Switched at Birth: Women Learn the Truth 56 Years Later

May 14, 2009 — -- When Oregon nurses handed Marjorie Angell her newborn daughter in the hospital in 1953, she insisted they had given her the wrong child. Her concerns were brushed off, but in an unlikely story that was 56 years in the making, her mother's intuition foreshadowed what was to come.

It was true. Her daughter had been switched at birth when she and the other baby were being bathed, but Marjorie Angell would never learn the truth because she died before it was revealed.

"It's sad," DeeAnn Angell Schafer told "Good Morning America." "Just to think I missed out on knowing my own parents."

Even though Kay Rene Reed Qualls said she enjoyed a wonderful life, she still feels guilty about the memories that should belong to DeeAnn and her family.

"I look at them and I feel like I cheated somebody," she said.

The story of two women who grew up in the wrong families just came to light last month to the surprise of everyone and no one.

On May 3, 1953, DeeAnn Angell of Fossil, Ore., and Kay Rene Reed of Condon, Ore., were born at Pioneer Memorial Hospital in the eastern Oregon town of Heppner. They grew up, got married, and had children and grandchildren of their own.

The women's lives were uneventful until last summer, when Kay Rene's brother, Bobby Reed, received a call from an 86-year-old woman who claimed to hold an astonishing secret.

He met the woman in her nursing home. She said she had known the Reeds' mother and had lived next door to the Angell family in Fossil. Her shocking claim was that Kay Rene wasn't really a Reed at all; she was an Angell.

The elderly woman said Kay Rene and DeeAnn were switched at birth.

To bolster her story, she showed Bobby Reed an old photo of DeeAnn's sister. Reed saw an instant and undeniable resemblance to the woman raised as his sister.