by John Douglas
One case that was solved following a lead phoned in to police by an anonymous caller was of interest to my unit in part because of how well it followed the elements of a classic infant abduction. Around 9:30 on the morning of June 20, 1988, a woman posing as a hospital nurse visited Renee McClure, a new mother at the High Point Regional Hospital in High Point, North Carolina. The “nurse” told Mrs. McClure that her son, Jason Ray, needed to go to the nursery to be weighed. Shortly thereafter, a real nurse entered the room and figured out what happened. Local police were contacted immediately and the FBI joined the investigation that afternoon.
The anonymous call came in the next day, along with a walk-in witness who corroborated the caller’s information. Based on those leads, police and FBI agents arrested Brenda Joyce Nobles for the abduction, along with her daughter, Sharon Leigh Slaydon, who figured out the baby wasn’t her mother’s but had not turned her in. Jason was found at their home, hidden in a back bedroom closet. His hair had been cut off in an apparent attempt at a disguise but he was otherwise in good condition.
From interviews with Nobles and Slaydon, we learned that Nobles’s boyfriend (who was about seventy years of age) would not marry her unless she could have his child. He especially wanted a son. Since she’d had a hysterectomy years earlier, which she didn’t tell him, she knew she’d have to find another way to accomplish this. In December of 1987, she told him and other family members that she was pregnant and started eating heavily so her body would transform convincingly. Slaydon had a baby at High Point in May of 1988 and Nobles took that opportunity to familiarize herself with the maternity ward. On June 19, 1988, Nobles visited another relative at the hospital and again stopped by the nursery. When she saw Jason McClure, she decided to put her plan into action.
According to Nobles’s boyfriend, on the morning of June 20 she told him she wasn’t feeling well and thought she might go into labor that day. When he returned home from work later, he found “his son” in bed with Nobles, who told him she’d given birth that morning in an outpatient clinic in town. He was so excited he invited friends and relatives to come over and celebrate the boy’s birth, never questioning her story or the child’s true identity. Someone, however, was suspicious enough to make the call, and in the end Nobles received a sentence of twelve years in prison for the abduction.
As both the Zabel and Nobles cases illustrate, these offenders are not particularly criminally sophisticated and they often leave a trail investigators can follow. Despite wearing a nurse’s disguise, for example, they show their face to people before and during the commission of their crime—giving police a description they can start publicizing immediately. They often discard parts of their disguise at the crime scene, leaving valuable fingerprints and other forensic evidence linking them to their crime.
They also tend to strike close to home. Investigators can often get quick leads by looking at the hospital’s records of recent miscarriages or stillborn births. The abductor may have applied for a job at the hospital or even worked there before. In abductions from a home, often someone can give a description of the getaway vehicle. But the most important leads come from those close to the abductors. Sometimes people get suspicious because the new baby is actually a three-month old, which anyone who’s ever been close to an infant can see looks and acts very different from a newborn. An abductor will happily show friends “her” baby, but can provide only sketchy details of the birth. No one knew when she went into labor and she contacted no one—not even the supposed father—in time to let them visit her in the hospital. There is also no birth certificate for the child. These facts, coupled with a good description of the baby and the abductor, circulated quickly over a wide area, often result in a relatively quick return of the infant to the parents.
Although perpetrators of infant abductions are nearly always female, every so often there is an exception. In the summer of 1991, Charles Neil Ikerd and his mother-in-law, Maize D. Hester, called the Aurora, Colorado, Police Department to report Charles’s eighteen-year-old wife, Terra Ann, and three-month-old daughter, Heather Louise, missing. Terra had been suffering from postpartum depression, and at first her husband agreed with her therapist that she was probably just trying to get some time away. Still, after discussing things, he and Maize—who allowed the couple to live in her home—were concerned enough about Terra and the baby to file a routine missing person’s report.
Things grew less routine about three weeks later, when Terra’s body was found in a field thirty miles outside of town by a road maintenance worker. She’d been shot twice in the chest and once in the head. There was no evidence of sexual assault and no sign of Heather. The position of Terra’s body and the fact that there were no shell casings located nearby indicated she’d been killed someplace else and transported to the dump site. University of Colorado experts examined the state of decomposition and vegetative growth around the body and determined she was killed shortly after she disappeared, probably within two days.
I’ve often said that victimology can be key to solving a case like this, and investigators looked into Terra Ikerd’s personal life. On the day she disappeared, Terra and Heather had both been at Terra’s job at a local sports club, where she’d started work just three days earlier. She got a paycheck that day and took Heather with her to the bank to deposit all of it. Then she went home to change clothes before going out again with her daughter. In a phone call with her mother, it didn’t sound like there was anything wrong. Sometime in the afternoon, a neighbor saw her and Heather get into a car driven by a white male. No one saw her alive again.
Her husband, Charles, was an immediate suspect, since they had a less than perfect marriage and he didn’t seem as broken up about his wife’s disappearance with their daughter as people thought he should be. But he had an airtight alibi for the time of her disappearance—he was hard at work at a local fast-food restaurant—and with his minimum wage job, it didn’t seem he had the money or the planning skills necessary to carry out a contract job. As the victim’s lifestyle came under closer scrutiny, at least three boyfriends came to light, one of whom had a vehicle that matched the description of the one her neighbor saw Terra get into the day she disappeared. Another boyfriend was also a viable suspect. A drug and alcohol abuser, he’d threatened to kill her if she ever married anyone else. A third boyfriend was in the Air Force and worked as a military police officer in Colorado Springs. He’d been issued a service revolver and ammunition that might match the weapon used to kill Terra. His alibi—that he was attending a funeral out of state when she disappeared—still left him enough time to travel back and kill her.
With multiple leads but no solid information—and still missing the baby—investigators struggled until August 8, when they were contacted by authorities in Topeka, Kansas, who had a lead from their Crime Stoppers hotline. The caller phoned to report an attempted baby sale in Kentucky that involved a baby who matched Heather Ikerd’s description. Using information from the Kansas police, Colorado authorities identified the man involved as Ralph Blaine Takemire. In his mid-forties, Takemire was a biker living in Kansas. When members of the Ikerd family were questioned about the man, Terra’s father-in-law referred to him as “Uncle Ralph,” an old family friend who visited them over the Fourth of July. During his visit, Takemire spent a lot of time with Terra and Heather, buying them Harley-Davidson T-shirts as gifts. The Ikerds felt that despite the coincidence of the date of his visit and Terra’s and Heather’s disappearance, Uncle Ralph was an old friend who would never be capable of something as horrible as abduction and murder.
Investigative authorities felt otherwise and the Kansas City FBI SWAT team began surveillance of Uncle Ralph’s house that very night. They confirmed that a baby was on the premises and confronted Takemire as he left the house the next morning. They recovered Heather alive and in good health. After confessing to Terra’s murder and Heather’s abduction, he was arrested on federal charges of kidnapping. A search of his home and vehicle
yielded shell casings from the murder weapon, along with bloodstains and Terra’s blood-soaked purse, in the vehicle. The gun used in the murder was found at a nearby pawn shop.
When interviewed by the FBI, Takemire indicated that he’d originally been driven to his crimes by many of the same motivations as female infant abductors. He had apparently been unable to impregnate his wife and felt the need to get her a child somehow, especially after they’d had arguments about how he promised to buy her a baby and then didn’t. Takemire rationalized his actions by concluding—from just his quick observations over the Fourth of July visit—that Terra was unfit to raise the child.
Another case that was unusual both in its level of violence and in the disorganization of the perpetrator came to our attention in the summer of 1987. On July 23, a very pregnant Cindy Lynn Ray went for a routine prenatal checkup at the clinic of the Kirtland Air Force Base Hospital, just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. As she left the clinic she was met outside by a woman named Darci Kayleen Pierce, who abducted her from the parking lot using a fake pistol to get the woman into her 1964 Volkswagen Beetle. Pierce had been telling her husband, friends, and family members for the past ten months that she was desperate for a baby and was now pregnant. She drove her victim to a remote area in the Manzano Mountains just east of Albuquerque, where she strangled Ray unconscious using a fetal monitor cord from Ray’s purse. She dragged Ray behind some trees, then used her car keys to perform a Caesarean section and bit the umbilical cord to cut it. Leaving her victim in the wilderness, Pierce drove back to Albuquerque and told people she’d delivered her baby by herself on the highway between there and Santa Fe.
An ambulance was summoned and Pierce and the baby were taken to the University of New Mexico Medical Center, where she refused to be examined by a physician. Doctors there surmised the baby had not been born vaginally and confronted Pierce, who then claimed she’d been given the baby by a surrogate mother who delivered with the help of a midwife in Santa Fe. The case came together when a midwife at the Air Force base mentioned that a very pregnant military dependent was missing. After being questioned by police, Darci Pierce finally led investigators to Cindy Ray, but it was too late to save her. She had died from blood loss and exposure.
After learning of his wife’s confession, Ray Pierce was shocked by the vicious crime and the truth about his wife’s condition. In his interview with Albuquerque police and Air Force special investigation agents, he said that he believed his wife had been pregnant for about ten or eleven months. Darci Pierce was placed in custody at Kirtland and later sentenced to life in prison.
Fortunately, in Pierce’s case, suspicious hospital authorities contacted law enforcement immediately, although they had no proof that anything illegal had taken place. Equally important, local police and military investigators quickly formed a solid investigative unit and worked together to bring the case to closure. While we don’t always see this type of cooperation with other kinds of crimes, with infant abductions the benefits of early reporting and effective publicity are obvious enough that authorities do come together and get the word out, setting up tip lines so people in the community can quickly report anything or anyone suspicious. And, in the past five years, largely as a result of groundbreaking work done by people such as John Rabun, vice president and CEO of the NCMEC, who’s also the author of guidelines for prevention of infant abductions in hospital settings, the incidence of those crimes has been reduced dramatically. Hospitals are now proactively training their employees, instituting greater security measures, and putting immediate response plans in place.
Rabun and the NCMEC have also made guidelines available to parents. These guidelines and more information for parents and health care professionals can be obtained from the NCMEC by calling 1-800-THE-LOST or writing the Publications Department, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 2101 Wilson Boulevard, Suite 550, Arlington, VA 22201-3052.
Even when these stories have a happy ending and the infant is returned safe and apparently healthy, there are tremendous and long-term effects on parents and, when abductions occur at hospitals, health care workers. Lawsuits are common, but nurses suffer more from psychological problems like post-traumatic stress disorder than fear of recrimination at their job. Even nurses with long and successful records may transfer or leave the profession altogether after an abduction, so traumatized are they by the feelings of guilt and helplessness from the event. Parents, too, go through a range of emotions throughout the abduction: from the trauma of the initial realization that their infant is gone, through the anxiety and fear of waiting for his or her return. Even after the baby is returned, the parents can never relax. They have to rebond with the child and the child with them, and are often terrified that something else may happen. Parents exhibit signs of PTSD, and at the very least tend to overprotect their child in the future. Often the child, too, while well cared for following the abduction, can suffer nightmares, fears, and flashbacks. And through the offender’s criminal trial and any ensuing civil litigation, everyone is retraumatized.
As in all types of crime, I’m always advising people to “study the art,” to get inside the offender’s identity, but there’s one instance in which all we have to look at is a blank wall, and that’s the most frustrating situation of all. When an infant or child stays missing, it breaks down the victim’s family as well as everyone involved in the investigation. You have no body, you have no crime scene to analyze, so you’re stuck working with the most generic of assumptions. When the victim is a child rather than an infant, statistically your UNSUB is probably not a family member, is probably a “he,” and is probably motivated by sexual desires. Maybe the way the abduction took place will give us an idea of the sophistication level of the subject, but you’re essentially looking at every sex offender—known or suspected—within a radius of a couple of hundred miles. Then you widen your search to include known or suspected abductors of children or adults. It can be a fishing expedition that may lead nowhere. And what makes it even worse is that some of your suspects may be so inadequate they’ll confess to crimes they never committed just for the attention and short-lived power. Unless you quickly prove these guys are full of it, you have to spend the time to follow up every lead—however bogus it sounds—because you can’t risk missing an opportunity to get the child back alive.
Even years later, when in most cases it’s safest to believe the child’s dead, families don’t move in hopes that the child—or someone—will call, maybe recognizing their loved one from the NCMEC’s free Missing Children Web Page. In turn, experts at the NCMEC use computer age-enhancing software to try to picture what the child would look like as he or she matured, hoping the image will strike a spark of recognition in someone, somewhere. In the meantime, investigators try to pull leads from any recent similar cases in the area.
Our world is full of dangers for children, from freak accidents to planned violent assaults by adults. The good news is that just as you can protect your kids by making buckling their seat belts an automatic reflex of getting in the car, you can ingrain other safety skills that will protect them without making them overly fearful. Next we’ll discuss what you can do for and with your children to help prevent them from becoming one of the too many faces on NCMEC’s wall.
CHAPTER 6
Fighting Back
As we’ve seen, children can fall prey to a frightening variety of dangerous predators. And the analogy of predator and prey is apt, since children in society, like young, defenseless animals in nature, are in many ways ideal victims.
Little Dannelle Lietz was a victim, as was Christine Jessop, for the same reason other children have become victims: they have no control over their environment. Kids can’t pick their family members, baby-sitters, neighbors, parents’ friends, or local school. If someone in their household physically or sexually abuses them, if they live in a dangerous neighborhood or attend a school where drugs or weapons are problems (or where a playground bully beats the
m up during recess every day), they can’t just pick up and move. And if they do run away, they become vulnerable to different dangers in their new hostile environment.
But the majority of kids at risk are trapped. Young children, abused or neglected, or even older ones, may not realize that other children live any differently, that their lives are not normal. For example, I had a case of a violent serial rapist. When this offender was a young teen, his father would take him out to bars most nights of the week, where he would pick up a prostitute, beat her or slap her around, then go off to have sex with her within the boy’s hearing. Now I’m not excusing what he became—unless we’re literally out of our minds, we’re all responsible for our actions. But I do submit that it’s a lot more problematic developing a respectful attitude toward your fellow human beings, male or female, when this is your role model of how women are supposed to be treated.
Even in the safest and healthiest of home environments, though, aspects of children’s very nature can work against them. There are definite characteristics—universal to all children—that make them ideal victims, including that they are curious by nature, they are easy for adults to manipulate and influence, they need affection and attention, and they feel a need to defy their parents in different ways at different stages.
Every parent can attest to a child’s natural curiosity. I know I’ve both cursed and admired the way my kids were always getting into things, sometimes getting hurt in the process, often just on the verge of calamity when Pam or I walked into a room. As my two daughters and son were growing up, I would alternately marvel at their frequent displays of intelligence and resourcefulness and their occasional incredible lapses of judgment. We see a toddler dashing into the street as a scary sign of thoughtlessness or willfulness. She sees it as one new thing to explore enthusiastically and doesn’t understand that the scolding or smack on the bottom she instantly receives for her adventurousness is merely her frazzled parent’s feeble attempt to correct a suddenly dangerous situation.
