And I think with Becky, I feel like Becky has a more similar personality to me, and that is that the girl will always land on her feet, and she will get knocked down, but she will wipe herself off and get back up again. And I would say that Becky is really She's so positive, and she's so warm, and she's so loving despite all of the heartache that she has been exposed to, or maybe because you know, she had two parents who really tried hard to make
her feel safe and loved. I think that she has the right to know who her father is, and I think just because her mother refused to tell her doesn't make it any less valid desire to know. I mean, any I think we all have the fundamental right to know who our parents are, And obviously I support her trying to find out who it.
Is that was Elena, Becky's former babysitter, who, like many people in Becky's life, recognize that despite what she's endured in her life and some of the choices she made early on, she's ultimately become a fundamentally good person, the complete opposite of who her mother is. Whatever darkness lives inside of Diane downs and whatever that may exist genetically inside Becky Bobcock, she's pushed past it to lead a life and become a person who's nothing like her biological mother.
And so I think there was this sort of this Diane shaped void inside of her that she's always trying to bring the drugs and the men and everything too. And I remember sensing she can't quite fill it with what she's trying to fill it with. And so I mean, she would talk about really sort of crying out to
God and saying, please help me. I don't know who I really am I just the daughter of this crazy killer, or am I this person who's going to have my own life and my own identity and I don't want to be known as the daughter of Diane Downs anymore.
And I think by the time we were done talking with her, she was pretty much it felt like she was shaking the dust of Diane off of her, because I think she makes the decision once they have some communication her and Diane, that she's not going to go She's not going to go back there, which is what Diane wanted. Please come visit me, let's talk, let's you know whatever. And so for Becky to say, you know what,
I'm making the decision. I really don't want to be involved in that, and so I have some control over a few things. And this is what I'm going to do, and it's going to feel better that I got to do it.
From the time he met Becky and as he got to know her, Eric Mason supported the idea of Becky searching for her father.
Oh.
I thought it was a really good idea, because she's looking for grounding. That's what I always felt about Becky from the day she showed up at that pizza parlor in Bend and I looked across the table and said, Wow, that is Diane's daughter. And she just had so many plans and dreams. It's like I would like to be a nurse and I would like to help people, and I have all these plans, and my Mercedes needs parts and I need to get it fixed, and I need
to find a better place to live. And there was this orbit around Becky that felt a little bit like the orbit and the energy and the spin around Diane. But certainly she had a lot more control and grounding, and she understood that if she wasn't careful, the undertow of all of that could pull her under and that she'd be lost. And so I think she really was introspective and really wanted to make changes and not be
like her mom. And so you know, she got involved in a church, and she really did some self examination when she would sense herself going down the rabbit hole of drugs and men and chance meetings and all of those things.
And she.
Would pull herself short and say, you know what, I can't go down those roads because for my she's in prison for the rest of her life. So I think she wanted to make contact, some limited contact with mom, but really did want to find out who her real biological father was. And that made sense and it was a good thing. I thought it was a great thing.
Michelle Leonard, the DNA detective who was key in helping Becky confirm that she was, without a doubt, Diane Down's biological daughter, reached out again, and this time with news about Becky's paternal side.
It's been several weeks since we all convened with Michelle at the DNA detective and Becky and now Michelle had some breakthroughs in your case, Becky, So I wanted to have this meeting so we could go over her findings and I'll turn it over to you, Michelle.
Okay, Hi, Melissa, Hi, Becky H. So last time we had a session where we talked about my first impressions of your DNA results, and there were some important clues that I was able to share with you at that time about your recent immigrant ancestry coming from areas like Poland,
Ukraine and perhaps the Netherlands. But this time, what we're going to do is much more of a deep dive into your actual DNA matches and their ancestry, and I'm going to go through the research I've been doing and talk you through how I've come to certain conclusions about your paternal ancestry.
Jumping off from the jackpot match she previously discovered, Michelle was able to narrow down the relationship of the match.
You've spent you know, most of your life wondering about, and to see it in black and white is a big thing. It really is. And of course you have what I named the jackpot match, a paternal match sharing around the same amount of DNA as your maternal uncle. Therefore, this is a very close paternal relative. And I had worked out the last time that it has to either be a paternal half sister because this is a female match,
or a paternal full aunt. The other option was grandparent, but that doesn't work because this person is matching to all of the different clusters of matches that I'm seeing on your paternal side, so that means she's matching to both your paternal grandparents. Therefore, she can only be a paternal half sister or aunt. But of course she doesn't
have a name. She just has a user name with a set of letters and numbers that aren't easy to decipher, and she doesn't have a tree, So we need to look at other matches to try to get to the bottom of this and try and work out who she is and who your biological father is. So if we scroll down your match list, the first thing you're going to know is exactly what I'm saying about all of
these maternal matches. I have been grouping your matches into color coded clusters, if you like, So I've been putting all the maternal matches into one group, and the maternal matches are here, and you'll see that as you scroll down. It's maternal, maternal, maternal, maternal, maternal, and the first useful match that doesn't match to your maternal matches is this one. And we're going to call this man Hugo Kowalski.
Just to note, Michelle isn't using any real names in order to make sure the identity of Becky's paternal relatives stay private.
So Hugo Kowalski is a pseudonym of my making, and he is the first interesting paternal match. Now he's sharing much less DNA than your massive jackpot match, of course, only one hundred and thirty eight centi morgans. But if we look at the probability chart for that, we'll see that it tells us it's fifty percent likely that this is a second cousin, once removed a half second cousin, a first cousin, three times removed a half first cousin Dwight. He's removed lots relationships there.
In order to start untangling the complicated web of potential relationships, Michelle has to dive into the relationships and start putting together a family tree. Sometimes the information is geographical, so the work Michelle is doing requires more than just the ability to analyze d and A results.
If you look at a tree and you say, okay, here's me, here's my parent, here's my grandparent, here's my great grandparents. So that's that number of generations removed from the common ancestors. And then you say, okay, here's a cousin, there's their parent, there's their grandparent, and there's the same great grandparents. Okay, so we're on exactly the same level. It is so much easier when you look at it visually than when you're trying to explain it in words.
But it is all to do with the number of generations away from the common ancestors between the two people. And that's so so important in this case because we've got all these relationships to look at, but how do we narrow them down? So Hugo is a great match to get on his own, but as you can see, there's only one shared match with him, and that shared match also has ancestry that goes back to Ukraine, but also an area that a lot of people call Galicia,
the Galicia area of eastern Europe. So when people immigrated from this area to the United States or other countries in the eighteen and nineteen hundreds, often they would say they're from Galicia, but sometimes they would say they're from Poland. Sometimes they'd say they're from the Ukraine. Sometimes they'd say they're from Austria. Sometimes they say they're from Hungary. It was part of the Austro Hungarian Empire at one point.
So that's why you might see in summer older records someone says they're from Austria when an actual fact, they're from the Ukraine as we would know it now. So this is the area that you have strong ancestry from, and very recent strong ancestry from. Found a cousin, if he is perhaps a first of one of your grandparents, then I want to know who his parents and grandparents were. Well.
I could only get as far as his parents because they were both immigrants and they came from the Galicia region to Canada.
Once Michelle has names and backgrounds, she starts doing a deep dive on social media accounts and even obituaries in order to find potential relationships. Michelle continues to unpack the relationships that unfall from this discovery, naming cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles down the paternal line. The lions cross and get somewhat complicated, but thanks for a visual buildout, Michelle is able to keep everything together.
And I do a lot of Facebook slothing to try and work these things. So that is a good way to go. So I built a few lines out and I looked at Vadim and Ella in particular, and I found that they had a door. Melissa was the act or of the eighteen eighties, and I traced Melissa's line forward and she married a man named Walter have Lenko. Now, this is one of these moments that I call a
Eureka moment because we've seen that name before. And I call it a Eureka moment because it's that moment where while we're building this large jigsaw puzzle and we're putting these pieces on the board, two of the most important pieces have come together.
And then Michelle's one step closer to Becky's father.
And I also was able to source John and Esther's obituaries, and those obituaries told me that they only had those two children. They only had those two daughters. Now, looking at this, I was convinced at this point that these two people are your direct ancestors. You descend directly from Esther and John. You have DNA to both their of ancestors, and they come together in Canada. So I believe you
descend from one of their children. Yes, okay, So looking at these people Esther and John, if you descend directly from them, they were born in the early nineteen hundreds in the Ukraine. They emigrated to Canada, and they had these two children in the nineteen thirties. You're born in the nineteen eighties. We're looking for a biological father for you, born around the nineteen fifties. Perhaps, therefore, this next generation, the daughters of Esther and John, this has to be
your grandparent generation. One of these two women is almost certainly your grandmother.
And from the grandparents, Michelle is able to narrow down the connection even more.
Oh yeah, so Katia, I've called her Katia Pavlenko, born in the thirties in Canada. And guess what she went to the United States. And guess what she did in the United States. She got married to a man who came from the Netherlands.
Oh.
I found they got divorced in a particular state in the United States in the nineteen seventies. And later I found that they had married in the fifties and they had three children. I have used the surname Jensen for your paternal grandfather. So I've called him Yan Jensen. He was born in the twenties in Northern Holland in the Netherlands. He immigrated to Canada as an infant, and in the
nineteen fifties he came to the United States permanently. But I have found a great document from the nineteen forties where he's crossing the border, and it actually gives us some information on his description, a description of his appearance. It tells us he's six foot three inches in height, got a fair complexion, very tall, blonde, blue eyes, quite typical Netherlands male description.
There. So a really interesting fact when I was young and started asking questions about who my biological mother and father were, I was actually given that exact description for what my biological father was.
And from this description of Becky's grandfather, she understands that the description that's been given of her biological father is most likely accurate.
So at this point I found that Katia Pavlenko married this Dutch Man, Yan Jensen, in the United States and they had three children. Now, Yan passed away a few years ago, and I did find his obituary as well, which confirmed that he had immigrated to Canada as an infant and had come to the United States in nineteen fifty and that he'd lived in Oregon. Wow, and that's
where he had died. So Yan and Katya had three children during their marriage between the nineteen fifties and the early nineteen seventies when they divorced, and those three children Matt, Richard and Louisa. Now, at this point I was fairly certain on who had to be your biological father.
And now with Becky's father identified, Michelle takes a somewhat careful approach of identifying him to Becky, starting with some of the questions she's had.
First off, I remember that it says that he was a little younger than Diane. That's true, he was slightly younger than Diane. Another thing is, of course, the appearance, the description. And I'm just going to sharing for a second and read a couple of things here.
I just saw in there it says he's still living.
He is still alive.
Yes, Becky, how do you feel right now? I'm looking at you on the screen.
Your face is blank. What are you thinking.
I'm trying not to cry.
Let's just take a moment.
This is really monumental, really monumental, and I don't want this to be trivializer dismissed.
This is really massive.
He's alive, which means that he's most likely known about me, And that's what's pretty hard for me right now. If I remove all emotion from it, I'm super curious what his name is, because you know, Diane had given me a certain name, and I'd heard names over the years and stuff. So it's I mean, there's that curiosity of who he is with the emotional part removed, but there's also the emotional part that's just flooding right now.
So we're at the point now where one of the sons of Jan Jensen and Katia Pavlenko must be your biological father. And I believe it is their son that has been named Matt Jensen. And I'm going to go over some of the additional evidence for that that isn't just the DNA. I have found a description of him which tells us that he has six foot three inches tall and has brown hair, which completely matches the description already given.
Yeah.
Additionally, there's location. This Matt Jensen is on a US index with an address in Cottage Grove, Oregon. Now, the date of this address isn't given, but it is prior to nineteen ninety three, and I have tracked where he was in the nineteen seventies. Therefore, he has to have been living in Cottage Grove in the nineteen eighties, which means he was in the right place at the right time.
Becky also learns that she has a half sister. Michelle reveals this information to Becky and explains this could be another potential point of contact.
How does that make you fail, Becky? Hearing you have a half sister.
Hopeful Christy and Danny didn't want a relationship with me, which I completely respected, it understood, But I mean maybe this person might or you know, maybe it would just be nice to know them. I mean, I don't know. It's all a lot, it's overwhelming right now, but I'm ready.
You know, it's very hard to take such news like this in and it takes time. It takes time to take it in and to understand it and to come to terms with it.
With Becky's mother being who she is, Michelle is ready with the background information of Becky's father, confirming that he's nothing like Diane.
I have not been able to find anything for your biological father. Other than he's a successful man. He runs a business. There's no criminal record. Rather than a speeding fine, I think nothing of any That's where I got the description of his physical features. A thirty dollars speeding fine is the worst thing I can find for him. He is educated, he comes across as intelligent. His daughter is
a high flying person in her chosen profession. I can't find anything about the family that gives me any concerns as to who they are. There's no news clippings of him having done anything wrong at all. That's good.
So I have a question. Was he a reporter? Yes, that's what we all thought.
And now the only step that remains for Becky is contact. Michean and Becky avoided contacting the jack Pop Match previously in order to prevent jeopardizing any chance Becky may have and making contact.
Now you remember, I was very reticent contacting the Jackpot match because I thought, if it's a half sister, we could be opening that can of worms and taking away his chance to tell her himself if he wanted to. And so it's a good thing that now we know for sure that that is who she is, that we didn't go take that route.
I agree, because if she doesn't know, that would be kind of a scare awakening exactly.
We could have blundered in with a message, Hey, you're a close match, who are you? Blah blah blah, and we might have got the answer much quicker and easier, but we could have taken away your chance of having any meaningful contact if that upset your biological father and he decided he didn't want to know because we had blundered in and told his daughter something that is Yeah.
What begins to dawn on Becky is that he's been near her the entire time and has likely known as relationships for this entire time.
In general, it's often said, especially in the United States, that it's better for something personal to come in this situation. That might be true, and it might not. I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't want you to send a letter that outlines everything. If he and his wife are people that open each other's male and his wife opens it, and that's how she finds out, and that's
that's then a big problem. If you decided on a letter to his address, then it would have to be something much more general to begin with, until you could get some way of being able to communicate with him that you were one hundred percent sure is private him and him only.
Yeah, most definitely. I mean, I'm curious about so many things. I mean about who he is and his life and how he knew Diane, and you know, if he really thought about me, you know, all that stuff. But it's just been a really long time that I've had those questions, and now I have the chance to ask them, and I'm I'm scared.
After Michelle revealed Becky's father's identity to her, including his immediate family location, and other details including biological information in some online and public information about him, she did, in fact reach out. He has declined to participate in the podcast, so this information is being left out in order to preserve his public autonomy. Becky reached out carefully through a letter, explaining very generally what her purpose was and locating him,
and gave her number. He contacted her through what appeared to be a burner phone, and after confirming her identity and purpose, he declined to speak at length with her or answer any of her questions, with the lingering promise that he would reach out to her after the holidays. Becky took some time to absorb this information, to reconcile her thoughts and feelings, and what we leave you with now is an end to Becky's journey.
In her own words, he's known that I've been who I am for at least ten years. I've been in the media, and he's chosen to stay out of my life and continues to choose. So I respect it. That's all I can do. I don't know, but he made it extremely clear that he is not interested. I mean, he used a burner phone to contact me, and the only reason I think that he even contacted me was because he knows I was looking for him, and I'm assuming he knows that I wouldn't stop until I found him.
But more so, I think that he contacted me to guarantee that I would not put his information out there. And as soon as I promised him I wouldn't, he didn't want anything to do with me. So that sucks. I mean, that's hard. I don't understand it. You know, my son out there, when he looks for me, I'm going to be so excited and so ready for him to be a part of my life and answer any questions that he may have and just embrace him into my life fully. My biological father, I think is scared.
He and it's understandable. I mean, he slept with an infamous killer and it produced a child that's now gone into the media and been pretty out there. So if I were him, I guess I'd be embarrassed. Maybe I don't know, or it would just be a secret that I would want to keep, and I think that that's what it is for him, as a secret he wants to keep, which means that that secret is me and I have to remain at a distance. I guess he had said that maybe around Christmas he would contact me,
but honestly, I am not holding my breath. I think that what I did get from him was probably all that I'm going to get from him, and it was just a bunch of promises to answer questions in the future and then telling me to never contact him again. So I got no real answers. I sought out to find him I did. It was disappointing, but it just reconfirms how amazing my parents are and how grateful I
am that I have such loving parents. My dad would you know, my dad would do anything to see me happy and to see me smile and to know that I'm loved and that's important. Not a biological father and not hanging on his every you know promise, But my real father, my adopted father, is my real father, because he is the one who has been there for every scrape me, every broken heart, every challenge my life and
to celebrate all of the good as well. He has always been there and he is a very very good man, and I am grateful to have him as just the same as my mom. I mean, she's amazing and she was always there for me and she still is. And I have amazing parents and if nothing else from this journey, it has confirmed that they are all that I need. I don't need Diane Downs in my life. I don't
need this new biological father in my life. I need my real parents, my adopted parents, the ones that love me, the ones that chose me, the ones that would do anything to see me safe and happy and left. What were my thoughts on the journey? Good and bad? It has been And it's been a wild ride for sure. I mean, there's been a lot of interesting facts that have come to light and a lot of disappointing ones. I mean, it's hard to be denied by people you
share blood with. Even if I don't want them to be my family, you know, it's still hurts my heart a little bit that they deny me, which is so weird. I understand. It's like I don't want to know them, but I want them to know me in a sense I don't know. I don't want to know them, but I want them to want to know me, if that makes any sense. It's just weird. I don't even understand myself. But you know, I denied by Diane, denied by her brother, now denied by my biological father. It's it has made
me extremely grateful for this life that I have. I have an amazing fiance, I have parents that I would never ever ever want to change. I've got a son who makes me so proud and so happy, and you know, I have a sister, and I just my life is full of love. I will continue my journey as strong as I ever have been. I'm grateful that I found my biological father and that I got some of the answers that I've been searching for. But it doesn't change who I am. It doesn't change my presence on this earth.
I'm here to be a good mother, a girl friend, a good wife, a good daughter. None of that is affected by who I came from. Diane Downs does not control who I am or who I continue to be. She was just somewhere that housed me for nine months. You know. It's that's all she was. She's not a mother. She's not someone that I care for or that I wish to have a part of my life. She was my incubator, and I mean in a sense I'm grateful for that, because if she hadn't gotten pregnant or continued
her pregnancy, I wouldn't be here. So for that, I guess, thank you, Diane Downs. But other than that, that's all she's ever been for me. Never my mother. I have never once referred to dian Down's as my mother. She is my biological mother. She may be my blood, but she would never be my mother. I've met some great people on this journey. The iHeartRadio staff and Melissa More have just been godsends. They've been amazing. Some of the
people that we've met and interviewed have been wonderful. It's been so great to meet kind, caring, honest people that are truly concerned about me. And in my journey due to where I came from, and they want to help and they wanted to, you know, answer any questions that they could, because they truly care and they are decent human beings, and for that I am grateful. We got a lot of answers, we found out some information. We are continuing to find out information as we go. Therefore,
we are working on some projects in the FIEL. So for the listeners that want to know more, there quite possibly could be more in the future that you're gonna want to hear and you're gonna want to know. But for now, I'm content, I'm happy, I'm healthy, I'm loved. I'm grateful for this journey. It didn't go as I had hoped or planned, but it gave me the closure that I needed that I've been searching for since I was eleven years old. I can close that chapter of my life and not have to look back on it
anymore or wonder or have questions. I can just live this amazing life that I have and appreciate everyone and everything in it.
Ben Bolan is our executive producer. Melissa Moore is our co executive producer. Maya Cole is our primary producer. Paul Dekkant is our supervising producer, Sam Tgarnan is our researcher, and Matt Riddle is our story editor. Featured music by dream Tent Happy Phase Presents. To Phase is a production of iHeartRadio