Jessica Diehl may visit Rockdale later this year.
It will be more pleasant for the North Carolina resident than her first encounter with Rockdale 38 years and one month ago.
Diehl was the newborn infant abandoned behind the 1200 block of Highland on June 1, 1981.
“I just want to find out more,” Diehl said. “I’m not looking to blame anyone. I don’t know who my mother or father were. I have reason to believe there may be family connections in the Rock-dale area and I’d like to find them.”
‘BLEATING’—On that warm morning in 1981, Floyd James, a resident of that block of Highland Avenue, was working in the garden behind his house when he heard something he described as “sounding like a goat bleating.”
James stepped into the field behind his house and saw a baby.
The infant was wrapped in a blanket and placed on a paper sack. James ran to alert his next-door neighbor, Rockdale Police Sgt. Jim Mortimer. She was rushed to Richards Memorial Hospital.
Mortimer said the baby “appeared to be okay except for a bad sunburn.”
“I’ve had eczema all over my body and I’ve always wondered if that was because of the sunburn I got as a newborn,” Diehl said.
Jessica—although that obviously was not yet her name in 1981—spent nine days in the hospital after her rescue and was also treated for insect bites.
She responded well to treatment, checking into the hospital at about five pounds and gaining about a pound during her stay.
Police and hospital officials theorized she was about two days old when left in the field and that she was probably abandoned the previous night.
FOSTERED—Diehl said she believes she was initially placed with two foster families in Rockdale.
By the end of that week in 1981, several local families had already volunteered to provide care for “Baby Jane Doe.”
“I was finally adopted by a wonderful family, the Diehls,” she said. “I was told they came to Rockdale to get me.”
“We moved around quite a bit,” she said.
While growing up, as Jessica Diehl, she began to notice the obvious difference in appearance between her and the family.
“I was blonde and my brothers weren’t,” she said. “I sure didn’t look like any of my family. So, I started in with the questions, ‘am I adopted’?”
Finally the answer came in the affirmative.
But that wasn’t the entire story. At age 15 she got a family member to tell her the rest of the story.
“You can imagine what that did to me,” she said. “I found out I was not only adopted, I was left in a field right after I was born.”
QUEST—Any chance the family might have had records with more details concerning Jessica’s background—if indeed any existed—were lost when the family’s home burned to the ground.
She went on and lived her life, but could not stop thinking about that field in Rockdale.
“I would like to know more about who I am,” she said. “I just feel like somebody knows something. That somebody may be in the Rockdale area. I may have relatives there.”
It’s more than just the obviously understandable curiosity. Diehl has a 14-year-old daughter and an almost-18 son. “My daughter has a rare disease,” she said. “It might help in treatment if we could find out more of my family’s medical history.”
She tried one of the commercial DNA testing products. “That wasn’t really any help,” Diehl said.
ROCKDALE—Then she searched around in the online site ancestor.com.
That brought more information, not the ultimate “these are your parents” info, but a number of replies concerning her birth.
One of them included The Rockdale Reporter’s June 4, 1981, story on the infant’s discovery.
Soon she was talking to Reporter staffers who remembered the 1981 incident but could shed no more light on the matter than what was reported 38 years ago.
“I have received the names of four families that somebody thinks might know something,” she said. “But that’s all they are to me, just names.”
So little information is known but there’s one tantalizing clue from The Reporter’s initial 1981 story. Police were certain the baby had not been born in a hospital or a health care facility because the umbilical cord had not been tied.
There’s another possibility, one that doesn’t offer quite as much hope.
Police at the time theorized whomever dropped off “Baby Jane Doe” might have simply been passing through Rockdale, drove to the end of an unfamiliar street, and placed the infant in the field.
“In that case, I might not have a thing to do with Rock-dale,” Diehl said.
But her instinct says otherwise. “I think whoever left me was from Rockdale,” she said.
Anyone with information is urged to contact Diehl at jessicadiehl81@gmail.com.
Diehl said she would welcome any bit of information.
“I just want to know where I fit in,” she said.
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