ShareThisIt was one of those heartwarming stories tailor made for something like the Hallmark Channel: A mother and daughter, reunited 29 years after the daughter was kidnapped by her father and spirited away to Canada.
It happened thanks to San Bernardino Police Chief Walter A. Shay and his detective work in 1909.
Shay was contacted by Winifred Haggarty, of Cleveland. She wrote to him that she had been separated from her mother when she was only 2. When she was 11, she discovered that the aunt and uncle who had been raising her were not her parents and found out who her father was. He told her that her mother was dead.
Only years later did Haggarty's father confess that her mother was still living. She was able to track her as far as Southern California but did not even have a name to look for. That's when she wrote to Shay asking for help.
The police chief got hold of authorities in South Dakota, where Haggarty's father lived. They got the father to divulge the name of Haggarty's mother. Subsequently, Shay tracked the mother down in Redlands.
A news report on March 18 described the scene when Sadie Brownwell arrived at the San Bernardino police station and was handed a letter from her long-lost daughter and told she had been found.
"For nearly 30 years denied the love of this child," the story recounted, "the heart saddened through those long years burst with gladness ... Tears were streaming down her worn cheeks. She could not talk and her body shook so that she clung to the railing for support."
Touched by the woman's ordeal, the story said, "eyes of stern faced officers became misty as they heard the story sobbed out by the happy woman."
Brownwell told the story of how she had been standing on the banks of the Missouri River near Yankton, S.D., with her daughter in her arms when a carriage drew up, a man leapt out and snatched the child from her. He jumped back into the carriage and as it raced off, Brownwell said, she saw her husband stick his head out from the other side of the buggy, looking back at her.
"I can hear those horses galloping yet," she told the crowd at the police station.
Days later the two women were reunited.
"Hardened men turned away with quivering lips and eyes that grew misty as the daughter who had never known a mother leaped into (her) arms."
It's so beautiful that happily ever after just seems a given.
But that's where the story goes south, switching from the Hallmark Channel to Entertainment Tonight.
Mother/daughter relationships -- they're so hard.
Just months later, on July 5, another story on the two women appeared in the San Bernardino newspaper.
"Two Hearts No More Beat as One," the headline read.
"The instinctive love of a daughter for a mother has changed to hatred," the newspaper reported. Haggarty "now regrets the day she met her long-lost parent."
Haggarty, along with her husband and children, had moved in with her mother in Redlands. But Brownwell reportedly had an explosive temper and a foul mouth to match it. When Haggarty and her family had enough and announced they were leaving to find a place in San Bernardino, "Brownwell threatened to shoot her," the news report said.
"Trembling with excitement, the daughter yesterday rushed into the police station at Redlands and implored the aid of officers."
No doubt grandma didn't get invited to Christmas dinner that year.
(E-mail reporter Mark Muckenfuss at mmuckenfuss(at)PE.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif.
