Conceiving Crime: The Adoption Machine

In 1975, Han Tae-soon came home from the market in Cheongju, South Korea, to discover that her four-year-old daughter had gone missing. The young girl, Gyeong-ha, had been playing in the front yard, and her friends told Tae-soon that she had left to go to her grandmother’s house, which was half a mile down a path from the family’s home. But when Tae-soon went looking, her daughter was nowhere to be found. She had completely disappeared.

It would be more than four decades before mother and daughter would be reunited.

The Adoption Machine | Conceiving Crime Podcast

While Gyeong-ha was playing, a strange woman approached her and told her that her family no longer wanted her because they had a new baby at home. Heartbroken, Gyeong-ha went with the woman to a train station and boarded a train with her.

Ultimately, she would end up adopted by a family in the United States and would spend the next 44 years of her life believing that her family had abandoned her.

But for those 44 years, Tae-soon never stopped looking for her daughter. She and her husband visited orphanages, hospitals, and government agencies. She went to the police station daily with her two younger children in tow, and she slept with Gyeong-ha’s photo under her pillow. But it got her nowhere. No one in South Korea or the surrounding islands could find her daughter.

Then, in 2019, the couple was matched through a DNA test to a nearly 50-year-old woman on the other side of the world in the U.S. named Laurie Bender.

Could Laurie be their long-lost daughter? Would she even remember them? And how had she gotten to the United States?

When mother and daughter were finally reunited over the phone, the truth began to unravel.

Listen to the latest episode of “Conceiving Crime.”