Dec. 25, 1931:

The fates collaborated late yesterday afternoon, and as the result a baby girl abandoned on the desert 10 miles west of Superior had been given a temporary home in a Mesa maternity hospital while seven families of that valley city had offered permanent havens.

Tire trouble of a homeward-bound Phoenix motorist, the restlessness of the motorists wife and the muffled cries that broke the desert’s usual vast stillness combined to save the tiny tot just as the approaching dusk heralded another anniversary of the Christ Child’s nativity.

Without a clue as to the babe’s identity, peace officers throughout central Arizona were wondering last night who her parents might be, where they are now, and why the wee tot was left 150 feet from the highway in the cacti-studded wastes on the uplands beyond Florence Junction…

—The Arizona Republic

A day earlier, Dec. 24, 1931

It was Christmas Eve, and the sun was starting to go down in the desert. Ed and Julia Stewart were making their way home to Mesa on Highway 180, two lanes of oiled gravel that wound through the heart of Central Arizona's copper country.

The young couple had been on a day-long outing with Julia’s twin teenage cousins. They’d driven up the rugged Apache Trail, spent time in the tiny town of Roosevelt, then driven back through the mining towns of Miami and Globe.

They had about 40 miles to go when their car broke down seven miles west of Superior.

While Ed worked on the car, Julia, all of 18, wandered into the chill of the desert stillness, hoping to keep warm.

The stars overhead reminded her of a Christmas card, but her attention was drawn to the ground, where she noticed something odd: a black pasteboard hatbox sitting on the rocky ground near a greasewood bush about 150 feet from the road.

She called her husband over to open it.

Inside the hatbox, wrapped in a blue blanket, was a newborn baby girl.

They heated some water from a thermos and fed it to the red-haired waif with a spoon.

Back home in Mesa, they turned the baby over to the constable. He placed her in the care of a doctor’s wife, who ran a maternity home.

By the next day, it was all over the newspapers and radio, the find heralded as a Christmas miracle. People brought the baby gifts — a locket, a gold bracelet — and they knelt at her cradle to pray.

They named her Marian, a variation of Mary, the mother of the Christ child.

It was the depths of the Great Depression. Maybe she was a sign that better days were ahead.

Lawmen from three counties tried to find baby’s mother, but they never did. Two months after her miraculous discovery, Baby Marian was adopted by a Phoenix couple and seemingly never heard from again.

A journey begins with a phone call in 1988

“Hello, city desk?”

It started with a phone call and a simple question.

“Have you ever heard of the Hatbox Baby?” the woman asked.

I was a cocky assistant city editor at the old Mesa Tribune, a spunky suburban newspaper. I prided myself not only on knowing a good story when I saw one, but how to tell it.

At 28 years old, I didn’t know how much I didn’t know.

The call came in a few weeks before Christmas, 1988. Back in those days, all the calls came into a central line on the city desk. It was before the Internet, when people would call newspapers with questions about everything under the sun, whether it was to settle a sports trivia bar bet (the distance between home plate and second base is 127 feet, 4 inches) or to find out the name of Calvin Coolidge’s dog (Rob Roy) for their kid’s research paper that was due the next day.

Yes, I had heard of the Hatbox Baby, I told the caller. It was an old Mesa mystery dating from the 1930s. I'd learned about the case from Walter Zipf, the Trib’s elder-statesman columnist, who was still banging out three columns a week at age 85 on an old manual typewriter.

“Why do you ask?” I said.

“I’m her,” the woman replied.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m her. I’m the Hatbox Baby.”

In years of answering the phone on the city desk I’d had my share of cranks and crackpots. But they usually phoned at night, and most of the time they sounded drunk or crazy or both.

This was early in the afternoon, and aside from saying she was the solution to the Mesa equivalent of the Lindbergh baby, she sounded perfectly normal, with a lilting, almost sing-song voice.

“What makes you think you’re the Hatbox Baby?” I asked.

And that is when Sharon Elliott proceeded to tell me a story that she — and I — would tell over and over again for the next 30 years.

A Christmas story about a complicated family

It is a Christmas story, not so much about hope and joy, but more about love, heartbreak and longing.

It is also a cautionary tale about secrets, and what happens when those secrets are revealed.

Most of all it is a story about family, and what it means to different people.

For some, family means the clan they were born to, the people whose DNA and physical traits they share.

For others, family means the people who raised them and instilled the values they hold dear.

For many of us, those people are one and the same.

For Sharon Elliott, and virtually everyone who is connected to this story, family is not that simple. In fact, it’s complicated, messy and sometimes cruel.

For most of her life, Sharon believed she knew what a family was, and more importantly, who her family was.

She grew up in Southern California with a mother, a stepfather and a stepbrother. She married, had a daughter of her own and divorced.

She roller-skated as a child, led cheers at Inglewood High as a teen and worked at an aerospace company as an adult.

But when she was 55, her notion of family was turned upside down.

Faith Morrow, the woman Sharon had always known as her mother, had carried a secret for those 55 years, and as she neared the end of her life she decided to unburden her soul.

She told Sharon she was adopted. More than that, that she was the center of a mystery that had made headlines across the country in 1931 after a couple from Mesa reported to the authorities that they’d found a newborn baby stuffed into a hatbox near an Arizona highway where their car broke down on Christmas Eve.

That baby, Faith said, was Sharon.

Faith would die six months later. Her burden was now her daughter's.

For the next 30 years, Sharon would wonder who her birth parents were and why they would abandon her in the desert to die when she was just seven days old.

If that’s really what happened.

Sharon would find answers to some of her questions, in unexpected places, at unexpected times. She and one living relative would learn about each other, astonished to find the connection. But there would remain a mystery she would spend her life trying to solve.

How one phone call changed two lives

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Before a story can end, it first must begin.

And this story begins with that day in 1988 when I made an appointment with Sharon to visit her tidy apartment in a sprawling Mesa complex she called home, a home filled with knick-knacks and Christmas decorations and pictures of her grandchildren.

I examined the trove of yellowed newspaper clippings, letters and documents that her dying mother had given her. I interviewed Sharon at length and listened to her story. It was enough to convince me that Sharon Elliott was who she said she was. She was the Hatbox Baby.

The story I wrote ran on Christmas Day. It was picked up by the wire services and ran in newspapers across the country, just like the original Hatbox Baby story in 1931.

A friend of a private investigator named Alice Syman read a version of it in the Los Angeles Times and sent Syman a copy, suggesting she take on Sharon’s case.

Syman often did work for the Arizona branch of an organization called Orphan Voyage, which was dedicated to helping adoptees find their birth parents.

She took on the case, and through her connections, the story of the Hatbox Baby made it to the producers of the television show "Unsolved Mysteries." The show's retelling aired and was one of their most popular episodes ever. It can still be seen on video streaming services today.

After the episode, thousands of tips poured in, and Syman tried to run each one of them to ground.

Dozens of them involved people whose family lore included siblings who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Others were sure that Sharon was the illicit child of red-headed movie star Ann Sheridan or silent-film cowboy actor Tom Mix, who died in Arizona in 1940. One person even insisted that Sharon was the sister of the Lindbergh baby.

None of the clues seemed to pan out, but that initial search gave Sharon some perspective — and comfort.

During her quest, Sharon would meet one of the men who investigated her case. He was 95 and remembered everything about that Christmas Eve night when Ed and Julia Stewart showed up at the Mesa police station with the baby in the hatbox and an improbable tale about how they found her.

She would also learn that "Sharon" was not the first, or even the second, name she was given.

And she would learn that Faith Morrow had secrets of her own long before the Hatbox Baby.

A 30-year search for answers

As Sharon gracefully transitioned from middle age to an elderly woman, she kept the strawberry blonde traces in her hair, and she never lost the twinkle in her blue eyes.

She relished the attention every time a story about her would appear on television or the newspaper, and she would beam when I would tell her nurses their patient was a celebrity.

As I accompanied Sharon for much of her 30-year journey, I hoped that someday I would be the one to solve the Hatbox Baby mystery story. But as I got to know Sharon better, I began to get a better sense of the hole her mother's revelation had bored into her life. I no longer wanted to solve the case for me, but for her.

As time passed and technology advanced, I was able to track down sources, documents and newspaper stories online. I even got Sharon to take a DNA test. We found no close matches.

Time can also be so cruel. Much of Sharon's generation, certainly anyone with first-hand knowledge of her case, is gone, and a year and a half ago Sharon fell and broke her hip.

I began to resign myself to the idea that despite the DNA test, Sharon might never know whether Ed and Julia Stewart’s Christmas Eve tale was fact or fiction.

In July 2017, I made that confession onstage in front of 300 people who had packed into the Phoenix Little Theater to hear me and five of my colleagues tell stories about our craft as part of an Arizona Storytellers program.

As the house lights came up and the storytellers mingled with the audience, a woman approached me. She said her name was Bonnie and that she was an amateur DNA genealogist. She offered to look at Sharon’s DNA results to see if there were clues I’d missed.

With nothing left to lose, I said why not.

Using the same kits that millions of Americans are giving each other as gifts this holiday season (last year Ancestry.com sold 1.6 million kits on Black Friday weekend alone), Bonnie Belza would painstakingly piece together the puzzle of Sharon’s forebears.

Through Bonnie’s efforts, Sharon would learn that she had a brother she never knew. She would be introduced to a great niece named Emily, who, like Sharon, had been adopted as an infant and was searching for answers of her own.

Both of their journeys would lead to secrets buried beneath secrets. Some of those secrets would eventually lead both women to their respective birth parents. And along the way, they found that elusive sense of family in each other.

NEXT: Chapter 2 — A mother unburdens her soul