Hello, John Doe

Todd Matthews, an amateur sleuth from Tennessee, has an unusual talent: Wielding the power of the Internet to match Jane and John Does with missing people, and helping grieving families find answers. Todd spent decades thinking about one family who had the misfortune of having not just one missing boy, but two. Both had vanished; their bodies never found. Then in 2019, one of the boys called him.

See omnystudio.com/listener for priv...

As a teenager, Steve didn’t dare ask his adoptive parents about his birth family. But once he was middle-aged and grieving the only father he’d ever known, Steve and his girlfriend decided it was time. What his mother told them opened a Pandora’s box of uncomfortable truths and led to a question: Why did a serial killer come up when Steve researched his family of origin online? Who was Franklin Floyd?

See omnystudio.com/listener f...

The answers to what happened to Steve as an infant were only a car ride away. In this episode, Todd visits with Steve’s biological mother Sandi to find out why she let him go. In the 1960s, Sandi fled her overbearing parents the best way she knew how: she married a man she didn’t love at 18, stepping into an unpredictable world. She kept falling for all of the wrong men. Until she met one who wasn’t just a bad match, he was a vultu...

When Todd started looking into Steve’s unusual adoption, he was faced with different versions of events. The story Steve's adoptive mother Mary told him and the tale Sandi told don’t line up, except for one detail: the tiny Honda they both remember from the day Sandi left Steve with Mary. For a long time after, Sandi said she searched for her son. Steve is skeptical so Todd tries to figure out what obstacles stood in her way, back ...

After Franklin Floyd kidnapped Sandi’s daughter, 6 -year-old Suzie, they left town and never came back. They spent their life on the run, with alias after alias. But they did stay in Forest Park, Georgia for years, long enough for Suzie to graduate from high school with the second highest grades in her class, and earn a scholarship to Georgia Tech. She dreamt of becoming an aerospace engineer and escaping Floyd. A twist of fate wou...

Franklin Floyd had been a wanted man since 1962 when he left town to avoid a kidnapping conviction  Bringing him to justice was the work of many investigators. In this episode, we meet FBI Agent Scott Lobb who did what no investigator had done before: he got the wily Floyd to tell the truth. What the FBI Agents discovered would lead him to Sandi’s doorstep. He'd be the one to tell her what happened to her little girl.

See omnystud...

Steve wasn’t the only boy from his birth family to disappear and be presumed dead. When Suzie grew up, she had a son. His name was Michael. One day he went to school, with his Aladdin backpack in hand, and never came home. He was just a first grader. When the the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children pushed to reopen the case, FBI Agent Lobb pieced together what happened to him. Incredibly, Floyd was trying to pass off...

Soon after Steve started texting with his biological mother, he discovered he had a sister named Amy, a school bus driver in Virginia. At this point, Steve wanted to get to know Amy, who’d grown up under Sandi’s roof. He was curious about her childhood, the road he hadn't taken. But he wasn’t so sure he wanted to know their mother. In this episode, Todd discovers the trauma that shot through Steve’s birth family was worse than he c...

A lot of relatives on Sandi’s side came out of the woodwork after Steve found his biological mother. Some of his long-lost relatives on his maternal side he let in, some he kept at arm’s length. In this episode, Todd goes to a family get-together to spend time with Steve’s half-siblings and learn what they make of finding him after all these years. After some disappointing news, Todd doubles down on fulfilling his promise to help S...

In our first bonus episode, we try to make sense of an unimaginable loss. In early January 2024, our “Hello, John Doe” host Todd Matthews died, suddenly. This episode memorializes Todd, a pioneer and an original. We couldn’t let him go to the other side of the veil without a proper goodbye. And Kate Mishkin, our producer talks to Steve Patterson one last time to discuss the impact Todd had on his life.

See omnystudio.com/listener fo...

Only finding out as an adult that you were adopted can throw you into a tailspin, forcing you to reconsider long-held truths. In this bonus episode, we hear from Dr. Amanda Baden, an expert on the experiences of late discovery adoptees. Research has shown the later an adoptee finds out, the more distress they have, and even finding out at 4 or 5 is considered “late.” Dr. Baden discussed why some adoptive parents choose to delay tel...

How was Franklin Floyd able to evade justice and hide from authorities for so long? In this second bonus episode, we spoke with Mark Yancey who prosecuted Floyd for the kidnapping charge that finally put him behind bars. Yancey also explained how Floyd ended up on death row in the Florida for murder and he remembered the day investigators gathered at Suzie's grave site to right a wrong.  

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy info...