Teenager admits snatching baby

Hugh Dougherty12 April 2012

A teenager today pleaded guilty to snatching a new-born girl from the foot of her mother's bed in a hospital maternity ward.

Kelly Oldnall, 18, took two-day-old Elizabeth Rice - one of identical twins - from her cot as mother Deanne slept, prompting a massive police search which ended six hours later when police raided her home.

Today Oldnall was remanded in custody until July after pleading guilty at Wolverhampton Crown Court to taking the child from her mother's lawful control.

Oldnall's barrister, Anthonie Muller, told Judge Christopher Hodson that she had miscarried a baby before the abduction. He said: "She became pregnant, she didn't approach the medical authorities about her pregnancy, she miscarried. Although I am no psychiatrist, I imagine her condition is linked to this incident."

The teenager, from Pensnett, near Dudley in the West Midlands, made her way through lax security at Wordsley Hospital in Stourbridge on 6 May and lifted Elizabeth from her cot, leaving behind twin Susannah. Minutes later the alarm was raised and a huge police operation swung into action.

But it was a tip-off from one of Oldnall's neighbours which led to her arrest at her home on a council estate six miles from the hospital. Baby Elizabeth was reunited with her father, Richard, 30, within minutesof being found, a moment he described as "like winning the lottery".

The abduction came after Oldnall had claimed for many months that she was pregnant and that her baby was due in April. One neighbour said: "She said she had had a scan and it was a girl due in a few weeks' time. I was suspicious straight away because although she is a big girl, she did not look pregnant."

Oldnall also made these claims to a friend - the woman who had introduced her to her boyfriend, Geoffrey Booth, 52, whom she had met at the age of 16 and lived with for two years.

On 6 May, a bank holiday Monday, Oldnall realised her fantasy. While Richard Rice and dentist wife Deanne, 32, prepared to take home their new babies, sisters for 16-month-old Rebecca, Oldnall was telling a neighbour that she had had her baby.

The neighbour said: "She ran up all excited and said she had had the child and was picking her up later. She said the baby weighed 4lb and was in an incubator."

That afternoon Oldnall was seen pushing a pram in the street outside her sister's house, which she gave in court as her home address. Three hours later, a neighbour who had seen her phoned police after seeing an appeal on television.

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