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A Chance to Find Her
"Where's Molly?" Jeff Daly asked his parents one gray spring afternoon in 1957. The six-year-old Jeff stood staring at the empty chair where his little sister usually sat. After a brief silence, Jeff's father answered, "Molly's not here anymore, but she's fine. It's nothing for you to worry about. Forget it and eat your supper."Over the next several months, when Jeff persisted in asking, "Where's Molly?" he was sent to his room. "She lives somewhere else now and she's happy," his mother firmly told him. "You're not to talk about this anymore." Jeff eventually stopped asking about Molly, but deep down never forgot her.
Nearly five decades later, on January 21, 2004 -- three months after his mother died of cancer and less than a day after his father died of heart failure -- Jeff came across his dad's wallet at his parents' home. Inside, he found a small laminated card printed with the name "Molly Jo Daly" and a Social Security number.
"My parents had told me to block her out of my mind," says Daly, now 54. "I assumed the card meant nothing." But Jeff's wife, Cindy, insisted that it was an important clue to Molly's whereabouts.
"This is your chance to find her," she said.
That afternoon, Cindy and Jeff searched for more clues in Jack Daly's house. In a crawlspace by the water heater, they found a cabinet crammed with old files. Tucked in the back was a folder labeled "Molly." Inside were a few records of Jeff's sister's life at the Fairview Hospital and Training Center in Salem, Oregon, where Molly had been taken nine days before her third birthday.
The institution had closed in 2000, but the Dalys found in the file a slip of paper listing phone numbers for three Oregon group homes for the developmentally disabled. Cindy quickly picked up the phone and dialed. The first two numbers led nowhere. But on the third call, to a home in Hillsboro, Oregon, she excitedly hollered for Jeff to get on the line. "Do you know Molly Jo Daly?" Cindy had asked the staffer who answered. There had been a long silence, then a male voice quietly said, "She's sitting right across from me."
For about three decades, beginning in the 1950s, there were thousands of "Mollys" growing up across the United States in state-funded institutions for the mildly to severely developmentally disabled. Although such institutions are becoming scarce, about 325,000 intellectually disabled adults -- many sent away as children -- are now living in small group homes or community residences. Those in their 40s and 50s in particular may have no knowledge that they have relatives of any kind, says University of Minnesota professor Charlie Lakin, who has studied demographics of the developmentally disabled. And now, with parents of these children dying without revealing any details, family contact may be cut off forever.
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