They thought their father abandoned them. A chance encounter set them on a much darker path

Mike Carroll at his home on Long Island. He spent years searching for his father, George (top left) only to make a grim discovery (right) - (HBO)

Long Island grandmother Dorothy “Dotty” Carroll was on her deathbed in 1998 when her second-youngest child, Mike, made a last-ditch attempt to find out what had happened to his father.

Dotty, 64, had been telling the family since the 1960s that George Carroll, a Korean War veteran, had gone out for cigarettes one day and never returned. She’d tell his four children, for years: “Don’t even think about him. He wasn’t a good guy.”