A BABY girl who was cut from her mother’s womb by another woman who passed the child off as her own has been found alive and taken into safe keeping by the authorities in New Hampshire.
The baby, whose mother had intended to call her Sheila Marie, was described as in “pretty good health” after she was found at a homeless people’s shelter in Plymouth. Staff at the shelter had become suspicious of the woman claiming to be the mother and called the police.
The real mother, Darlene Haynes (23), was found murdered in her home in Plymouth on Monday. Her body, which had been wrapped in bedding and dumped in a cupboard, was found by her landlord, who had been investigating a “horrifying smell” in her apartment.
It was not until the following day that an autopsy revealed that Haynes’s eight-month foetus was missing. She had head injuries, although the precise cause of death will not be known until toxicology tests reveal whether she had been drugged.
Julie Corey (35), from Worcester, Massachusetts, was arrested and charged with being a fugitive from justice.
She is likely to face homicide and kidnapping charges. A man who was with Corey was questioned by police and later released.
A worker at the Pemi-Bridge House shelter told the New Hampshire Union Leader that Corey had said the baby was six days old and that she was the mother. The worker said: “I knew something was funny.” Later, when she heard news about Haynes’s murder and the removal of her foetus, “something went up in the back of my neck”.
The worker said Corey’s behaviour had aroused suspicion. “She had a lot of post-traumatic stress and was obviously not a well woman. She said a child had been taken from her before, and it’s not going to happen again.”
Haynes’s baby was to be her fourth child. Her two eldest children, aged three and five, are being brought up by her grandmother and the third, aged 18 months, is in state custody after the murder.
Haynes was unemployed and had learning difficulties, according to neighbours who talked to local Worcester paper the Telegram. “She was a little helpless,” one acquaintance said.
Her murder is the latest in a long line of foetus abduction cases, including several in which the baby survived.
In December 2004, Lisa Montgomery from Kansas killed a woman she had met through a dog-breeding website and cut the baby from her womb, pretending the child was her own. Montgomery has been sentenced to death.
Michelle Bica killed her neighbour in Ohio and cut her baby out in September 2000. Bica killed herself as the FBI arrived at her door; the baby was found unharmed in a cot upstairs.
Similar murder/abductions happened in California in 1998 and Illinois in 1995, with the babies surviving in both cases.
The National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children has studied child abductions and found that nine of the 247 infants taken from their mothers between 1983 and 2006 had been forcibly removed as foetuses by Caesarean section. In these cases eight of the mothers and three of the foetuses died. Other studies into foetal abductions show that the attacks are often carefully planned.
The offenders frequently go to sophisticated lengths to pretend to be pregnant, setting up nurseries and showing friends fake sonograms of their non-existent foetuses. Many also take trouble to learn about the pregnant women they have identified as their victims, befriending them before carrying out the attack. – (Guardian service)