Driving home from a family wedding in Oklahoma City, Amy Cox’s husband shared a piece of gossip he had heard at the reception.
“It’s a crazy story,” he told her. “About you.”
This was August 1996, and Cox was an 18-year-old newlywed just out of high school. She had always known she was adopted but had never heard anything about the circumstances.
On the day she was born, according to the story Rick Cox heard, somebody left her in a phone booth at the Tulsa state fairgrounds.
“Who told you that?” she asked, laughing at such a wild tale. “That can’t be right.”
Cox had grown up with two older brothers in Hartshorne, a town of 2,100 people in southeastern Oklahoma. Her parents made no secret of the adoption, but they had been waiting until she was older to tell her the rest.
“Yes,” her mother acknowledged when Cox asked. “It’s true.”
About 11:45 in the morning on Monday, June 12, 1978, an anonymous woman called the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office and told a dispatcher that a baby girl was in a phone booth near the Skyride. A deputy arrived minutes later and, sirens blaring, rushed the newborn to a hospital.
Doctors estimated she was 3 to 4 hours old, and they found a twist-tie looped around her umbilical cord. Wrapped in a blanket and lying in a well-worn baby carrier, she weighed 6 pounds 9 ounces and measured 19 inches long.
Although she has since had surgery to improve her vision, Cox was legally blind as a child and had a mild case of cerebral palsy, suggesting that she might have suffered from a lack of oxygen at birth.
“When I found out that I was abandoned,” Cox says, “I wanted to find my biological family even more.”
She looked for clues in the archives of the Tulsa World, but details were scarce. The press had called her “Baby Maybelle” because she was found in a Ma Bell phone booth.
A young woman repeatedly called a hospital and the Tulsa Police Department to ask about “my baby,” and officials promised not to press charges if she came forward, but she never did.
Six months later, the state put the baby up for adoption.
The police also received an anonymous tip from a young man who claimed that the baby’s grandmother had taken the child away from its mother, who needed medical attention. He apparently knew details about the baby that police had not made public, indicating that he might actually have seen the child, according to World archives.
“I have a birthmark on my back,” Cox says. “In my mind, that could have been it.”
Was he the father? An uncle? Or a convincing liar who pulled a prank on investigators?
“I have so many questions,” says Cox, now 36 years old and living in Pawnee, an hour east of Tulsa. “There’s got to be a reason. There’s got to be a story behind it, and that intrigues me. Good, bad or otherwise, it’s my story, and I want know what started it.”
Her initial search in the ‘90s came to a dead end. But earlier this year, Cox launched a new effort to find answers, starting a Baby Maybelle blog that has attracted 50,000 readers and making a personal plea that went viral on Facebook, shared more than 100,000 times in just one week.
Soon, a woman came forward claiming to be Cox’s mother with a heart-wrenching story about rape and incest.
“The resemblance was remarkable,” Cox says. “Put blond hair on me, and you would be looking at her. My friends who saw her were in tears because we looked so much alike it was crazy.”
A DNA test, however, ruled out any chance that they were related, and the woman admitted that she had made up the whole story. Cox will be less gullible next time.
“I’m not mad at my mother, whoever she is,” she says. “Maybe she was young. Maybe she was scared. Maybe it wasn’t her choice. I don’t know. Whoever put me there wasn’t trying to hurt me. They were trying to get me to a safe place.”
With a petite figure and thick, curly hair, she has some Irish background, but her genes are mostly Spanish, according to the DNA results.
Estranged from most of her adoptive family, she’s raising three daughters, ages 15, 12 and 9, and they want to meet their grandmother.
“Somebody somewhere knows something,” Cox says. “If not for me, then for my girls. Tell us who we are.”
Michael Overall 918-581-8383
