Female Abductors : Babynapers: Deep Needs, Desperation

When Sharon Howard is out in a crowd with her baby, when she turns her back to load her daughter into the car seat, when she glances into her automobile’s rear-view mirror on the drive home, she is haunted by the memory.

It has been nearly a year since the October day when little Lauren Nicole Howard, then just 3 weeks old, was kidnaped by a stranger who apparently had staked out her Riverside home. A woman knocked on the Howards’ door, claiming at first that her car had broken down and then producing what looked like a gun. She bound and gagged the mother and sped off with Lauren.

“It was worse than death,” said Howard, who apparently had been followed home by the kidnaper from a pediatrician’s office the day before the terrifying abduction. “We didn’t know if that person was feeding (Lauren) regularly, changing her, sexually or physically abusing her, or if she was in the black market and thousands of miles away.”

Infant Found Unharmed

Thirty-five hours later--Howard counted every one of them--Lauren was found, unharmed, at the home of Elyse Joyce Ricker, a 39-year-old-woman who had feigned pregnancy and who, Riverside police said after her arrest, “simply wanted a child.”

Horrifying as they are, kidnapings of babies generally are rare, experts say, with no more than a handful reported annually nationwide. Yet, there have been at least three abductions of young children this year in Southern California alone. In each case, the abductor was a woman.

Psychologists and psychiatrists agree that the motivation for baby stealing usually is different from that underlying other kidnapings. Often, they say, deep psychological needs that go far beyond simple unfulfilled maternal feelings are involved.

Answers Baby-Sitting Ad

On Jan. 2, a 44-year-old woman who answered an ad for a baby-sitting job in Van Nuys stole off with the family’s 3-month-old son. Fearful of being arrested, she left the child in a church.

Cossette Vivas of Pasadena later told police that she had miscarried and feared that her boyfriend would leave her unless they had a child to raise. She pleaded guilty to kidnaping and was sentenced earlier this month to one year in jail; the judge gave her the option of spending the year in a psychiatric hospital at her own expense.

In March, a 3-year-old girl was abducted from her Huntington Beach home and was found wandering in a park in Anaheim late the next night. The kidnaping suspect, a 16-year-old runaway who had been befriended by the toddler’s family, reportedly was still grieving over the stillborn, premature daughter she had delivered a few months earlier. She was charged with kidnaping in juvenile court, where the details of her case are shielded by confidentiality laws.

Later the same month, a 14-month-old girl was taken from a Garden Grove day-care center by an 18-year-old neighbor. The child was found unharmed later the same night in Darlene Johnson’s closet. Johnson has since pleaded guilty to kidnaping and is undergoing psychiatric evaluation before sentencing. She faces a maximum sentence of seven years in prison.

The FBI does not keep statistics on women kidnapers and has no profile of the type of person most likely to steal a child. But one common denominator, say psychiatrists and psychologists familiar with cases of child stealing, is a fragile sense of self-esteem that is put to the test by an emotional trauma, such as a miscarriage or the death of a baby.

Such was the case, according to court psychiatric reports, of a woman who two years ago disguised herself as a nurse and stole a newborn infant from a Long Beach hospital. The product of a broken home who blamed herself for her parents’ divorce, the woman, then 22, had no previous criminal record. But, according to the reports, she could not handle the stress when, four months pregnant, she lost the baby that she was convinced would hold her own troubled marriage together.

Pretending still to be pregnant and desperate to produce the baby that her husband and family believed she was carrying, she hastily planned and carried out the kidnaping. Four days later, the baby was found and the woman was arrested at her Bakersfield home.

‘Something Drove Me’

“It was like something drove me,” said the young woman, who agreed to an interview if her name was not published. She served a year for her crime and now lives in Orange County. “I didn’t think at the time of the consequences,” she said, “and I most certainly didn’t think about that poor mother or the baby, or my own parents, or anyone else. I just thought this is what I had to do.”

Sitting in the elegant living room of the home her mother and stepfather own and speaking through a steady stream of tears, she said she still is trying to understand her problems and to learn to live with her past.

“All I thought of night and day was to keep this marriage together, that I’m not going to let what happened to my parents happen to me,” the woman recalled of the months before she abducted the baby.

But her marriage was foundering; her husband was a domineering drug user who physically and emotionally abused her. He and his parents had been pressuring her to have a baby to carry on the family name and, after three operations to clear blocked Fallopian tubes, she finally became pregnant.

“I was ecstatic. It was an unbelievable feeling to think I have the whole world in my hands now,” she said. When she miscarried four months later, “I was just so devastated.”

The idea of kidnaping a baby did not occur to her immediately, she said. Her plan initially was to conceal the truth from her husband, put on weight, appear pregnant and conceive another baby before anyone found out.

“I made up this lie and thought, ‘I’ll get pregnant again. I’ll tell him then, and he’ll understand.’ ” But as the months passed, she became increasingly frantic. She and her husband moved to Bakersfield where, isolated from friends and family, she could confide the truth to no one and could not bear to face the truth herself, she said.

“I was definitely messed up, definitely living in some fictitious world, not facing reality,” she said. “I knew something was wrong, that eventually something would happen, but I was living day to day. By that time it was horrendous. The marriage was bad. He was back into drugs. It just got worse and worse . . . but that’s all I had in the world.”

Court-appointed psychiatrist Kaushal K. Sharma of Huntington Beach wrote in his report:

“The defendant felt she was being pushed into a corner. . . . She could not return to her mother’s house because she could not accept admitting the failure in her marriage. She could not continue to live with her husband because of the increasing physical abuse and his drug intoxication.

Fear of Getting Caught

“She was also concerned that sooner or later she was going to be caught playing the game of being pregnant. However, she was forcing herself (into) believing that if she could really have a baby everything would be wonderful.”

It was early September, 1985--time for her to produce a baby--when she drove to the Long Beach area to visit a friend, who happened to mention how lax security was at a nearby hospital. “That’s the first time anything like that had ever come into my head,” she said.

The next morning, according to court records, she bought a uniform, donned it in a service station restroom, walked into the maternity ward and told a woman holding her 3-day-old son that she needed to deliver the baby to a doctor.

Instead, with the baby in her arms, she headed for the fire exit.

Contrary to her plan, the baby did not solve her problems when she returned home. Some friends and her husband became suspicious, and her husband insisted she be examined by a doctor, who determined that she had not given birth. The authorities were notified.

At the time, she didn’t give a thought to the grief she was causing the baby’s mother. Now, she said, she can think of little else.

“There isn’t a day that goes by that I forget,” she said, tears running down her face. “To think what I did to that poor family, the hell they must have gone through. I’ve lain awake many a night because of what happened.

“I could never go through as much pain as they went through . . . but if there was anything that I could do in this world to make it up to that poor mother and that poor baby, I would. . . . I wish I could take those four days away from her (the mother). I honestly did not know what I was doing.”

A woman who kidnaps after suffering a loss focuses her energy on the baby rather than her own problems, said Orange County psychologist Lynda Moss, who counsels infertile couples.

‘Emotional Deprivation’

“The baby becomes a representation of their need, and when the baby is taken away they are worse off than ever,” Moss said. “So they think if they could only get another baby, that would fill them up.”

A 1972 article in the British Medical Journal analyzing 13 abductions of children found that while five of the women responsible were of subnormal intelligence or schizophrenic, the rest were classified as “psychopathic” or “manipulative.” Those with psychopathic personalities all had severely disturbed family backgrounds; the manipulative group suffered from pronounced neurotic traits.

“Emotional deprivation, frustrated maternal feelings and a real or imaginary miscarriage seem predisposing factors . . .” the study concluded.

Though most women who kidnap babies are psychologically troubled, said forensic psychiatrist William Vicary of Los Angeles, “they’re not hearing voices; they’re not grossly psychotic. These ladies have been victimized and abused and exploited. From my recollection, somebody who did not come from a background like that would be an exception.”

Last year, Ramona Joan Thompson, 45, elaborately faked a pregnancy to hold onto her boyfriend and then abducted a day-old baby boy from the Philadelphia hospital where he was born. She and her boyfriend were caught a week later with the infant near Baltimore; the boyfriend remained convinced that the child was his son until hospital footprint records confirmed the baby’s identity. Thompson recently was sentenced to 18 years in prison.

Thompson had a “heartbreaking background,” poor self-esteem and “a tremendous dependency need” that led her to believe that manipulation was the only way to hold onto a man, said Baltimore attorney Daniel F. Goldstein, who represented her.

Her brother was murdered when she was 6. She was sexually and physically abused and abandoned by her father, then brought up by her grandparents, Goldstein said. At 15, when her grandmother was hospitalized in a coma, she found herself out on the street after her alcoholic grandfather financed a binge by selling all the furniture in the house. She married almost immediately “as a solution to having no place to live,” Goldstein said.

That was the first of three abusive marriages. She had four children before undergoing a hysterectomy in 1978. Ultimately, she linked up with a boyfriend “whose sole requirement was a male heir,” Goldstein said. So she told her boyfriend she was pregnant and used a pregnant woman’s urine sample to get a doctor’s diagnosis, put on weight, took a maternity leave from her job and plotted the kidnaping, according to the FBI.

“She had this thing well planned out,” said spokesman Andy Manning in the FBI’s Baltimore office, which was responsible for Thompson’s arrest a week later in a suburb north of the city.

Despite the psychological troubles that precede many abductions of babies, Dr. Milton Miller, chairman of the department of psychiatry at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, cautions against accepting the women’s tales of grief as “explanations.”

“If you could say only one thing about taking somebody else’s baby, you would say it is beyond comprehension,” Miller said. “It’s an act so basically cruel to the baby, to the parent, to the self. . . .

“There is no sane explanation, no civilized explanation for the taking of another child. It’s an act of profound inhumanity. The simple explanations--that she lost a pregnancy or her younger sister died--those are sort of feeble efforts to explain that which is hard to explain.”

For Sharon Howard, the explanations lead nowhere. Although it has been nearly a year since her daughter’s brief abduction, the experience remains a part of her everyday life.

Today, Lauren Nicole is an inquisitive, bubbling 1-year-old. She “is in good shape. She loves her mommy and daddy. And she’s fine as long as we are here. But if we want to go out, she screams the whole time,” said Howard, who is undergoing counseling.

As for the 32-year-old mother, “I’m not ultra-paranoid, but I am ultra-alert of everything around me.”

Even though she knows that what happened to her was “so rare, it was like being hit by lightning,” she wants to get the word out to people to be extra careful with their children.

‘Precious Commodity’

“Babies are such a precious commodity, I don’t think you can be too aware,” she said.

Lauren’s kidnaper is now serving 14-year sentence at the Northern California Women’s Facility in Stockton, according to the state Department of Corrections.

“And in my opinion, she deserved every bit of it,” Howard said. “It’s a heinous crime. That woman turned our lives topsy-turvy. We’re just everyday people. . . .

“It will fade, but it will never leave my memory. Now, I don’t take anything for granted. There’s not one day that goes by when I don’t think, ‘What would my life have been like if we hadn’t found our baby?’ ”

Times staff writer Dennis McLellan contributed to this story.