Hello everyone and welcome back. So happy to have you here with me today to discuss another case and if you are new then welcome. So today we are going to be talking about the incredible story of Melissa Highsmith and this is very similar to a case I covered recently just last year on Holly Klaus.

I recently saw this in the news and just knew I had to cover it because I love cases like this. I love when there is a happy ending for families, especially when they have been through so much trauma. And I just think it is so cool the way cases are being solved these days with DNA. It's happening more and more frequently. We're hearing about more stories like this in the news and it's just incredible.

So today we are going to talk about a woman named Melissa Highsmith who had been missing since she was a baby for the last 51 years and she was recently reunited with her family. It's amazing.

And National Center for Missing Exploited Children which we just raised over $159,000 for in 2023. Thank you again. I can't say it enough. I'm just so excited. But we're going to be mentioning them a lot in this video.

So the Neck Meck team has been kind enough to record some clips to be included in this video so you guys can get a better idea of what Neck Meck does. And before we get started, I wanted to insert a little thank you message that Neck Meck wanted to give to all of you who participated in the campaign last year.

Hello, I'm a shelter lawn president and CEO at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. I'm here today to thank Kendall Ray, her fantastic team and every one of you who contributed to this wildly successful campaign that supports our great organization.

Your donations will support our efforts to find missing children to stop child sexual exploitation and ultimately to prevent these crimes from happening in the first place. Every child deserves a safe childhood and I'm just grateful to know that there's so many of you who not only believe that but you're willing to get involved and support us.

I encourage you please visit our website, look at the free resources that we've designed to help you better protect the children in your lives and follow us on social media, help us raise awareness of missing and exploited children. We have a lot of children and family counting on all of us.

Thank you again, Kendall Ray for your generosity and all of you for your support.

So again, thank you guys. I will be continuing to raise funds for Neck Meck in 2023. So you can always access my donation page if you would like to make a donation.

I also have Neck Meck charity merch that's still available and 100% of the profit from that goes directly to them. So I will have all that linked below of course, but let's get into this story here.

So we're going to start back in the mid 1960s. So Alta Appenteco, who was 18 year old at the time, was introduced to 17 year old Jeffrey Highsmith during a blind date that was set up by his roommate.

Jeffrey says that he remembers just how gorgeous he thought that Alta was when he first met her and then they ended up getting married in November of 1968.

And they were pretty young. She was 19 at the time and he was 18 and just a year later, Alta had her first baby. Melissa Highsmith was born on November 6, 1969.

So Melissa was actually named after a friend of theirs at the time, a friend of Alta's and Jeffrey says that he remembers her being a very active baby, very happy baby.

Now, Alta did struggle a lot with becoming a parent. It can be very hard, especially at a young age. And when you hear what she herself went through as a child, it all makes a lot of sense.

Alta was actually one of 12 kids. And when her mother couldn't take care of all those kids, she sent the youngest six to go live in an orphanage. And Alta grew up there.

Specifically, they went to the Church of Christ children's home and she lived there for 16 years. So because of that, Alta really never got experience what it's like to be loved by a mother.

And so she struggled to be a mother herself, but she did try to give her daughter Melissa the absolute best life that she could.

So Melissa was born in Fort Worth, Texas. And they stayed there for a little while, but eventually they decided to relocate to Southern Illinois. And unfortunately, this is when Alta and Jeffrey began fighting a lot and fighting so much that their relationship actually ended in past interviews that they've done.

They have each explained their side of why they split up, but ultimately it was because Jeffrey was pretty selfish and was unfaithful to Alta. Although Jeffrey has said that there was more to it that Alta was mean to him.

He found her to be very cold and their relationship was just negative a lot of the time. And so that also contributed to them breaking up as well.

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