Welcome to strangers from KCW in Radiotopia.

I'm Leah Tau.

When Jack was a little girl, her mom and dad were terrible parents from the very start.

Jack was just an infant when her father played this cruel trick on her mother.

One time my mom had come home from work and she asked where I was and he said,

oh, I buried her in the

backyard.

And he pointed outside and she looked out and there was a mound of dirt.

So she ran out there and was digging and digging and digging and she sees this little

hand and she rips my baby doll out.

And she said she didn't realize she loved me until she ripped that baby doll out of the ground.

Welcome to our two-part series about Jack.

Part one, survival.

The story will be hard to hear. It was harder to live.

And it'll be near impossible to understand.

Not what happened, but how such awful things could take place.

And how, just how, a soul as sweet as Jack's, could emerge from such horrors.

In the end, Jack's story is a beautiful one.

But along the way, boy oh boy, consider yourselves warned.

This story is not appropriate for kids,

and survivors of abuse should use discretion.

It was Jack's mom who told her that story about her dad pretending to bury baby Jack in the backyard. The dad would beat the mom off into a pulp, also while she was pregnant, first with

...