Chapter 1: What is the main theme of the stories shared in this episode?
This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm your host, Jennifer Hickson. In this hour, variations on the question, does the truth set you free? Does it? Coming up, stories of confessions, culpability, and sometimes redemption. And occasionally, the truth shows up when you aren't even searching for it.
We're going to start with a story that we first heard at the Moth's pop-up porch, which is a tiny house on wheels that we've carted around various cities in the United States, searching for new tellers and stories. When we parked in Dallas, Texas, Brad Yule showed up to share a story around a bit of information that had shook up his world. We were intrigued.
Later, we developed it for a main stage show at the Moody Performance Hall, where we partnered with AT&T Performing Arts Center. From Texas, here's Brad Yule.
So it was 2019, I was 48 years old, had been in my career for 25 years, had been married to my wonderful wife for 27 years, we had three great kids who were growing up too fast, and my parents were still alive, lived close by, together and still in our lives. My life changed in March of that year with a text message. My wife and I had done AncestryDNA several years before this,
just to kind of find out where we came from. And through that, a woman had reached out to her trying to figure out how the two of us were related. My wife gave her a ton of answers. All of those got shot down after we sent them back to her. And we were kind of at a dead end until this text message came through.
And when this text message came, everything was different because she had an answer herself. She said that her sister had a baby boy born in 1970 in Dallas on my birthday, and she thought it was me and that my parents had just never told me they adopted me.
That sounds like a shock, and it was initially, and it really turned into kind of blowing it off and thinking this poor lady is out in left field and we gotta help her. So we agreed we're gonna do some research, get her back on the right track, I'll look at my birth certificate, we'll figure some things out, and we'll help her out.
In less than 24 hours, all I had was more questions than answers. I suddenly realized that my mom had never talked about being pregnant with me. I had never had the mom guilt trip of, I was in labor for you for this many hours, and this is what you've done or how you treated me. And I had never seen a picture of her pregnant.
So I came to the hard conclusion that at 48 years old, I was going to have to ask my parents if I was adopted.
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Chapter 2: How does Brad Ewell discover his family secret?
Why? Well, nothing important. I went through all the reasons why you might need to talk to your parents at that age. Everything was fine. And the more I deflected, the more he'd come back to, I want to meet you for lunch. I just want to know what we're going to talk about. So I finally gave up and realized that I'm going to ask my 79-year-old dad over the phone if I'm adopted.
And I said, Dad, this lady's reached out to us saying that her sister had a boy and it's me and the child adopted me and didn't tell me. Is that true? And there was nothing but silence on the other end of the phone. I could hear his fingers drumming on what later I learned was his dashboard. He had run an errand that day and that's why he answered his cell phone.
And after a long pause, I got, yeah, Bradley, you're adopted and we've been trying to figure out how to tell you. If that initial 48-year-old secret wasn't a big enough shock, it came with two more. My birth mother had died 19 years before I ever found out I was adopted. I was never going to close that part of my story up.
The flip side of that was my biological father was very much alive, but he had been in Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana for the last 50 years for murder. That sent me on a mad research dash to find out everything I could about this man, why he was in prison, who he was, anything I could learn about him. Back in Louisiana in the 70s, they didn't keep a whole lot of court records.
Everything I found ended up being through the newspaper. I was able to piece together his crime, his eventual conviction. I actually found a picture of the man he killed wrapped in a sheet laying on the side of the road. While I did all this research, I was really okay with the story. It was a weird story to have, but as long as I didn't personalize it for myself, that was fine.
It was just a funny story to tell people. All that changed when newscaster Lester Holt decided to do a 48 hour special on Angola State Penitentiary. He spent three nights there, recorded everything, met a bunch of people, recorded everywhere in the prison. And when I watched that, everything suddenly became personal. Where I had made my dad a very, or my biological father,
concept in my life all of a sudden he was a real person in a real place that I had now seen and I couldn't stop thinking about it. That led to therapy and therapy led to a pretty quick conclusion of I have to meet my biological father once to put that part of my story to bed just so I can have it done. Going to Angola gave me a lot of time to think about what it was gonna be like to meet him.
It's an eight-hour drive out there And this is probably a good time to tell you all that successful 25 year career I talked about at the first of the story has been as a police officer. So I already had a vision of who I was going to meet.
I'm not saying everybody in prison and jail is like this, but I am saying the majority of the people I've dealt with are not responsible for anything that happened in their lives. If the world was more fair, they wouldn't be there. And at the end of the day, none of this was their fault. Before I became a police officer, I worked in the jail.
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Chapter 3: What shocking truth does Brad uncover about his biological father?
It's called Right to Know. I called Brad to talk to him about Life Since the Story and how things are going at the nonprofit.
It is going great. We're always looking to help more and more people. The longer that consumer DNA tests are out there, the more people that are getting surprises. And that's just the trend that will continue. I don't think you'll ever see a stop in the surprises.
So we work constantly for reform on birth certificates so people don't have to try to fight to get their original birth certificate and find out where they came from genetically. And outside of that, we're working hard to provide support for all the people that are having this happen like I did.
I know that you learned about your origin story really late in life, so I'm sorry you never got to meet your mom. Do you ever wonder about how you would have responded to the news that your father was in prison when you were a younger man? You know, I really have. I think... I think that was one of the parts where I was very fortunate in my life.
What I've told people and what other people have always said is that people who could be very good criminals are usually the ones that become good cops. And I could say, looking at myself in the mirror and just being honest with myself, had I grown up in a completely different environment than I did, I very likely may have ended up exactly where my father was at some point.
I think that could have gone either way for me. And it was just, who ended up raising me at the time I was raised. Yeah. How about, how about what is pop up to these days? You know, he has been really living his best life. He is back together with the woman that he was married to when he went to prison.
What, what pop tells me all the time is every day out here is a much better day than any day had in there. So he's just soaking up every day. You can get, you know, when you, when you spend that long, I think in prison, Just going to the grocery store is a pretty cool thing. It takes very little to be a big deal when most of your life has been so confined. And it was 50 years he was in there?
Yep. What's something loving you could say to adoptive parents who feel nervous about telling their kids? Even though I've built a great relationship with my biological father, my dad will always remain the person that was my dad, and that's the one that raised me because that was who was in my life.
So when you look at it, it's – the best way I try to describe it to people is it's no different than grandparents. Nobody looks around and says, oh my gosh, this kid can only like one set of grandparents. Because all of us get two, or most of us do, unless something bad happens. But parents can be the exact same way.
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Chapter 4: How does Brad's relationship with his biological father evolve?
This was before the times of FaceTime and WhatsApp. My parents' marriage had been through a lot with the move, and the strain of being in different countries was just too much for them, so they ended up getting a long-distance divorce. And then my 18th birthday crept up. Remember when I said that when we were minors, we were covered under my mom's visa?
But the lawyer explained that the second I turned 18, I would become illegal. So here comes the second Gabby's choice. Do I stay or do I go? The day before my 18th birthday, I landed in Spain. I reunited with my dad, I reconnected with my grandparents and all my family. I went to theater school to one of the most amazing schools in the country. I had a fantastic time.
But you see, when you're an immigrant, it's like you have this curse, right? That no matter where you are in the world, you're always going to miss someone. And I miss my mom. So when I graduated in 08, I came back to America. But this time it was different. I was able to apply for papers and I became, long story short, an American citizen.
And of course, I met the love of my life in Miami and we took a Euro trip to go hang out with dad. He booked a cruise down the Danube River, And that's where he popped the question. It was the perfect proposal, the perfect ring, the perfect man. But then he said something that blew my mind.
He said, babe, you know, I'm so happy that we were able to celebrate our engagement here because your dad won't be able to come to our wedding in America. At that point, I realized it's been 17 years. 17 years my dad has missed of our American life. I'm talking graduations, driver licenses, plays, special moments. And I refuse to let him miss another one. I can't.
Now, I consider myself a feminist. But at that moment, all I wanted was for daddy to walk me down the aisle. So when I got back to Miami, I went straight to work. But see, this time it was different. I was bold. I was empowered. I voted for Hillary. So I marched right down to that immigration officer and I said, American knocking here, I have an inquiry.
You know how in the movies when the main character walks in and they give this like all American speech and the crowd does a slow clap into a crescendo and they get everything they ever wanted? It was just like that. Except there wasn't a crowd, nobody clapped, and the agent said, no, we don't do that here. So I asked, isn't this the immigration office? And he said, yes.
Does your father want to migrate here? Oh, no, no, no. I'm not falling for that one again. No, no, no, no. He just wants to be here for my wedding. He said, well, we don't deal with visitors. OK, so one thing led to another. And I finally found a lawyer in Spain who specializes in tourist visas for Spaniards. And she said, the US government is very forgiving.
If you're European and white, of course. She said, as long as you admit your crime, do your time, you're fine. So she got him an interview at the US embassy in Madrid. My dad goes there with all of his documents, including my wedding invitation, and they got back to him with a 10 year visa. The week before my wedding, mom took some time off of work to help me with the last details.
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