Tale of 4 Mothers: Adoption Fraud Ends Happily for 3

On Monday morning, as Sue Ellen Mitchell was going to jail, Ruthee Goldkorn was going about her life, a happy woman with a career, a husband and a new adopted daughter.

A year ago, these two women--the 25-year-old slumped in a courtroom chair in a blue jail smock, and the San Fernando Valley office manager with her long-awaited child--had been allies of a sort.

Back then, Mitchell held the key to the Goldkorns’ happiness: the unborn baby that the pregnant woman and her common-law husband, Ronald B. McElroy, had promised to allow Goldkorn and her husband to adopt.

At last, they thought, after five frustrating years of trying to adopt, their time--their baby--had come.

Other Offer Made

But the trouble was that Mitchell and McElroy had also promised the child to at least one other childless Southern California couple anxious for a baby, court records show. Within three weeks, the Mitchells, as they called themselves, had accepted nearly $5,000 in food, rent, cash and a yellow station wagon from the two couples, each unknown to the other.

The Mitchells, in an account provided by court records and the victims themselves, had even contacted a third childless Los Angeles couple who wanted to adopt. Then they vanished, leaving all three couples without the promised child.

Last month, Mitchell and McElroy pleaded no contest to three misdemeanor grand theft counts; two other counts of failing to follow through with an adoption after accepting money for expenses were dropped.

The couple were arrested in July, in Kingman, Ariz., as they asked police about getting travelers’ aid, unaware of a California warrant for their arrest.

Dominant Figure

McElroy--considered the dominant figure in the scheme by prosecutors--was sentenced to nearly three years in jail here and faces prison escape charges in Utah. Mitchell, who has been in jail since her arrest, was ordered Monday to serve nine months in jail and three years’ probation.

“It’s the preying upon (people seeking to adopt) that makes this such a sad story,” said Deputy City Atty. Sue Frauens, who prosecuted the pair.

There are thousands of hopeful adoptive couples who are equally vulnerable, she said.

Now, the three couples have all adopted babies privately. And in an odd twist, the Mitchell-McElroy couple no longer have their children. Their two sons--Christopher, now nearly 3, and the boy Sue Ellen Mitchell was pregnant with when she met the California couples--have been adopted by New York families.

And she apparently will have no other children. In court Monday, in a barely audible voice, Mitchell assured Municipal Judge Veronica Simmons McBeth, “Yes, I had my tubes tied.”

But for the couples who met the Mitchells, paid their bills, bought them food and rented a place for them to stay--all for the sake of the unborn baby they thought would be theirs--the scars remain, and they want to warn other adoptive couples of the risks.

“In one sense we are helpless,” said Goldkorn, 31, who, after coming very close to adopting at least once before, explained, “You feel as if you’ve given birth and the baby died. That’s exactly the way it feels.”

‘Become Blubbering Idiots’

“The dynamic of adoptive couples is fascinating: We can all be duped,” Goldkorn explained. “The problem is it’s not just the fact that people like him (McElroy) exist and know people like us exist, it’s the fact that we highly intelligent, highly educated adults become blubbering idiots” in their anxiety to adopt.

“You get horribly vulnerable,” said the San Diego County woman Mitchell first offered her unborn child to.

The woman and her husband, who did not want to be identified, had been trying for more than five years to adopt. Public agencies told them they were too old, and the wait for infants was too long.

With the Mitchells, “I was trying to be sensible, but you don’t know. We were very willing to help: medicine, money to get them started again. But we were not in the baby-buying business.”

Laws governing independent adoption permits couples to pay medical and incidental expenses for the woman whose child they want to adopt. To find such a woman, the couples ran newspaper ads in states that permit them, ads like, “California couple with much love wish to adopt a baby. Expenses paid. Totally legal. Call collect.”

The Mitchells called the San Diego woman from Nebraska in October, 1985. They paid the Mitchells’ way to Los Angeles, put them up in a motel, sent them to their own doctor and lawyer.

Once they arrived, the Mitchells called the Goldkorns about their ad, which had ran the same day in the same Nebraska newspaper.

The Mitchells met Goldkorn at a Los Angeles restaurant, the records show, on the same day they talked with the San Diego couple on the phone. On another day, according to records, the San Diego woman picked them up in front of the Van Nuys apartment that the Goldkorns had just rented for the Mitchells.

At a restaurant that day, said the San Diego woman, McElroy had put her hand on Mitchell’s belly.

“Feel this,” he told her. “You’re feeling you’re child for the first time.”

‘Gift of Gab’

“He had the gift of gab, this guy,” sighed the woman. “I could look back and say, ‘Don’t do it,’ but at the time, how do you know?”

The scheme finally fell apart when Goldkorn, with a “sixth sense,” went to the Van Nuys apartment one Saturday morning and found the Mitchells had left the night before, driving the $600 car the San Diego couple had bought for them and for which Goldkorn paid another $600 in repairs.

In the apartment, Goldkorn found dirty dishes and a list of things to do--among them “Call Cindy,” the pseudonym the San Diego woman gave the Mitchells.

The Goldkorns had gotten a tear sheet of the ad they had put in the Nebraska paper. There was another ad from a California woman named Cindy, and Goldkorn made the connection.

“She called me and asked, have you heard from a couple named Mitchell?” recalled the San Diego woman. “We both went, ‘Oh no.’ ”

And when they learned from an attorney that the Mitchells had also called a third couple in West Los Angeles, they realized “they played us both against each other,” she said.

For months, Goldkorn campaigned to find them.

“I knew it was wrong, and I knew we’d been ripped off . . . I made this my little crusade.”