Hello, John Doe

The answers to what happened to Steve as an infant were only a car ride away. In this episode, Todd visits with Steve’s biological mother Sandi to find out why she let him go. In the 1960s, Sandi fled her overbearing parents the best way she knew how: she married a man she didn’t love at 18, stepping into an unpredictable world. She kept falling for all of the wrong men. Until she met one who wasn’t just a bad match, he was a vulture who preyed on her children.

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As a teenager, Steve didn’t dare ask his adoptive parents about his birth family. But once he was middle-aged and grieving the only father he’d ever known, Steve and his girlfriend decided it was time. What his mother told them opened a Pandora’s box of uncomfortable truths and led to a question: Why did a serial killer come up when Steve researched his family of origin online? Who was Franklin Floyd?

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Todd Matthews, an amateur sleuth from Tennessee, has an unusual talent: Wielding the power of the Internet to match Jane and John Does with missing people, and helping grieving families find answers. Todd spent decades thinking about one family who had the misfortune of having not just one missing boy, but two. Both had vanished; their bodies never found. Then in 2019, one of the boys called him.

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