Riverside Kidnaping : Baby Found Safe, Back With Parents

A 3-week-old baby girl was recovered--apparently unharmed--Wednesday night, nearly a day and a half after she was kidnaped at gunpoint from her home in Riverside, police said.

Sandy-haired Lauren Nicole Howard was reunited with her parents, Sharon, 31, and Monte Howard, 35, after an informant telephoned Riverside police to say she had seen an infant matching the description of the one abducted Tuesday morning.

“And she was right,” said Riverside Police Lt. Jim Rector. “The baby was all right, and we took two people into custody on suspicion of kidnaping. Then we called the Howards to come to the station and get their little girl. . . . “

The Howards later took the infant to Riverside Community Hospital, where she was examined, pronounced in good condition and released to return home.

It was a happy ending to a story of terror that began at 10 a.m. Tuesday, when a heavyset woman came to the Howard home in Riverside and asked to use the telephone, saying her car had broken down.

Sharon Howard, at home with the baby and her 7-year-old son, Corey, allowed the stranger inside because, she said, “she looked OK.” She said she had little Lauren in her arms when the woman, appearing to be in her middle to late 30s, knocked at the door of the three-bedroom home, just two blocks from the University of California, Riverside, campus.

“She said she needed to reach her husband and asked to use the phone,” Howard recalled. “There was no answer and she said she would try her car again. A minute later, she came back and said: ‘Now, it won’t even turn over. Can I try calling my husband again?’

“I said, sure.”

She said the woman started to leave but pulled a gun from her purse as she neared the front door.

“She instructed me to tell my son to go into the bedroom and shut the door and to set the baby in the baby carrier, which was on the floor,” Howard said. “Then she told me to lie on the floor and to keep my face to the ground at all times.

“I kept pleading with her and begging her not to hurt my family.”

The stranger promised she would not, Howard said.

“She told me she wasn’t going to hurt my family, she wasn’t going to take my children. She said, ‘I have too many children of my own already.’ ”

But Howard said the woman told her a male companion outside the house would kill her if she did not cooperate.

“I don’t know whether this person was fictitious or not,” she said.

“I closed my eyes and had my hands behind my back like she instructed me. I heard movement around the house and then I heard somebody leave.

“I looked over at the baby carrier and the baby was gone.”

Running out of the house, Howard caught a brief glimpse of the speeding car then hurried back inside. “I had to see if my son was OK,” she said.

Police circulated a description of the car and of the missing baby. They also set up a “hot line” for information on the case--and shortly after sunset Wednesday, the hot line paid off.

“A woman informant called” Rector said, “and said a neighbor of hers named Elyse Bobbi Ricken, who is married to a man named Tim Wayne Ricken and lives on 12th Street here in Riverside, had said a very strange thing to her yesterday.

“She told her that she was pregnant--and was going to have a baby almost at once.

“The informant said she didn’t believe her, and became even more suspicious when Mrs. Ricken allegedly left for the hospital later in the day--and came back with a new baby she said was hers.”

Rector said the informant described the infant, and the descriptions “matched to a tee--even including a birthmark that was not previously publicized.”

He said the Rickens--Elyse, 39, and Tim, 23--did not resist when officers went to their home, and were brought into the station for questioning. By late Wednesday, Rector said, the couple had not been booked.

“We think,” he said, “that Elyse Ricken simply wanted a baby . . . “