The story behind "Changeling"

The Los Angeles Times recently had an interesting story about the new Clint Eastwood film "Changeling," which tells the true story of an infamous case involving a missing child and the corruption within the Los Angeles police department.

Christine Collins was a single mother of a 9-year-old son, Walter, who went missing on March 10, 1928. Five months after his disappearance, police found Walter and returned him to his mother, except there was a problem. Christine Collins insisted the child was not her son. She fought a long battle against the police department and endured a brief stay in an insane asylum in her fight to find her child.

Screenwriter and journalist J. Michael Straczynski made extensive use of newspapers and court records from the period to reconstruct Christine's story. The Daily Mirror blog has a post showing one of the newspaper clippings about the case.