Incredible. Absolutely incredible.
Donna Casasanta got the call this week, a call she’s spent half of her life praying for.
A call about Holly Marie.
More than 40 years ago, her son, Harold Dean Clouse, moved to Texas from New Smyrna, Fla., with his wife, Tina Linn, and their young daughter. Then, all three abruptly vanished.
Finally, in October 2021, genealogists called Casasanta and her relatives with painful news: Police had discovered the couple’s bodies, back in 1981, in a copse of trees in east Harris County, but only had recently identified them using modern technology.
Dean was beaten to death. Tina had been strangled.
There was no sign of their baby, Holly Marie.
This week that changed. Holly Marie is alive and well and living in Oklahoma, after a family adopted her as a baby.
Investigators from the Texas Attorney General’s office walked into Holly’s workplace on Tuesday and told her who she was.
Hours later, Holly and her grandmother and aunts and uncles met, in a raucous Zoom call.
It was June 7, the day that her father would have turned 63.
“Finding Holly is a birthday present from heaven since we found her on Junior’s birthday,” Casasanta said, in a statement released by a family spokeswoman. “I prayed for more than 40 years for answers and the Lord has revealed some of it.”
See here and here for the background. This whole story richly deserves a prestige true-crime miniseries on HBO, and there are still some huge questions that may never be answered. Read the rest, and read the previous stories of how Linn and Clouse were identified if you haven’t yet. The Observer has more.