On July 10, 1959 when she was 14, her mother drowned in a swimming pool. On her 44th birthday in 1988, at a family gathering, an uncle informed her that she had been the one to discover her mother's dead body. Until then, she remembered little about the death itself, suddenly the memories began to drift back, clear and vivid. A few days later her brother called to say her uncle realized he'd made a mistake, that Loftus's aunt had found the body, not Loftus. Therefore, those few days of "recovered" memories were utterly false.