UNCOVERING MY MOTHERSSECRETS

IN AN EVOCATIVE NEW MEMOIR, TOM HANKS'S SECOND-OLDEST CHILD REVEALS A HAUNTING FAMILY MYSTERY AND THE QUESTIONS HER TROUBLED MOTHER LEFT BEHIND

- By LIZ MCNEIL

When E.A. Hanks's mother, Susan Dillingham, died, she left behind the usual miscellany: a threadbare quilt from her daughter's bed, a potato masher, a binder of poetry, a trove of papers and more. Only years later did E.A. (short for Elizabeth Anne), 42, discover among those papers a mysterious red journal. "It wasn't a journal with dates, but more stream of consciousness," she says, "and I read her description of her father committing this horrible crime."

Almost two decades after Susan’s death from lung cancer in 2002 at age 49, E.A. took to the road to learn more about her mother, who was the first wife of her father, Tom Hanks, and her strange, shocking words. Susan was a troubled woman who had long struggled with mental illness and addiction. “There was always this cloud of mystery because she had her own version of events,” E.A. says. Did Susan’s father, John Raymond Dillingham, who died in 1981, really rape, murder and cannibalize a little girl?

In search of answers—and family ghosts—E.A. embarked on an odyssey across Interstate 10 from Los Angeles to Palatka, Fla., where her mom’s family had once lived. She shares her story, part travelogue, part true crime, in a new book, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road. "If any part of the red journal is true," she says, "then my mother never stood a chance."