In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers discover shocking truths through genetic analysis.

Part 1: When Mackenzie Brown’s adoptive father passes away suddenly from a heart condition, she is determined to find out what genes she did inherit.

Mackenzie Brown grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina and graduated with a Masters of Public Health from the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University. Her graduate research focused on understanding how depressive symptoms impact disease management strategies in people with hypertension in the rural South. After a year of collecting data across the country as a Research Fellow with Stanford University, she moved to New York and worked as a Research Coordinator conducting behavioral interventions for individuals with rheumatic diseases. Now at DAC, she is interested in pursuing a PhD to explore how early birth trauma and premature birth can impact mental health across the lifespan.

Part 2: Martha Buford Reiskind thought the case of her mom’s murder was closed when no DNA match came up for the single piece of hair left at the scene.

Martha Buford Reiskind started her undergraduate career as a theater arts and music major at a small liberal arts school in Bronxville NY, Sarah Lawrence College. At the time there were only 1,200 students and it had only recently become a coed school. After several years in what she likes to call her Liberal Arts Tour, she finished up her undergraduate work at University of California Berkeley, in Integrative Sciences. She started her Faculty Position at NC State in 2012 and conducts research in conservation genetics and teaches courses in population genetics, conservation science, science communication and science ethics. She is also a sister, daughter, wife, auntie, and mother and love those roles as much as the research and teaching she does. She directs a first-year graduate training program at NC State, the Genetics & Genomics Scholars program, and graduate training and education is one of her passions. She seeks out opportunities to combine the arts and sciences and help her students develop effective science communication, both visual and oral. You can find her near or in the water or with her hands in soil or dough.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

My dad passed away from sudden cardiac arrest when I was six years old. Ever since then, I've had an intense fear of heart related issues. This is partly unfounded, though, because I'm adopted. So while I won't inherit my dad's poor heart genes, I don't actually know what genes I did inherit.

My brother is also adopted and both of our adoptions were closed but it was never kept a secret from us that we were adopted.

Looking back on the way that we were raised, my family always made it a point to tell us that families were created all different ways. Some are made, some are found, and some are chosen. Our family just happened to be made all three of those ways, and that's called adoption.

I always knew that I wanted to find my biological mom one day. I really wanted to learn more about my family history and I always struggled with the nature versus nurture question. What parts of me could be attributed to biology and what part of me were influenced by my environment? My bad sense of humor and my dry sense of humor had to come from somewhere and I needed to know who to blame for my pathological existentialism. It was becoming a problem

Mackenzie Brown shares her story at Caveat in New York in March 2024. Photo by Zhen Qin.

My brother's biological mom found him during the pandemic. Texting back and forth turned into phone and video calls, which progressed to him posting with them on family vacation to the lake for their Christmas card. He had six new brothers and sisters to discuss the latest Star Wars theories with and I was jealous. Not because I love Star Wars, but because I wanted siblings.

I'm the OS, the original sister, like I like to call it, but that's really tough competition. His nature and nurture were coming together so beautifully to paint this picture of his past and help narrate his present. But where was mine, right? I was so happy for him, but didn't I deserve that too?

I had theories that I wanted to discuss, granted they were more informed by my passion for mental health research and the psychological implications of the Stanford Prison Experiment, but, still, where was mine?

I struggled with these questions quite a bit on and off. I wasn't ready to start trying to find answers to these questions until after I had graduated from my Master's of Public Health program, which is where I fully started to understand the importance that social support had on my overall health and happiness.

Naturally, I put on my white lab coat, like a real scientist, and I collected my spit in a tiny little test tube, and I sent it off to Ancestry.Com to be analyzed. I was convinced that my biological mom or another close relative would pop up in the search results.

Mackenzie, her mom and brother.

According to my DNA, though, my closest living relative was a third cousin who lived all the way in Scotland with no connections to this half of the world. This was effectively a dead end.

Should I spend more money on another DNA service, like 23andMe? Should I hire a private investigator? Did people even do that outside of the movies and TV shows? I had no idea.

As a young adult, WebMD had become my best friend. A general sense of worry about nothing in particular, as it goes when you have anxiety, had always simmered on the surface for me, but strange new symptoms like heart palpitations and air hunger, which is a thing, brought that simmer to a boil with an overwhelming sense of panic and impending doom about all of the ways that I could actively be dying at any given moment.

Being supportive, my boyfriend at the time suggested that starting my search again for answers to these questions about my family history and specifically my family health history could help ease some of these worries. So, a couple months later when we were sitting at a Brewery on the patio drinking a nice cold Colch on a beautiful spring day, we brought the conversation up again.

I didn't know where to begin the search and he suggested that I searched for her on Facebook. People were reunited on Facebook all the time, right?

It sounded a little too simple and wild hadn't I thought of that, but I eagerly picked up my phone and felt my heart start to race and beats hammer in my chest and the beats reverberating throughout my body as I picked up my phone and open the Facebook app. With shaky and trembling hands, I typed in my mom's name on Facebook and saw a bunch of profiles pop up. I sighed a little with relief. More options meant this had a bigger chance this was going to work.

My eyes scanned the first two profiles on the left, taking in the names and the vague locations of the individuals. I had known my mom's name and it was pretty unique, so that helped. But I knew almost immediately that these weren't her. My mom had me when she was 19, and these individuals looked to be a little bit older than I expected my mom to look at this point in time.

My anxiety peaked. Hot acid spread throughout my stomach like a battery had exploded. I realized not everybody had Facebook, not even some of my close friends were on social media nowadays. What if this didn't work? What was my next step?

My finger flipped the screen and the third thumbnail peeked over the horizon of the phone and I froze. I saw her long oval face, upturned button nose and freckles dotting her cheeks, hair the color of dandelion honey and steeped black tea. She was beautiful, and I looked like her.

I eagerly pressed her profile so I could look at a bigger picture, see her clear, find the rest of myself within her profile, but it was loading so slowly. And while I waited, I contemplated what I would say in my first message to her.

“Hi, how are you? I'm your daughter.” What do you say in a situation like that? I Googled it. Nobody had any answers.

Finally, the page loaded in a blink and a flash of color, pixel by pixel and I saw her face clear as day. I saw her infectious smile and could almost hear her contagious laughter through the screen.

I scanned the rest of the page, looking for more of myself in the confines of her profile, but as I was looking, cursive letter caught my eye. And at the top of the page and the heading next to her name was “In Loving Memory”.

Part 2

When I went away to school, I went to a small liberal arts college outside of New York City that was as far away from the San Francisco Bay Area, where I grew up, as I could get. And when I say it was a small liberal arts college, it was tiny. There was only a thousand, just a little over a thousand students.

I was a theater major and I quickly fell into a really cool crowd of friends. We would stay up late. We were not smoking dope, but maybe some cigarettes, and doing improv jams.

Later, I would walk home in the cold New York night, get into my room, grab the phone from the middle of the room and drag it as close as I could to my bed, pull the coiled cord of the receiver up to my face, pull the covers over my head and call my mom, and cry, and cry, and cry. I was wicked homesick.

This went on for months. And, initially, my mom was very sympathetic and definitely, you know, "Oh, I'm so sorry, Sweetie," things like that. Then, eventually, she started talking about things about going on at work or going on in her life, and I kept thinking, "What is wrong with her? Why doesn't she miss me as much as I miss her?”

This went on for some time, but, eventually, I started to feel a little less homesick and I wasn't calling home quite as much. I had finally landed a role in a play. It was being produced by an off Broadway director. It was very exciting, so things were looking up.

Martha Buford Reiskind shares her story at North Carolina State University in April 2024. Photo by Corey Bellamy.

It was the Friday night before…

I'm going to back up. I want to explain a little bit more about this homesickness thing and my mom. From when I was 12 until I went away to school, it was just the two of us. My dad had left, my brother and sister were away at college and, kind of secretly, it's what I had wanted.

My mom and I were a lot alike. We were really close. We just kind of drifted well together. Also, I was the baby, the last of three. She was a single mom working, and she was tired. That meant I kind of had a lot of free reign. I came and went as I wanted to. As long as I was safe and I checked in, it was totally cool.

My brother and sister liked to tell me I had a totally different parent than they had. So, I had a lot of freedom and she kind of embraced and celebrated that freedom.

But she was also kind of a badass. My mom had been a political activist since I could remember. She and a bunch of mothers started a school in East Palo Alto. They called themselves "The Mothers for Equal Education”.

Then on a whim in her 40s, she decided to go to law school. She became a criminal defense attorney and she took cases that everybody thought were hopeless. She specialized in juvenile offenders. She even represented a pot farmer. Yeah. And that earned me all kinds of credit with my friends that, “Yeah, your mom is so badass.”

On the one hand, it made sense that I missed her because we had this close relationship and I looked up to her, but on the other hand, given how independent I'd been, I came and went as I wanted to, it didn't make sense.

Now, we can fast forward to this part where I'm talking about not being quite as homesick in landing the play. And so it was the Friday night before the opening night of the play and we were exhausted. We'd been working. It was dress rehearsal. We'd been working super late into the night. I finally was crawling back home in that cold, it was February cold New York night. It was dark, slushy snow. I don't even remember falling asleep. I was asleep before my head even hit the pillow.

In the middle of the night, I woke up with a start. There was a phone ringing right outside my room in the hall, and I remember thinking, “That's for me, and it's not good news.”

I ran out to the hall and I picked up the phone and they said to call home, that there had been an emergency.

I raced back in my room and I called home and a woman answered the phone. And I said, "Mom, mom, who is it?"

The woman answered, "Martha, it's Aunt Becky. It's your mom."

“No, not my mom.” My brain raced through all the people it could be, all the people in my life it could be, but not her, not my mom.

At the same time that I was in my dress rehearsal, my mom was leaving work. She went to an ATM and deposited a couple checks. And when she got in her car, a man had gotten into the back seat and abducted her.

We don't really know what happened for about an hour and a half, but about an hour and a half later, people noticed a struggle in a car at another ATM down the road. My mom floored the gas, crashed the car into traffic, the man ran out of the back seat, she came out of the driver's seat, grabbing her chest. She'd been stabbed. And she fell to the ground and died in the street with strangers.

My mom had been murdered.

There are no words to describe what that felt like. It almost felt as if the universe had packed a punch so hard in my stomach that it shot me straight out of my body.

I don't remember anything. Things were blurry. But when I came back to it, it was the next morning. And my housemates decided I was going to go meet my sister and we were going to fly back to California.

My housemates decided that I needed to eat. Internally, I was not so sure this was such a great idea. On the one hand, I felt starving. On the other hand, I thought I was going to vomit. But either way, I went along with it.

I had a housemate on either side. I was looking at the back of my roommate's head, and we got into the cafeteria. It was loud. Saturday morning. Lots of clanging dishes. People talking really loud. The sicky sweet smell of syrup and bacon and eggs. You know what I'm talking about, right?

We got about halfway in and everything went real quiet and I heard this quiet whispering. I took a few more steps and then I realized they were whispering about me.

“There she goes. There's the girl whose mother was murdered.”

In my small liberal arts college, overnight, it had spread like wildfire. Everyone knew.

My housemates got me out of there and I remember leaning up against the cold outside wall of the cafeteria, thinking to myself, “I am not going to be the girl whose mother was murdered, nor is my mom's extraordinary life going to be defined by how she was taken.”

What I didn't realize is I made a second decision. That by not talking about the trauma, by not talking about what had happened, I really couldn't talk about her. I wound it up and I buried it.

We got back to California. They couldn't find him. There were no fingerprints. He had vanished. All that was left in the back of my mom's crashed car was a paisley baseball cap, and on that cap was a single hair. And on that hair was a follicle that they extracted DNA from.

They ran that DNA through the system and there were no matches. So the investigators took all the evidence, they threw it in a drawer and slammed it shut, and that was it.

Over 300 people came to my mom's memorial. They talked about all the things she had done in the community, how she had helped people, how she cared for people that nobody else seemed to care for, what an extraordinary person she was. I could not be moved. They didn't know her. They didn't know me. They didn't know that I didn't know how I was actually going to survive now that the center of my universe had been taken from me.

Needless to say, I did not go back to that small liberal arts college where everybody knew my story. No. I channeled my rage and my anger and became an environmental activist. I was going to save the species. I was going to be the voice for the species that nobody cared about.

This eventually led me to maybe go back and get my undergraduate and my Master's and my PhD, still with a conservation passion. But now, I was interested in using genetic tools to address these conservation questions.

I would look at the DNA of the species throughout the species range and try and figure out how different individuals were related to each other so I could better conserve and protect them. I used the DNA from the species I cared about to tell their stories.

All this time through my undergrad, my Master’s, my PhD, my professors, my advisors, my colleagues, my lab mates, nobody knew. No one knew who she was, what had happened to me. I took all of that and tightly wound it and buried it as deep as I could.

Towards the end of my PhD, I got a phone call. The investigator had actually opened up that cold case file drawer and ran the DNA and they had a match. It was a man serving a life sentence in Texas.

All of a sudden, front page of the newspaper, all in the same area where I grew up, where I got my Master's and my PhD. It was in the news in the evening. All of a sudden, everybody knew. Everybody knew and it was all about how she was taken and not about her life.

“Cold case murder solved 17 years later.” It was like I was right back in that cafeteria with the hushed whispers, the sicky sweet smell and wanting to vomit.

The trial took many months. Eventually, he confessed, and he was found guilty. But the next stage was the sentencing hearing and the prosecution was seeking the death penalty.

Well, my mom was a political activist and she was anti death penalty. She didn't believe in it. She had worked very hard against it. And so my sister and I felt, despite other members of my family absolutely not agreeing with us, my sister and I felt that it was very important for us to go to the sentencing hearing, address the judge, and beg for mercy for this man who had killed our mother.

Well, I had defended a dissertation. I kind of knew how to talk to authority. I'd had a little experience doing that in the past. I had this in the bag.

I had three succinct points that I was going to make that would be just perfect that this judge would hear and this man wouldn't get the death penalty, and then I would have stood up and honored this woman that had meant so much to me.

We arrived to the courtroom. I had my three bulleted points on a piece of paper and we opened up the door and a wave of stale, nervous sweat smell hit me in the face. My mouth went dry and I could hear my paper rattling from my shaking hands.

We walked in and everybody was facing the judge, including the man who had killed my mom. I was looking at the back of his head and I was looking at the judge.

And people are asking me, like, “What did you feel?”

I can't answer that question. I felt nothing. I felt something. I don't know. But I was looking at the man who had taken so much from me, but only the back.

As I looked at him, I looked down at my piece of paper, bracing myself to make my points, defend this, to speak for my mom just like I had defended my dissertation. And when I looked down, it was blank. It was blurry. I'd had a blind panic.

Here I was at the most important point in my life where I was going to actually stand up and speak for the woman whose voice had been silenced and I had nothing.

I felt my sister to my right. I looked at the judge. I looked at the back of the man's head and then I started to talk.

Martha and her mother when Martha was three years old.

Martha's mother.

Martha in the field catching fish.

Martha in the field.

It took me a while to figure out what I was even saying but it was definitely not the three points I had made. But what I did say was the story of my mom. I talked about her sense of humor. I talked about how she always believed every single human had light and good, that every person deserved a second chance. That she would have defended someone just like him.

I talked about what she meant to me. I talked about how we communicated without even talking, that she was my best friend, that we called ourselves the survivors.

In this process of telling the story of my mother, and my sister next went and told her story from her perspective, we talked about who she was, what she wanted, and we begged the judge to listen to these words and listen to the voice of our mother.

The judge went back into his room to deliberate and we sat there. I think at that point I probably did come into my body and realize the enormity of what was going on. And when he came back, he said that, based on the family's words, he could not give the death penalty to this man. That he would have life without parole. So our words had made that difference.

But what's more significant to me than any of that is that little piece of DNA, that little chunk of DNA, the DNA that I use to conserve species. That little piece of DNA allowed me to uncoil and unravel the story of my mother. For the first time in my life, I was able to talk about this extraordinary, badass woman I was lucky enough to call my mom.

Thank you.