Heir to a Scandal

"It was a blank trail," Currey says. "He cleaned out all the stores and took all the money. Everyone in the family was left holding the bag." Currey says law enforcement officials tried to locate Robert Gifford after the family filed a missing persons report but had no success.

Within a few weeks of Robert Gifford's disappearance, Andrew Gifford and his mother, Barbara, were forced to apply for welfare and food stamps, because not only had Robert Gifford robbed the company of funds, he'd also taken the contents of the family bank accounts and the family car. The family's stately home in Kensington was in danger of being auctioned off to pay Robert Gifford's creditors ("I remember the day the sheriff came to the house and we hid behind the curtains," Gifford says), but Currey was able to pay the liens on it, so Gifford and his mother were allowed to remain. Over the years, the home deteriorated around them, becoming what Gifford calls "the House of Usher." "The gutters would fall down and shatter the bay windows," he says. "The floors were rotted in the basement. . . . We were pariahs in the neighborhood."

For Gifford, more crushing than the financial ruin was the shattering of his family. His mother, who had met Robert Gifford while working as a waitress at the original Gifford's store, suffered from alcohol and drug problems, as well as mental illness. "Dad leaving ruined Mom," he says. "She was always nuts, but this put her over the edge." She believed the birds outside their house talked to her, he says. One, she insisted, was Jesus. Stunned by the loss of his father, his mother's sanity, any sense of financial stability and the family business he'd been raised to assume was his to inherit, Gifford turned to books. He read science fiction and fantasy novels voraciously, grateful for the escape they offered.

Months after Robert Gifford disappeared, a bankruptcy judge ruled that the company's assets should be liquidated, and on April 26, 1985, as the Baileys Crossroads store sold off the last of its ice cream and homemade sauces, customers flocked there to get a final taste and recall their relationship with what had become, in nearly 50 years, a local tradition. One woman said Gifford's was the first place her husband brought her after they were married. "I remember days when you had to fight to get in here," she told a Post reporter.

Andrew Gifford is the last of the original ice cream Giffords. His mother died in 1999 in a car crash. His father, Robert, resurfaced after his mother's death -- not to apologize, make amends or even explain his absence, but to file suit against Andrew for the $20,000 he'd received from his mother's estate. (A judge threw out the case.) At that time, Andrew learned that his father had been living in Atlanta for the 15 years since his disappearance. After Robert died in January 2007, Andrew went to his Atlanta home in search of answers. "There has always been this idea of trying to find the Gifford millions buried in the back yard," he says. "I took that house apart, piece by piece, looking for clues to his life and clues to the money, and there was nothing."

As part of the liquidation back in 1985, the Gifford's name and logo were sold, allowing for a succession of ice cream stores to open under the Gifford's name in the past 20 years. The current Gifford's incarnation has six locations in the Washington area, none of which Gifford can bring himself to patronize. "It's a combination of thinking of all that could have been, and also thinking, 'Gosh, that's my name they're using,' " he says. "There's a resentment and loss that my dad ruined it for no particular reason. I was very stunned. Still am."

AFTER LEAVING DOWNTOWN SILVER SPRING THAT DAY, Gifford drives out to his old house, a five-bedroom, four-and-a-half bath, white brick home on a quiet, tree-lined street in Kensington. "Well, the house looks good," Gifford says. "I guess it recovered from us." Just a few blocks away is Kensington Frederick Avenue Park, where, on a summer night in 1995, when he was 21, Gifford argued with a friend over a girl both wanted to date. While the girl rocked back and forth on the swings, the argument escalated until the friend rushed Gifford, head-butting him. The blow pushed Gifford's front upper teeth back into the roof of his mouth, shattering the palate.

Months later, long after his jaw and mouth had healed, Gifford was sitting in a classroom at Davis & Elkins College in West Virginia, where he was putting himself through school, when he suddenly felt a jolt radiating through the right side of his face. It was pain like nothing he'd ever experienced, and it was made worse by the fact that he immediately assumed it was a lingering effect of the fight over a girl he didn't even care about anymore. For two weeks, he missed classes while he writhed in bed. Then, one day, the pain left as suddenly as it had come on -- until, a few months later, it returned.

For the next five years, as he graduated from college with a degree in history, worked at the Audubon Society and traveled throughout the United States and England, Gifford experienced what he came to call pain attacks. "I'd be fine and be able to eat and talk, and then I would say a word that would trigger it, and I would feel an electric current in my right cheek," he says. "I kept going back to the dentist and orthodontist, and they couldn't find anything wrong. I went through 10 doctors in the 1990s. One put me on nasal spray. One put me on antibiotics. One did a root canal. From a couple of them, I got, 'Maybe it's in your head.' " As the years passed, the pain intensified. "It would come and sometimes be extraordinary and knock me out for weeks, and then it would drift away. I'd be bedridden -- I couldn't eat or sleep or talk. My grandfather had to nurse me."

Then, in the winter of 2000, the pattern changed: The pain came and never went away. Gifford couldn't put his head under the water when he showered. Brushing his teeth and shaving -- even blinking -- exacerbated the pain. Anything touching his cheek, even a breeze, sent shocks through the right side of his face. "The rush of wind in the subway tunnels really did a number on me," he says. "But, then, so did the motion of the subway. There were many days I'd have to get off at each stop on the way to work, just to recover for a bit."

When he went to restaurants, he rarely ordered anything; he could barely choke down protein shakes and soups at home. If he turned on his right side while sleeping, he cried out. He withdrew from friends and potential girlfriends because he could barely converse -- and any physical romantic contact was impossible. At times he lived with roommates, at times with his grandparents. He didn't think about the future or about creating a satisfying career. He was thankful just to be employed at APA, where his boss was sympathetic to his condition.

Finally, in 2003, eight years after Gifford first experienced the terrible pain in the right side of his face, he visited a neurologist who gave his suffering a name: trigeminal neuralgia, a disorder that causes the trigeminal nerve, which runs from the brain to the face, to fire hyperactively, sometimes due to compression by an artery. "It is the most painful condition," says acclaimed neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who has treated trigeminal patients at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore since he was a third-year resident 26 years ago. "It's like a lightning bolt. There is not another pain I can think of that would compare with it." Because the condition is rare (Carson says it affects about one in every 5,000 to 10,000 people), many medical professionals don't recognize it, leaving people to suffer, as Gifford did, for years without treatment. "They are all severe cases," says Carson, who is head of pediatric neurosurgery at Hopkins and treats trigeminal patients because he is so passionate about relieving them of their pain. "It totally takes over their lives. Everything they do is in reference to this disease."