We had two foundlings, now we have three foundlings.

Two is shocking enough. Three is unprecedented. Although they had different fathers, all three shared the same mother. Who is she? Did she do this by herself? Why would she abandon them? Ceece's research, culling old newspapers, reveals a familiar refrain, a baby, hours old, umbilical cord still attached, wrapped in a towel.

Julie was left at the Happy Market.

It's a nice name.

If you had to be left somewhere.

It was in the wee hours of a January morning in 1985. This time, a delivery man dropping off the morning newspapers, discovers a baby wearing a blue jumpsuit. But the mystery remains, who during the '80s would get pregnant three times, give birth three times, and then put the baby in a sack and drop it someone to find?

I've always known I was adopted.

Julie Hutchison, like the others, would be adopted into a loving home. Birthday cakes, kittens, and petting zoos punctuated her childhood. Fast forward, she's now 31, working as an artist living in Baltimore. How old were you when your parents got you?

I was a newborn. Just a couple of days.

Did you ever know the story about how you were abandoned as a baby?

I knew little bits bits and pieces. My mom, I guess, she didn't want to tell me right away as a young. She didn't think I could handle it. So when I think it was around 18 or 19, she finally told me, You're abandoned as a baby outside of a place called the Happy Market. And she's like, We thought it was an omen because you were such a happy baby. You were always laughing, and you made other people laugh and other people smile.

They're amazing parents.

I don't think I would have come as far in life as I have without parents like them to guide me, to push me.

We bring Julie 2,600 miles from Baltimore to Los Angeles to meet her biological brother and sister. This is a big thing.

I hope she has our same laugh. I just want to know, how was their life growing up adopted? There she is. Okay. We're nervous. This is it. Okay, I might cry. Give me a hug.

It is an embrace that none of them ever dreamed they would share. The connection is immediate. Hey, guys.

I'm so cute. Oh, we have the same laugh. Yes.

Three pees in a pod. They had the same sense of humor. They were cracking each other up. There is something about biological and genetic bonds that survives any separation.

With us in tow, they hop in the car, retracing the locations where they were left. Would there be a pattern that could give them any clues?

I'm thinking, why out of all places? I mean, I guess-For Dean, a random house on a residential street. I guess it seems busy, so maybe she thought people would see me right away.

Just a short two-minute walk down this Laundale block to where Julie was found.

She must have cared a little bit because she left me where the delivery guy would find me.

Finally, Janet sees the alley where she was left next to a dumpster.Ce.

Nt of creepy.Yeah.

It is.

It's.

As they travel, something does become still clear. With each of these locations only within a mile of each other, the mother most likely lives here. Could she be one of the neighbors? Is she peering out from behind the curtains in one of these houses?

Lots of questions that we'll get the answers to. I'm not going to let this dumpster find who I am.

But for all the brick walls they're hitting, Cee more's DNA analysis is about to knock one down. There is another close DNA match to all three kids.

We got very lucky. We found a first cousin.

A first cousin on their mother's side. His name is Adrian. And here is where it gets interesting, because Cee Cee looks Adrian up on Facebook, and there she is stunned. As she scrolls down Adrian's list of friends, a name this patchwork family already knows well. Joanne Hauzer. Remember her? There was a baby in the bag. That good Samaritan who found Janet while riding her bike. It is an extraordinary coincidence that the woman who discovered Janet as a baby is friends with Janet's biological cousin.

Right. So when I first looked at it, I thought, Why are they friends?

But if you do family searches as long as Cee more has, you will know that there are far fewer coincidences than deeply buried read secrets. She immediately begins to build out Adrian's family tree and finds that Adrian's mother has two sisters, and Joanne is one of them, making Joanne either the sibling's aunt or even more shocking, their mother. It's the conversation Cee never thought she would have with these three foundlings. For an already fractured family, this news may shatter them.

All three of you have a first cousin match named Adrian. Adrian Adrian's mom and your mom are sisters. Now, his mother has two full sibling sisters, and so Joanne is one of them. Wow. So the woman that found you is either your mother or your aunt.

It takes a moment for the reality to sink in, especially for Janet. Then an enormous sense of betrayal. Joanne either gave birth to them or her sister did, and she helped her cover it up. Either way, she was withholding vital information when she met Janet in 2013. I've met her.

We sat in her house.Hi.Hi. Oh. Hugged her. This breaks my heart. I'm so sorry. We all had to go through all this. Just the fact I sat in her house is eating me alive.

Janet is furious this and wants to confront Joanne.

She has agreed to see us today.Wow.Yeah..

Are you guys ready for this? Yeah, I want some answers.

A doorstep, a grocery store, a dumpster. Who left them there? Their aunt or their mother? After a long, arduous journey, the truth is now just one step away.

It's not six degrees of separation. We're down to one.

Stay with us.

Janet Barnacote and her newfound siblings have made an unsettling discovery.

The woman who found Janet so many years ago and who is a Facebook friend of hers may be the birth mother of all three. Now, after After 30 years, it's time to finally unlock the truth. Once again, here's Elizabeth Vargas.

We are going to go in and talk to Joanne, the lady who found me. See if she can lead us in any direction.

Joanne Hauser's moment of reckoning has arrived. The so-called Good Samaritan, who said she rescued baby Janet from an alleyway, is being paid a visit. Three siblings, Janet, Dean, and Julie are on their way over for a 6:30 meeting. As cliché as it sounds, it is a date with destiny. You must have been nervous as heck.

I was scared. I was nervous. I was still, I think, a little angry, but I knew that we'd come this far. We might as well just keep going until the wheels fall off.

Tense, nervous, Janet decides she should go in first. As you walked up to her door step that day, what's going on in your head?

All I kept telling myself was, just please let her tell the truth.

Cee more goes with her.

Oh.

Janet is finally sitting at the table with the woman who may have the answers to a lifetime of questions. Cee is thankfully there to break the ice.

I've been working with Janet. There was a man named Adrian, your sister's son, and he came out as Janet and Dean and Julie's first cousin.

Oh, yeah.

So that leads us back to you.

Yeah.

After more than three decades of harboring a dark secret, Joanne can hold it in no longer.

Well, okay. I have something to say. I, today, I decided I'd better come clean. But I've been living with the guilt for so long. It's just a secret I've been carrying all these years, you know? And it's probably mind boggling. But, yeah, I did give birth to you.

I knew it. I just want you to know I'm not mad at you.

I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm not mad at you. This is a monumental thing.

Finally, the truth. A 34-year-old mystery is solved. Joanne wasn't her guardian angel. Joanne is her birth mother.

I know this has impacted your life and the life of your other two.

It has, but I forgive you. I'm so sorry. I really do. I forgive you.

How can you forgive me, though? I mean, it's killing me because I abandon you guys.

You know what? Foundlings, people that were abandoned, what I have found is they're the most forgiving, loving people I've ever known. I'm not exaggerating.

I was supposed you would have to be, huh?

But we want you to know we're not mad at you. We love you. When she finally came clean, I could feel her burden. I could feel it and I could see it, and I could it. And I just couldn't be mad at her.

All that anger just disappeared. It did. I hated you.

Not you, but I hated you.

Yeah, I know.

And I can't anymore.

Janet asks about that story that's come to define her whole life.

Please tell me I wasn't in an alley. No, you weren't.Oh, thank God.No..

I just made the call, and they came, and I just made up a story.

So So Janet was never abandoned in an alley. It was all a ruse. But what about Julie and Dean? They're about to come face to face with their histories as well.

They are here and they want to meet you. Where are they? Outside.

Moments later, Dean and Julie appear at the door.

Come, come, come. So this is Julie.

Hey. Julie, hi. The two children Joanne has not seen since they were born.

And this is Dean.

Dean, oh my God. Are reunited with their birth mother.

As soon I walked in there, my heart broke for her. Why? This is a woman who's been through so much. I can't hate her. I just want you to know that I do love you. Yeah. Do you? Yeah. We all do. He's the quiet one.

For Dean, forgiveness comes hard.

She just looked like a stranger to me.

She didn't look-It was no flicker of recognition? No. Not like you had with your own sister? No.

I can't imagine it's been... I mean, you've ever forgotten about us, right?

Never.

Never.

Barbering a secret has clearly taken a toll. They're about to learn just how big.

It's been killing me all this time, and it's killing me now. No.

It is not a figure of speech. Joanne recently suffered both a heart attack and a stroke. The timing was significant. It happened just as Janet, Dean, and Julie's Odyssey was playing out on Facebook, and Joanne, a Facebook friend, was watching it all.

Joanne watched Janet find Dean and then watched her find Julie. Can you imagine if you were Joanne, how you must have been feeling?

I would think terrified might be one of the things because at this point, the three babies you abandoned have grown up and are finding each other and are going to find you.

It's all over Facebook and everything. It's really killing me. I have to have open heart surgery within a few weeks.

Oh, no. The whole process from her meeting me to us finding And Julie, I think it really did a toll on her.

Miraculously, they've met their birth mother after endless searching, only to realize their time with her may be limited. What were the most important questions you needed her to answer.

Does she love us? You loved us. Yes. And I'm sure that was-I still do. She said, Oh, God, yes.

I still do. I'm so sorry.

You're okay. Come here.

When we come back for the first time, the woman with a lifetime of secrets opens up. Why did she do this? How did she do this? Did she have help? Tell me what you were thinking.

You're asking me these questions, and I would like to know the answer myself.

Stay with us. Hey, I'm Andy Mitchell, a New York Times bestselling author, and I'm Sabrina Kohlberg, a morning television producer. We're moms of toddlers and best friends of 20 years. And we both love to talk about being parents, yes, but also pop culture.

So we're combining our two interests by talking to celebrity communities, writers, and fellow scholars of TV and movies.

Cinema, really. About what we all can learn from the fictional moms we love to watch. From ABC Audio in Good Morning, America, Pop Culture Moms is out now wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, I'm Nate Thurston, and I'm supposed to write a 30-second ad that tells you everything you need to know about my podcast, Good Morning Liberty, which I co-host with Charlie, my best friend of 20 years. That's a tough feat to accomplish, but let's give it a shot. At Good Morning Liberty, we cover the news every day from an individual liberty perspective. We believe that you own yourself, and a tyrannical overreaching government is the biggest threat to your liberty. If you agree, you can find a new episode every day of the week on your podcast app or by going to bernilies. Com in your browser. Three children have come to a home, a house they never grew up in and to a mother they've never met. It was so tense that when the meeting was over, they are gitty with relief.

But for Joanne Hauser, there is no relief, just shame, weighed down by the secret she alone knew about and never spoke about until now.

There are people who hear this and can wrap their heads around perhaps doing it once. Yeah.

But three times? Three times, right. I didn't want to do this because I would be here with you, and I would be on TV, and everybody's going to know.

Joanne came of age in the '60s, she dropped out of college and embraced the LA party scene.

We were partying all the time, smoking pot and drinking.

At 22, Joanne marries and has two boys, but the marriage quickly crumbles. Joanne divorces and falls back into her partying ways. It was at one of those parties, fueled by drugs and alcohol, that Janet is conceived. Joanne, broke, single, unemployed, keeps the pregnancy secret.

I just really didn't have any financial support. I felt I had no family support. I was extremely fearful when I got pregnant, and I just never felt like I could tell anybody.

How did you hide it, Joanne?

I'm big. I mean, look at me.

Nobody ever said, Hey, you're looking a little...

They're looking a little heavy there. No.

Joanne would not tell a soul. Nine months later, in At the early hours of an august morning, she goes into labor alone in her house with her two older boys sleeping in the next room. So what happened when you went into labor? Were you afraid?

I was terrified. I remember it was around four o'clock in the morning, and I did it by myself. I laid there and went through the labor and then went into the bathroom in the tub and drew the warm water and laid in the warm water, and that helped.

The Joanne never wanted to face is now staring back at her in the form of a new baby girl, 4 pounds, 1 ounce.

I'm like, What am I going to do? What am I going to do?

Feeling ill-equipped to care for any more children, a desperate Joanne hatches that outlandish scheme, pretending she's found a baby by a dumpster, playing Good Samaritan to the police. Nobody looked at you and said, Hmm. No. Nobody asked to take you in for a medical examination to make sure that, in fact, you hadn't just give birth?

No.

Nothing. They believed you. Hook, line, and sinker.

Hook, line, and sinker. Right.

And you went on to give interviews to the local newspaper describing this incredible incident, this unbelievable discovery, and they... Behind the liquor store, next to the dumpster.

And it was very uncomfortable, too. Why? Because I was lying. I was lying. I remember this young guy would call me and call me a hero.

Not a hero. They only knew the real story.

Yeah, I'm not a hero.

You went to visit Janet every day for that first week of her life in the hospital. Why did you do that?

Because I wanted to see her. I was totally amazed. Yeah, she was perfect. Just tiny little thing. Just almost didn't want to give her up. I felt if someone else had her, they could give her a better life than I could.

Four years later, still single, she finds herself pregnant yet again. Why weren't you using birth control?

Stupid, crazy, not thinking.

Julie, like Janet, would be born at home. Her mother, with no medication, no help, That's the umbilical cord herself. Julie was born on one of your son's birth?

Yeah, January 19th. Yeah, my oldest son.

After you left her at the happy march, you You came back and threw a birthday party. Yeah, I did.

How did you do that? That was tough because I was not feeling too great after I had her.

Photos from that day capture a pale Joanne smiling through the pain of just giving birth and then abandoning her second child. What was going through your mind as you're celebrating the birthday of one child, having just given birth to another child and left it behind a store?

I felt like was the biggest hypocrite in the world.

And shockingly, it wouldn't be the last time. The very next year, Joanne is pregnant again with Dean. For the third time she endures labor alone, delivers a son alone and cleans up alone.

I remember driving around with him in the car, and it's like, What can I do? What am I going to do? So I knew the first time he cried, they would probably open their door and find him right there. You know?

An inconceivable act to do once, let alone three times. How much did you think about these three children?

All the time, every day.

And then one day in 2013, you find out Janet is looking for you. Yeah. Were you excited?

Yeah, I was.

You thought, I'm going to see my daughter.

I was thrilled. It was just like, Oh, my God, there she is. And she's a grown woman. Hi.

Looking back, a closer examine examination of that reunion gives it a whole different meaning. Over and over, Joanne pulls Janet back to look at her face.

When I look at it, I see someone who's very proud of Janet. It looks like more of a motherly proudness.

Yet again, Joanne keeps her secret and passes up the opportunity to tell Janet the truth. Joanne, what is it like to live with that guilt? That shame.

I'm blown away at At their kindness.

Their forgiveness.

Their forgiveness, right.

Have you forgiven yourself yet?

I don't think I have. Everybody's encouraging me to, Forgive yourself, forgive yourself. Well, how do you do that? Is there a formula for that? Is there? No. See?

You just have to find your way there somehow because living in this doesn't work.

It makes you sick. Now I'm facing major heart surgery in a week.

A mother filled with remorse, trying to reconcile with the very children she abandoned, now facing that dreaded operation. For the three siblings, could this be the last goodbye from their newfound birth mother?

It is five o'clock in the morning, and I'm here at the hospital because my biological mom is having heart surgery. Did you get any sleep last night?

A little bit.

It is time to mend a mother's broken heart. Janet wonders if this hug is her last.I love you.I love you, too. Just before she goes into surgery, Joanne has one last gift for her children, the names of the men who fathered them.

Even if she made a lot of bad choices in the past, she's starting to make good choices now. There's never a phone call that someone is expecting to get. Normally, I call-Ceci coaches Janet through a phone call to the father, Kent.

And after leaving a message, a call back.

What do I do?

Pick up.

Hi, Kent. How are you? Yes. You may be my father. I actually do know who my mother is. Her name is Joanne. Were you with a woman named Joanne in the '80s?

Kent truthfully acknowledges that he was with Joanne back then, but says he is in shock. He's just trying to take it all in.

I couldn't imagine what you would be going through with a phone call from someone random. Hey, I'm your daughter. Awe.

But then something unexpected. Choking back tears, he tells Janet he always wanted a little girl. Bye-bye.

That broke my heart. He's crying. I know.

A few days later, father and daughter meet for the first time.

I love you. I love you too.

I love you. Like my little girl.

Little did Kent know he's also a grandfather. And Janet wasn't the only one who got to meet her birth father, Julie meets her birth father, Bobby.Hi..

Julie?yes.hi, Bobby.Nice to meet you.

You do look like my mom. Who immediately takes out a photo of his mother. There is a striking similarity.

That's scary how much I look like her.

After an afternoon of catching up on a lifetime.

It's really nice to meet you.

Goodbyes and promises to keep in touch. Good to meet you. But Dean's reunion with his father is not to be, at least not yet. Even though Dean has his name, he can't find him. Could he be watching? As for Joanne, she made it through her surgery. It's now been six weeks. Hi. Hi. I'm going to see.

You look good. Group hug, please.

I never thought just a little vial of saliva could take me to this point. It's great.

Now the really hard healing can begin. Cici predicts Joanne's toughest critics will be herself and the millions of viewers she has just confessed to.

She will be judged, unfortunately. I just don't think that judgment helps anyone. I've learned that families are the most forgiving, loving people when they grow up that I've ever met. They want that connection. And so in order to have that and foster it, you have to let go all of that negativity.

A recipe for redemption. A family is building their own new memories together. A first haircut for a grandson, a backyard barbecue, and a toast to a once-torn fabric now stitched together into a portrait of a family. Cheers to that.

Cheers to family. Cheers. Salut.

This is Deborah Roberts. Dean Hundorf tells us that as of 2019, the family is doing well, and he and Janet keep in touch with each other and with Joanne and her other children. He has not yet located his birth father, but remains hopeful he will someday. Thanks for listening to this episode of 2020 True Crime Vault. We hope you'll join us Friday nights at 9:00 for all new broadcast episodes of 2020 on ABC. Thanks for listening. We've got the exclusive view behind the table. What is happening here? It's just beautiful chaos. Every day, right after the show, while the topics are still hot, the ladies go deeper into the moments that make The View, The View. To be honest, I was thinking about asking him for a foot massage, and then I just froze. This is the can happen. That is what we do here. I'm not going to lie, the chair's a little small from my behind. The Views Behind the Table podcast. Listen wherever you get your podcast.