(CNN) — Three-year-old Michelle “Shelley” Newton poses for the camera in a sailor’s outfit, smiling wide, showing the gap between her two front baby teeth in an undated missing persons flyer from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office.

“Michelle was taken by her Mother,” it reads.

Now, Michelle, 46, is on a path to healing. Her mother is facing one charge.

The toddler’s vanishing took place in spring 1983, after her mother Debra Newton claimed she was “relocating to Georgia” from Louisville, Kentucky, “to begin a new job and prepare a new home for the family,” according to a Monday news release from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office.

CNN affiliate WLKY spoke to Joseph Newton, Debra’s husband and Michelle’s father, in 1986 after three years of searching for his daughter. He said th

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