Until then Daniel had known only that his dad was one Al Kinkade, who had briefly worked for the security company where Weaver answered phones. She and Al had carried on a three-month affair, and she had never told him that she was pregnant. Nor did she share any details with Daniel or with her older son by another man. When the boys were 9 and 15, Weaver died of colon cancer. "I felt like I'd been left alone," says Daniel, now a heavy-equipment operator in Vista, Calif., and married to homemaker Kellie, 42. After a stint with an aunt, he wound up in a boys' home, and his half brother moved in with his paternal grandparents. Seven years ago Daniel began searching for his father, to no avail.
Meanwhile, Al was having hard times of his own. A heroin addict, he flunked out of rehab nine times and spent a stretch living under a highway overpass. But he has been clean since April 1998—three months before Daniel's daughter Sierra was born. "Maybe I was getting ready to be a grandpa without even knowing it," he says. He eventually found steady work doing telephone fund-raising for a California police charity.
Father and son met six days after the fateful call. "There was a flat-out bear hug," recalls Al, who looks forward to going to wrestling matches with Daniel. "It still takes me a second when he calls me Dad. I hear it, and I start to cry."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
