Woman almost convicted for murder of an imaginary person
Strange but true story - and what it means for investigating cases of infanticide
This is a true story of a young woman who almost got herself convicted for murdering someone who never existed.
A.S. (her name is a matter of public record, but I’ve chosen not to use it since it doesn’t add anything to the story) was a young woman in Oregon. Her adoptive parents adopted or fostered a lot of children. A.S. had around 65 or 70 siblings – the exact number was murky, even to family members.
A.S. was a little troubled. She had some addictions issues. She felt she didn’t get much attention or recognition; with at least 65 siblings, this feeling was almost certainly true. In the fall of 2010, A.S.’s menstrual cycle was broken. She took a home pregnancy test. As the old saying went, she killed the rabbit.
Slang historical detour: from the late 1930s until 1970, a pregnancy screening test involved injecting urine from a possibly pregnant women into a rabbit. A few days later, the rabbit would be killed and dissected – if it had enlarged ovaries, it usually meant the woman providing the urine was pregnant (high levels of the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin, you see). “The rabbit died” became a colloquial way of saying the pregnancy test was positive, notwithstanding the fact that the rabbit always died.
Whatever A.S. might have felt about being pregnant, her large family was elated. A massive baby-shower was held. The baby-to-be was given the name “Lucias”. For the first time in her life, A.S. was the centre of attention.
Then A.S. got her period. She went to a medical clinic for another pregnancy test. This one came back negative. There was no baby on the way.
Distressed at the thought of returning the anonymity of being one child amongst over five dozen, A.S. made an ill-considered decision. She pretended to be pregnant. As time passed, she used padding to imitate a growing baby bump. It was a plan with an inescapable flaw. Pregnancies don’t last forever.
Nine months after the beginning of her putative pregnancy, A.S. came home without her baby bump. She told her mother and sisters that she delivered the baby at the local hospital, but it was stillborn. Two sisters went to the hospital to pick up the corpse of little Lucias so the child could be given a proper funeral. Needless to say, hospital staff were a little puzzled. A.S. had not been a patient in the hospital’s maternity ward. Nobody by the name of Lucias S. had been born that day. In fact, no baby of any name had made an entrance into this cold, cruel world that day. One thing led to another. The police were called. A.S. was brought in for questioning. Still unwilling to confess to deceiving her family about the pregnancy, she deceived police. A.S. worked at a local motel. She told police she had delivered the baby by herself in a motel room, wrapped it in a sheet, and thrown the baby in a garbage dumpster.
There was no sign of little Lucias. The garbage dumpster had been emptied. The local Sherriff’s department excavated the landfill looking for the body. "You're talking about an infant who's probably about 6 to 10 pounds, which is normal birth weight I would think and brand new," the officer in charge of the search told the media. "It's been in the landfill since October 19th probably. The day after is when we figure the garbage was actually dumped out there and compacted and scooped around with these large machines. It's pretty unrealistic that the body will be found in any recognizable form…It's probably worse than the proverbial needle in a haystack." Police officers were told not to stop searching until they find the baby's remains. They dug up a 2-acre area to a depth of 10 to 15 feet before finally giving up. Nobody realized they had been looking for an imaginary baby.
A.S. was charged with murder. The consequences of her deceit didn’t really sink in until a court hearing when she heard the prosecutor saying he was considering seeking the death penalty. A.S. recanted her confession, explaining she had lied about the pregnancy. Nobody believed her denial.
The prosecutor abandoned a quest for the death penalty, declaring that 30-years in prison was more appropriate. At the trial, a parade of witnesses testified that A.S. had been pregnant. A.S.’s family members called for a conviction. "I can't ignore the fact that Lucias did not have a voice," said one sister, "and he needs someone to stand up for him." The video of A.S.’s confession was played. A.S.’s lawyer, a public defender working with limited resources, put A.S. on the stand to tell her strange story of faking her pregnancy and lying during her confession. Eleven members of the jury voted to convict; one held out for an acquittal. The one person to believe A.S.’s courtroom testimony was a hospital maintenance worker. He was a stubborn man. Eventually, a mistrial was declared because of the deadlock.
At the second trial, A.S.’s defence lawyers took the case more seriously. Cross examination of the prosecution witnesses was more thorough - and much more revealing. The doctor who examined A.S. at the time of her arrest testified that A.S. had none of the tell-tale signs of a pregnancy or delivery. The police forensics team testified that that no blood or other evidence of a birth had been found in any of the motel rooms. The motel manager testified no sheets had gone missing. Then defence witnesses were called. A staff person from the medical clinic confirmed the negative pregnancy test. An expert witness told the jury about the psychology of strange lies and false confessions. With that preparation, A.S. took the stand. This time, she not only told her story of deceit and false confession. She demonstrated how she had fabricated her baby bump.
With the benefit of this more diligent work by the defence team, the jury quickly reached a unanimous decision to acquit A.S.
Legally, that was that. Case closed. Media about the case does not tell us how those initially deceived by A.S. were feeling – the family members who genuinely thought there was a baby on the way or the police who had dug through tons of stinking, rotten garbage looking for a figment of imagination. One guesses some hard feelings remained. As for A.S., I don’t know what happened to her. It’s been a decade since this troubled young woman almost lied her way into a 30-year prison sentence. One can only hope that she’s gotten her life together.
Babies and Vulnerability to Homicide
The police and prosecutor dealing with A.S. can, in retrospect, be criticized for not taking a hard look at the evidence they had (or didn’t have) after A.S. recanted her confession. They should, however, be commended for their effort and diligence in taking the report of a missing baby very seriously. It is not always thus. What’s more, the authorities sometimes never even learn that a murdered child has gone missing.
For a long time, a killer could get away with murder by successfully getting rid of the body of their victim. This has been changing in recent decades. Improved forensic techniques such as DNA testing combined with technologies such as the tracking capacity of cell phones have given police new tools to generate compelling evidence of murder.
As importantly, the bureaucratic documentation of our lives has made it possible for police to show that absence means death. It’s become difficult for an adult to disappear without a trace while still aslive – and almost impossible to do innocently or inadvertently. The one exception to this is for young children. If the parent or other care-giver murders a child and disposes the body, the child’s disappearance can remain invisible. Here’s a few examples:
In 1970, Wayne Clifford Roberts shook his 4-year-old step-daughter, Surrette Clark, to death in Arizona. Roberts buried the girl under a bridge and forced the rest of his family to move to Canada. Nine years later, Surrette’s skeleton was discovered, but nobody knew who she was. In 1994 a family member finally went to police. It was the first time the authorities knew Surrette had disappeared. Roberts was convicted of murder in 1996, but it was another 14 years before DNA tests identified the unknown skeleton as Surrette.
Also in 1970, Anita Vega drowned her three-year-old daughter, Anna Marie in the bathtub. When her husband got home from work, Vega ordered him to dispose the body. A nine-year-old sister witnessed the killing; other siblings were at school. When they got home, the children were told Anna Marie had died and the funeral was already over. By 1992, the terrified nine-year-old sister had grown up. She went to police and told the story of Anna Marie’s unnoticed death. Vega initially denied the girl ever existed, but confessed when police obtained Anna Marie’s birth certificate. Besides her sister’s memory, the birth certificate was the only documentation of the girl’s life.
Sometimes children can be murdered without notice right under the noses of child protection authorities. In 2000, the Florida Department of Children and Families placed four-year-old Rilya Wilson in the care of a foster parent, Geralyn Graham. Social workers hadn’t noticed that Graham had an extensive criminal record for various fraud offences and had used 42 aliases over the previous two decades. Court records from earlier lawsuits showed that she had been diagnosed with dementia and suffered from hallucinations. In any event, Graham beat little Rilya to death. Fifteen months passed before anyone noticed the girl was missing. The social worker responsible for monitoring Rilya’s well-being was holding down two full-time jobs and fabricated her contact reports. In addition to murder, Graham was convicted of fraud for collecting payments for caring for the girl after she had been murdered.
I could go on with these depressing stories (I’ve got documentation for over 70 of them on my computer hard drive), but I’ll spare you. The chilling reality is that young children are disposable socially as well as physically. Their existence is not yet embedded in most bureaucratic record systems. They pay no income tax and have no bank accounts. If they are too young to be in school, there are no teachers to notice they are gone. If they are home-schooled, this educational invisibility can continue for many more years. Even if the child is in school, a note to the principle saying the family has moved is enough to prevent inquiry. In most cases, a child is only visible to a relatively small and insular group of family and friends. The children most at risk of being killed are usually from the most socially isolated, transient and dysfunctional families. When they are killed, they can disappear without any outside adult noticing or caring. The person legally entrusted with the power to report the child missing is often the person who killed them. When a child is murdered, their fate can remain unknown with chilling ease.
I’ve looked at over 500 successful “no-body” homicide (where the killer hid or destroyed the body of the victim) prosecutions in Canada and the United States. Intimate partners (almost always female) are the most common victims in this type of homicide prosecution. Young children come next. But here is the thing – when a stranger abducts, murders and disposes a small child, there is almost always an immediate search and investigation. When a parent or other caregiver kills and disposes the child, often nobody notices for a long period of time. Most “no-body” prosecutions for the murder of small children occur years or decades after the crime – sometimes only happening when a sibling grows old enough to tell authorities about some really, really bad childhood memories. It raises a chilling question – how many children have been murdered without even being recorded as a missing persons case? As it stands now, it is a question that is impossible to answer.
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