Found abandoned in hatbox in the Arizona desert on Christmas Eve, 1931;

Her story was featured on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries.

She spent 30 years trying to find out who left her in the desert and why.

Sharon Elliott, who captured the nation's attention as the infant found abandoned in a hatbox on Christmas Eve of 1931, died Saturday, just three weeks short of her 87th birthday.

Elliott had been in failing health after falling and breaking a hip a year and a half ago.

Elliott never knew she was adopted and never knew she was the center of Arizona’s longstanding “Hatbox Baby” mystery until her adoptive mother, who was dying of breast cancer, told her the circumstances of her birth.

Elliott contacted a newspaper reporter in Mesa to find more information about the case. After the reporter wrote a story about her, a private investigator helped Elliott get her adoption records unsealed and arranged to have her story told on the popular "Unsolved Mysteries" television show.

Her story prompted thousands of tips, but none of them revealed who might have left her in the desert southeast of Phoenix or why.

A newborn on Christmas Eve

That was the second time the Hatbox Baby became a nationwide sensation.

The first was in 1931, when a couple from Mesa showed up at the police station with a newborn baby girl on Christmas Eve.

The couple, Ed and Julia Stewart, told the authorities they had been driving home from a daylong outing with Julia Stewart’s two teenage cousins when they had car trouble about seven miles west of Superior.

Julia Stewart told authorities that while her husband fixed the car, she wandered off the remote roadway and stumbled upon a black pasteboard hatbox. Thinking it suspicious, she called her husband over to open it.

Inside was a live, red-haired baby, wrapped in a blue blanket.

After the Stewarts turned the child over to authorities, the courts allowed a Phoenix couple to adopt her, and she was not heard from for 55 years.

Although suspicion turned toward the Stewarts early on, they maintained to their dying days that their story was true and were particularly upset by their portrayal in the "Unsolved Mysteries" episode.

Still unanswered questions

Elliott, a retired aerospace worker who grew up in Southern California, eventually moved back to Arizona to be closer to family and spent 30 years trying to solve her own mystery.

Most recently, she had been working with the same reporter who wrote the original 1988 story as well as a DNA genealogist. Their work yielded some answers, but those answers have led to more questions.

Elliott’s survivors include her daughter, Jan Elliott; a grandson, Steven Olsen; granddaughter Stacey Clark and her husband, Dustin; and two great-grandchildren, Erik and Analise; and longtime friend Alice Syman.

Arrangements were pending. The family has set up a fund to help with funeral expenses. Find it at gofundme.com and search for Hatbox Baby.

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