After amnesia, falling in love all over again

By Angie Wagner

updated 9:19 p.m. ET Feb. 14, 2007

OLYMPIA, Wash. - Jeff Ingram hunches over the countertop and peers at the foreign words in the Betty Crocker cookbook.

One-and-a-half cups of egg whites.

He should know this. He shoots a puzzled glance to his girlfriend.

“I haven’t shown you yet how to separate an egg,” she says as she cracks the egg and gently demonstrates how to toss the egg between the two shells to separate it.

Jeff is 40, and this, in a way, is his first angel food cake.

He used to bake so much that he had a special cake platter to display his creations. But now he moves about the kitchen a bit unsure of where the ingredients are kept.

He and his girlfriend, Penny Hansen, brush by each other. They exchange flirtatious smiles, like a couple in the first bloom of romance.

To Jeff, she is as new in his life as angel food cake. But Penny knew Jeff in another life — before he went missing and wound up on a downtown Denver street with no memory.

“Dissociative fugue,” doctors called it, a rare form of amnesia caused by stress or trauma that can influence people to travel far away from their homes.

Jeff was found, but he had no idea who he was, much less who Penny was.

If they were going to stay together, they would have to get to know each other all over again. For Jeff, there was no past.

But what about the future?

Is it possible to find the same love twice in a lifetime?

Jeff Ingram and Penny Hansen were about to find out.

Love at 40
When Jeff and Penny met for the first time in 2005, the connection was instant. Jeff joked that he should just kiss Penny immediately and get it out of the way. They had talked on the phone every other night in the year since they connected on an Internet game site.

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Never mind that he lived in Canada, where he worked in a mill, and that she lived in Olympia, Wash., where she worked as a state transportation and policy analyst. The 988 miles were little hindrance, and finally Jeff moved to join her.

Relationships hadn’t worked out for either in the past. But now, at 40, they were in love.

She did not blanch when he told her he had once suffered amnesia in 1995 — that he had turned up in Seattle, nine months after disappearing from his home in Slave Lake, Alberta. Where had he been? How did he get there? He did not know, and he never regained memories of his life before he vanished.

It was just a medical condition, she thought, a small matter compared with all of Jeff’s fine qualities — his kind and gentle way, his sense of humility, his nurturing soul.

Last summer, Jeff proposed, and Penny accepted.

Then, on Sept. 6, 2006, Jeff said goodbye and walked out of their tidy green house. It was 7:30 a.m. and Penny was crying. She wouldn’t see him again for a month.

‘Alpha 74’
Jeff planned to drive to Canada to visit a dying friend in the hospital. He had been meticulous in his planning, lining up a job there and renewing his driver’s license.

“This isn’t a goodbye,” she told him. “If you miss me, I’ll be right here,” and she touched her heart.

But Jeff never called. He never answered his cell phone. He never made it to Canada.

Something horrible had happened, she was certain.

Penny didn’t know it, but Jeff did surface four days later.

Only it wasn’t Jeff — it was someone so confused he didn’t know who he was. He remembers picking himself off the street in downtown Denver, a place he had never been before, and somehow finding his way to a hospital.

He didn’t have a name, so a Denver Health hospital worker wrote “Alpha 74” on his chart.

Jeff underwent a battery of tests. He was hypnotized, given an IQ test, fingerprinted and had spinal fluid drawn. He was tested for drugs and scanned until it was determined he was the healthiest person in the hospital.

He was sent to live at a transitional housing facility. He spent time going to church and visiting with some Denver police officers he’d come to know; they suggested a plea on national television, and on Oct. 22, his face appeared on news stations all over the country.

“If anybody recognizes me, knows who I am, please let somebody know,” he said.

In that vast television audience, someone did recognize him: Penny’s brother. And though Jeff had shaved off his mustache and goatee and was wearing different glasses and a hat she had never seen, Penny knew him instantly.

Jeff was waiting in a room at the Denver police station when a detective walked in and tossed some pictures down in front of him.

“This is Penny,” the detective said, as Jeff stared at her picture.

Beautiful, he thought. Absolutely beautiful.

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