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Finding Nellie Wilson

At first, Sarah took the same approach. She was young, she says, and living in the United Kingdom, and it all just seemed too hard. She also didn’t want to upset her adoptive parents by going looking for her birth family. 

She knew her parents had struggled with the adoption process. They felt there was a lack of support from social workers. Sarah’s mother was also frightened that at any moment, someone might come and take Sarah away.

By the time Sarah decided to try and look for Nellie during a trip back to New Zealand in her early 30s, it was too late. Adoption services told her Nellie had died in 2008. 

But there was some good news. Nellie’s sister, Mavis Snook, had left a note on the adoption file. It said that if Sarah ever came looking for her birth family, she was happy to be contacted.

For three months, Sarah procrastinated over calling Snook. Then one morning, she picked up the phone and dialled the number.

“When Mavis answered, she started crying. She said ‘your whole family is here’,” Sarah says. It was the day of Mavis’ husband’s funeral, and everyone had gathered at her home before the service. Both Mavis and Sarah thought the timing of the call was some kind of sign that they were supposed to meet. “It was quite sweet. I quite like things like that,” Sarah says. 

Sarah drove to meet Snook and the rest of her family a few days later. That’s when they gave her the autopsy report. 

They also told her more of Nellie’s story. She had a relatively normal childhood until she began coming home from work, aged 14, dishevelled, with her blouse undone. She also began wetting herself. At some point in her teenage years, she went away for a while, not even returning for the funeral when her father died. Shortly after this, she was put into Porirua Hospital, and rarely came out until it closed in the early 1990s.

“My aunt thinks she initially went away to have a baby,” Sarah says. “Because obviously back in the 50s they used to send girls away if they got pregnant and weren’t married.”

And therefore, Sarah thinks, it could be that first baby that caused the trauma that led to Nellie being institutionalised.

A search for truth

For five years after meeting Snook and the rest of Nellie’s family, Sarah found herself coming back to the mystery of her birth mother’s story again and again.

She got the impression that Nellie’s family - particularly her aunt Mavis - had really wanted to know more about this supposed first pregnancy, and about the circumstances of Nellie’s death. But every time they tried, they were stymied, fobbed off.

“You can kind of tell they’ve been shut down by all these doctors and experts saying, well, this is the way it is, you know, like don't ask questions,” she says. “It doesn’t seem fair.”

In August 2022, Sarah decided to take action. She sent an email to several New Zealand journalists titled: “Investigating the possible murder of my mother.”

She wanted help to look into her mother’s story, and to seek justice for her.

“I feel it is wrong to perhaps let a murderer go unpunished, as well as two rapists, and a child to not know her true origins or sister.”

The email made its way to me, and eventually became a podcast called Nellie’s Baby, which follows Sarah as she tries to uncover the truth about her mother’s life and death - and about her own birth.

Spanning the decades from the 1950s to the late 2000s, the story covers roughly the same time period currently under scrutiny by the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care. 

The podcast has a particular focus on the stories of women and girls - who the commission has heard frequently suffered forced adoptions, misdiagnosis and sexual abuse while in the care of the state.

At the beginning of the investigation, Sarah had only a single document to go off: the letter from social services that her parents received in 1988. 

Finding more involved a year of work, including complex records requests, library searches, DNA tests and help from experts in disability, mental health and genealogy, as well as tracking down past patients from Porirua.

For Sarah, her drive to look into Nellie’s life was twofold. Partly, she wanted to find the truth of why she was adopted out, after years of believing she had been abandoned. 

“Growing up, I just always thought I wasn’t wanted,” she says. “Being adopted, you feel like you don't belong, you don't have a place you can't fit into society. You know, and you just feel like a little alien.

“Because you know, I had no frame of reference at all - I had never seen a picture of my mother at all. It was really challenging.”

But she also found herself wanting some kind of justice for her birth mother, even though she never met her.

“I feel a bit like, no one fought for her, her entire life. She was probably raped, she was probably beaten, her whole life was just tragic really,” Sarah says. “I feel like someone needs to at least answer some questions…Someone must know something.”