Expectant mother Michelle Wilkins had ticked almost everything off her list. She’d had a baby shower, decorated the nursery and brought enough baby clothes to last for her child’s first year.
There was just one final thing for the 27-year-old to do – buy a cot. She searched second hand sites on-line and a Craigslist advert caught her eye. She sent a text enquiring and got one back the next day.
There was no reason to think that anything was amiss. But tragically, Wilkins was walking straight into the hands of a psychopath.
Dynel Catrece Lane was so desperate for a baby that she had been faking her own pregnancy, reportedly telling her husband David Ridley that he was going to be a father.
When Wilkins arrived to look at the cot Lane had advertised everything seemed normal. The two women talked in the living room for about an hour. “She seemed so normal,” Wilkins told the Mirror.
But when Wilkins tried to leave, Lane persuaded her to go to the basement to look at some baby clothes. And then she attacked, allegedly coming at Wilkins from behind.
“She grabbed me by the sweater. I was yelling ‘what are you doing?’
“She pushed me pushed me into one of the nearby bedrooms. She wrestled me on to the bed, got on top of me and tried to start smothering me with a pillow.”
Wilkins says that Lane then smashed a lava lamp over her head before stabbing it into her neck.
“I remember thinking ‘I have to survive for Aurora’,” she told the Mirror.
“But then everything went black and the next I knew, I woke up on the floor.
“I tried to stand but I couldn’t feel my legs, so I fell forwards. Then I became aware I could feel my insides through my pants, I could feel the blood seeping out.
“When I felt my intestines through my stomach, I hoped that was Aurora, that it wasn’t my gut.”
The unthinkable had happened. Lane had cut Wilkins baby daughter from her uterus and then fleeing to hospital (she claimed that she had suffered a miscarriage), Wilkins was literally left for dead.
It was close; Wilkins heart stopped and she needed to be resuscitated. She pulled through, just.
Wilkins was eventually reunited with her tiny deceased daughter in the hospital and was able to dress and sing to her.
“It shouldn’t be anyone’s first moments with their daughter, holding, dressing and singing to a cold body,” she said.
Lane was sentenced to 100 years in jail for six counts relating to the case including attempted first-degree murder, assault and unlawful termination of a pregnancy.
At the time of sentencing, Wilkins said that she doesn’t hate Lane, but understandably, she is angry.
“I am angry for all the pain she has caused, the deceit and for her selfishness.”
