The book
In February 2017 a man Maximus Sego had known his whole life sent him a text message. It said that his mother was not his mother.
He was forty years old. The woman who raised him was his grandmother, Beryl Jean Taylor. She had written her own name on his birth certificate at his birth, taken him at three months old, and never filed an adoption anywhere in the state of Utah. His real mother lived thirty minutes away for thirty-six years and died in 2013 without ever having been allowed to say out loud that he was her son.
His whole family knew. Those who tried to tell him were called liars.
He found his father with a cheek swab in two months. Over the next two years he tracked down an uncle everyone said had died as a boy, and recorded twenty-one phone calls with the people who had been in the room. Almost every page of this book is on tape or on paper.
And there is Becky, an eight-year-old foster child. What was done to her was done in that house. She was carried out by ambulance at the end of the nineteen seventies and died at the hospital.
His brother wrote down what he saw.
“When I was five or six years old, I watched my grandparents murder a little girl.”
Maximus Sego is a journeyman lineman. He holds an associate degree and a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. He lives in Arizona with his wife and two children. This is his first book.
Read the first chapter
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The recordings
Twenty-one telephone calls stand behind the transcript chapters. He was on every one of them. They are not published here or anywhere else. They exist so that if a quotation is ever challenged, he can produce the recording.