Mystery Man

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Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1.
Every time I hear about my dad, it's oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And I think with Becky, I feel like Becky has a more similar personality to me.
And that is that the girl will always land on her feet and she will get knocked down, but she will wipe herself off and get back up again. And I would say that Becky is really, she's just, she's so positive and she's so warm and she's so loving despite all of the heartache that she has been exposed to.
Or maybe because, you know, she had two parents who really tried hard to make her feel safe and loved. I think that she has the right to know who her father is.
And I think just because her mother refused to tell her doesn't make it any less valid desire to know. I mean, I think we all have the fundamental right to know who our parents are.
And obviously, I support her trying to find out who it is.

that was elena becky's former babysitter, who, like many people in Becky's life, recognized that despite what she's endured in her life and some of the choices she made early on, she's ultimately become a fundamentally good person. The complete opposite of who her mother is.
Whatever darkness lives inside of Diane Downs and whatever that may exist genetically inside Becky Bobcock, she's pushed past it to lead a life and become a person who's nothing like her biological mother. And so I think there was this sort of this Diane-shaped void inside of her that she's always trying to bring the drugs and the men and everything to.
And I remember sensing she can't quite fill it with what she's trying to fill it with. And so, I mean, she would talk about really sort of crying out to God and saying, please help me.
I don't know who I really am. Am I just the daughter of this crazy killer? Or am I this person who's going to have my own life and my own identity? And I don't want to be known as the daughter of Diane Downs anymore.
And I think by the time we were done talking with her, she was pretty much, it felt like she was shaking the dust of diane off of her because i think she makes the decision once they have some communication her and diane that she's not going to go she's not going to go back there which is what diane wanted please come visit me let's talk let. Let's, you know, whatever.

And so for Becky to say, you know what?

I'm making the decision.

I really don't want to be involved in that. And so I have some control over a few things, and this is what I'm going to do.
And it's going to feel better that I got to do it. From the time he met Becky and as he got to know her, Eric Mason supported the idea of Becky searching for her father.

Oh, I thought it was a really good idea because she's looking for grounding.

That's what I always felt about Becky.

From the day she showed up at that pizza parlor in Bend, and I looked across the table and I said, wow, that is Diane's daughter. And she just had so many plans and dreams.
It's like, I would like to be a nurse, and I would like to help people, and I have all these plans, and my Mercedes needs parts, and I need to get it fixed, and I need to find a better place to live. And there was this orbit around Becky that felt a little bit like the orbit and the energy and the spin around Diane, but certainly she had a lot more control and grounding.
And she understood that if she wasn't careful, the undertow of all of that could pull her under and that she'd be lost. And so I think she really was introspective and really wanted to make changes and not be like her mom.
And so, you know, she got involved in a church and she really did some self-examination when she would sense herself going down the rabbit hole of drugs and men and chance meetings and all of those things. And she would pull herself short and say, you know what, I can't go down those roads because for my mom, she's in prison for the rest of her life.
So I think she wanted to make contact, some limited contact with mom, but really did want to find out who her real biological father was. And that made sense.
And it was a good thing. I thought it was a great thing.
Michelle Leonard, the DNA detective who was key in helping Becky confirm that she was, without a doubt, Diane Downs' biological daughter, reached out again, and this time with news about Becky's paternal side. It's been several weeks since we all convened with Michelle at the DNA Detective and Becky, and now Michelle had some breakthroughs in your case, Becky, so I wanted to have this meeting so we could go over her findings, and I'll turn it over to you, Michelle.
Okay, hi, Melissa. Hi, Becky.
So I wanted to have this meeting so we could go over her findings and I'll turn it over to you, Michelle. Okay.
Hi, Melissa. Hi, Becky.
So last time we had a session where we talked about my first impressions of your DNA results. And there were some important clues that I was able to share with you at that time about your recent immigrant ancestry coming from areas like Poland, Ukraine and perhaps the Netherlands but this time what we're going to do is much more of a deep dive into your actual DNA matches and their ancestry and I'm going to go through the research I've been doing and talk you through how I've come to certain conclusions about your paternal ancestry.
Jumping off from the jackpot match, she previously discovered Michelle was able to narrow down the relationship of the match. You've spent, you know, most of your life wondering about and to see it in black and white is a big thing.
It really is. And of course, you have what I named the jackpot match, a paternal match, sharing around the same amount of DNA as your maternal uncle.
Therefore, this is a very close paternal relative. And I had worked out the last time that it has to either be a paternal half sister because this is a female match or a paternal full aunt the other option was grandparent but that doesn't work because this person is matching to all of the different clusters of matches that I'm seeing in your paternal side so that means she's matching to both your paternal grandparents, she can only be a paternal half-sister or aunt.
But of course, she doesn't have a name. She just has a username with a set of letters and numbers that aren't easy to decipher and she doesn't have a tree.
So we need to look at other matches to try to get to the bottom of this and try and work out who she is and who your biological father is. So if we scroll down your match list, the first thing you're going to know is exactly what I'm saying about all of these maternal matches.
I have been grouping your matches into color-coded clusters, if you like. So I've been putting all the maternal matches into one group and the maternal matches are here and you you'll see that as you scroll down, it's maternal, maternal, maternal, maternal, maternal.
And the first useful match that doesn't match to your maternal matches is this one. And we're going to call this man Hugo Kowalski.
Just to note, Michelle isn't using any real names in order to make sure the identity of Becky's paternal relatives stay private. So, Hugo Kowalski is a pseudonym of my making,

and he is the first interesting paternal match. Now, he's sharing much less DNA than your massive

jackpot match, of course, only 138 centimorgans. But if we look at the probability chart for that, we'll see that it tells us it's 50% likely that this is a second cousin once removed, a half second cousin, a first cousin three times removed, a half first cousin twice removed.
Lots of relationships there. In order to start untangling the complicated web of potential

relationships, Michelle has to dive into the relationships and start putting together a family

tree. Sometimes the information is geographical, so the work Michelle is doing requires more than

just the ability to analyze DNA results. If you look at a tree and you say, okay, here's me,

here's my parent, here's my grandparent, here here's my great-grandparent so that's that number of generations removed from the common ancestors and then you say okay here's a cousin there's their parent there's their grandparent and there's the same great-grandparents okay so we're on exactly the same level it is so much easier when you look at it visually than when you're trying to explain it in words but it is all to do with the number of

generations away from the common ancestors between the two people and that's so so important in this case because we've got all these relationships to look at but how do we narrow them down so Hugo is a great match to get on his own but as you can see there's only one shared match with him and that shared match also has ancestry that goes back to Ukraine but also an area that a lot of people call Galicia the Galicia area of Eastern Europe so when people immigrated from this area to the United States or other countries in the 1800s and 1900s, often they would say they're from Galicia, but sometimes they would say they're from Poland. Sometimes they'd say they're from the Ukraine.
Sometimes they'd say they're from Austria. Sometimes they'd say they're from Hungary.
It was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at one point. So that's why you might see in some older records, someone says they're from Austria, when in actual fact, they're from the Ukraine, as we would know it now.
So this is the area that you have strong ancestry from, and very recent strong ancestry from. Found a cousin.
If he is perhaps a first cousin of one of your grandparents, then I want to know who his parents and grandparents were. But I could only get as far as his parents because they were both immigrants and they came from the Galicia region to Canada.
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Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid.
Long, silent voices from his past came forward. And he was just staring at me.
And they had secrets of their own to share. Um, Gilbert King.
I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott. I was no longer just telling the story.
I was part of it. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer.
He's just straight evil. I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known.
If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail. I would have never existed.
I never expected to find myself in this place. Now, I need to tell you how I got here.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. Bone Valley, Season 2.
Jeremy. Jeremy, I want to tell you something.

Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 starting April 9th on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content starting April 9th,

subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Once Michelle has names and backgrounds, she starts doing a deep dive on social media accounts and even obituaries in order to find potential relationships.
Michelle continues to unpack the relationships that unfold from this discovery, naming cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles down the paternal line. The lines cross and get somewhat complicated, but thanks to her visual build-out, Michelle is able to keep everything together.
And I do a lot of Facebook sleuthing to try and work these things out, so that is a good way to go. So I built a few lines out, and I looked at Vadim and Ella in particular, and I found that they had a daughter, Melissa Wozniak, born in the 1880s.

And I traced Melissa's line forward and she married a man named Walter Pavlenko. Now this is one of these moments that I call a eureka moment because we've seen that name before and I call it a eureka moment because it's that moment where while we're building this large jigsaw puzzle and we're putting these pieces on the board, two of the most important pieces have come together.
And then Michelle's one step closer to Becky's father. And I also was able to source John and Esther's obituaries.
And those obituaries told me that they only had those two children.

They only had those two daughters. Now, looking at this, I was convinced at this point that these two people are your direct ancestors.
You descend directly from Esther and John. You have DNA to both their sets of ancestors and they come together in Canada so I believe you descend from one of their children yes okay so looking at these people Esther and John if you descend directly from them they were born in the early 1900s in the Ukraine they emigrated to Canada and they had these two children in the 1930s.
You're born in the 1980s. We're looking for a biological father for you born around the 1950s, perhaps.
Therefore, this next generation, the daughters of Esther and John, this has to be your grandparent generation. One of these two women is almost certainly your grandmother.
And from the grandparents, Michelle is able to narrow down the connection even more. Oh yeah.
So Katya, I've called her Katya Pavlenko, born in the thirties in Canada. And guess what? She went to the United States and guess what she did in the united states she got married to a man who came from the netherlands oh i found they got divorced in a particular state in the united states in the 1970s and later i found that they had married in the 50s and they had three children i have used the surname jensen for your paternal grandfather So I've called him Jan Jensen.
He was born in the 20s in northern Holland in the Netherlands. He emigrated to Canada as an infant.
And in the 1950s, he came to the United States permanently. But I have found a great document from the 1940s where he's crossing the border.
And it actually gives us some information on his description, a description of his appearance. It tells us he's six foot three inches in height, got a fair complexion, very tall, blonde, blue eyes, quite typical Netherlands male description there.
So a really interesting fact, when I was young and started asking questions about who my biological mother and father were, I was actually given that exact description for what my biological father was. And from this description of Becky's grandfather, she understands that the description that's been given of her biological father is most likely accurate.
So at this point, I found that Katia Pavlenko married this Dutch man, Jan Jensen,

in the United States, and they had three children. Now, Jan passed away a few years ago,

and I did find his obituary as well, which confirmed that he had immigrated to Canada

as an infant and had come to the united

states in 1950 and that he'd lived in oregon wow and that's where he had died so jan and katia had three children during their marriage between the 1950s and the early 1970s when they divorced and those three children Matt, Matt, Richard, and Louisa. Now, at this point, I was fairly certain on who had to be your biological father.
And now with Becky's father identified, Michelle takes a somewhat careful approach of identifying him to Becky, starting with some of the questions she's had. First off, I remember that it says that he was a little younger than Diane.
That's true. He was slightly younger than Diane.
Another thing is, of course, the appearance, the description. And I'm just going to stop sharing for a second and read a couple of things here.
I just saw in there, it says he's still living. He is still alive.
Yes. Becky, how do you feel right now? I'm looking at you on the screen.
Your face is blank. What are you thinking? I'm trying not to cry.
Let's just take a moment. This is really monumental, really monumental.
And I don't want this to be trivialized or dismissed. This is really massive.
He's alive, which means that he's most likely known about me. And that's what's pretty hard for me right now.
If I remove all emotion from it, I'm super curious what his name is because, you know, Diane had given me a certain name and I'd heard names over the years and stuff. So it's, I mean, there's that curiosity of who he is with the emotional part removed, but there's also the emotional part that's just flooding right now yeah so we're at the point now where one of the sons of jan yensen and katia pavlenko must be your biological father and i believe it is their son that has been named matt yensen and i'm going to go over some of the additional evidence for that

that isn't just the DNA. I have found a description of him, which tells us that he has six foot three inches tall and has brown hair, which completely matches the description already given.
yeah additionally there's location this matt yensen is on a u.s index with an address in cottage grove oregon now the date of this address isn't given but it is prior to 1993 and i have tracked where he was in the 1970s therefore he has he has to have been living in Cottage Grove in the 1980s, which means he was in the right place at the right time. Becky also learns that she has a half-sister.
Michelle reveals this information to Becky and explains this could be another potential point of contact. How does that make you feel, Becky, hearing you have a half-sister?

Hopeful. Christy and Danny didn't want a relationship with me, which I completely respected and understood.
But, I mean, maybe this person might, or, you know, maybe it would just be nice to know them. I mean, I don't know.

It's all a lot.

It's overwhelming right now, but I'm ready, you know. It's very hard to take such news like this in, and it takes time.
It takes time to take it in and to understand it and to come to terms with it. With Becky's mother being who she is, Michelle is ready with the background information of Becky's father, confirming that he's nothing like Diane.

I have not been able to find anything for your biological father other than he's a successful

man. He runs a business.
There's no criminal record other than a speeding fine, I think I found.

Nothing of any. That's where I got the description of his physical features a $30 speeding fine is the worst thing I can find for him he is educated he comes across as intelligent his daughter is a high-flying person in her chosen profession I can't find anything about the family that gives me any concerns as to who

they are. There's no news clippings of him having done anything wrong at all.
That's good. So I have a question.
Was he a reporter? Yes. That's what we all thought.
and now the only step that remains for Becky is contact. Michelle and Becky avoided contacting the jackpot match previously in order to prevent jeopardizing any chance Becky may have of making contact.
Now, you remember I was very reticent about contacting the jackpot match because I thought if it's a half-sister, we could be opening that can of worms and taking away his chance to tell her himself if he wanted to. And so it's a good thing that now we know for sure that that is who she is, that we didn't go take that route.
I agree, because if she doesn't know, that would be kind of a scary awakening.

Exactly. We could have blundered in with a message.
Hey, you're a close match. Who are you? Blah, blah, blah.
And we might have got the answer much quicker and easier, but we could have taken away your chance of having any meaningful contacts. if that upset your biological father and he decided he didn't want to know because

we had blundered in and told his daughter

something that is, yeah.

What begins to dawn on Becky is that he's been near her the entire time and has likely

known his relationship to her this entire time.

In general, it's often said, especially in the United States, that it's better for something personal to come. In this situation, that might be true and it might not.
I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't want you to send a letter that outlines everything if he and his wife are people that open each other's mail and his wife opens it and that's how she finds out and that's that's then a big problem if you decided on a letter to his address then it would have to be something much more general to begin with until you could get some way of being able to communicate with him that you were 100% sure is private, him and him only? Yeah, most definitely. I mean, I'm curious about so many things.
I mean, about who he is and his life and how he knew Diane and if he really thought about me, all that stuff. But it's just been a really long time that I've had those questions and now I have the chance to ask them and I'm scared.
After Michelle revealed Becky's father's identity to her, including his immediate family, location, and other details, including biological information and some online and public information about him, she did in fact reach out. He has declined to participate in the podcast, so this information is being left out in order to preserve his public autonomy.
Becky reached out carefully through a letter explaining very generally what her purpose was in locating him and gave her number. He contacted her through what appeared to be a burner phone and after confirming her identity and purpose, he declined to speak at length with her or answer any of her questions, with the lingering promise that he would reach out to her after the holidays.
Becky took some time to absorb this information, to reconcile her thoughts and feelings, and what we leave you with now is an end to Becky's journey in her own words. He's known that I've been who I am for at least 10 years.
I've been in the media and he's chosen to stay out of my life and continues to choose. So I respect it.
It's all I can do. I don't know.
Um, but he made it extremely clear that he is not interested. I mean, he used a burner

phone to contact me. And the only reason I think that he even contacted me was because he knows I

was looking for him. And I'm assuming he knows that I wouldn't stop until I found him.
But more

so, I think that he contacted me to guarantee that I would not put his information out there. And as soon as I promised him, I wouldn't, he didn't want anything to do with me.
So that sucks. I mean, that's hard.
And I don't understand it. You know, my son out there, when he looks for me, I'm going to be so excited and so ready for him to be a part of my life and answer any questions that he may have and just embrace him into my life fully.
My biological father, I think, is scared. And it's understandable.
I mean, he slept with an infamous killer and it produced a child that's now gone into the media and been pretty out there. So if I were him, I guess I'd be embarrassed maybe, I don't know, or it would just be a secret that I would want to keep.
And I think that that's what it is for him, is a secret he wants to keep, which means that that secret is me and I have to remain at a distance, I guess. He had said that maybe around Christmas he would contact me, but honestly, I'm not holding my breath.
I think that what I did get from him was probably all that I'm going to get from him. And it was just a bunch of promises to answer questions in the future and then telling me to never contact him again.
So I got no real answers. I sought out to find him.
I did. It was disappointing.
But it just reconfirms how amazing my parents are and how grateful I am that I have such loving parents. My dad would, you know, my dad would do anything to see me happy and to see me smile and to know that I'm loved.
And that's important. Not a biological father and not hanging on his every, you know, promise, but my real father, my adopted

father is my real father because he is the one who has been there for every scraped knee, every broken heart, every challenge my life, and to celebrate all of the good as well. He has always been there and he is a very, very good man.
And I am grateful to have him as just the same as my mom. I mean, she's amazing.
And she was always there for me and she still is. And I have amazing parents.
And if nothing else from this journey, it has confirmed that they are all that I need need I don't need Diane Downs in my life I don't need this new biological father in my life I need my real parents my adopted parents the ones that love me the ones that chose me the ones that would do anything to see me safe and happy and loved. What were my thoughts on the journey, good and bad? It has been and it's been a wild ride for sure.
I mean, there's been a lot of interesting facts that have come to light and a lot of disappointing ones. I mean, it's hard to be denied by people you share blood with.
Even if I don't want them to be my family, you know, it still hurts my heart a little bit that they deny me, which is so weird. I understand.
It's like, I don't want to know them, but I want them to know me in a sense. I don't know.
I don't want to know them, but I want them to want to know me. If that makes any sense.
It's just weird. I don't even understand myself but you know I was denied by Diane denied by her brother now denied by my biological father it's it has made me extremely grateful for this life that I have I have an amazing fiance I have parents that I would never ever, ever want to change.
I've got a son who makes me so proud and so happy. And I have a sister and my life is full of love.
I will continue my journey as strong as I ever have been.

I'm grateful that I found my biological father and that I got some of the answers

that I've been searching for,

but it doesn't change who I am.

It doesn't change my presence on this earth.

I'm here to be a good mother,

a good friend,

a good wife,

a good daughter.

None of that is affected by who I came from.

Diane Downs does not control who I am or who I continue to be.

She was just somewhere that housed me for nine months.

You know, that's all she she was she's not a mother she's not someone that I care for or that I wish to have a part of my life she was my incubator and I mean in a sense I'm grateful for that because if she hadn't gotten pregnant or continued her pregnancy, I wouldn't be here. So for that, I guess, thank you, Diane Downs.

But other than that, that's all she's ever been for me.

Never my mother.

I have never once referred to Diane Downs as my mother.

She is my biological mother.

She may be my blood, but she's my mother. I have never once referred to Diane Downs as my mother.
She is my biological mother. She may be my blood, but she would never be my mother.
I've met some great people on this journey. The iHeartRadio staff and Melissa Moore have just been godsends.
They've been amazing. Some of the people that we've met and interviewed have been wonderful it's been so great to meet kind caring honest people that are truly concerned about me and and my journey due to where I came from and they want to help and they wanted to you know answer any questions that they could because they truly care and they are decent human beings.
And for that, I am grateful. We got a lot of answers.
We found out some information. We are continuing to find out information as we go.
Therefore, we are working on some projects in the future. So for the listeners that want to know more, there quite possibly could be more in the future that you're going to want to hear and you're going to want to know.
But for now, I'm content. I'm happy.
I'm healthy. I'm loved.
I'm grateful for this journey. It didn't go as I had hoped or planned, but it gave me the closure that I needed, that I've been searching for since I was 11 years old.

I can close that chapter of my life and not have to look back on it anymore or wonder or have

questions. I can just live this amazing life that I have and appreciate everyone and everything in it.
Ben Bolin is our executive producer. Melissa Moore is our co-executive producer.
Maya Cole is our primary producer. Paul Deckant is our supervising producer.
Sam Teagarden is our researcher. And Matt Riddle is our story editor.
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