The searches were conducted by 3,000 local people and 500 policemen, including the Civilian Conservation Corps and the American fraternal order Elks Lodge to trace the missing child.

[4] The book details how the author, Harold Thomas Beck, then editor-in-chief of the Mountain Laurel Review, resurrected the disappearance.

In 1997, he was contacted by the missing girl's older sister, Dorothea, who provided additional information, corrected errors in newspaper accounts, and sent along family photographs, including one of herself at age 65.

Beck launched a personal website to share his information and begin a search to determine if the now-adult West could still be alive.

Dorothea's childhood photos strongly resembled those of Marjorie at the same age, and Beck extrapolated that the same would hold true in adulthood.

Beck met this person, Sylvia Waldrop London, at her home in North Carolina and told her of his suspicions that she was the missing Marjorie West.

She eventually admitted that her mother confessed on her deathbed to her husband having stolen her from a park, and that she had remembered the names Dorothea and Allan from childhood.