On Nov. 20, 1979, Charity Ann Johnson was born in Travis County, Texas, to Larry Johnson and Shirley Anne Burton. She suffered from drug-withdrawal symptoms. Shirley, a tall, thin woman with scars on her face from a car accident, admitted to taking illegal drugs immediately before giving birth.

Throughout the 1980s, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) investigated multiple allegations that Shirley emotionally and physically abused Charity. Once, she whipped 5-year-old Charity on her neck, chest, and back with a belt; another time, she told Charity that Charity’s aunt had murdered her family and committed suicide — a lie — to scare her. In 1985, Shirley was briefly committed to a hospital and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but she remained Charity’s primary caretaker, even after attacking a caseworker who knocked on her door, until Shirley left for good in 1994.

That August, DFPS received a tip that 14-year-old Charity was living at The Settlement Home, a group foster house and residential treatment center in Austin. She was slated to be released later that month, due to a lack of state funding. Relatives told DFPS Charity's father was in jail for murder and that her mother was last seen in New York City.

“I don’t know where she is,” Charity told DFPS. “She may even be dead.” According to Charity’s case file, Shirley never contacted her daughter again. Records show that she died homeless in Salinas, California, in 2002.

Years later, Charity told friends that the happiest times of her childhood were spent with her grandmother, who died the same month Shirley disappeared. Charity’s older sister died of leukemia a few months after that. No other relative was willing to take Charity in, so she stayed at The Settlement Home despite funding concerns. Somehow, she managed to keep up her grades in middle school while also confronting her “abandonment issues” in group and independent therapy.

“Charity has had a difficult time expressing her feelings, but has recently begun to verbalize and explore her feelings,” a caseworker wrote in September 1994.

The following August, Charity moved in with a Settlement Home volunteer who was dedicated to meeting all of Charity’s “medical, emotional, physical, and therapeutic needs,” according to a report. But it didn’t work out. By Thanksgiving Day, Charity was back at The Settlement Home, due to “behavior difficulties that the foster parent was unable to manage.”

The next year, another relative surfaced: Melissa, an older sister who was married with two young children and wanted Charity to come live with her. (Her name and her husband’s name have been changed.) Research shows that foster children who are placed with relatives transition to adulthood more smoothly, and some state laws have even codified the preference for relative placement. But caseworkers were doubtful that Melissa, who was only seven years older than Charity, would continue Charity’s therapy and provide her with the structure and discipline she needed. There were also some issues with Barry, Melissa’s husband: Charity told friends he sexually abused her, but later said it was a misunderstanding. DPFS investigated and concluded that while Charity had not been abused, Barry should never be left alone with her “for everyone’s protection.” Charity moved in with the family in 1997.

By then, Charity was almost 18 and had “improved a great deal,” according to her caseworker. She was getting good grades, babysitting for pocket money, and taking after-school dance classes. She was on antidepressants, and her “behavior issues” had subsided. She had completed The Settlement Home’s “Preparation for Independent Living” classes and passed a self-sufficiency assessment test.

That year, the court closed Charity’s case, effectively declaring her a success against the odds. The last report in her file declared that it was in Charity’s “best interest” to transition to independent living upon her graduation from Lanier High School in 1998.

Her home life wasn't as pleasant as her case file implied, according to Barry, who emphatically denied the abuse allegations and said Charity stole from Melissa, skipped school, and refused to act her age.

"She didn't progress like other kids were progressing," Barry said. "There was something she was trying to hold onto in terms of her youth. I don't know if it was because she never had a relationship with her biological mother, or what. But she wanted to stay a little girl."

Charity was too much for the young couple to handle, so Barry and Melissa dropped her off at a "home for troubled teenagers" — Barry can't remember the name — after a year and a half, when she was about 18 or 19.

"We had barely stopped being teenagers, and here we were trying to raise a teenager who should have been able to start taking care of herself," he said. "It wasn't a financial decision. We just wanted to help her flourish."

After that, he says, she ran away.

Although Charity's caseworker expected Charity to graduate in 1998, she is just a junior in the 1998 Lanier High School yearbook. She looks happy in her yearbook photo, wearing hoop earrings and a half-ponytail, smiling a closed-mouth smile as she poses with the student advisory council and other community service groups.

"I like to help people inside and outside of school, such as Plant Day when we planted trees in the park and talking to certain girls about their problems," reads a quote from Charity in the yearbook.

Lanier couldn't confirm whether a student named Charity, or Charite, Johnson ever graduated. But five years later, in 2003, she did graduate from Garza Independent High School, an alternative institution for students who don’t function well in traditional schools, just eight miles across town. She was 23. By then, Charity was living with a new family, whose surname she would later adopt: Stevens. Barry and Melissa didn't know the family, but heard through friends that Charity had claimed to be an orphan.

"We heard that she told people she had been through hell and back," he said. "But Charity has always had family."

At first, Charity tweaked her age just a bit: When she was arrested for shoplifting at J.C. Penney the same year, police cited her as “Charity Annie Johnson,” born in 1982. But as the years went by, Charity grew younger and younger.