Celeste Nurse was only 18 when her newborn baby Zephany Joy was kidnapped from her hospital bedside in 1997.
Now she is facing the woman accused of kidnapping her daughter in a Cape Town court room.
The accused woman, who has pleaded not guilty to kidnapping, cannot be named as this would reveal the identity of the stolen child.
The case came to light when the younger daughter of Nurse and her husband began attending high school and pupils pointed out that she looked remarkably like an older girl at the school.
The younger girl told her parents, who met the older girl and immediately believed her to be their long-lost baby.
The Nurses called the police, and DNA tests confirmed that the girl was indeed Zephany.
The accused woman handed the court a 35-page explanation of her not-guilty plea. In the document, she described being abused as a child and raped and beaten by boyfriends, before having a series of miscarriages.
After a miscarriage in December 1996, she began exploring options to adopt a child.
She says she paid a woman who promised to find her a child to adopt, and in April 1997, she was handed a baby wrapped in a blanket at a train station in Cape Town “by an unknown female”.
The baby turned out to be Zephany, who she presented to her husband as her own child.
Unbeknownst to the Nurse family, they were living within a few kilometres of their kidnapped daughter. They celebrated every birthday and never gave up hope of finding her.
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