One Twisted Family Tree – 4
WOW. That was the first thing that came to mind when I read the headline of this story. Valerie Spruill from Doylestown, Ohio didn’t discover that her husband, Percy, was also her father until after his death. Percy died at the age of 60 in 1998 and Valerie wasn’t told until 2004 by her uncle that the rumors she had heard over the years were, in fact, true. She had a DNA test done to confirm it.
This wasn’t the first big lie that had effected Valerie’s life. When she was 3 months old her mother shipped her off to live with her grandparents. At age 9 they finally told her that the man she believed was her father was actually her grandfather and that a “family friend” that came to visit was her biological mother.
My very first question after reading this was why did no one tell her about her father/husband?! Hearing all those rumors you would think Valerie would want to look in to it a little bit, or at least ask her husband about it. From the sounds of it she did neither. And if she had relatives that knew why would they chose to keep that a secret from her and let her marry her own father? She is going through therapy now to deal with an entire situation that could have been avoided if people would have told the truth.
As far as this being newsworthy I think it definitely falls under the category of rarity. I was also kind of surprised at the direction the full story ended up taking. It sounds like Valerie is handling the situation well. It actually seems to me she was more upset about not knowing who her real mother was than she was about marrying her father. When the story goes in to detail about her father it first tells where he’s from, how old he was and what his job was. Then right about that, a sentence that stands alone says: “He and Valerie’s mother hooked up when he was only 15.” This just caught my eye because for one they separated it from the other paragraphs. The other thing was the reporter up until this point had been using more of a professional voice and the way he phrased this sentence sounded kind of tacky to me. Even though it sounded tacky I think it also emphasized the kind of relationship they had, which maybe that was the point all along.
View the whole story here.