It took scientists five months to confirm what Willie Mae Ruffin knew in an instant: The man known as Henry Miller is really her son Kevin, who was kidnapped 18 years ago.
"We knew all the time," Ruffin said. "But now everybody knows that he's my child."Ruffin's son now goes by his childhood name, Kevin Portis. He was reunited with his mother in December, and both say they knew at first sight they were family.
But police waited for DNA tests before announcing Wednesday that Portis, 22, is the son of Ruffin and Kenneth Portis, who are separated. Now a kidnapping case is being prepared against Mamie Singleton, who raised Portis about 50 miles away from his mother in Mead Valley.
To celebrate the test results, Portis got two words tattooed across the left side of his chest: "Willie Mae."
"It keeps her close to my heart," Portis said. He plans to add his father's name soon.
Ruffin said Portis tells her about his life as the two sit up late at night in her house in Hawthorne outside Los Angeles, where he now lives.
"He gets depressed now and then thinking about how he was raised," Ruffin said.
Portis was kidnapped from a park near his home in Inglewood, which is next to Hawthorne, on May 26, 1976.
He had doubts throughout his childhood about his relationship to Singleton. When he wanted a driver's license, Singleton couldn't provide him with a birth certificate and state officials told him he didn't exist.
But he knew nothing of his real family until Singleton's granddaughter, Myisha Alvarez, called a missing children hot line. Late last year, investigators sent her a picture of a 5-year-old Portis.
"It looked just like him, the way he looks now," Alvarez said.
When confronted by investigators, Singleton said the child was given to her in 1976, said a police source who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Alvarez, 18, said Singleton took the child and told her estranged boyfriend that it was his in order to persuade him to live with her.
"She kept saying she had a son by him, and he finally pressured her to come up with the son," said Alvarez, who now lives in Oakland.
"I'm just glad he has found a family," she said. "I just wish I could have done something a lot sooner."
Singleton refused to discuss the accusations against her, instead hurling a string of obscenities at a reporter from the door of her ramshackle house in dusty, rural Mead Valley. Between epithets, she said the investigation of the case had been closed.
But police plan to ask the district attorney's office within a week to prosecute Singleton for kidnapping and child endangerment. Portis and Alvarez both say he was beaten.
"She probably thinks because the time has gone by, she's cleared," said Capt. Jack Frazier of the Inglewood Police Department. "But that's certainly not the case."