He popped the tape into the old VCR, starting and ending something that began almost two decades prior...

March 1992, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco:

The thing about staff at say a group home or an orphanage is that like parents, they can't be everywhere at once. Unlike parents however, they tend to have more children to watch, anywhere from six to twelve active kids, often with the behavioral problems that tend to come with being a part of the system running about, rather than one or two, or maybe three. Fortunately, there are usually more staff than parents hanging around during an outing. With three or four of them along, they tend to manage to keep an eye on the entire group with few incidents. That doesn't mean that they are infallible however, and sometimes a child or two manages to slip off during an outing.

On this particular day, a group from Edgewood, more specifically Diamond cottage, were on an outing to the playground at Golden Gate Park. There were three rather vigilant staff with them, but when it came to the girl with a fondness for swings, their watch was slightly relaxed, as she rarely caused trouble, and usually wasn't the sort to run off. Their watch on her was soon completely relaxed when a fight broke out between two of the boys while she sat quietly playing in the sand at the edge of the playground, and it was at that point that a predator took the opportunity to pick off a Likely-Not-To-Be-Missed-Too-Much bratling from the herd.

While this predator could be considered human, he was also the sort of being that John Winchester hunted. Unlike most of the human predators who frequent parks and snatch children, he had sold himself to something that required frequent sacrifices in order to obtain power. He often picked kids who looked to be wards of the state, as they were less likely to be missed, and nobody would make too much of a stink when they disappeared because there were no crying parents to stick in front of the news cameras, and they ran off all too often. The child who had been picked off from the group was to be the latest of these sacrifices.

The child whose disappearance had not yet been marked by the staff who had their hands full with breaking up the fight that had taken their attention, and who had been rendered incapable of calling for help was carried by her captor - who seemed to be one of the nice ordinary sort out for a day with his daughter who had grown tired and fallen asleep to passerby - to one of the unfortunately all too common isolated and hidden areas of the park where an altar had been set up for a purpose which normally wouldn't be discovered until it was far too late, by which point the child would be dead and the predator would have moved on to another large city. Unlike prior occurrences however, there was someone on the predator's tail, and that someone was John Winchester.

One of the reasons the predator who had stalked through the park had wanted power and had been willing to trade his soul and even his humanity to get it was that he was a coward. It had been because he was a coward that he had done what he had done, and gave a good man a nearly impossible choice. When John had reached the altar where the child was to be sacrificed, the man already had a weapon at hand, the clawed instrument with which the ritual was to be completed. Despite the fact that the ritual wasn't complete, the man swiped the weapon across the child's belly, ripping her open the instant he spotted John. It was then that he ran, leaving John with the choice between trying to help the obviously dying child who was bleeding out in front of him, or going after the monster who had pretty much just killed her in front of him, and preventing even more deaths.

"I've got him, go help the girl!" an armed man whose appearance practically screamed Hunter! who had raced into the bushes behind him yelled as he ran in the direction of the predator, ending John Winchester's moment of hesitation right as he had been about to spring into action and chase after the murdering bastard himself.

The girl who was rapidly bleeding out was still alive. In those days before cell phones had become anywhere near as common as they would be in the future, it would have taken too long to run for help and wait for an ambulance. Knowing that he had little time, John Winchester did his best to staunch the blood flow as he raced back to his car to drive the child to the nearest hospital.

Years later, when John had grown so used to having the girl around that he almost forgot that he didn't originally have three kids, he would never know how he'd managed to get away with what he'd done without getting arrested, and why nobody had associated the girl with the missing child who had finally ended up on the news a couple days after his adopted daughter had been admitted to the hospital when the staff who had brought her on the outing to the park couldn't find where she'd supposedly run off to, and searching police officers didn't turn up anything resembling the missing girl.

When he'd brought the girl to the hospital, he had told the suspicious doctors that she was his child. He'd hung around after dropping the girl into the arms of the doctors, because it would have been suspicious if he'd left after claiming that she was his, and he hadn't needed police on his tail for the attempted and possibly actual murder of a little girl. As he waited for the child to get out of surgery, he was stuck spinning a yarn to a pair of suspicious police officers, a yarn that would get him in deeper if they didn't buy it.

Fortunately for him, the girl he'd brought to the hospital had roughly the same hair and eye color as his own children, and Bobby Singer had pulled through for him when he'd faxed over some records that had been made from back-up copies of documents he'd left with Singer for safekeeping. According to the records that John was able to give to the hospital, Sam had a twin. Singer had apparently been watching re-runs of I Love Lucy when he'd made the convincing looking forgeries if the name he'd given the kid was anything to judge by.

Unfortunately for him, he hadn't been thinking when he'd raced into the hospital carrying a bleeding and dying child who'd nearly been eviscerated, and had inadvertently used his real name which was also on the documents that Bobby had sent over. With that little oversight, he couldn't simply slip away into the night, leaving the kid who would undoubtedly be identified at some point after his departure and be sent back to her group-home behind. If he did, he'd have the police on his ass for several real crimes to go with whatever they chose to dream up and charge him with. He could even end up losing Sam and Dean which was a far worse prospect to him than the possibility of serving prison time.

That was how John Winchester ended up on the road with three kids instead of two. As the Impala drove East as soon as Lucy was discharged from the hospital, a man stood on the sidewalk watching it go by, eating a candy bar as it passed.