'Baby Holly' still seeking answers after learning about birth parents’ murders
VOLUSIA COUNTY, Fla. - It’s not every day you learn your birth parents were murdered and that you were considered missing for most of your life. For Holly Marie, it was a revelation when investigators contacted her in 2021.
"I was in unbelief when I found out," she told FOX 35 via Zoom from Oklahoma. "I was just in overwhelming joy because I didn't know I was wanted and searched for."
When she was an infant, her parents surrendered her to a church in Arizona. Former pastor Philip McGoldrick and his wife took her in.
"My dad was always honest with me and told me what a special gift from God I was to him," she said.
As she grew older, she believed her birth parents were members of some cult. She even thought they were killed during the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.
"I truly mourned them at that time, thinking that they had died," Holly said.
But in 2021, investigators in Texas learned the unidentified bodies of two people found in the woods in Houston about 40 years earlier were Holly’s biological parents.
'Baby Holly' found alive, 42 years after Florida couple was murdered in Texas
After more than four decades, a Florida family will be able to reconnect with a woman – known to them as "Baby Holly" – whose whereabouts were unknown ever since the murder of her parents over 40 years ago.
Using advanced DNA technology and genetic genealogy, the bodies were identified as 21-year-old Harold Dean Clouse Jr. and 17-year-old Tina Gail Linn Clouse.
The body of her father, Dean, had been found bound and beaten, and her mother, Tina, was found strangled.
"I was in real overwhelming grief for what had happened to them. I thought they willingly died, not that their lives were stolen from them," Holly said.
Investigators have not ruled out that a member of the nomadic religious group they had belonged to killed the couple. But so far, their murder case remains unsolved.
Holly wants answers.
"I believe there is a witness out there who may not have had any illegal participation but just knew what happened to us," she said.
Holly is now making it a mission of hers to find out what exactly happened to her birth parents. In the meantime, she’s getting to know her biological family who live in Volusia County, where she was born.
FOX 35 spoke with Holly’s grandmother in June 2022, just two days after she learned "Baby Holly" was alive, well, and a wife and mother of five.
"It was like a gift from heaven 'cause we found out she was alive, and she's OK," Donna Casasanta said then.
Donna has passed since the time of that interview, but Holly says she will never forget her reaction when they spoke for the first time.
"She yells in before anybody else, says, ‘Thank God you are sound, safe and alive, and you're married with children. Thank you, God.’ [She] was just praising God for an answer to her prayer," Holly recalled.
It’s a prayer Holly hopes others in her shoes will also one day have answers to.
"There is a great need in this world to be able to solve those other cases that are out there, the thousands and thousands of cases," she said.
Holly has since written a book titled, "Finding Baby Holly: Lost to a Cult, Surviving My Parents' Murders, and Saved by Prayer." She also encourages people to donate to Genealogy for Justice, a nonprofit organization dedicated to cold cases across the country.
If you happen to have any information regarding the murders of Holly’s parents, contact the Texas Attorney General’s Office.