Debra Newton has been sentenced on custodial interference charges after abducting her daughter Michelle Newton at age 3

NEED TO KNOW

• Debra Newton has been sentenced in connection with the abduction of her 3-year-old daughter more than 40 years ago
• Her daughter Michelle Newton, now 46, tells PEOPLE she was first brought to live on a commune and never knew her real name or her family
• Now, Michelle is forming a relationship with the family she never had and probing questions about her past and her identity

Just before Thanksgiving 2025, Amanda Blake, a 46-year-old business development manager from central Pennsylvania, was grocery shopping when she got a call from her 16-year-old son that the police were at her house.

She raced home, expecting to learn something “catastrophic” about her mother. “I thought he was gonna tell me my mom was dead,” she tells PEOPLE.

Instead, she learned her mother was in police custody — and the life she had known was about to shatter.

“You’ve been missing for 43 years,” she recalls being told by officers. “You’re not Amanda, you’re Michelle Marie Newton."

“It was the most surreal thing ever. I remember crying but also being numb,” Michelle tells PEOPLE. “My life has been such a mystery to that point and there’s been so many things that didn’t make sense that everything in that moment clicked into place.”

Michelle knew her mother as Sharon Nealy. But she soon learned her mom was actually Debra Newton — a fugitive wanted for kidnapping her daughter when she was just a toddler.

“It felt like listening to someone else’s life, like a movie, this can’t be right,” Michelle says. “You must have the wrong person.”

A tip to law enforcement from an amateur sleuth led to Debra’s November 2025 arrest at her home in The Villages, Fla., in a scene captured on viral police bodycam footage. Through tears, Debra admitted to detectives interrogating her that she had taken her daughter, claimed she was fleeing from an abusive marriage and admitted to using someone else’s identity to forge a new life.

Debra took a plea deal reducing her felony custodial interference charge to a misdemeanor.

On May 15, 2026, she received a one-year suspended prison sentence, to Michelle’s dismay. Debra refused to even look her daughter in the eye as she left a Louisville, Ky., courtroom, Michelle says.

She says her mother ran off from her life in Kentucky and went to Georgia with another man, whom she described as a “very persuasive businessman,” when Michelle was just 3 years old. Debra’s ex-husband, Joe, admits he was not a perfect partner, but denies ever being abusive.

Debra had married Joe Newton when she was just 16, her sister Karen Spalding tells PEOPLE. Michelle, nicknamed Shelly, was born in 1979, when Joe was 20 and Debra was 19.

Joe worked in construction while Debra worked in a trucking company office, where she met the businessman, says Dave Ernst, a retired detective with the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office.

One day in 1983, Debra told her family she had gotten a new job in Georgia. “She just said 'I got a job there' and packed a small van, and she left two weeks later,” says Spalding.

Joe intended to follow them to Georgia a few weeks later after finishing a job in Kentucky, Spalding says.

Soon, though, Debra stopped answering the phone. Joe went to Georgia and quickly learned Debra wasn’t working where she said she was; an employee at the company quietly told him his daughter was in a “bad situation,” he recalls.

Joe then went to a run-down address following the co-worker’s tip, but couldn’t get in, at which point he decided to leave and involve law enforcement rather than risk burglary charges. He did not see or hear from his daughter or ex again for four decades.

Ernst says by that time, Debra had run away with Michelle and the businessman — a self-styled minister — to join a commune, where he allegedly kept multiple wives. “He was a lot like Jim Jones,” says Ernst. “He just didn’t give anybody Kool Aid.”

Michelle claims this man repeatedly sexually abused her, with Debra’s knowledge, and until last year believed him to be her biological father.

The main wife in the cult later kicked Debra and Michelle out when she saw the businessman enter their room late at night, Ernst says. It’s not clear why Debra didn’t return to Kentucky; by the time Michelle was in Kindergarten, she and her mother had relocated to Florida. Eventually they settled in Pennsylvania, where Debra married Wayne Brookover and Michelle says her life started to resemble normalcy. Brookover has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

But, she always suspected Debra was harboring a secret. Any time she asked her mother about her past, and her extended family, she got an evasive answer. Debra’s parents were killed by a drunk driver, she was told, while her baby pictures were supposedly lost in a house fire.

By the time she was a teenager, Michelle was in detective mode trying to learn her life story.

At 19, she reached out to the state of New Jersey, where she thought she was born, requesting a copy of her birth certificate under the name Amanda. She was told one didn’t exist. Her mother said there had been a fire at the hospital that destroyed the vital records, Michelle recalls.

“She basically told me not to worry about it, that we would get it fixed at some point,” she says. Her investigative file about her own life eventually ran to several hundred pages.

After reporting his daughter missing, Joe eventually won legal custody, while court records show Debra was charged with unlawful flight in 1985. The complaint was dismissed because authorities couldn’t find her. In 2005, an adult Michelle was removed from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s database.

The family followed leads for years but came to believe Debra and Michelle had died and that they were looking for bodies, Joe says.

Both of Debra’s parents died in the 2010s without knowing what had happened to her and Michelle, Spalding notes.

Debra eventually married Marine Corps veteran Reggie Nealy, moved to The Villages — the world’s largest senior community — and retired from her job at Wells Fargo. Nealy has not been accused of any wrongdoing. Meanwhile, Debra was re-indicted in Kentucky state court after Ernst and his partner presented their findings to a Louisville grand jury in 2016. Age-progression photos of Michelle were later posted online by the NCMEC.

Last year, Spalding was approached at her home by Joe’s sister Margaret and volunteered a sample of her DNA. “By the end of that week or maybe that weekend, Joe called me and said we found her,” she recalls.

After her mother’s arrest, Michelle took “the longest drive of my life,” from Pennsylvania to Kentucky, to meet her family. “Are these gonna be good people?” she wondered to herself during the 11-hour trek. But when she hugged her father for the first time in 43 years, “there was an instant comfort,” she says. “We’re pretty much inseparable at this point.”

“It still is emotional for me, and it probably will be until I take my last breath,” Joe tells PEOPLE. “The first thing I told my daughter, I wanted her to know I never abandoned her.”

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Joe is one of 13 kids, so Michelle has a large new family, and everyone has a piece of her past to share. Her aunt Karen, for example, gave her an Easter basket embroidered with the nickname Shelly; her grandmother intended to give it to her for Easter 1983.

Michelle, who has two sons and a daughter, isn’t currently speaking with her mom, who she says promised to apologize but hasn’t. Legally recognized as Amanda, Michelle says she is embracing the name she was given at birth. Despite everything, she says she feels more secure in who she is now than ever before.

“I think the identity crisis happened growing up, that was when I didn’t have answers. Everything went back into perspective when this unraveled, now it’s about sorting through what’s true,” Michelle says. “Every day I get a little more grounded and secure in who I am.”

Debra Newton declined to comment for this story through her attorneys.

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