How 3-year-old boy was stolen from mother by Irish nuns and sold for adoption into U.S.

Irish nuns refused to let mother or son find each other

Anthony - who had been sold to a middle class couple from Missouri for about $2,500 - was now named Michael Hess.

A gay attorney, he worked for the Republican National Committee and kept his sexuality a close secret.

However, by 1993 he had contracted AIDS and wanted to see his birth mother before he died.

He arrived in Roscrea in 1993 to make an emotional appeal to the nuns for the information that would help him find Philomena.

The nuns didn't care.

They were unmoved by his pleas for help.

But they did offer him a paid gravestone at the convent.

Michael had appealed to the Mother Superior to let him be buried in the convent. He wanted to use the gravestone as a way of letting his mother know where heas.

The nuns allowed him to do that - in return for a hefty donation to the Church.

And so, when he died in 1995, his remains were brought to Roscrea for burial at the very convent where he had been so cruelly stolen from his mother in 1955.

His gravestone reads: "Michael Hess, a man of two nations and many talents,' the inscription reads. 'Born July 5, 1952, Sean Ross Abbey, Roscrea. Died August 15, 1995, Washington DC."

Nine years later, in 2004, Sixsmith would begin researching the vanishing paper trail at the convent and eventually traced Anthony's path from Roscrea to Missouri to Washington D.C. and back to Roscrea.

Tragically, Philomena's lasting memory of her son is a three-year-old boy peering out the back of a car as he was taken away from Roscrea at Christmas 1955.

She never saw her child alive again.

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Nster.com