By 1978, the children had deteriorated. Not physically, but mentally. They began to show confusion, memory lapses, and what the staff described as an identity crisis. They forgot their own faces. One boy spent an entire day convinced he was one of the girls. Another claimed she had died years before and that the person who had replaced her was someone else. They stopped recognizing each other. The synchronicity that had once defined them was gone, replaced by chaos. Two of the children became violent, not with the staff, but with each other, as if trying to destroy something they could no longer control. They were sedated and separated into different rooms. Both died within 48 hours. The official cause of death was heart failure, but their hearts had been perfectly healthy the day before. It was as if their bodies had simply given up the moment they could no longer be what they had always been.
By 1980, only four of the original eleven children were still alive. The state decided to close Riverside Manor. The residence was too expensive, raised too many questions, and wasn’t producing results. The surviving children were transferred to a standard group residence in southwest Virginia. They were given names—Sarah, Thomas, Rebecca, and Michael—from a list of common names with no connection to their past. They were enrolled in a program designed to integrate adults with developmental delays into society. It didn’t work. In less than six months, Thomas disappeared into the woods behind the residence and never returned. Search teams found no trace of him. Rebecca stopped speaking altogether and spent her days rocking back and forth, humming the same low voice that haunted the Riverside staff. He died in his sleep in 1983. Michael remained there until 1991. He lived in a supervised apartment, worked part-time at a supermarket, and, by all accounts, seemed almost normal until the night he found himself caught in highway traffic near Roanoke. He wasn’t running, he wasn’t stumbling. Witnesses said he simply stepped into the roadway and stood there, arms at his sides, staring at the headlights of the oncoming car. He died instantly.
So only Sarah remained, the youngest, the sole survivor. Sarah Dalhart, though that wasn’t her birth name—if she ever had one—lived longer than anyone would have believed. In 2016, she was just over fifty, though she looked decades younger. She had spent most of her adult life in nursing homes, group homes, and halfway houses in Virginia and West Virginia. Sometimes she worked—dishwasher, janitor, night clerk at a store—always in jobs where she didn’t have to talk or interact much with people. Social workers described her as quiet, functional, and profoundly lonely. She had no friends, no romantic relationships, no ties to anyone. She lived on the fringes of society, present enough not to raise suspicion, absent enough to go unnoticed. For nearly 40 years, she never spoke of her origins or her family, until in 2016 a journalist named Eric Halloway found her
Halloway was researching a book about forgotten Appalachian communities when he stumbled upon a reference to the Dalhart children in a declassified court document. Most of the details had been redacted, but there was enough information to follow the trail. He tracked down former employees of Riverside Manor, obtained partial medical records through Freedom of Information Act requests, and eventually found Sarah through a social services database. He wrote to her for six months before she agreed to meet with him. They met at a restaurant in Charleston, West Virginia, on a cold November afternoon. Halloway recorded the conversation. This recording, which lasted more than three hours, was never made public, but excerpts were transcribed and published in a limited-edition article in a little-known history journal in 2017.
