‘I tortured myself for not staying in touch with him’ Growing up, I often wondered about him... ‘Who’s my dad?’ I’d ask my mum Mandy, now 49.
My parents had split when I was 3, and I couldn’t really remember Dad.
In my teens, I wanted to know more.
So Mum showed me some newspaper cuttings.
They were reports about my dad, Jeffrey Shepherd.
He’d had a few run-ins with police for petty crimes when I was a baby.
Nothing serious, but I understood why Mum had ended things.
I was still curious, though.
‘I want to find him,’ I told Mum.
She agreed to support me.
So I called family members, but nobody knew where Dad was. With such little information, I struggled to make headway.
Years passed, then…
