Women Reunite With Baby They Found in a Shopping Cart More Than 50 Years Later

It was a late summer Sunday evening in 1972 when two friends left a movie theater at Westgate Shopping Center in Cleveland, Ohio and headed toward their car. A shopping cart had been pushed up against it.

Rita Marshall and Darlene Gilleland didn’t think much of it at first—until they noticed the paper bag inside the cart rustling. When they looked closer, they realized there was a newborn baby inside.

More than five decades later, that same baby would return to the very same place to meet the two women who found her.

“I had to get in close because it was dark,” Marshall recalled of the night. “And I saw her little face, and I said, ‘Darlene, it’s a baby, it’s a baby!’”

The baby girl was just hours old, wrapped in a blue blanket and wearing a yellow dress. The two women immediately called police and stayed with the baby as she was transported to the hospital.

Doctors examined the newborn and found her healthy. She was given the name Jeanne Westgate after the mall where she was found, and “Jeanne” after the nurse who cared for her. The story made the news, but her mother was never found. Jeanne was later placed with child services and eventually adopted.

Fast forward 53 years, and Pearl Marshall had begun to grow curious about her origins. She knew she had been adopted in Cleveland in 1972. She had a happy childhood. She became a Girl Scout, then a music teacher, and later married her husband, Jack.

When Ohio opened previously sealed adoption records, Pearl requested her original birth certificate. What she received was a “foundling report.” The Jane Doe certificate listed the name “Jeanne Westgate” and her birthplace as Westgate Shopping Center.

Pearl’s adoptive mother remembered reading a newspaper article years earlier about a newborn found in a shopping center parking lot and always wondered if it might be connected. This discovery seemed to back up her hunch so Pearl began searching online and found the article.

She continued investigating and eventually connected with Chris Gerrett, the historical researcher for Fairview Park. Gerrett was intrigued and agreed to help.

“I don’t golf. I don’t travel. This is what I do for fun!” Gerrett said.

There was no existing police report, but Gerrett dug up more news articles from the time. She then set out to find the two women who had discovered the baby. Searching property, school, and probate records, she eventually located a phone number connected to one of the women’s families.

“I called him… and told him I was looking for a couple women who found an abandoned baby at Westgate in the ’70s, and fingers crossed he didn’t think he was talking to some lunatic and hang up on me!” Gerrett recalled. “It was dead silent, and after a very long pause, he said, ‘My mother told me that story years ago.’”

Gerrett and Pearl had found them.

She reached out to ask if they would be willing to meet, and a reunion was arranged. This past summer the women met where it all began — at the Westgate Shopping Center. It was a reunion filled with tears, laughter, and wonder.

“I’ve always thought about her,” Marshall said. “Wondered how she was. What she was doing. I feel like our long-lost baby has come home.”

“We always felt like someone was watching to make sure we found you,” Marshall and Gilleland told Pearl.

“I won’t forget the day that we found her,” Gilleland said. “And I won’t forget the day that we found her again!”

As a postscript, Pearl has reconnected with her biological father through genetic testing and has enjoyed getting to know him and his family. Though she is still searching for her biological mother, this incredible reunion at Westgate Shopping Center has already given her a profound sense of belonging—and the full-circle moment of meeting the women who first saved her life.

She said, “I feel a greater and greater connectiveness to the rest of humanity.”

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