A Daughter’s Search Begins at Door of State Hospital

For most of her 34 years, Theresa Ann Gray has viewed her life as rootless and incomplete, like a jigsaw puzzle short some key pieces.

Much of her adulthood has been spent searching for the woman who gave her life from a Camarillo State Hospital bed 27 minutes before midnight on a crisp spring night in 1962.

The auburn-haired birth mother, a mental patient at the state hospital, gave the infant Theresa up for adoption weeks after she was born.

The balance of Gray’s life has been a hunt for her background and identity.

“I just don’t have anyone in my life right now,” said Gray, whose adoptive parents are both deceased. “I’m getting older and time is going by very fast. I want to know my blood. I have that right.”

Now getting by on public assistance in a Pensacola, Fla., suburb, Gray said the impending closure of Camarillo State Hospital has sparked a new urgency in finding her biological relatives.

“If I found them, I would feel alive again,” said Gray, a former waitress now on disability. “Not knowing makes you feel like you’re not a whole person. You’re alive, but you don’t feel like you’re alive.

“I want to see my flesh and blood.”

Only recently has Gray jump-started her longtime effort to locate her blood relatives. She knows this much for certain:

* She was born at Camarillo State Hospital on April 28, 1962, to a woman with freckles whose name is unclear. The circumstances surrounding the pregnant woman’s admission to the state hospital are murky.

* Gray’s birth certificate lists her adoptive parents as the parents of record.

* A private investigation in the 1980s turned up the name Theresa Marie Keene as the potential birth mother, but Camarillo State has no record of a patient by that name.

* Gray was adopted by a Ventura County family, and she moved from Thousand Oaks to Florida as a young girl. The Brodowskis, Mathew and Lois, had no biological children and have both since died.

* The birth mother was released from Camarillo State a month after she gave birth.

* Confidentiality rules at both the state hospital and the county social services office make many records unavailable.

As an adult, Gray moved cross-country several times, coming closest to finding her birth family while living in Northern California in the mid-1980s.

That trail ended, however, with a stalled private investigation and a four-page letter from the Ventura County social worker who supervised her adoption during the weeks after she was born.

Barbara Hutchason only vaguely remembers the pregnant, 22-year-old unwed patient who turned up at Camarillo State Hospital in the spring of 1962. The name Keene rings a bell, but Hutchason is not sure if that was the woman’s name.

“She was a pretty girl, kind of long hair and kind of frail-looking,” said Hutchason, who is now retired and lives in Ventura.

“They were poor, and the grandmother was very demanding and demeaning,” Hutchason said. “It was like the girl had no self-confidence and let herself get pushed around by other people.”

*

By March of 1962, the woman Gray knows as Theresa Marie Keene was soon to give birth and short on options. Hutchason said the woman was obliged to care for an ailing mother and may have feigned mental illness as a means to escape that responsibility.

“Since she was acting ‘crazy,’ someone committed your birth mother and then the concern over her physical condition took over,” Hutchason wrote to Gray in 1986.

In a recent interview, she added: “The main thing I remember about [Gray’s] mother is that I tended to believe her story that she acted crazy to get away from her mother.

“She might not have been mentally ill, but she didn’t have good coping skills,” Hutchason said. “As she found out, that can get you into a lot of trouble.”

Unwed mothers in the early 1960s had a much more difficult time than their counterparts these days, Hutchason said. Adoption was practically the only option available to the young mother, she said.

Gray’s birth mother “didn’t have a job and she didn’t have a place to live when she got out,” Hutchason said. “She really did not want to give the baby up, but she didn’t know what else to do.”

What’s more, Hutchason told Gray in the 1986 letter, the birth father was an irresponsible young man of few means. About the time Gray was conceived, the man also impregnated another woman, a married friend of Gray’s mother, Hutchason said.

“He thought this was funny and thought it would be really great if both women went to the same doctor,” Hutchason wrote. “Your birth father did not offer your birth mother any help, and she does not think he offered anything to the other woman either.”

*

Hutchason said that Gray’s birth mother was given information about the adopting family, and that pictures were sent to the woman. “She seemed pleased to get them,” Hutchason noted.

Nonetheless, the woman, who would be about 57 years old now, has never contacted the Ventura County Public Social Services Agency looking for her daughter.

Dennis Trenten, the Ventura County adoptions supervisor, said that situation is not unusual.

“You get many more requests from adult adoptees searching for their birth parents than you do the parents who gave the child up,” said Trenten, who gets 30 to 50 such inquiries each year.

“Adult adoptees are anxious to find out about their history and why their parents let them go,” he said. “But it may have been a troubling time for the parents. And since they relinquished the child, they often feel reluctant to initiate the contact.”

Camarillo State Hospital spokeswoman Anna Pavin said she would like to help Gray. But without confirmation of the birth mother’s name, there is little that hospital record keepers can do, she said.

“We would do what we could to find her mother,” Pavin said. “But she would need to provide birth information for us, and the clinical records staff would work with her.”

If Gray is somehow able to dig up her birth mother’s name, the hospital staff would attempt to contact the woman and alert her that Gray is looking for her, Pavin said.

“We would forward any information she had to the woman,” she said.

But the looming closure of the state hospital also is muddying the situation. Early this year, Gov. Pete Wilson ordered the hospital shut down due to spiraling costs and the dropping number of patients.

It is unclear what will happen to the decades-old patient records once Camarillo State shuts its doors in July. But they will probably be stored on microfiche somewhere else by the state government.

“The location is yet to be determined,” Pavin said.

There are a number of adoption services groups that help adoptees locate their birth parents. The trouble is, however, that birth parents have to register with the agencies and approve any connection.

Anthony Vilardi is the registrar of the nonprofit International Soundex Reunion Registry in Carson City, Nev., which has reunited more than 5,000 adoptees with their biological relatives in its two decades of work.

He said he would gladly add Gray’s biographical information to his database of hundreds of thousands of names. But unless her mother also decides to sign up with the registry, there is little else the service can offer.

“We’re a service of hope,” he said. “There are no fees and no cost. We’ll send her a registration form, but the birth mother would also have to register for there to be a match.”

Another alternative for Gray is to complete the private investigation launched 10 years ago while she lived in the Northern California community of Mountain View. There, an investigator uncovered the name Keene, although that has proved fruitless.

Some adoption agencies conduct searches for a fee, and simple memberships open doors for adoptee workshops and other services aimed at reuniting parents and the children they released for adoption.

For a $65 sign-up fee and $45 for annual dues, Gray could join the Adoptees Liberty Movement Assn., a search and support group that assists adoptees across the country.

“We work like a genealogist or a private investigator would,” said Katharine Rudolph, who heads up the Southern California ALMA chapter. “We have a 97% success rate in finding the birth parents.”

But, Rudolph conceded, such investigations cost money, and the annual membership only covers the registry and initial services and workshops.

*

For people like Gray, with few resources and little education, ALMA may waive some fees, Rudolph said. Any follow-up investigation, however, would stall without more investment.

All of this leaves Gray wondering, uncertain whether her birth parents are dead or alive, whether they miss her or not.

“Hopefully they’re alive,” she said. “But if they’re not, then I’d like to meet their relatives. I need to know this for my own mental well-being, just to feel good about myself.”

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FYI

There are no precises figures, but adoption services advocates estimate that there are about 8 million adoptees in the United States. Only a small percentage have been reunited with their birth parents. The nonprofit International Soundex Reunion Registry in Carson City, Nev., helps reunite families at no charge to adoptees. It can be reached at (702) 882-7755.