Almost 35 years ago, someone kidnapped her baby
The choice that has haunted her ever since
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Paul Duggan.
The woman in the bus depot, the perpetrator, was amiable and chatty, Eleanor Williams tearfully told the police. She was African American and appeared to be in her 20s, Williams recalled, speaking publicly for the first time in decades about a mystery that has perplexed D.C. police.
After a while, in the sweetest voice, she asked whether she could hold the child.
Please? Just for a minute?
She said her name was Latoya.
Which might have been a lie. Who knows?
She said she was headed “out west” — maybe also a lie.
The woman, cradling April, said the baby needed a diaper change, Williams recalled.
“She said: ‘Oh, I’ll take her to the bathroom. You look tired.’ And I was skeptical, like, ‘Well . . . okay, I guess.’ Because I was tired. And I thought about it, but I had already said okay, and she had already got up and taken her to the bathroom.
And then, I don’t know, about 10 minutes later, when she didn’t come back, I started getting nervous.”
Williams struggles every day to live with this: She entrusted her infant daughter to a stranger in a bus station, some woman.
“She went to change her,” Williams said, “and I never saw them again.”
The kidnapping
“I’m pretty sure this is the only cold-case kidnapping we have, the only stranger kidnapping, where we still have a victim out,” Cmdr. Leslie Parsons, head of the D.C. police criminal investigations division, said recently. Parsons wouldn’t discuss details of the case, but apparently there isn’t much to say. “About the only thing we can do proactively at this point is put it out in the media,” he said. “Hopefully someone will see it, and they’ll call us.”
When another anniversary of the abduction rolled around in December, the department issued a news release, a standard plea for help: “The infant victim was named April Williams. She has a small birthmark on top of her left wrist in a straight line.” The statement was a terse rendition of the basic facts, repeated by police many times through the years, including details from the mother’s 1983 recollection of her chat with the kidnapper.
A few weeks ago, the detective handling the case contacted Williams in Connecticut, where she has lived since 1988, and asked her to speak with the news media. Publicity is good for cold cases, he told her: You shake the tree, and something might fall out. Plus, it’s the Internet age. The last time Williams talked publicly about April, in the days right after the kidnapping, stories and photos didn’t routinely circle the planet as they do now.
‘I wanted to commit suicide’
Williams lives alone and works as a surgical technician, helping physicians with their instruments in operating rooms. She is “extremely close” to her grown son and daughter, both born after April. She has two grandchildren and hopes for more, she said.
“There were times when I was younger when I wanted to commit suicide, I just felt so bad and so guilty,” Williams said. “But my other kids were always my strength. Like, what would they do if anything ever happened to me? I remember coming home one night after work and thinking, ‘I could just drive off the road into a tree, and nobody would ever know that I wanted to do this.’ And then I thought about my other kids.”
Still, there’s hope, although very little.
April weighed 11 pounds when she vanished.
Assuming she is alive, she turned 34 last summer.
