Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times

Paula Johnson, 40, leans down and strokes her daughter Callie Conley's face as Callie lies on the kitchen counter after shopping to find a dress to wear for her mother's wedding. Callie is tired from celebrating her birthday and staying up late.

The Roanoke Times | File 1998

Courtesy of Pam Conley

Rebecca Chittum poses in June with her family in Buena Vista. Standing in the back, from left: Rebecca, Lindsey Chittum and grandparents Rosa and Larry Chittum. Sitting: Braden Conley, Carlton Conley, Brendon Conley and Pam Conley.

Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times

Callie Conley tries on dresses Tuesday with the help of her mother, Paula Johnson, at the Spotsylvania Towne Centre mall in Fredericksburg. Johnson is getting married Aug. 8 in Nags Head, N.C. Callie says she doesn't visit the family of her blood relatives in Buena Vista that often anymore, but she doesn't plan to stop.

Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times

Callie Conley, 13, takes her dog, Cooper, for a swim in the harbor inside the neighborhood where she lives with her mother, Paula Johnson. Her soon-to-be stepfather, Greg Keith Gentry of Charlottesville stands on the ramp.

Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times

Callie Conley, 13, takes her dog, Cooper, for a swim in the harbor inside the neighborhood where she lives with her mother, Paula Johnson. Her soon-to-be stepfather, Greg Keith Gentry of Charlottesville stands on the ramp.

Courtesy of Pam Conley

The girls switched at birth, Rebecca Chittum (left) and Callie Conley flank Pam Conley as they pose for a Christmas portrait in 2006. Carlton Conley, Pam's husband and Rebecca's biological father, sits between their son Brendon and Lindsey Chittum.

Her first year in middle school, Callie Conley gave a show-and-tell presentation that no other child in her class could have done.

She addressed the whispers and rumors about herself head-on, stood up in front of her fellow sixth-graders and told them about what it was like to be switched at birth with another girl.

She backed up her story by showing her classmates an August 1998 issue of People magazine with her picture on the cover.

Ten years ago yesterday, when Callie was 3 years old, a Greene County judge told her stunned mother that DNA tests proved Callie wasn't her biological daughter.

Ten years ago today, a young couple from Buena Vista and four children riding with them died in a tragic collision on Interstate 81, leaving behind their grieving parents and siblings and their daughters, Lindsey, 1, and Rebecca -- a 3-year-old who'd been born at the same Charlottesville hospital as Callie, just hours apart.

Neither family knew how tangled their lives were about to become.

None of them knew that though the wreck took away the couple who had raised Rebecca since childhood, it was Callie who had lost her birth parents.

Asked in a recent interview if she regretted not knowing her biological mother and father, Callie, who is now 13, answered, "I wish I had, 'cause I hear all these great stories about them. I just wish I knew 'em."

A small town's tragedy

Independence Day, 1998. Kevin Chittum and Whitney Rogers decided to celebrate the holiday with a trip to the Salem Fair.

The young couple had been together for five years, since Chittum spotted the high school cheerleader walking down a Buena Vista street, pulled over and introduced himself. At first, the couple had to see each other on the sly -- he was six years older, done with school, working for his dad as a carpenter -- but by the time of their trip to Salem, they were happily engaged and raising a pair of daughters. Chittum had bought a house and planned to marry Rogers as soon as he finished fixing it up.

The girls remained in Buena Vista that July 4. The couple instead brought along Chittum's 13-year-old sister, Bridget; Bridget's boyfriend, Josh Conner, 13; his younger brother Jonathan Conner, 10; and Chittum's niece, 11-year-old Sheena Miskovsky.

Near Buchanan, as they tried to pass a tractor-trailer during a heavy rain, Rogers' Honda hydroplaned and slid across the median into the path of an oncoming tanker truck. The truck pushed the car nearly 200 feet, then ran off an overpass, plunging both vehicles 100 feet onto U.S. 11. No one survived.

The tragedy tore at the heart of the tight-knit town of 6,500. About 1,000 mourners came to the funeral, six days after the crash, and wept over the six caskets lining the front of the Buena Vista Pentecostal Holiness Church.

'The media storm'

The day before the crash, almost 90 miles away in Stanardsville, Paula Johnson had been dealt a world-shattering blow.

A single mother who worked for a construction company, she was in the midst of a court battle over child support with her ex-boyfriend, Carlton Conley.

When she called the Greene County courthouse in response to frantic messages from court personnel, a judge informed her that Conley was not Callie's father.

Nor was she Callie's mother.

Suddenly, she was faced with the frightening notion that she might have to give up the child she had raised for three years, and that the child she had given birth to was somewhere else, growing up without her.

She hired a lawyer, Cindy Johnson of Charlottesville, who approached the University of Virginia Medical Center, where Callie was born. The hospital determined that Callie and another baby girl had been switched but didn't reveal the identity of the other family.

Yet it didn't take long for the mystery to unravel. When Paula Johnson's story went public in early August, it seized the attention of the national media and prompted a USA Today reporter to conduct his own investigation. Using Charlottesville birth announcements and the process of elimination, Dennis Cauchon tracked down family members in Buena Vista and learned that on July 21, just 11 days after Kevin Chittum and Whitney Rogers were buried, a UVa doctor and nurse came to Buena Vista seeking a blood sample from Rebecca.

Johnson remembers Cauchon's call. At first, she didn't believe him. While Rebecca Chittum's name was on a list Johnson had compiled of children who might have been her biological daughter, she believed the girl had died in the July 4 accident.

No, she's alive, she remembers the reporter telling her.

On Aug. 5, 1998, Cauchon's story named Rebecca as the other child, and her grandparents awoke to find camera crews camped out on their lawns.

"I don't think any of us were prepared for the media storm that followed the announcement," Cindy Johnson said.

In the years that followed, while the Chittum and Rogers families tried hard to avoid the spotlight, Paula Johnson would be interviewed by Katie Couric and Barbara Walters, and attorneys both for her and the Buena Vista families would field media calls from London and France.

Johnson also learned firsthand about the dark side of the media spotlight: "Everything or anything I've ever done, good, bad or indifferent, became public knowledge."

'No amount of money'

UVa hospital officials first claimed that the baby switch had to have been a deliberate act, that it was impossible that such a thing could have happened by accident. But the hospital's investigation never determined exactly how the switch happened or pinpointed one individual as the person at fault. The possibility arose that the babies' loose-fitting identity bracelets slipped off and somehow were swapped.

Johnson remembers how, when she took her baby home, "Callie had lost 2¹₂ pounds. I knew something wasn't right. I knew it."

Medical records showed that both families had raised concerns about strange, sudden changes in the weight and appetite of their infants -- concerns that were ignored as the girls were sent home with the wrong mothers.

The state attempted damage control. Chittum's and Rogers' parents accepted a settlement from the hospital that would pay out more than $1.5 million to Rebecca through her early adulthood, along with other compensation.

But Johnson not only refused the deal, but she also tried unsuccessfully to block the hospital's agreement with the Buena Vista families.

She appealed the dismissal of her own $31 million lawsuit against the hospital to the Supreme Court of Virginia. On April 19, 2001, the day before the high court intended to rule, she settled with the state. Under the agreement, Johnson received $475,000. An additional $200,000 was placed in a trust for Callie, and the state also purchased an annuity that will eventually pay Callie more than $1.5 million, identical to the arrangement for Rebecca.

Johnson's $24 million lawsuit against Precision Dynamics Corp., the makers of the identity bracelets, was dismissed in federal court.

Johnson says she's still not satisfied with the payout from the state. "Absolutely not. There's no amount of money that they could ever give me that could undo what they've done to me, and to these children."

What she really wanted, she says she never got: an apology.

Courthouse showdown

The legal conflict wasn't confined to the families' efforts to hold the hospital accountable.

At first, Johnson and Chittum's and Rogers' parents told the world they were determined to work things out in a peaceful way. The People magazine article described a friendly meeting, swapping stories, comparing pictures, contemplating what to do next.

But the relationship quickly unraveled. Upset that Rebecca's grandparents could not seem to agree among themselves how to handle custody of Rebecca, Johnson filed her own claim.

"The only reason why I filed for custody was because they were all fighting with each other. She needed one stable home to come to live in," Johnson said. "I wish I would've done things differently, but I can't change it."

The Buena Vista community rallied around their own, angry and fearful that Johnson would try to take Rebecca away from those who had raised her as a grandchild, who had lost so many loved ones in the highway crash.

The conflict appeared to come to a head Nov. 11, 1999, when Paula Johnson came to a Buena Vista court to fight to take Rebecca home. She found a letter posted on the courthouse door by friends of the opposing family that asked, "What is Miss Johnson's loss? ... She has a beautiful little girl with her and another little girl whom is very happy with the only family she has ever known." The letter claimed taking Rebecca away would ruin her life.

But the potentially ugly confrontation -- three of Johnson's ex-boyfriends, including Conley, were lined up to testify against her -- didn't happen. Instead, the parties emerged from the closed hearing and exchanged tearful hugs. Johnson apologized to the Rogers and Chittum families, and they to her, for insults and miscommunication, and the group went to Pizza Hut together to have dinner and mend fences. Johnson accepted the one weekend of visitation she'd been given, saying, "This is all I ever wanted, just to be a part of her life.''

The truce didn't last. Before long, the two sides were back to squabbling. According to Mike Groot, an attorney for the Buena Vista families, the situation didn't settle down until about three years ago, when Johnson failed to show up for a hearing and lost her visitation rights. Johnson says she was never given notice of the hearing.

But about the same time, the girls became old enough to express their own wishes. They didn't want to be shuttled back and forth between Stafford and Rockbridge counties, Johnson said.

Johnson and Rebecca have not seen each other in about three years. Callie still visits Buena Vista, but only occasionally.

"It really hasn't worked out the way we would have hoped," Groot said.

'Normal as they can be'

The custody and visitation entanglements had one result no one could have predicted at the start.

Carlton Conley, Rebecca's biological father, also wanted custody of the girl. The judge granted him visitation rights and told him he would have to travel to Buena Vista to see her.

When Conley traveled to town, he wound up spending time with Pam Miskovsky, Kevin Chittum's sister, who had lost her only daughter in the crash. Miskovsky was the one who'd bring Rebecca to see him, and she'd take Lindsey along as well. At first they did things together, such as visit the zoo, for the sake of honoring the visitation arrangement.

But she and Conley hit it off, and their relationship bloomed. They wed in 2001.

Now Rebecca and her sister, Lindsey, live with Carlton and Pam Conley, who have since had two sons of their own.

"Things are pretty much as normal as they can be at this point," Pam Conley said.

Rebecca makes good grades in school, plays soccer and enjoys clog dancing. Pam Conley said that in a way Rebecca has the best of both worlds, because she lives with both her biological dad and the family that raised her.

The Buena Vista families have been protective of Rebecca from the start, and in keeping with that, Conley declined a request for an interview at her home.

Despite this, Conley said the media attention on her family hasn't really bothered her. She had too much to cope with to pay the media furor much attention after the switch was revealed, she said.

"To me it was like we were given a part of Kevin and Whitney back when we found Callie," she said.

By contrast, Johnson not only welcomed an interview but she also let Callie choose whether she wished to be interviewed, then put her on the phone.

Callie participates in gymnastics, prefers math over her other subjects and enjoys hanging out with friends at the mall. She said that though she's not visiting Buena Vista as often as she once did, she doesn't intend to stop.

"I still want to keep that little connection," she said. "I don't want to completely lose it."

Johnson has had other tragedies in her life. One of her sons, Frankie, committed suicide five years ago at age 15.

She's raising Callie and her younger son, 17-year-old Cody Leavell, and working as a zoning code enforcer in Manassas. She also has a grown son and a 27-year-old foster daughter. Later this summer, Johnson plans to get married for the third time.

Johnson's children consider both Callie and Rebecca to be their sisters, she said. "Blood doesn't mean anything to this family."

Though Conley and Johnson clearly don't see eye to eye on many things, both agree on one point: They're convinced that someone at the hospital knew about the switch when it happened and kept it quiet.

Johnson encouraged Callie to give her show-and-tell presentation to her classmates.

When Callie came home wondering what to do about the rumors, "I just said, 'Tell 'em. There's nothing to be ashamed of. You didn't do anything wrong. I didn't do anything wrong. The hospital did it.' "

News researcher Belinda Harris contributed to this report.