Growing Up as Someone Else, Two States Away

The woman who had taken her — later identified by investigators as Gloria Williams — carried the baby to South Carolina and raised her under a new name: Alexis Manigo. Alexis went to school. She made friends. She celebrated birthdays. She grew into a teenager, then graduated high school. To everyone around her, including herself, there was nothing unusual about her life. She had no idea she had ever been anyone else, or that a family in Florida had spent eighteen years wondering if she was even still alive.