Fetal abduction refers to the rare crime of child abduction by kidnapping of an at term pregnant woman and extraction of her fetus through a cesarean section. Dr. Michael H. Stone and Dr. Gary Brucato have alternatively referred to this crime as "fetus-snatching" or "fetus abduction."Michael H. Stone & Gary Brucato. The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2019). Homicide expert Vernon J. Geberth has used the term "fetal kidnapping." In the small number of reported cases, a few pregnant victims and about half of their fetuses survived the assault and non-medically performed cesarean.
Fetal abduction does not refer to medically induced labor or obstetrical extraction. The definition of the subject does not include compulsory cesarean sections for medical reasons nor child removal from parents for court-approved child protection. However, the "Children of the Disappeared" (desaparecidos) in the Argentine Dirty War are an example of criminal fetal abduction in state institutions as detailed by testimonies on cesarean delivery on desaparecidas and child adoption in a military hospital. Historical cases of cesarean extraction for fetal murder (not for child adoption) fall outside the subject definition.
Fetal abductions typically start with the lie that the perpetrator is pregnant and often coincide with a fear of losing a romantic partner. Then the perpetrator murders a pregnant woman to claim the fetus as her own (as a stillborn baby or, if the fetus survives, as a newborn child).
Abductor profile Fetal abduction is mostly perpetrated by women, usually after organized planning. The abductor may befriend the pregnant victim. In some cases, the abductor impersonates a pregnant woman and later a puerperal mother, using weight gain and a prosthesis to fake a pregnancy and cutting of the reproductive organs to replicate injuries gained during birth. Some abductors then take the neonate to a hospital. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s spokesperson, Cathy Nahirny, stated in 2007, “Many times the abductor fakes a pregnancy and when it is time to deliver the baby, must abduct someone else's child”. Criminal motives include delusions of fulfilling a partner relationship, child-bearing and childbirth.
Statistics The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children recorded 18 cases of fetal abductions in the United States between 1983 and 2015, which represented 6% of the 302 recorded cases of infant abduction.
List of reported cases and attempts
This list distinguishes actual abductions from attempted abductions. An attempt can involve severe harm inflicted on both the mother and fetus, but it does not result in the mother's murder or the extraction of the fetus.
Fetal abduction cases 1987 In Albuquerque, New Mexico, 23-year-old Cindy Ray was eight months pregnant when she was kidnapped at Kirtland Air Force Base outside a prenatal clinic. Darci Pierce was nineteen years old when she strangled the pregnant woman to death. She used her car keys to open Ray's womb. The unharmed fetus, Amelia Monik survived. Pierce was found to be mentally ill, but guilty of first degree murder, first degree kidnapping, and child abuse. She was sentenced to life in prison plus 19.5 years, to run concurrently. Pierce became eligible for parole in 2017, but her parole requests have all been denied.
1995 In Addison, Illinois, 28-year-old Debra Evans was murdered in her apartment. Jacqueline Annette Williams (28), her boyfriend Fedell Caffey (22) and her cousin Laverne Ward (24) went into Evans' home and shot her in the head. Ward was the ex-boyfriend of Evans. She had three children and was pregnant with a fourth. The murderers then proceeded to cut through her womb with scissors and remove the fetus. During the break-in, Evans' 10-year-old Samantha was stabbed in her sleep while her other two children, 7-year-old Joshua and 2-year-old Jordan, were kidnapped along with the fetus. Joshua was found dead in an alleyway the next day. The three murderers were caught with the surviving boy and the fetus, later named Elijah. Williams, Caffey, and Ward were all convicted of three counts of first degree murder. Williams and Caffey were sentenced to death, while Ward was sentenced to life in prison without parole after jurors voted against a death sentence in his case. Williams and Caffey had their sentences commuted to life without parole after Governor George Ryan commuted the death sentences of everyone on death row in Illinois in 2003.
1996 In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, seventeen-year-old Carethia Curry was murdered by her friend, 29-year-old Felicia Scott. Curry was abducted by her friend on a night out. She was found three months later, stuffed in a garbage can at the bottom of a fifty-foot ravine with several gunshot wounds to the head, her torso sliced open. The baby girl whom Curry was carrying survived. Scott was found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole after jurors unanimously voted against a death sentence. Scott's boyfriend, Frederick Polion, was acquitted of capital murder, but convicted of first degree kidnapping and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Scott's sister, Angela Burton, was convicted of hindering prosecution in the first degree for trying to cover up the murder and was sentenced to 17 years in prison.
1998 In Fresno, California, Margarita Flores was eight months pregnant when she received a phone call from Josephina Saldana, who offered her gifts of baby furniture and a free one-year supply of diapers. Flores went to a warehouse to collect them and was murdered. Saldana was caught at a hospital the day afterwards carrying a dead fetus that she claimed to have just given birth to. Saldana hanged herself in prison in 2001, three days after her conviction for kidnapping and murdering Flores and her unborn child and three weeks before her sentencing to life imprisonment.
2000 In Ravenna, Ohio, Theresa Andrews was twenty-three years old and pregnant when she ran into Michelle Bica. Bica was thirty-nine-years-old and was pretending to be pregnant at the time, and the two exchanged addresses. Then Bica started stalking Andrews. On September 27, 2000, Bica invited the woman to her home, then killed her, extracted the fetus she was carrying, and buried the woman in her garage. The baby survived, and Bica claimed he was her son. When Bica was being investigated by the FBI, she became fearful of punishment for her crime and shot herself.
2003 In Okemah, Oklahoma, Carolyn Simpson was twenty-one years old and six months pregnant when she was shot and killed. She worked at a casino, where her murderer, Effie Goodson, age thirty-seven, was a regular customer. Goodson offered to give Simpson a ride home, and Simpson was later found in a ditch two miles away from her abductor. The baby, removed from the mother's womb three months premature, did not survive. When Goodson brought the fetus to the hospital, the child was pronounced dead, and it was discovered that she was not the mother. She was initially found incompetent to stand trial. Three years later, Goodson agreed to drop her insanity plea, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to life in prison without parole, in exchange for prosecutors not seeking a death sentence.
2004 In Girardot (Cundinamarca), Colombia in April 2004, a case was reported in which both the mother and child survived. Aseneth Piedrahita extracted the baby boy of Sol Angela Cartagena Bernal, 8 months pregnant. Reportedly the perpetrator had limited, but some medical knowledge. Piedrahita had offered Cartagena food and baby clothes before drugging her with a sleeping pill mixed into her coffee. In Skidmore, Missouri, Bobbie Jo Stinnett died of strangulation at the age of twenty-three at the hands of thirty-seven-year-old Lisa M. Montgomery. The two had been in contact previously; they were both Rat Terrier breeders in a dog show circuit. Montgomery had e-mailed the victim, telling her that she wished to purchase one of her dogs. Montgomery faked a pregnancy, and on December 16, she drove from her Kansas home to Skidmore, Missouri. After strangling Stinnett to death, Montgomery cut open her abdomen and took her one-month-premature daughter. An hour later, the victim's mother found her body, and less than twenty-four hours later Victoria Jo Stinnett, the victim's stolen fetus, was found healthy in Melvern, Kansas. Since the baby was taken over state lines, the crime became a federal case and Lisa Montgomery was tried under the Federal Kidnapping Act. A jury subsequently found Montgomery guilty and sentenced her to death. Montgomery, 52, was executed by lethal injection on January 13, 2021, at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.
2006 In East St. Louis, Illinois on September 15, 2006, the 23-year-old Jimella Tunstall, seven months pregnant, was murdered by her childhood friend, 24-year-old Tiffany Hall. She was beaten unconscious with a table leg and had her unborn baby cut from her abdomen with a pair of scissors. Neither survived the attack. Tunstall's body was left in a vacant lot. Hall also drowned Tunstall's three children, ages one, two, and seven, and left their bodies in the washer and dryer machines in the family's apartment. To avoid a possible death sentence, Hall pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison without parole in June 2008.
2008 In Kennewick, Washington, Araceli Camacho Gomez, age twenty-seven, was stabbed to death by twenty-three-year-old Phiengchai Sisouvanh Synhavong. Gomez's hands and feet were bound with yarn throughout the attack, and her fetus was cut from her womb with a box cutter. The child survived the attack. Synhavong called the police for help and attempted to pass the fetus off as her own. It quickly became apparent to authorities that she was lying and guilty of the crime. Synhavong was found guilty of aggravated first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. The prosecutor declined to seek a death sentence due to her lack of a criminal history and the wishes of the victim's family. In Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, pregnant eighteen-year-old Kia Johnson was murdered during a fetal abduction by 38-year-old Andrea Curry-Demus, who had previously spent eight years in prison for stabbing another expectant mother to obtain her unborn baby. Curry-Demus had also seized a child from a hospital. Johnson's body was later found in Curry-Demus' apartment. The baby survived.
2009 In Worcester, Massachusetts, Julie A. Corey, 35, murdered Darlene Haynes, 23, and extracted her fetus. The baby, Sheila Marie survived. Corey was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole in February 2014.