`I Just Want To Know. . .' -- Abandoned As An Infant, Woman Searches For Her Parents, Identity

ELLENSBURG - Will someone, anyone, please tell Jillanna Samuelson who she is?

She'd like to know. She'd like to know her mother and father, and her siblings and grandparents if she has any. She'd like to know her ethnic heritage because, first, she's tired of checking the "OTHER" box on forms, and, more importantly, she'd like to tell her own children what heritage they have.

The consensus among friends is that she's part-Caucasian and part-something else: Mexican or Native American or Pacific Islander, something that gives her skin a natural bronze and her eyes a slight curve. But Samuelson will never know until someone comes forward with new information about the day she was abandoned 26 years ago.

Early on the morning of March 21, 1968, she was found in a women's restroom on the main floor of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. She was lying on a gray bedsheet inside a toilet stall, partly covered in blood and fluid from birth. Doctors estimated she was less than 8 hours old.

Both The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran stories about "Baby Jane Doe," stories that Samuelson has kept folded and hidden away over the years. She recently dug them out to search for more clues.

Finally, a television movie last Sunday about a child's search for her parents pushed her to call The Times. Said Samuelson:

"I want to give a message to my mother: `Contact me. I want to have a relationship. I want you to know that I'm not mad at you. I have been in the past, of course, but I'm over that now. I picture you then as being young, scared, kind of lost, not knowing what to do. That was a lifetime ago. Now I just want to know who you are.' "

Samuelson calls herself "just a housewife." She says this with a laugh. She has been married to Cletus Samuelson for about six years; he is a general contractor. They live with their two children, Katie Lee, 5, and Cole, 3, in a modest, two-story, wood-frame house in the west half of Ellensburg, not far from where she attended high school.

Of her husband she says, "I didn't start living until I met him."

Once or twice a year they visit her adoptive parents, who reared her from the time she was 14 months old. Her adoptive mother, Nancy Olson, a buyer at the University of San Diego, says she supports her daughter's search but doesn't want her to get hurt.

"She wants to know her roots, but I'm not sure if I want her to know what kind of woman her mother might have been," Olson said.

Speculation has swirled since the beginning: maybe the mother was a migrant worker or a drug addict. Maybe she gave birth in the bathroom stall, then boarded a plane, in which case the possibilities radiate in a thousand directions.

Samuelson herself didn't know her own story - that she had been abandoned, then adopted - until she was 12 years old, when an older brother began teasing her about being found in a garbage can.

When she asked her adoptive father about it, he told her everything, then went out and got drunk.

She was stunned at the news, and things have never been the same.

"Ever since, she's felt completely misplaced in her life, and it's bugged her. It's bugged her something fierce," said her adoptive stepfather, Vic Olson.

Still, she managed to hold back from going public about her quest for years, even while her closest friends were urging her to contact television shows such as "Unsolved Mysteries." A friend actually wrote a letter to the producers of that show, but Samuelson "chickened out" - afraid of the publicity or perhaps more afraid of the truth that might come out.

There were a few turning points and long gaps in between. One was the birth of her children. Becoming a mother, she says, made her long to know her birth mother. And there was the constant stream of talk shows and movies about children reuniting with long-lost parents. They wore her down, and finally, there was the movie "Family of Strangers" last Sunday.

"The movie pushed me over the edge, and I couldn't get to sleep that night trying to decide what to do," she said.

"But I knew when I got out of bed that morning that I was going to do something. I just hope that it leads to some kind of completion." ----------------------------------------------------------------- Information?

Anyone with information that might shed light on the circumstances of Jill Samuelson's birth and abandonment can write to P.O. Box 1608, Ellensburg, WA 98926.