Facing up to ordeal of a child abducted

At 1.40pm yesterday in the Wordsley Hospital, another family experienced those dreadful feelings; their twin girl had been abducted.

No-one knows the agony of such an experience better than Dawn Griffiths, whose daughter, Alex, was abducted from St Thomas’s Hospital in south London 12 years ago.

Little Alex was just two days old - like yesterday’s victim - when her father, Geoff, unwittingly handed her to a baby-snatcher posing as a social worker in January 1990.

Janet Griffiths, 33, (no relation) chatted to the tiny girl’s parents for 20 minutes before walking off with her on the pretext of doing some tests.

When 20-year-old Dawn Griffiths appeared on television weeping and shaking, thousands of viewers wrote or phoned in offering support.

It was a fortnight before Janet Griffiths, a nurse, was spotted in the Cotswolds village of Burford. Police found Alex in a cottage where she was being "cared for" by Griffiths who had taken her in an attempt to prevent her married lover dumping her. Griffiths was detained in a psychiatric hospital for seven months in 1992 and has since died of cancer.

When she was ten, Alex attempted to depict the experience in an examination essay. "There were a lot of hoax calls off a lot of nasty people," the schoolgirl wrote. "The police kept telling my mum I would certainly be returned. It was just a matter of eliminating all the calls. This ... didn’t help my mum who must have gone through hell and back."

Dawn Griffiths’ life deteriorated after the ordeal. She split from Alex’s father, married again, divorced and suffered severe depression. She and Alex live with her second child, Charlie, in a terraced house in Middlesbrough. The girl said her mother’s over-protectiveness affected her childhood: "I wasn’t allowed anywhere like my brother is. I wasn’t allowed to play out in the road.

"I know why mum is like this. That’s why I hate Janet Griffiths. But I blame the hospital, too. She shouldn’t have been able to take me out."

Four years after Alex’s abduction, five-hour-old Abbie Humphries was snatched from the Queen Elizabeth Medical Centre in Nottingham. Her parents, Roger and Karen, suffered 15 days of despair in July 1994 after Julie Kelley, dressed in a nurse’s uniform, took Abbie out of her father’s arms, saying she needed a hearing test. Abbie was finally found in a house near the hospital.

Kelley, then 23, had faked a pregnancy in a bid to keep her boyfriend. She pretended to have antenatal checks and tricked him into believing she had given birth at home in 90 minutes. She was put on probation for three years on condition she was treated for a severe personality disorder.

Within nine months of Abbie being taken, three-day-old Lydia Owens was snatched by a bogus visitor from Glan Clwyd Hospital in Bodelwyddan, Wales. The baby was missing for 20 hours. By the time the culprit, 39-year-old grandmother Susan Brooke, appeared in court in June 1995, public sympathy for baby-snatching women had run its course.

Whereas previous offenders escaped with relatively light sentences, Brooke was branded cruel and wicked by the judge who sentenced her to three years in prison.

Karli Hawthorne was snatched from the side of her sleeping mother in Basildon General Hospital just three hours after her birth in 1997. Mother-of-three Denise Giddings, 33, from nearby Langdon Hills, admitted taking Karli and was put on probation for three years after a judge accepted she had been suffering from serious mental delusions.

The Portia Trust, which counsels women driven to snatch babies, was set up in 1970, and at one time it was dealing with up to 40 cases a year, although the rate has fallen. The trust says improving security would not stop baby-snatches by desperate, psychologically disturbed women. A spokesman said: "If you fortify hospitals, people will take babies from prams."

Ken Norman, the trust’s chairman, said the women who snatched the baby girl yesterday will be in a state of panic and are likely to give her up once they have calmed down and begun to bond with her.

He said: "Women are usually driven to snatch babies either because they have recently experienced the loss of a baby or they are unable to have children of their own. If they do not receive proper counselling or share their feelings of loss with friends and family, some women can become isolated.

"They have irrational thoughts which they keep to themselves. These thoughts build up until they get into the state where they are driven to take drastic action.

"It is very unusual for two women to snatch a child together. They would both have to be in a very similar state of mind."

SECURITY VIGILANCE STEPPED UP

SWEEPING changes to hospital security were made after baby-snatching incidents highlighted shortcomings in UK maternity units.

The abduction of Alex Griffiths in 1990 led to the introduction of a number of security measures in hospitals in an effort to prevent a repeat. CCTV cameras and 24-hour security were introduced in hospitals across the UK.

Despite this, until Abbie Humphries was abducted in 1994, parents and visitors wandered through maternity wards relatively unchallenged. Her case prompted hospitals to step up vigilance and a range of security measures, including swipe cards and tagging, were tried. Most hospitals, however, decided not to introduce electronic tagging of babies after it was found they could be removed without triggering an alarm.

The very nature of hospitals, open places with staff and visitors coming and going 24 hours a day, makes security a major headache.

Guidelines issued by the Department of Health in 1995 stressed the need to alert parents and staff to the possibility of a baby being taken: "It is vital that parents, visitors and staff are aware of the importance of security measures, to report any suspicious behaviour, to challenge unidentified people and never to leave infants unattended."

Hospitals do not have to use all or any of the recommendations and each measure has its shortcomings. Basildon Hospital in Essex, where Karli Hawthorne was snatched in 1997, had closed-circuit TV. Staff were issued with badges and internal doors were fitted with security locks. An inquiry warned there was nothing to stop it happening again.

In October 2000 a baby boy was taken from his cot at the Erinville Maternity Hospital in Cork in Ireland. He had a security tag on his wrist which triggered an alarm and alerted security personnel, but his abductors fled in a car.

Mothers and their new babies at Wordsley Hospital’s maternity unit, where yesterday’s abduction took place, are protected from the outside world by security doors which lock automatically when closed.

Visitors to the unit must speak into a voice intercom and can be observed at all times by a camera sited directly above the door.

A Scottish Executive spokeswoman said it is up to individual trusts to decide security levels.

She added: "Scottish hospitals pay serious attention to security matters, particularly for maternity wards. After this latest unfortunate incident managers will no doubt want to re-check their measures."