Celeste Nurse of Cape Town, South Africa remembers lying on a hospital bed recovering from a caesarean section.
She gave birth to a healthy and bushy-haired baby girl they named Zephany on April 27, 1997.
The drugs had barely worn off when a nurse offered to help her soothe her crying baby.
As the nurse picked her up, Celeste quickly drifted off. She woke to a nurse frantically waking her asking where here child was.
Confused, Celeste said that a nurse had come in to care for her baby. When it quickly dawned on her that the nurse had not been a nurse at all, she was terrified.
Tearing the IV off of her arm, she leapt off the bed and she searched frantically for Zephany.
“We ran everywhere in the hospital,” Celeste said on the witness stand Tuesday. “The baby was nowhere to be found. Missing. Gone.” The young couple was distraught.
READ: Woman disguises herself as a nurse to steal a newborn from a hospital
Next page: Following the clues
Celeste and her husband Morne met as teenagers in Cape Town and married with a baby on the way within the year.
The young parents were devastated by the unjust disappearance of their firstborn.
“I was crying my heart out in the fetal position,” said Morne in his testimony.
There had only a few clues to hold on to such as Zephany’s clothes, a handbag whose owner they couldn’t identify and the pillow which was allegedly used by the abductor to fake a pregnancy, which they found dumped in an abandoned tunnel from the maternity ward leading outside the hospital grounds.
Though the hospital called the police for help, they found no further evidence.
Even more devastating was that the hospital didn’t have any security. Morne and Celeste quickly became enraged and they felt helpless.
“I went ballistic,” Morne told the Cape Argus. “I even knocked over a medicine cabinet and all the bottles broke on the floor.”
“We came home to nothing,” added Celeste.
Everything reminded them of their lost child from the baby gear to the cats purring that sound like babies. It seemed the nightmare would not end.
After 18 years of hoping to find her, Celeste finally came face to face with the woman who allegedly abducted her child.
Next page: A surprising turn of events
The woman reportedly snatched Zephany to raise her as her own.
Celeste could hardly believe that the one responsible could have been found.
For nearly two decades, Celeste’s story has fascinated the locals of South Africa.
Though there have been cases of missing babies, something about Zephany’s case was special.
The fact that Zephany means “the Lord is hidden” in Hebrew has been fascinating to many due to her disappearance.
Each year they would celebrate Zephany’s birthday, occasionally making public appeals on TV for their daughter’s safe return.
12 years after the disappearance, someone called claiming they knew where Zephany was. The hushed female voice was demanding 500,000 rand ($44,450) for information on the girl’s whereabouts.
She told the family to bring the cash to a KFC restaurant.
They called police for help and they attached a surveillance wire on Morne but the caller never showed up.
The police, however, were able to trace who the caller was and arrested her for extortion.
“I’ll never ever give up hope,” Morne told a local newspaper in 2010. “I can feel it in my gut — my daughter is out there and she is going to come home.”
Next page: Celeste and Morne welcome a new baby girl but still longs for Zephany’s safe return
Celeste and Morne had a baby three years later but Zephany never left their minds.
They named the girl Cassidy and they raise her in their hometown of Mitchell Plains in Cape Town.
They would stay together for nearly 13 years before splitting up. But she and Morne remained bonded by the fight for justice.
After a brief battle with cancer, Celeste was able to beat the disease. She soon got engaged to another man.
An unbelievable twist in their story
In a surprising turn of events, when Cassidy was a freshman in high school felt strangely drawn to a Senior girl, with whom her friends claim she bears a striking resemblance. They became instant friends.
When Cassidy told her parents about her ‘doppelganger’, they asked to meet the girl at a local Mcdonald’s.
Next page: Could it be Cassidy’s missing sister Zephany?
“We went to McDonald’s and I started questioning her,” Morne told the court. ”I asked what her date of birth was — her birthday was the date my daughter was abducted. She said she didn’t look like her own folks, and she told me that she had thought about that over and over.”
“I asked her why she thought she looked like me and Cassidy. She laughed and said she didn’t know, she said she felt confused,” adds Morne. “I didn’t want to scare her. I wanted to protect her at all costs. I left with the information I was looking for.”
So Morne did some digging and looked through the girl’s Facebook page, he saved a photo of the girl’s mom and after more digging, with the help of a witness, they were able to pinpoint that it was in fact the woman who was last seen “soothing” Zephany.
Eventually, Morne sent the photo of Celeste when he was able to verify the story.
“I just — I got that feeling inside, I just grabbed my heart and said this is my daughter,” Celeste told CBS. “This is my daughter.”
He then brought the evidence he collected to the authorities who took DNA samples from the girl.
Six weeks of testing went by.
They confirmed that the girl was in fact Zephany. She grew up barely a mile from her biological family.
“I burst out into tears when I saw her,” Celeste told CBS. “And she kept me like this, in her arms the first time when she saw her dad, and when she came to me I just — I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t stop crying. I said, finally, I found you. For seventeen years I’ve been looking for you. I found you finally. You’re mine again.”
Next page: Justice is served
A day after Celeste and Zephany were reunited, her alleged abductor, a 51-year-old seamstress was charged with kidnapping fraud for filing false paperwork regarding her daughter’s birth and identity.
(Zephany’s name was also kept anonymous as per a court order)
The accused woman claims to have had a series of miscarriages due to abusive relationships which dated back to when she was a child.
She claims to have suffered a miscarriage in 1997 which she kept a secret from her husband. She arranged to adopt a baby from a middle-woman.
Zephany, thinking that they were her family, grew up close to her ‘father’.
“Although I was not her biological mother, I raised her as my own child. I recall sitting with her, brushing her hair, bathing her and always wondering where her parents were and why they did not want her as I found her to be pretty and cute,” she continued. “I thought I was helping a child who was not wanted and would not be cared for sufficiently by her biological parents.”
“She [the middle-woman] told me that the baby’s mother is a young girl who wanted to give her child up for adoption. … I was told that the baby was mine and the documentation will be sorted out later,” the accused wrote in her plea. “I had a bad feeling that something was wrong.”
Surprisingly, Celeste is willing to forgive the woman.
“When I see the woman that took her, I would like to give her a hug,” she said. “When I see her I want to say thank you for what you’ve done. You’ve done a good job, look at my daughter, she’s beautiful inside out.”
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