Baby-Abductor’s Choice: Jail or Hospital

A woman who kidnaped a 3-month-old baby after her own miscarriage was given a choice Friday: serve a year in jail or a year in a psychiatric hospital at her own expense.

Superior Court Judge David Perez gave the options to Cossette Vivas, 45, a Nicaraguan national described in her probation report as “refined, intelligent and upper-class.” Vivas pleaded guilty to kidnaping the son of Javier Ortega and Haydee Linares from their Van Nuys apartment Jan. 2.

Perez offered the unusual sentence at the request of Deputy Dist. Atty. John K. Spillane, who said Vivas isn’t psychotic but does suffer from severe neurosis.

Perez also said he agreed “with the defense that this was a situation that occurred only once and probably won’t occur again.” He said justice would not be served by sending Vivas to state prison. He could have sentenced her to a maximum of 11 years.

Vivas could not be committed to a state mental hospital because she is not legally insane. Under the law, a person is insane only if “he or she is incapable of understanding the nature of the criminal act or is incapable of distinguishing right from wrong” in relation to a criminal act.

‘Psychiatric Problems’

“No one believes she belongs in a state facility,” said Barry Taylor, Vivas’ public defender, “but it is clear she has psychiatric problems that have to be dealt with.”

However, Taylor questioned whether Vivas could raise the money to pay for hospitalization, which could cost several thousand dollars a month.

“Although she came from a wealthy background, she doesn’t have a lot of money now,” he said. Vivas was represented by a public defender only after the court made a finding that she did not have the resources to hire a private attorney.

Perez, a Van Nuys judge now hearing cases in Santa Monica, gave Vivas until Oct. 2 to raise money from family members to pay for her hospitalization. Otherwise, she must serve time in the Los Angeles County Jail.

She also was ordered to perform 3,000 hours of community service and to repay Ortega and Linares for any psychiatric counseling they received after the kidnaping.

Vivas, who lives in Pasadena, said she stole the baby because she had miscarried and feared that her boyfriend would leave her unless they had a child to raise. She miscarried at home, placed the fetus in a bag, and threw it into the ocean off Long Beach, according to a probation report.

She didn’t tell her boyfriend and continued to wear maternity clothes and buy baby furniture. She called foster homes frantically searching for a baby to adopt.

She became “obsessed with finding a child,” hoping her boyfriend would divorce his wife and “come to love me and marry me,” the report said.

She learned from a Spanish-language newspaper advertisement that Ortega and his wife were looking for a live-in baby sitter. She was interviewed and hired. On her first day, after the couple went to work, Perez kidnaped the infant, leaving the Ortegas’ other child, a 22-month-old, asleep on the couch.

“It was a desperate crazy moment,” Vivas told her probation officer. The next day, overcome with guilt, she left the baby in a pew at a Highland Park church, where he was found unharmed. Police used telephone records to track down Vivas.

Ortega said Friday he thinks the sentence offered by Perez is “about right, since she didn’t do anything to the baby.”

Vivas has said she was the oldest of 15 children born to a wealthy Nicaraguan industrialist and exporter who owned factories and sugar and lumber mills. Authorities have relied on Vivas’ own description of her background, saying they have no reason to try to verify it.

She said she attended Catholic schools in Spain and France. At 16, she married a physician who was later appointed ambassador to Japan, a fact confirmed by her attorney. Her husband died in a car accident that left her in a coma for 60 days.

In 1963, she married a wealthy businessman whose family owned much property in Nicaragua, she told authorities. When the Sandinistas took over the country in 1978, the couple moved to the United States and later divorced. Since then, she has held sales jobs in real estate and insurance, and at swap meets.

A psychological evaluation of Vivas states that, after the loss of her baby, she “suffered a temporary breakdown of her otherwise rational faculties” that isn’t likely to recur.

But police are not convinced by Vivas’ story. They speculate in the probation report that she returned the baby because of massive publicity about the kidnaping. They also question whether she actually was pregnant and suffered a miscarriage.

A clinic Vivas claimed to have visited while pregnant denied she had been seen there. Another doctor who prescribed medicine for morning sickness never physically examined her, according to the report.

Vivas’ sentence includes a suspended five-year term that could be enforced if she gets into trouble during five years of probation. The 104 days she has been in Los Angeles County Jail already will be applied to her one-year jail sentence.

She has four children. The oldest is 26, and some of the others live with relatives.