A Mother's Love

*** Prologue ***

Special Agent in Charge

FBI – Kansas City

11180 NW Prairie View Road

Kansas City, MI 64153

To whom it may concern:

While still of sound mind and body, I provided this letter to my attorney with instructions to mail it in the event of my death. Since you’re reading it now, we can only assume that said event has occurred.

Though likely long forgotten, during the late 1950’s to the mid-1960’s, there was a spate of infant abductions across the Midwest. The fact that these were seemingly random abductions with virtually no clue left behind is the only thing that tied the cases together – and it took quite some time for that association to even be made. But once it was, the name “The Baby Snatcher” was ascribed to the perpetrator.

I am that perpetrator.

In May of 1957 my wife Mona and I suffered the still-born death of our firstborn, a son, and we were told that she would never bear another child. She was absolutely devastated, going out of her mind, deeply depressed. No matter what I did, what medications or therapies the doctors suggested, I watched her fading from me, turning into someone I didn’t recognize. She rarely left the house and accepted no visitors, not even her parents or siblings. I couldn’t stand it, it ate at me, tore at me. I decided that she needed a child. Someone to hold, someone to love, someone and something else to think about besides her grief.

I knew that I’d need to wait the obligatory nine months before a baby could appear in our home. I spent many sleepless nights working through scenarios on how best to make this happen. In the interest of time and space and my poor cramping hand, I won’t go into detail, but I finally drove to Des Moines and came home with a baby boy.

For the next three children, Mona and I planned and pretended and acted our hearts out, getting better with each one. We rigged up a series of increasingly larger “pregnancy bellies” that Mona would wear so that when we came home with a baby, no one was any the wiser.

Our children neither know nor suspect any of this. They have always known Mona and I as mom and dad. So, I humbly request that you think long and hard about who will be hurt by divulging any of this to them. I do this solely to bring some closure to the families of these children.

They are:

Stephen Graham         Des Moines, IA           March 15, 1958

Doreen Alters            Rapid City, SD            May 28, 1960

Bradley Revend         Grand Island, NE       August 19, 1962

Kelly Minor              Red Wing, MN           July 24, 1965

Respectfully,

Gerald G. Feraat

Master Detective KCPD, Retired

Kansas City, MI

P.S. There was a July 1965 case in Sioux Falls, SD that was attributed to “The Baby Snatcher”. We had nothing to do with that one. That child’s birth name was Rosemary Doleton.

*** Beth, the present ***

“Mrs. Winger? Beth?” The inquiry floats up the stairs and into the corner bedroom, where I sit in my makeshift office.

I go to the top of the steps and look down, where Matt Lico, plumbing contractor extraordinaire according to angi.com, stands looking up at me, one muddy brown boot on the first riser.      

“What is it?”

“You’d better get out here. We… the backhoe… it found something.” With that Matt turns and exits through the kitchen, letting the screen door slam in his wake.

Two months earlier, lying in a hospital bed, wires sprouting from her body, surrounded by beeping machines, my mother had weakly squeezed my hand and pleaded, “Bethie, please take me home. I don’t want to die here.”

So I did. I took her to her home, my childhood home, leaving my daughter, seven-year-old Chloe, in the care of her father on the other side of the state. The dining room became Mom’s hospital room and I hired a full-time nurse for her care. Mom has become steadily weaker and mostly non-responsive as she slowly slips away from me.

Most nights, I cry myself to sleep. I’m so overwhelmed, juggling Mom’s rapid deterioration, my job, being away from Chloe. What I didn’t need was to be woken by a pouring rain only to find raw sewage leaking into the basement. Enter Mr. Lico.

The rain has burned off but it’s still muggy as hell when I step from the house. I note with a quick despair that the huge yellow machine has left deep ruts in the soft grass on its way to the back corner of the yard. It stands there, no longer running, with the rose bush I had begged Matt to preserve canted in its muddy bucket, three feet off the ground. I remember the day my mom planted that rose bush, and she has since tended it with such care that I couldn’t bear for it to be destroyed. Matt and his crew of three stand around it with their backs to me, studying something on the ground. They turn to look at me as I approach, faces somber. One of the men has tears in his eyes. All of them except Matt step back and I take a place beside him. My eyes follow his to the clump of mud and roots on the ground.

“Oh my god!” I step backward on unsteady knees, one hand flying to my chest. Matt reaches out to steady me as I continue to stare at the mass at our feet, from which protrudes a tiny, clearly human, skull. But what truly draws my attention, what truly evokes my horror, is the scrap of fabric embroidered with faded pink rabbits that is poking out of the tattered remains of a black trash bag.

My baby sister Rosie went missing when I was four years old. I don’t remember a lot about her, other than that she cried all the time. But I do remember that blanket. I was jealous of her, I suppose. I used to steal that blanket from her crib at times, hiding with it beneath my own covers, feeling the softness of it, running those happy rabbits through my fingers as I drifted off to sleep. Mom would snatch it back in the morning, return it to Rosie, swaddle her in it as she attempted to nurse. Then, one morning I woke up and the house was quiet and Mom said Rosie was gone, that someone had stolen her in the night. Once all the hubbub wore down, Mom rarely spoke of her again.

“Oh Mom,” I whispered. “What did you do?”

*** Jenny, the past ***

That day, the day before Rosemary disappeared, had been an especially trying one. We called her Rosie, and she had been a difficult, unhappy baby from the start. But for that, I didn’t blame her. I knew she was simply pushing out the grief, my grief that she surely absorbed through the placenta as she grew within me after the military notification officer in his perfectly pressed uniform and his shining black shoes stood at the door saying, “We’re sorry to inform you, ma’am, that your husband, Richard R. Doleton, was killed in action in Vietnam on October 7, 1964.”

Sometimes I just had to put Rosie down and walk away, leaving her crying, writhing and red-faced in her crib. And I had done so on that day, the last day, retreating to my own bedroom and collapsing into weary tears on the unmade bed. But I looked up as hesitant footsteps crossed the room and little Bethie crawled up next to me, awkwardly embracing me with her stubby arms.

“Don’t be sad, mommy.” Her hands patted me, and she reached to kiss my cheek. “It will be alright, you’ll see.”

I wiped my tears and pulled her into a hug. “You’re absolutely right, my sweet. How can I be sad when I have you?”

We made it through the rest of that day, a day like so many others, and finally about 1 a.m. I fell into bed, exhausted. Hours later, I jerked suddenly awake, disconcerted by the length of time I’d slept, alarmed by the silence in the house, surprised that Rosie had slept so long. I extricated myself from the tangled bedsheets and stumbled down the hall to the nursery.

The room was eerily quiet, and I could see by the glow of the nightlight that Bethie had crept into the crib again to lie beside the baby, something she did on occasion to try to sooth her. But as I approached, I knew something was different, something was wrong. I couldn’t see Rosie’s face and I realized with mounting horror that Bethie was lying directly on top of her. Rosie’s favorite blanket, a fuzzy white square embroidered with pink rabbits, was between them. I roughly rolled Beth out of the way and placed a trembling hand on Rosie’s chest, shaking her.

“Rosie? Rosie, sweetie?” There was no response, no pulse, no quiet breaths. I wailed as I clasped her to my chest, sank slowly into the rocking chair in the corner. I sat staring into the crib at the sleeping Bethie, numb with shock, swallowing my panic.

After some time, I gently lay Rosie back into the bed and picked Bethie up. As I gathered her in my arms to return her to her own bed, she whispered sleepily, “Mommy happy now?” I recoiled, pulling away to look at her drowsy face. I nearly dropped her in the process, appalled at the implication of what she’d just said. But she gave no notice and was fast asleep when I tucked the covers under her chin.

Much later, I thought maybe I had imagined those words. But by then it was too late. Because in the wee hours of that morning, I did what I needed to do. I wrapped Rosie in that blanket, pulling the corner of it over her sweet face, then placed the bundle in a black trash bag. I hid the package under the pork chops and the beef roasts, the ham hocks and the frozen dinners, deep in the cavern of the chest freezer in the basement.

Then I called my father. Police Chief Randall Oates.

I should have gotten an Oscar for my performance that day, the next few months, years even. But when your father is the chief of police and your brother is the lead investigator in small town America, they don’t look at you too closely. To help matters, there had been a series of unsolved child disappearances in the Midwest around that time, dubbed ‘The Baby Snatcher’ case, and Rosie was eventually added to that list of victims.

Beth remembers nothing of what really happened that night, I saw to that. In the spring following Rosie’s death when I took up gardening, those around me were relieved, thinking it would help me take my mind off my grief, my loss. With silent tears, I buried Rosie beneath a yellow rose bush and now… now each year I eagerly await its blooms.