Found in a Sycamore: The Envelope That Unraveled a Family Secret
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Found in a Sycamore: The Envelope That Unraveled a Family Secret
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The shock of finding a sealed manila envelope hidden in a sycamore - dry, undamaged, and tucked into a hollow on a trail open only nine days - reveals handwriting from a man who'd been dead six years and a photo labeled "Baby Girl Zimmerman - July 9, 1987." How did those eleven handwritten words and that photograph end up waiting in a tree, and who arranged for a dog to find what a dead man could not deliver himself?
In this episode, we follow the discovery by Ronald Padgett and his dog Biscuit, the call that reopened an old secret, and Pamela Zimmerman's search through sparse adoption records that point to a missing placement document. Can the initials on a routing slip and a dead records clerk finally explain where Pamela came from?
Person: Pamela Zimmerman
Date: July 11, 2019
Location: Weston Crossing, Ohio
Person: Roger Richardson
Event: Missing placement document
- Biscuit, a seven-year-old chocolate Labrador, pushed her nose into a hollow sycamore six-tenths of a mile from the trailhead and found the envelope.
- The envelope contained eleven handwritten words on yellowed notebook paper, a photograph of a newborn, and an ID card reading "Baby Girl Zimmerman - July 9, 1987."
- Ronald Padgett stopped walking because his dog stopped first on the morning of July 11, 2019.
- Dennis Zimmerman died in 2013 at age sixty-one of a cardiac event; his wife Lorraine was sixty-four at the time of the discovery.
- The county agency routing slip listed the placement document as handled last by initials R.R., corresponding to Roger Richardson, a records clerk who worked at Greer County Family Secret from 1974 to 2004 and died in 2019.
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