Sobering true story behind haunting image with four young children 'for sale'

Warning: This article contains discussion of child abuse which some readers may find distressing.

The true story behind a famous historical photo which depicts four children 'for sale' is no less sobering than it would sound.

The image has a woman named Lucille Chalifoux covering her face as she turns away from the camera while beneath her sit four children, beside them is a large sign which declares: "4 CHILDREN FOR SALE, INQUIRE WITHIN."

First appearing in the Indiana newspaper the Vidette-Messenger in 1948, the image soon spread around and became infamous.

Sadly, the true story behind this photo is that all four children were indeed sold, and there's even a fifth child you can't see because he was in his mother's womb at the time this picture was taken was also sold off.

The siblings scattered among various different homes depending on buyers they each went through devastating ordeals.

These four children were sold, as was the as yet unborn child in his mother's womb (Bettmann/CORBIS)

Of the four children sitting together, the little girl on the top right is called RaeAnn, and decades later she would tell the Times of Northwest Indiana she was sold for $2 so her mother had money to spend on bingo and because the man she was dating didn't want the children.

The couple that bought the little girl also took her brother Milton (sitting bottom left) with them because he was crying at the time.

They changed the children's names to Beverly and Kenneth Zoeteman, and were abusive to the children as RaeAnn remembered 'they used to chain us up all the time'.

When she was a teenager, she was kidnapped and raped, got pregnant and had her baby taken from her and put up for adoption, so she left home at the age of 17.

She managed to meet her birth mother when she was 21, but said she found no remorse, regret or love from the woman who sold her.

The four children Lana (top left), RaeAnn (top right), Milton (bottom left) and Sue Ellen (bottom right) were sold off, along with another sibling (Bettmann/CORBIS)

Milton said on the first day with the people who bought them, he had been tied up and beaten by his adopted father, who expected him to work like a slave on his farm, while his adoptive mother told him 'from now on, you’re going to be my little boy'.

However, the beatings continued and he was sent to live with other relatives before being placed in the care of a different family.

Following an incident where he pushed a police officer into a tree he was told by a judge he could either go to a mental hospital or a reformatory, choosing the hospital where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

He would later move to Chicago and get married, and in 1970 he did spend a month living with his birth mother until she threw him out for getting into a fight with her second husband.

Milton said his birth mother 'never did love me' and that she never apologised for selling him.

Lucille Chalifoux was pregnant with another child, David, who she also gave up, many of them met her again and found she had no regrets about it (Bettmann/CORBIS)

The childhoods of the other two children sitting beside the sign offering them for sale were name Lana and Sue Ellen, but when their family tried to track them down they struggled to uncover details of their childhoods.

Lana died in 1998 of cancer before she was able to reunite with her siblings, with her son Timothy saying her adoption records were lost in a fire, while Sue Ellen was dying of lung disease when RaeAnn found her.

Sue Ellen grew up in Chicago and believed she had been adopted by a family named Johnson, and before she died said of her birth mother that she 'needs to be in hell burning'.

Lucille Chalifoux was pregnant with son David at the time the photo was taken and he too ended up with another family, a couple named Harry and Luella McDaniel who could not have children.

He remembered he 'had bed bug bites all over my body' when he was taken from his birth mother, and lived with his new family near where RaeAnn and Milton had been taken, David said he remembered finding his siblings tied up the the barn and would untie them.

He did meet his birth mother, who told him 'you look just like your father', and learned that she had four more children, all daughters, who she didn't sell.