Baby crazy woman murders pregnant mum for stolen baby
Annette Morales-Rodriguez of Wisconsin, used techniques she learnt from the Discovery Channel to perform a Caesarean section on a woman she’d abducted and murdered, in fervent hopes that she could pass the woman’s child off as her own.
According to police reports, Morales-Rodriguez, 33, is accused of killing 23-year-old Maritza Ramirez-Cruz and then cutting the baby from her womb last week. Morales-Rodriguez faces two counts of first-degree intentional homicide while armed. The victim, Ramirez-Cruz, was set to deliver her baby boy next week if not for the murder.
Mandatory life in prison is what Morales-Rodriguez would face for her crime, if convicted. The Wisconsin native made a brief court appearance Monday, standing silent as her bail was set at one million USD.
According to police reports, Morales-Rodriguez told detectives that her boyfriend wanted a son but she couldn’t get pregnant. She lied and said she was pregnant, and then started to grow desperate as her made up due date approached.
Investigators found out that she had planned for two weeks to find a pregnant woman, take the baby and make it hers. The baby crazy woman drove around on Wednesday searching for a pregnant woman, but found none, authorities said. On Thursday, she drove around a non-profit organization that provides Hispanics with health care and found Ramirez-Cruz.
Ramirez-Cruz had moved from Puerto Rico to join her childhood sweetheart whom she had three children with. The murdered unborn baby boy would have been their fourth.
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Bloodcurdling account
Telling Ramirez-Cruz she needed to change her shoes, Morales-Rodriguez drove them to her weathered two-story house on Milwaukee’s south side. Once there, Ramirez-Cruz went inside to use the bathroom. When she returned, the would-be murderer was waiting for her with a baseball bat.
Morales-Rodriguez then said she began to bludgeon the victim until she fell to the ground. She straddled her victim and choked her until she passed out. According to court reports, she then duct-taped Ramirez-Cruz’s hands and feet, along with her nose and mouth.
The defendant then used a knife to cut open the victim’s abdomen, telling detectives she was trying to imitate a procedure she had seen on the Discovery Channel. She told the court that when she pulled the foetus out, the stolen baby was not breathing. She then dragged the victim’s body into the basement and hid it near the hot water heater.
She smeared some of Ramirez-Cruz’s blood around her thighs to make people think she was bleeding from giving birth. Morales-Cruz then called 911 and said she’d given birth to a stillborn. She was taken to a hospital, but left before she could be fully examined.
An autopsy on the remains of the stolen baby boy revealed that the stillborn was not the product of a natural birth. Police returned to Morales-Rodriguez’s house that day and took her back to the hospital. An examination verified she hadn’t given birth and police then began questioning her.
Suspicious, police raided her home and found the bloodied victim’s body in the basement. She is due back in court Oct. 19 for a preliminary hearing.
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“Baby crazy” takes on a whole new meaning
Horrifyingly, this case is not the first of its kind.
In April this year, Kathy Michelle Coy, a 33-year-old mother of two from Kentucky befriended a pregnant woman on Facebook before subduing her with a stun gun, killing her, and cutting the stolen baby out with a drywall knife. Closer to home, in 2009, the then 27 –year-old Leung Sin Ting from Hong Kong, strangled a pregnant friend before cutting her open to remove the baby.
Similar cases of women taking an unborn child from another mother’s womb were reported in Massachusetts and Oregon in 2009, in Pennsylvania in 2007, in Illinois in 2006 and Missouri in 2004.
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Wisconsin woman accused of abducting, cutting out foetus
Woman allegedly murdered expectant mother to steal baby
