Press
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Biography, short
Maximus Sego is a journeyman lineman in Arizona with an associate degree and a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. At forty he learned that the woman who raised him was his grandmother, that she had written her own name on his birth certificate, and that no adoption was ever filed. NOBODY is his first book.
Biography, long
Maximus Sego was born in Utah in August 1976 and raised in Magna as Martin Lavon Taylor Jr. In February 2017 a man he had known his whole life sent him a text message telling him that his mother was not his mother. He was forty years old.
He found his biological father in four months, through a DNA test and a second cousin. His father had been shut out in 1976 and adopted him in 2019, forty-three years late. Over the two years that followed he traced an uncle the family had reported dead as a boy, recorded twenty-one telephone calls with the people who had been in the room, and requested records from county recorders and courts in Utah, Nevada, Colorado and Texas.
He is a journeyman lineman. He holds an associate degree and a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. He lives in Arizona with his wife and two children. NOBODY is his first book.
The blurb
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In February 2017 a man Maximus Sego had known his whole life sent him a text message. It said that his mother was not his mother.
He was forty years old. The woman who raised him was his grandmother, Beryl Jean Taylor. She had written her own name on his birth certificate at his birth, taken him at three months old, and never filed an adoption anywhere in the state of Utah. His real mother lived thirty minutes away for thirty-six years and died in 2013 without ever having been allowed to say out loud that he was her son.
His whole family knew. Those who tried to tell him were called liars.
He found his father with a cheek swab in two months. Over the next two years he tracked down an uncle everyone said had died as a boy, and recorded twenty-one phone calls with the people who had been in the room. Almost every page of this book is on tape or on paper.
And there is Becky, an eight-year-old foster child. What was done to her was done in that house. She was carried out by ambulance at the end of the nineteen seventies and died at the hospital.
His brother wrote down what he saw.
“When I was five or six years old, I watched my grandparents murder a little girl.”
Maximus Sego is a journeyman lineman. He holds an associate degree and a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. He lives in Arizona with his wife and two children. This is his first book.
Cover
- Front cover (PNG) 1875 x 2775, 313 dpi at 6 x 9 in
The full print wrap is a manufacturing file rather than a press asset and is not published here. Ask if you need it.
Author photograph
- Portrait (JPG) 1200 x 1500
- Square (JPG) 1300 x 1300, for a podcast tile
Cropped from the original. Nothing else has been changed.
Facts a producer can check
Every date is on the timeline, and the documents behind them are on the record, each with its own address.
Five suggested interview questions
- You found out at forty. Who told you, and how?
- Four people tried to tell you the truth over forty years and every one of them was called a liar. What does it take for a whole family to agree on something that isn’t true?
- Your brother wrote down what he saw when he was five or six years old. What did he write, and what happened when you took it to the church?
- Your birth certificate is a real document, properly filed with the state of Utah, and the parents named on it are not your parents. How did that happen, and how many other people do you think are walking around with one?
- Almost every page of this book is on tape or on paper. What did you do when the record contradicted your own memory?
I will talk about the documents, the church, and what happened to Becky. I do not discuss anyone in the family who is still living beyond what is already in the book.
Film
Transcripts are open below each film and are in the page source.
Transcript
In February 2017, a man I had known my whole life sent me a text message. It said my mother was not my mother.
I was forty years old.
The woman who raised me was my grandmother. Her name was Beryl Jean Taylor. She took me when I was three months old, wrote her own name on my birth certificate as my mother, and never filed an adoption anywhere in the state of Utah.
My real mother lived about thirty minutes away for thirty-seven years. She died in 2013, four years before I found out who she was. I knew her my whole life. I never once knew her as my mother.
My whole family knew. Two of them tried to tell me over the years, and both of them were called liars for it. One of them was my aunt Kathy. She said it for forty years and nobody believed her, including me.
I called her in the spring of 2017. She gave me my mother’s name and my father’s name in the first five minutes. She was dead by August.
So I started recording. Twenty-one phone calls with people who were actually in the room. And I started ordering paper.
A marriage certificate from Washoe County, Nevada. Divorce filings from the Third District Court in Salt Lake. A 1960 case where she swore to a judge she was too poor to pay a filing fee. A newspaper court column from Longview, Washington.
Almost every page of this book is either on tape or on paper. Where it is not, I say so.
And there is a little girl in it. Her name was Becky. She was a foster child in that house at the end of the nineteen seventies, and she was about eight years old when she died.
My brother Earl wrote down what he saw. He was five or six.
“When I was five or six years old, I watched my grandparents murder a little girl.”
I am not a writer. I am a journeyman lineman. I live in Arizona with my wife and two kids.
I wrote this because everybody who could have told me is either dead or is not going to. The book is what I found and how I found it. If you have ever been told something about your own life that turned out not to be true, you already know why I could not leave it alone.
Transcript
This is a marriage index entry from Elko County, Nevada.
My grandmother divorced Martin Taylor on the seventh of June, 1973. A Utah judge granted it. She got the house in Magna, the furniture, and two cars.
Four months and eighteen days later, on the twenty-fifth of October, they married each other again, right here, in front of a civil celebrant in Elko.
And look at what they both put down for where they lived.
Texas.
They lived in Magna, Utah. A Utah court had awarded her a house there four months earlier.
It is a small lie, and nobody ever checked it. That is the whole book, on one line, in one county register.
Contact
The recordings
Twenty-one telephone calls stand behind the transcript chapters, and the author was on every one of them. They are not published and will not be provided for broadcast. They exist so that a challenged quotation can be answered.