A woman who suffered a horror attack after answering a Craigslist advertisement has described how her baby was cut from her womb and later died.
Twenty-seven-year-old Michelle Wilkins, from Colorado, accuses Dynel Lane (35) of luring her to her home in March 2015 under the pretence of selling maternity clothes. Wilkins, who was eight months pregnant at the time, claims that when she arrived, Lane punched her, hit her with a lava lamp, stabbed her and eventually used two kitchen knives to cut the foetus from her body.
‘She pinned down my arms with her legs and she was trying so hard to choke me and put the heel of her hand on my windpipe and remember everything going black.’ Wilkins told the court.
‘I remember thinking of Aurora and feeling like I really; I just thought of her, and I wanted to survive also for her so I fought back harder.’
She added: ‘I just kept saying “why, why are you doing this?”’
When Ms Wilkins woke up, she was lying in a basement covered in blood. There was a large wound in her abdomen stretching from hip bone to hip bone.
“I could feel my intestines outside my body,” she told the court.
Barely conscious, she called the police. Just before an officer arrived, Lane’s partner, David Ridley returned home to find his partner standing in front of the door to the basement with her hands covered in blood. Lane told him that she had given birth in the bath. When he checked the upstairs bathroom, he found the lifeless baby in the bath and rushed the infant and Ms Lane to Longmont United Hospital.
Shortly after they arrived, the doctor told the couple their baby daughter had been pronounced dead. 30 minutes later, Ms Wilkins was rushed in on a stretcher.
Timescall.com
When doctors determined that Lane had never been pregnant, she told them that Michelle Wilkins had attacked her and claimed that she had killed her in self-defence. Lane also said that she cut the foetus from Lane’s womb in order to save its life.
District Attorney Stan Garnett said that Ms Lane was ‘obsessed’ with pregnancy and had pretended to be pregnant for a number of months prior to the attack. She had told her partner she was expecting, chosen the name ‘James’ and even attended a baby shower thrown for her by friends.
Lane has pleaded not guilty to eight felony charges including attempted murder and unlawful termination of a pregnancy.
The case continues.
