Mother's fight for girls sold on-line

AS THEY were bought and sold and passed from pillar to post, three-year-old American twins Kiara and Keyara became so distraught that a psychiatrist decided they were seriously mentally ill.

And now the toddlers - internationally famous after they were bought by a British couple, Judith and Alan Kilshaw, over the internet - look likely to be on the move again.

Their biological mother, Tranda Conley, who went back on an agreement with Richard and Vickie Allen, from California, to make a deal with the Kilshaws instead, said she "dropped to her knees and just thanked God" when the Missouri supreme court ruled this week that she had been wrongly stripped of her parental rights.

The appeal judges also overturned the legal adoption of the twins by the foster parents who looked after them following their return from Britain.

Mrs Conley, who has not seen Kiara and Keyara since June 2002, now hopes to visit them as early as next week.

The case has also been passed back to a lower court to decide the place the twins should next call home - but it will certainly not be the Kilshaws’ council house in Wales.

The couple shot to infamy in January 2001, when they told a tabloid newspaper that they had bought the months-old twins for 8,200.

Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, spoke for the nation when he described the sale of children over the internet as disgusting.

The resulting furore, in which the babies were taken into care after less than three months with the Kilshaws, ruined the couple, who went from a comfortable middle-class lifestyle to a breadline existence.

Alan Kilshaw, a solicitor, was struck off in 2002, after using 17,000 of his clients’ money to prop up his spiralling overdraft, and they were forced to sell their house in Chester.

Judith Kilshaw, 50, was furious that the court had found in Mrs Conley’s favour.

"I don’t think she has any feeling for the twins whatsoever. They’re just a commodity to her," she said. "She might have given birth to them but she signed away her parental rights. She didn’t want these babies. If she wanted them so badly why did she do all this?

"I’d fight her in court if I had the money to go to Missouri. I’d go there and say she cannot have them."

Mrs Kilshaw, who lives with her husband in Shotton, North Wales, said she had been given an assurance from the United States social services that the twins were "well looked after and loved" by their new foster parents and said she believed they should stay where they were.

In the US courts, a psychiatrist for the state testified that the children were recovering from a mental condition called reactive detachment disorder caused by their experiences, although this was challenged by psychiatrists for the defence.

Mrs Kilshaw said: "They should have left the twins with me and Alan. They would have had a comfortable life with love and care, education and hopefully have gone to university.

"If I was selfish, I would say I want them back. But I’m thinking for them, not for me, and so should Tranda Wecker [Conley]. She should put her children first for once."

On Tuesday, the Missouri Supreme Court

rejected the earlier finding that the twins’ two adoptions through the internet broker amounted to "severe and recurrent acts of emotional abuse" by Mrs Conley.

Richard Teitelma, Supreme Court judge, said: "The two attempts at placement of the twins for adoption may have been mistakes, and may even have harmed the twins, but no reported Missouri case has ever held that placing a child up for adoption more than once rises to the level of abuse."

Mrs Conley, 32, who is divorced from the father of the children, Aaron Wecker, and has since remarried, said she hoped to eventually win back custody of the children.

"I feel very excited, very blessed. I’m just elated," she told The Scotsman. "I’m a very spiritual person and I was very confident God was going to see me through all this.

"Just to see my girls again - I’m going to be very excited. I have a family and I am a good mom. I have a husband and we can do just as much [for the children] as the foster parents are doing."

Mrs Conley, whose also has three children aged 16, 12 and six, added: "I’ve no ill-feeling towards the Kilshaws. I thought they were very nice people.

"I don’t care what Judith Kilshaw is saying. She’s upset because they opened up a can of worms they couldn’t close by going to the media."

Mrs Conley has denied receiving any money for the children, maintaining any financial deals must have been with the adoption broker, whom she found in the phone book. The court found no evidence that she profited from either of the abortive adoption deals.