NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Her life is a memoir, too Hollywood for Hollywood.
Born in 1963, inside a non-descript cinder block building in McCaysville, Georgia, she was delivered by the town’s only doctor, Thomas Hicks.
The newborn was taken from her mother’s body and whisked out the back door, where an Ohio couple waited in a sedan, its motor still humming.
After handing the good doctor $1,000, Judith and Homer Sheets took their newfound bundle of joy up north to suburban Akron.
A decade or so later, Judith, by then divorced from Homer, pulled over her car and told a startled Melinda the story of her unusual birth.
“I was sad she wasn’t my real mom, but she was comforting about it. She made me feel like her daughter. She made me feel safe,” Dawson remembered.
That moment stuck with her, but it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that Melinda learned of so many others, dozens of boys and girls, who were also delivered in McCaysville and secretly sold to adoptive parents by Dr. Hicks. This practice had gone on for nearly 15 years.
As a group, they were branded with the crassly impersonal nickname: “Hicks Babies.”
Melinda, as would be her nature, became the face of the Hicks survivors, as she and Judith shared their scandalous story to an eager-eared audience, in newspapers across the world, and on one of her first major national TV appearances, the Maury show.
“The goal was to get the word out. We had DNA and I wanted to find my siblings, people who looked like me. I wanted to know where I really came from,” she said.
By this time, Melinda was married to Clarence Elkins for 17 years. They had two teenage sons. But before she and her mother could work together to unravel the adoption, Melinda’s world was upended.
“I lived it and I can’t even imagine it,” she said. “It was just shocking. Every single second of my life.”
It was early in the morning of June 7, 1998 when Judith’s body was found inside her Barberton home. Raped and beaten to death. She was 58, but in poor health.
Melinda’s niece, 6-year-old Brooke, was spending the night with Judith. She endured the same punishment as her grandmother and was left for dead by the intruder.
But Brooke lived to tell her story to police that same day – and later at trial: “Uncle Clarence did it."
Clarence Elkins was immediately thrust into the headlines, cast by police as a callous, unrepentant killer, who did unspeakable crimes. Every other suspect was ignored. Case closed.
“It was an overload of trauma, for sure,” Melinda recalled.
Based on little evidence aside from the testimony of his niece, Clarence Elkins was convicted and sentenced to life.
Melinda was Clarence’s alibi. She knew he was home with her at the time of the killing. But no one listened. Rather, prosecutors and most everyone else who followed the case cast Melinda as basically an accomplice-after-the fact to her mother’s murder.
It took seven years, and uncanny circumstances, before Melinda proved Clarence was innocent.
Earl Mann, who lived near Judith Johnson’s home at the time of the slaying, was in prison for raping his children. Melinda made the connection after reading an account of Mann's plea in the Akron Beacon Journal.
By 2005, fate put Mann in the same prison, in the same pod, as Clarence Elkins.
Based on Melinda’s hunch, Clarence picked up Mann’s discarded cigarette butt and mailed it to their attorney. Incredibly, Mann’s DNA matched DNA at the crime scene. Within several months, Clarence was released and Mann was pleading guilty to murder and rape.
The story has been told and retold on countless true crime TV shows. Melinda also has a pending movie deal on her life.
Shortly after his release from prison, and after the state and Barberton police paid them millions for the wrongful incarceration, Clarence and Melinda divorced. Both have since remarried.
Since then, Melinda renewed her search for her birth family, gathering many Hicks babies for a reunions. She knew time was running out to meet her birth parents.
Other Hicks adoptees would find their birth parents, but many also learned their parents had died.
Last year, Melinda again put her trust in DNA. So, too, did Terry Griffith.
On and off for the past 18 years, Terry was looking for a younger sister whom his mother gave up for adoption. In February, he learned of a full sibling DNA match after putting his profile on an online ancestry registry.
Before long, he and Melinda spoke by phone.
"It's like a big factor of closure and I think for both of us, we finally know,” Griffith said.
“It was a surprise. Not a shock…A delightful surprise to learn that she was there.”
Last week, Melinda drove from her home in southern Ohio to Nashville, Tennessee, to meet her brother in person for the first time.
She’s since learned that her biological parents each died several years ago. She also discovered she has a dozen half-siblings, but none has expressed an interest in meeting her.
For now, it was the end of another journey. She found what she was looking for.
"I never gave up. I knew that if I just kept chipping away that it would eventually happen,” Melinda said. “My mom would be so happy.”
“It's awesome. After so many years, I'm sitting here with my brother and I can't even wrap my head around this. I really can't. I'm so happy. I really and truly am.”