Reining In the Past : Search for the Truth Led Judy McCarron, Wife of Jockey Chris, to the Parents and Five Sisters She Had Never Known

Once she made up her mind, Judy McCarron hired a private investigator. A good one in Massachusetts was recommended to her. It was time for Judy to find out the truth.

Within 24 hours, the private eye had some solid leads. It wasn’t long before Judy was at home in California with the information in hand, the woman’s name and a New England phone number. There was only one thing left to do. Call the number.

“Is this Ethel?” Judy asked.

“Yes?” the woman replied, not recognizing the voice.

“I don’t know how to say this,” Judy said, blurting it out before she lost her nerve, “but I think you’re my mother.”

When the shock wore off, McCarron, 42, a mother of three from Sierra Madre whose husband is one of horse racing’s top jockeys, discovered she had parents and five sisters she had never known. Judy even has a sister named Judy. Families from all across America have their Thanksgiving stories, and this is hers.

Judy McCarron was born in Boston on a mid-February day, with a different first and last name. Her parents had a situation, pertinent today but scandalous in 1954. They were unmarried. The child’s mother was raised in strict Jewish faith. The father was a devout Catholic.

Like many young parents, they made a difficult choice. Somebody else would raise their baby.

More than a year later, Ruth and Bill Wexler adopted a daughter, and gave her a name. They had no idea what had happened to the natural parents, that Ethel Stambovski had become a nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, or that the marriage would take place after all, because baby Judy’s father had converted to Judaism.

It was not as common then as it is now for birth parents to engage foster parents in a legal fight for custody. By the time the newlyweds returned to the adoption agency to claim their child, she was gone.

They accepted that hard truth, in a way perhaps they would not today.

And for 40 years, Judy McCarron accepted her fate.

She raised three daughters of her own, Erin, Stephanie and Kristin, into their teens. Together they attended horse shows, or traveled with the girls’ father, Chris McCarron, as he rode in the Kentucky Derby, Breeders’ Cup and thoroughbred races throughout North America, watching him become the first jockey to surpass $200 million in earnings by his mounts.

After returning home from a summer season at Del Mar, something that had been on Judy’s mind for quite a long time finally had reached a point of no return. She had to know.

Judy’s adoptive mother “tried to discourage Judy from doing this,” Chris McCarron recalls.

“I never encouraged Judy, either, simply because we had no idea what we were getting into. We didn’t know what can of worms we might open.”

He could stop a fast horse on a dime, but there was no stopping Judy now.

Remembering her mind-set at the time, Judy says, “I had to get to a place where I could accept what happened, no matter what. Good news or bad, I just had to have some answers.”

The first step was to contact the adoption agency. Applying for “non-identifying information,” Judy was able to get some details, minus vital statistics like names and addresses.

“When I read it, I found out the most important thing, that I was a product of love. Think about it. I could have been the result of a rape, or of incest, or of something equally awful.

“As soon as I realized that I was made out of love, that gave me the courage to take the next step.”

Clearing her schedule of everything else, McCarron gave her birth certificate and a few bits and pieces to the private investigator, then sat back and waited. She did not have to wait long. Next day, she received a page from the Springfield, Mass., telephone directory, with the surname Stambovski highlighted, eight times.

Calling one, under the pretense of organizing a reunion for nurses who worked at Mass General between 1950 and 1960, Judy asked about an Ethel Stambovski. The young man on the phone told her, “That’s my aunt.”

He gave her the number.

Two sisters she had never met were at home when Judy steeled her nerve and made the call. Judy considers herself “a talker,” which is why she opted not to write a letter, but her words to Ethel Stambovski Gariepy were the hardest she ever had to speak.

“You’re my what?” her mother asked.

Unable to absorb this information all at once, and unable to speak freely because the two daughters were in the house and none of the children knew this 40-year family secret, Ethel asked if Judy could call back the next day, same time.

Judy hung up and told Chris, “I just spoke to my mother.”

“You did?” he said.

A day later, a man answered the phone in Massachusetts. He asked, “Are you the young lady who called yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“Hold on, I’ll get Ethel,” he said.

More calm than the previous day, Ethel said hello to the daughter she hadn’t seen since 1954. Judy said she had a million questions, starting with, “Whatever happened to my Dad?”

Ethel said, “You just spoke to him.”

In the weeks that followed, the family finally had its reunion. Judy likened it to an out-of-body experience. The news was broken to her five new sisters, Lynn, Cheryl, Debbie, Lisa and Judy, with whom Judy McCarron soon discovered endearing coincidences. She and Lynn have the same birthday, two years apart. The two Judys share the same mannerisms, facial expressions, voice. Chris says, “If they wore their hair the same, you would swear they were twins.”

Judy McCarron lost part of the middle finger on her right hand, after a childhood accident with some hedge-clippers. As a kid, the other Judy cut the same finger, which remains numb to this day.

“I found out one job my birth father had was caretaker at a cemetery,” Judy says. “I grew up next to a funeral parlor.”

Her new relatives had never heard of Chris McCarron and wondered what he did for a living. Judy suggested they watch the Breeders’ Cup on TV to find out.

This weekend, while Chris rides at Hollywood Park in the track’s sixth annual Turf Festival--including a stakes race Sunday named, strangely enough, the Matriarch--his wife will be in Massachusetts spending more time with her extended family. Their eldest daughter, Erin, 18, now attends school in Amherst. Her new grandparents look out for her.

Ruth Wexler, who raised Judy, lives in Monrovia. Her husband, Bill, died of a heart attack several years ago, in the McCarrons’ home.

Some children know no mother. Judy McCarron has two.

On Thanksgiving, she gave thanks.

“Do you know how lucky you are?” Chris asked, the night she and her natural parents were reunited.

Judy did.