Fraud on the Court

by Mike Chalek

  In the end, Josette was faxed a copy of the request. And she agreed to fax back a response to the court the next day. By this time, the afternoon was turning to evening. I was still hours away from my home in Boca Raton, so I got in the car and headed back, resigned to waiting for the legal process to grind its way forward.

  The days passed agonizingly slowly as I waited for confirmation that the petition was granted. On December 14th I received notice by phone that the judge had signed an order to unseal, and that the copies of my adoption record would be overnighted to me from the Department of Children and Families. Contrary to my perception of an agonizing wait, the entire ordeal ended just a little over a month after I made my unplanned trip to Virginia Snyder’s office. I threw my hands in the air in a silent victory celebration and decided there was no way I would be waiting for the truck to show up at my door the next day.

  I called Fed Ex and asked them where the shipment was, based on a tracking number I got from Josette. They told me it had left Tallahassee and would be on a plane landing at the main Fed Ex distribution center in Ft Lauderdale in a few hours.

  I arrived at the receiving desk for Fed Ex at the Ft Lauderdale airport at six a.m. that morning. I handed over my ID and explained to the attendant what it was that I wanted. I told her I had a package coming in and was hoping that I could grab it before it was loaded onto a truck.

  “Um, I think we can do that,” she told me. “But that plane hasn’t even landed yet, and you’d have to wait.”

  I waited. About two hours later, she handed over a large cardboard envelope. I signed the receipt and without another word I tore open the package.

  The size of the bundled copies was much thicker than I had been led to expect. My understanding was that most adoption records were fairly short and followed a pretty consistent format. Instead, I had what appeared to be a hundred or more pages of blurred, damaged, frequently off-centered documents, many of them transcriptions, that had been copied, microfiched, printed back out and otherwise manhandled. The technology was far from the digitized document storage procedures we have today. I realized that I was never working my way through the packet while standing in the middle of a cold Fed Ex facility in the pre-dawn light.

  I put it all back into the envelope and drove to a nearby diner. There I informed the waitress that I would be hanging out for a while, and all I needed was coffee and some privacy. She led me to a booth in the back and obligingly left me alone. I pulled out the papers once more and started reading.

  I read once, quickly, through everything that was legible. The most important detail I got from this first reading was my birth mother’s real name. Her maiden name was Winnie Faye Higginbotham. She was a Jacksonville local, had been born there in fact. She had been married at the time of my birth to a man named Thomas Yarber, although they each incorrectly believed that the other had filed for and obtained a divorce. So my name on the birth certificate should have been Baby Boy Yarber. In the end, Thomas Yarber had been required to sign his own consent to my adoption once it was discovered that he and Winnie Faye had never legally divorced. Since he was remarried with his own children by that time, it must have been a strange moment indeed: legally signing away another man’s child, by a wife he was believed to have divorced. According to the many pages of notes regarding Thomas Yarber, he had led the case workers on a merry chase in their attempts to get his signature. I wondered briefly if he had ever fixed the problem of his divorce and remarriage.

  The only other important information I extracted on this first reading were the implied reasons that the courts never obtained a corrected consent from my birth mother. In the beginning of the adoption study, Mrs. Fielding had become embroiled in some legal difficulties regarding a highly publicized lawsuit. She would not give adequate information to the welfare workers on how to locate Winnie Faye, and there was speculation that the lawsuit might have some bearing on her reticence.

  I was nine months old by the time the department did locate my birth mother, and between the date of her interview with the case worker and the time of the final hearing, she had once again disappeared. The case worker had also left the agency during the intervening months. No one remained who knew where my birth mother had worked, nor where she might have gone.

  Tracking her down would have been too much trouble for them. In the initial contact with Winnie Faye, she had also asked twice if she could possibly get me back. That wasn’t the outcome the social workers or the adoptive parents wanted. So they put the file before a judge, falsified information and all, and he added his signature. I frowned at the thought. Such a small-town, small-minded thing for them to do. I reflected again on how much I hated the South. It made me all the more glad that I was planning a move to Colorado at the end of the month.

  I had only been in the diner for an hour or so, but I decided that it would take me days to piece together the entire story from all of the various documents and interviews. And making sense of the garbled text wasn’t the task I most wanted to pursue in that moment. What I wanted was to take this information back to Virginia Snyder and have her help me find Winnie Faye. Most of the answers I was seeking weren’t going to be included in the 108 page adoption record.

  I paid my check, jumped in my car, and headed over to Delray Beach.

  Chapter 6

  Back in Virginia’s offices, she and I spent a moment in celebrating our success.

  “See, I told you that you could thank me once it worked,” she said.

  I had become better acquainted with Virginia and her moods and personality in the past few weeks. I knew that she was incredibly pleased with the success of our plan, just as she always took joy in any investigation that resulted in the truth “coming out.”

  “I want to find Winnie Faye, now,” I told her.

  “Of course you do,” she said.

  “Will you help me?”

  “No. But Wayne will. Finding people, now that is his greatest calling in life,” she replied.

  By that, she meant her nephew, Wayne Campbell. He was also a private investigator and did much of the footwork for her; eventually he was slated to inherit the entire business. I knew him to be meticulous and capable, so I gladly turned to him for help.

  Instead of taking over the search, Wayne gave me a rundown on how to go about doing it on my own. I left their offices with a game plan, as was becoming the norm. And the best advice he gave me? Start simple. Without giving out too much information, just call around and see who is willing to talk.

  I went home, got a copy of the local directories around Callahan, where Winnie Faye had indicated her father was living at the time of my birth. It was close to Jacksonville, and seemed as good a place as any to start looking up the Higginbothams. With a last name like that, I figured I should find someone related to me and Winnie Faye with very little effort.

  I made a few calls that first night with no success. But on the following morning I picked up the phone again. I left more messages and sometimes was able to cross a name off of my list until finally I reached a charming old gentleman—he was 90—who claimed to remember my mother very well.

  “She was such a cute little girl, blond curls and all,” he said. “I don’t know where she is now, but I know a woman who was her good friend. Let me give you her number.”

  I thanked him, and took down the number of a woman who now lived in the town of Stark, Florida.

  She answered her phone on the second ring. I felt the stars must be aligning in my favor once again.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Hello, ma’am,” I replied. “I’m trying to locate my mom, Winnie Faye Higginbotham, and I can’t seem to track her down. I was wondering if you might have her number on you.”

  “Oh, honey,” she said. “I don’t have her number. But the last I heard, she and Roy, you know her new husband Roy, they were living in Lanark Village out around Apalachicola Bay somewhere.”

  “Well that helps. I appreciate it,” I told h
er sincerely. “What was Roy’s last name, again?”

  “Whitaker, that’s his name. And if you reach her, you let her know I send my best, you hear?”

  “Yes ma’am,” I replied.

  I started looking up Whitakers in the Apalachicola Bay area.

  Turns out that Lanark Village was a trailer park out in a very rural part of the state. And there was no Roy Whitaker or Winnie Faye Higginbotham listed with that address. Now when I say trailer park, some of my readers may have a very different image in their minds than what I’m talking about. These trailers weren’t packed together like sardines in a tin. They were stuck out in dense vegetation, with lots of room between neighbors. There was no HOA or front office I could call and ask for assistance. After another day of wasted inquiries, I did the only logical thing.

  I called the police station in their area and told them I needed to reach Winnie Faye because I was related to her and that there had been a death in the family.

  They knew her and Roy, and were happy to help.

  “Do you have a phone number where you can be reached if we don’t find her? Or so she can call you back?”

  I gave them my number, and my first name. They agreed to get on it quickly. So I sat near the phone for the next few hours, waiting and trying to hold my emotions in check. When the phone finally rang, I almost jumped out of my chair.

  “Hello,” I answered.

  “This is Winnie Faye,” a strong voice declared. “Who is this that wants to tell me about a death in my family?”

  I struggled to find my voice. My stutter was the worst I could remember it ever being. I mastered each word with difficulty.

  “Well, actually, there hasn’t been a death,” I replied. “But I did need to reach you. I was just wondering, does the date January 25, 1952 mean anything to you?”

  I thought for a moment that the line had gone dead. Then I heard her voice, much softer.

  “Oh my God, yes. You’re my son, aren’t you?”

  She was clearly crying.

  “Yes,” I told her. “I am.”

  I remembered that the closed adoption record had mentioned her inability to discuss the relinquishment without crying. She was equally unable to contain her emotions now.

  “And they called you Mike? Well, you know, Mike, you’ve got lots of brothers. One of them lives out in Crawfordville. I just can’t do this over the phone. I’m going out to Crawfordville tomorrow to Robert’s house, that’s your brother. Let me give you his number.”

  I took down the number and told her I’d call him immediately to work out some details.

  She agreed, and after a call of a few short minutes, she was gone.

  It didn’t matter. I knew she wanted to meet me, she had even got the ball rolling for us. I worried a little about how Robert might take all of this, whether he knew he had a brother that was given up for adoption. I called him anyway.

  When he answered, I explained the situation as quickly and gently as I could. He seemed surprised, to say the least, but didn’t have any problems believing the story.

  “If I fly up to Tallahassee tomorrow,” I said, “Would you pick me up at the airport and take me to meet our mother?”

  Our mother. The words left me giddy and elated.

  He agreed. I hung up the phone and realized that, once again, my world had changed in a short 24 hours. I had to stop doing this to myself. The emotional strain was enormous.

  As exhausted as I felt, I still had a last minute flight to book, and a suitcase to pack.

  * * * * * *

  I used the short flight to Tallahassee as an extra chance to explore the adoption record. I brought along a magnifying glass to help me with the faded and blurry sections. Yes, the copy was really that bad. By the time the flight landed, I had noticed a few other items that were bothering me.

  For one, I wondered about the sentence in the opening pages that stated,

  Mrs. Fielding is the wife of a Jacksonville police officer who has had a good deal of damaging publicity in the recent suit which an unmarried mother has brought against her, implying black market dealings with babies.

  This publicity seemed to have occurred between the time I was born, and the time of the department’s first contact with the Chaleks in July, when I was six months old. I made a note to see what I could discover about the lawsuit, once I had more time. Whatever it was, it had been the cause, as later noted in my files, of the Fieldings having to change their phone number and withdraw from the public eye for a while.

  Then, I began to piece together how my own adoption had begun as just that, a black market transaction. The Chaleks had heard of Mrs. Fielding and her baby-finding services through someone who worked with Al at the Colgate company, from someone who had also “procured” a baby through her. The Chaleks had paid their $200, brought me home, and might never have begun any legal proceedings at all if it hadn’t been for a concerned neighbor who called the Florida Department of Children and Families to report that Adela and Al had an infant in their home, but Adela most certainly had never been pregnant. Why this woman believed that the adoption was anything else than legal and aboveboard is not known. But it was her concern that caused the Chaleks to finally file an official petition for adoption through their lawyer, William D Hopkins. The lawyer’s name set off an alarm in my memory. I should know who that is, I thought. I decided to follow up on that as well.

  Also, both Al and Adela had reported to the social workers that they were previously married, and divorced. I wondered what the divorce records might reveal about them.

  And when the social worker described her first interview with Al, I almost laughed aloud.

  Infectious smile, well-spoken, outgoing and likable personality.

  Oh yes. That’s the salesman we all knew and loved.

  Mr. and Mrs. Chalek both participated in the interview…although he took the lead.

  And again, I could picture it in my mind’s eye. Al would rather have died than let an outsider see him as in any way less than the master of his home, including being master over his wife and her behavior or opinions.

  When the social workers had pointed out to my potential adoptive parents that you couldn’t just buy a baby and bring him home, that there was a matter of due process to follow, the Chaleks claimed ignorance of the law. They pointed fingers at Mrs. Fielding, her lawyer, the physicians, anyone but themselves. The case workers gave them the briefest of reprimands, then went about the business of trying to ramrod the process through the courts. They obtained consent from the legal father, technically outside of their scope of work. They hand-held the lawyers for both Mrs. Fielding and the Chaleks through each step of the process. They glossed over the details of both Al and Adela’s previous marriages (although I wouldn’t know that until months later).

  In short, they claimed to be in charge of a process that protected infants from inappropriate adoptive placements, all while landing me squarely into a home that viewed adoption as a poor but last-ditch substitute for having a biological child.

  I read with alternating sadness and fury of the affection that both Al and Adela had shown for me in that first year of my life. They spoke “proudly” and “warmly” of my good nature, quick development and attractive features. I appeared happy and inquisitive. They were concerned that the birth mother might have legal grounds or the desire to take me back. For a brief moment in time, the Chaleks clearly believed that I was the son they wanted to raise.

  It was a far cry from the day when Adela would express the wish that she could send me back into Winnie Faye’s womb. But then, it was also years before Adela would give birth to a son of her own womb. To escape this line of thinking, I took a break from my reading. For a while I stared out the plane’s window, seeing nothing but a vast expanse of sky above me.

  As we approached the Tallahassee airport, all thoughts of my childhood and of the flawed adoption were banished to their dark corners. Instead, I experienced a trepidation and anticipation like
nothing I had ever known. Only other adoptees and birth parents who have faced the moment of their own reunions can understand what happens when a primal desire for connection collides head-on with a crushing fear of rejection. I was about to meet my brother, and sleep deprivation and raw emotions had me standing on a razor’s edge.

  Robert made it easy. We located one another based on our previous descriptions over the phone. He shook my hand and we made our way to his waiting pickup. He explained that the pickup was something he had used in his business as a tile layer. He’d learned the trade from one of Winnie Faye’s husbands, a man who had treated Robert like a son, even though he wasn’t officially.

  That’s how the conversation started, and it carried us through until we reached Robert’s home. Along the way, I learned that all of my brothers were born with different biological fathers. Robert tried over and over to explain, like a warning, that Winnie Faye was “not like other people,” to which I replied that I didn’t mind at all. He took it a bit further, saying that the doctors had told them she suffered from bipolar disorder. I shrugged it off. Whatever she was, it was enough that she had loved me at birth and still did.

  We pulled into Robert’s driveway as the afternoon light was beginning to fade. He had a beautiful place on several acres, and we parked just in front of the open garage.

  “Mom’s waiting just inside,” he said.

  “The garage?” I asked.

  “Her wheelchair makes it hard for her to maneuver in the house. She wanted some space around her when you showed up to meet,” he explained.

  It wasn’t just Winnie Faye who was waiting for me in the garage. Robert’s wife was there as well, and some other family members. But the only person I really remember is my mother. She was older in appearance than I expected, and quite small. Her wheelchair swallowed her up. I walked up and introduced myself, and despite my typically reserved nature, I was soon bending over to give her a hug. After all the introductions were completed, we finally moved into the house.