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On the afternoon of June 17, 2009, a woman walked into one of the largest hospitals in Mexico City.
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And not a single person thought to stop her. Why would they? She belonged there.
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She had a staff ID clipped where everyone could see it. She had a face the maternity.
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Nurses recognized from the hallways.
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She worked in administration at that very hospital.
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Hospital General de Mexico. And on that particular afternoon, she walked into the maternity ward.
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But she was carrying an empty paper shopping bag from a department store.
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She had also spent the previous months telling everyone a wonderful story.
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A story about her due date.
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Because she was pregnant. Full term.
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Days away from meeting her baby. Her husband, of course, believed.
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Her family, of course, believed. There's even a home video of her at her own baby shower.
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Surrounded by tiny clothes, wrapped boxes, glowing.
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They believed because they thought it was real, but none of it was real.
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There was no baby. By a quarter to seven that evening, Eleanor Alejandra Marin Mendoza walked back out through the front of that hospital. That shopping bag?
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No longer empty. Inside, there was a newborn girl.
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She had been born just the day before. To a mother who was lying in a recovery bed, one floor away, Ale carried that bag past the nurses, past the guards, and out the doors, and into the evening.
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Nobody looked twice.
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How she did that? How a woman walked a living newborn baby out of a working hospital in a brown bag without one person raising an alarm.
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That's something that will stay with you. But the crime did not begin in that maternity ward.
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It began months earlier, as it usually does, with a pregnancy that ended in blood.
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In a marriage, Ale believed that she could not keep without a child.
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And a lie that clearly came with a due date.
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Welcome to GBRLIFE Transmissions. I'm your host, Kaitlyn. And you're listening to GBRLIFE of Crimes, where we explore not just what happened in crimes committed by women, but why they happened and the psychology behind them.
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Today, we're looking at Eleanor Alejandra Marin Mendoza, known to the people in her life as Ale, the hospital administrator who faked an entire pregnancy, then stole a newborn to make that lie come true.
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Her story is now the subject of the Netflix documentary, A Child of My Own, Un Hijo Propio, A film that opens inside Ali's version of events, and then slowly, deliberately, takes that version apart.
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But here's the thing about that story. There is one man in there who ends up having to spend two and a half years inside a prison for a crime that courts eventually decided he didn't commit.
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He's the part that not a lot of people see coming, because he was not a getaway driver. He was not a partner in a plan.
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He was Ale's husband, who held that newborn in a hotel room and believed, with everything in him, that that day, in that moment, he was holding his own daughter.
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What the lie did to Arturo is the second thread of this case.
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But we'll get back to him.
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Ale was 17 years old when she married Arturo in July of 2000.
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By her own account, she was already pregnant.
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And that pregnancy was part of the reason they married so young.
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So from the very first chapter of her adult life, before she was old enough to have become much of anyone else, Ale was already cast in a single role, wife.
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And on her way, everyone assumed, to mother. We know almost nothing about who Ale was before that.
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There is no earlier self on record for her to fall back on.
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And as we go through the story, you're going to understand there wasn't one for her to fall back on either.
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Because that first pregnancy, it was real, but it did end in miscarriage.
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And it wasn't the last. By her mid-twenties, Ale had lost three pregnancies.
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She went through medical testing. She tried in vitro fertilization, the injections, the procedures, the hope, and the crash that so many women lived through in silence.
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And that pregnancy ended too, after loss, after loss. Each one grieved, mostly alone.
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But she wasn't allowed to grieve them quietly, because the people closest to her would not let the subject rest.
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In the documentary, Ale describes a family that blamed her for the losses.
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And she singles out her mother-in-law, Arturo's mother, as especially cruel, needling her again and again about her failure to get pregnant.
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Scientifically, pregnancies that end in miscarriages typically happen due to the male DNA.
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That does not mean that there wasn't anything going on with Ale either.
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But it was quite interesting and a bit ironic.
Load full transcript
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But there was a lot of pressure on Ale. And whether or not that information is out there, it doesn't mean that Arturo's mother even knew that.
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So when we talk about the pressure bearing down on Ale, it's not some vague cultural weather.
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There was a true face and a voice at family gatherings.
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A specific woman reminding her over and over that she wasn't measuring up.
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Even though reality is, she was getting pregnant and likely she was measuring up fine.
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But underneath all of it sat the fear Ale herself has named.
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She was terrified that she could not give Arturo a child.
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Arturo would leave her. That's what she kept saying. That was her worry.
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In Allie's mind, the baby stopped being only a child that she wanted or longed for as a woman, as a potential future mother.
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It became the price of keeping her marriage, her family, her whole life from walking out the door.
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The baby became insurance against being abandoned.
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And ultimately, as most of us know, one of the worst reasons to have a child.
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After that final miscarriage, most people, whatever their pain, tell the truth.
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Ale did the opposite. She decided she simply would not let the pregnancy be over this time.
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Not that it's a choice you can make, but she made the choice.
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She would keep it alive in public as if nothing had happened.
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The sheer scale of what that took is staggering.
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Because it's not a woman who just told a lie in a weak moment.
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Ale gained around 25 kilos or 55 pounds so that her body itself would show the story.
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She altered medical documents. She produced fake ultrasound images.
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She talked about the baby coming and let people plan. She accepted gifts.
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She sat there on video at a baby shower thrown for a child that she knew didn't exist, not anymore.
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Every single day for months, she got up and performed a pregnancy for everyone who loved her.
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The question that unsettles people is how.
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How do you keep that running for months without cracking? How do you sit at your own baby shower opening presents for a ghost?
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The answer is a piece of psychology we've talked about before on this podcast.
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Compartmentalization.
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The mind is capable of walling a fact off so completely that a person can hold two truths that cannot both be true and simply never let them touch.
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One part of Ali knew there was no baby.
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Another part performed the pregnancy so convincingly that it fooled the husband sleeping beside her every night.
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The performance was not only for them. On some level, it was for her.
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A way to keep the unbearable fact sealed behind a wall so she could function.
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Every fake ultrasound was another brick in that wall.
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It's easy to reach for the comforting explanation here. And it is the wrong one.
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There is a real condition called pseudosiesis, which is a false pregnancy.
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In this case, it's where a woman's mind becomes so convinced that she's carrying a child that her body actually produces the signs and the swelling and the misperiods, sometimes even the sensation of labor, even though there's no baby there.
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It would be easier to file Ale under that and call it a delusion that she couldn't help.
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But that's not what this was. That didn't happen.
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Ale knew. The images that she faked The weight she deliberately put on All of it was constructed on purpose With her eyes open, And you can trace the psychology of why There is a difference between guilt and shame.
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And in this case, it matters here. Guilt says, I did something bad.
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Shame says, I am something bad.
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A woman taunted in her own home for failing to conceive does not simply feel bad about a hard situation.
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She comes to feel that she herself is defective at the core, no matter what the science says.
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And it's a signature behavior. Guilt pushes a person towards confession. towards repair.
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Shame, it pushes the other way, towards hiding, hiding the flaw at any cost.
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And that's a large part of why Ale could not sit her family down and admit that she was not carrying a child and that she wanted to adopt.
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Shame does not permit that kind of exposure. It demands the defect to be buried.
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But a fake pregnancy has a due date, and that deadline is what turned a devastating lie into a trap.
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Every day, she kept it going. The cost of ever telling the truth, it climbed higher.
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This is the escalation that you see in every long con and in every person who digs deeper instead of confessing.
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Each new lie gets told to protect the last one.
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And by the ninth month, confessing would have
meant unwinding all of it.
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At once, the husband's hope, the family's expectation, the nursery, the baby shower.
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And the whole rebuilt identity of a woman who's about to be a mother.
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She painted herself into a corner with only two doors left. She could confess and watch her life collapse in front of everyone.
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Or somehow she could produce a child.
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And Ale of all people. She worked in the one building in the city where newborns, were lying in rows, just down the hall.
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So, on June 17, 2009, Ale walked into the hospital.
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That day, with her empty department store bag, she walked down the maternity recovery area and she saw Mayra Navarro and her baby daughter, Katia. Katia Valentina.
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Born the day before, a tiny thing of about 2 1⁄2 kilos.
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Myra was not in any state to stand guard over her child every second because she had just given birth.
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And at some point that day, she was pulled away from her baby, just for a little while, taken to give a urine sample so the staff could check her for infection.
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That was the window. Now, Ale has an explanation for what happens next.
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And it's a smooth one. She says she and Myra knew each other and that they had met months earlier.
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That the two women had come to a private arrangement.
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Myra and Ale's telling did not want to keep the baby and had agreed to give the baby to Ale.
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So what happened at the hospital, Ale insists, was not a kidnapping at all.
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It was two women completing a quiet agreement.
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There's only one problem with that story.
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Almost none of it goes along with the facts.
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Myra says that she never laid eyes on Ali before the hospital room.
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She never agreed to give away her daughter.
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In her account, a stranger approached her bed presenting herself as a social worker, running a survey.
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And that was the first time the two women had ever actually spoken.
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And the paper trail backs Myra, not Ale.
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The prenatal records show Myra had been getting earlier care at a different hospital entirely.
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That completely changes Ale's claim.
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How could the two of them, per Ale, meet at that hospital for months prior if Myra hadn't even been there months prior?
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You strip the story away and what's left is much simpler. And much colder.
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Ali didn't have to break in She didn't need a weapon or a threat She had a badge She had a familiar face, And the easy authority of someone who worked there She moved through that ward like she owned it Because in a sense, she did And when Myra was gone from that room Ali just lifted a day-old baby.
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She put her inside of her paper bag, and she walked for the exit.
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Security footage caught her going in with an empty bag and out, around a quarter to seven, with a bag that clearly didn't look empty any longer.
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She walked right past the nurses.
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She walked right past the guards.
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And right out the front.
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Myra came back from her recovery area and found the bassinet empty.
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Her daughter was gone. She was gone.
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And that is how it happened. Not some daring cinematic break-in, a trusted employee, a paper shopping bag, and a hospital that never once questioned a woman who looked like she belonged.
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The horror of it is actually how ordinary every step looks.
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Right up until you remember what's inside the bag. The hospital did move fast here. Staff realized the baby was gone.
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Security footage was pulled immediately.
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And there was Ale, on camera.
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An employee they could name. Police went to the addresses in her personnel file, and from one of those addresses, they traced a phone call to a place called Hotel Hollywood in Mexico City.
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In the small hours of the next morning, somewhere between 3 and 4, so about eight hours after Ale actually strolled out of that hospital, officers came through the door of room 449.
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Inside, they found Ale, And they found baby Katia, alive and unharmed.
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And she was returned to her parents. So no one was injured or died here.
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But a baby was gone for hours. And when they went to court, the whole case came down to a single question.
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Did Mayra ever give Ale permission to take her child?
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Because if she had, this becomes something else. A messy, unlawful, private adoption.
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A disputed handoff, but not the theft of a stranger's baby.
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But Myra said no. She never agreed to anything. Her husband said no.
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And the evidence backed that story up.
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It didn't back up Ali's story.
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So on November 9th, 2011, the court found Ale criminally responsible for the illegal deprivation of the liberty of a victim under the age of
16.
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She was sentenced to 13 years, 3 months, and 25 days in order to pay a fine.
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Pretty large crime? No one was injured, and she still got 13 years.
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Ale was 26 when she was arrested in 2009. Counting the years that she was held before and after conviction, she served more than 13 years, and she walked out in 2023 at the age of 39.
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She lost the entire back half of her 20s and most of her 30s inside the corner that she had painted for herself, which I'm sure now you're asking yourself, so what happened to Arturo?
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Well, when the police found that hotel room, Arturo was in it with his wife and the baby.
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So it didn't look good for him. The early theory was the obvious one, that the two of them had planned the whole thing together.
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And there was even a piece of video recorded before the crime of Arturo talking about the baby coming on June 17th, the very day Ale took Katia.
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But the same video fits a very different explanation, and it's the one the courts eventually accepted.
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Arturo talked about a baby arriving on June 17th because his wife had spent months convincing him that a baby was arriving on June 17th.
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So the truth, and he believed the pregnancy because Ale made it impossible not to believe.
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He saw her body change. He sat through the preparations. He was waiting on a due date that she had handed him.
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From his earliest statements, Ale insisted Arturo knew nothing.
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Not that the pregnancy was fake. Not that the baby had been taken from another woman.
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But in the end, that is what the law concluded too.
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And by then, Arturo had spent two years and six months behind bars before he was acquitted.
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So he actually belongs on the list of people that this lie destroyed.
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Ali's deception did not only tear a newborn out of Myra's arms for a night.
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It swallowed an innocent man whole, and it cost him years of his freedom for a crime he didn't even know was happening.
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A crime that's actually, in Ali's case, a pattern.
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Law enforcement and child protection researchers, including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, have built a detailed profile of the non-family infant abductor, because this specific crime repeats itself in specific ways.
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The typical offender is a woman of childbearing age who appears pregnant or has faked a pregnancy.
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She has usually lost a baby or been told that she cannot have one.
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She's married or partnered, and the drive to give that partner a baby to keep him always seems to sit at the center of why she does it.
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She plans. She often studies the hospital first, its layout, its routines.
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She'll pose as a nurse or a social worker or some other kind of staff to get close to the infant.
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She uses deception, not force, and she's usually able to care for the baby once she has it.
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Take that profile and put it next to Ale.
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It's almost a checklist. Childbearing age, fake pregnancy, lost babies that she couldn't carry, married, terrified of losing her husband, desperate to give him a child, posed as a social worker, used deception, never forced, walked out with a newborn and was calm enough to tend to her in a hotel room hours later.
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The thing is, Ali is not some one-off who invented a horror that nobody had done before, which is why you know this story.
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You may go, I already know what's going to happen. You're right, you do. Because it fits a known profile.
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And Ali fits it almost line for line. And the one place she breaks from it is the most chilling detail of all.
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Because most women who do this have to case that hospital from the outside and learn its rhythms and plan their way in.
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Ali never had to. She already worked there.
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The access those offenders have to manufacture was clipped to her chest as a laminated badge.
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But a profile only describes the outside of a person.
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It tells you the shape of the behavior, not what's happening inside one particular woman's head.
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And one thing about Ale, no profile can soften is the hardest part of the whole story.
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Because Ale, of all people, knew exactly what it felt like to lose a baby.
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She had lived it many times. She knew that pain intimately, and then she turned around and inflicted it deliberately on another mother.
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And she did this psychologically as a need, a wound tight enough.
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It narrows a person's field of vision until other people stop registering it as fully real.
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In the grip of her shame and her terror of being left, Ale was not weighing Myra's suffering against her own.
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Because in that moment, Myra wasn't a person to her at all. She was an obstacle. And then a source.
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And that's not the same as saying Ale felt nothing.
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It's saying that empathy, the thing in us that holds another person's pain as
real and treats it as a wall that we don't climb over, It can be switched off by a need strong enough.
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That's the true center of this case, the override. More than any other details about bags or badges, Ale was not born without a conscience.
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Her own needs shut it off towards the one woman standing between her and a child.
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A child that Ale really, really wanted.
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But what's more interesting about this case was actually within the documentary, A Child of My Own.
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Ale, who's now out, still claims that there was an agreement.
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It's the way her version quietly moves the blame off of her.
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In Ale's telling, she was pulled into the situation created by grief, by the pressure, and by a woman supposedly offering up an unwanted baby.
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That kidnapping became something that happened to her, a current she got swept into, rather than a long chain of choices that she made with her own hands.
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And she's telling herself this story continuously in order to survive.
00:24:20.890 --> 00:24:24.349
The documentary itself is also created a very particular way.
00:24:25.420 --> 00:24:37.950
Giving you this entire story from Ali's side, and towards the end, giving you Myra's account, with the records and contradictions, and it allows the whole thing to quietly collapse.
00:24:38.720 --> 00:24:47.410
Because by doing this, you start to see the truth about what's going on inside of Ale's mind, who she actually is.
00:24:48.019 --> 00:24:54.849
And ultimately, after Ale got out, the exact thing that she had been so terrified of coming true, it happened.
00:24:55.609 --> 00:24:59.029
Arturo still wanted a child. The two of them separated.
00:24:59.829 --> 00:25:04.089
And during that separation, Arturo had a son with another woman.
00:25:05.049 --> 00:25:09.589
The part that's a little bit insane is the fact that he did actually get back together with Ale.
00:25:10.529 --> 00:25:16.470
And the two of them today are raising his son together.
00:25:17.470 --> 00:25:31.319
So regardless of the things that Arturo went through, regardless of what really went on on his side, he forgave her. But it doesn't take away what she did or make anything that she did any better just because he forgave her.
00:25:31.759 --> 00:25:34.089
Or the fact that Myra has her daughter again.
00:25:35.029 --> 00:25:37.529
Because it was eight hours that Myra didn't have to go through.
00:25:38.480 --> 00:25:46.240
And then many, many years of having to deal with it continuously because people know that that was the child taken.
00:25:46.720 --> 00:25:52.819
She'll continue to be interviewed about it. She'll continue to be asked about it. A life she never asked to be a part of.
00:25:53.759 --> 00:25:59.559
When we ask why a woman does something like this, wanting a baby badly enough can never be the whole answer.
00:26:00.009 --> 00:26:07.259
Because countless women have endured miscarriage, infertility, cruel families, and cruel marriages.
00:26:08.450 --> 00:26:14.519
And they've bent under the weight of everyone's expectations, but they didn't walk out of a maternity ward with a stranger's child.
00:26:15.460 --> 00:26:24.750
What separated Alai was not the depth of her longing. It was that she let a lie grow until only a real baby could keep it standing.
00:26:25.589 --> 00:26:30.250
She spent her days inside the one building that put a stranger's newborn within reach.
00:26:31.230 --> 00:26:34.500
The wanting, that's ordinary.
00:26:35.380 --> 00:26:40.009
The willingness to make another woman pay for it, That's not normal.
00:26:41.269 --> 00:26:53.180
This has been GBRLIFE of Crimes, part of GBRLIFE Transmissions, and I'm your host, Kaitlyn, reminding you that understanding the darkness helps us appreciate the light. Join me next time as we uncover another case that challenges everything we thought we knew about the criminal mind.
00:27:10.849 --> 00:27:13.950
Hey, it's Kaitlyn, and if you stayed this long, a big thank you.
00:27:14.359 --> 00:27:20.660
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Slow, breath between the words we choose Stories in the spaces we don't.