When She Let a Stranger Hold Her Baby Almost 35 Years Ago Was the Last Time She Saw Either of Them

Eleanor Williams, 52, gave her 3 and a half months old little girl to a strange woman who begged to hold her at a bus-stop – then vanished with her infant daughter 35 years ago. Williams said the woman approached her at a bus station in 1983, asking to hug the tot.

The young mum, then just 18, naively let her take her daughter, April Nicole Williams in her arms after she pleaded: ‘please, just for a minute?‘ in a “sweet voice”.

Shortly after the stranger, who called herself Latoya, insisted she take baby to the bathroom to change her, telling Eleanor: “you look exhausted”.

But the woman never came back – and the pair have been missing ever since.

Sobbing, she told the Washington Post:

“She came over next to me at some point and just started talking to me. She was being friendly, asking me lots of questions. Like, ‘Where are you going?’ And, ‘How old is your baby?’

“She was nice, you know? Then she was like, ‘Do you mind if I hold her?’ And I was sitting right next to her, right there, so I said okay, and I let her.”

It was then the woman asked to take April to the toilet.

“She said: ‘I’ll take her to the bathroom. You look tired.’ And I was sceptical, 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,” Eleanor added.

Now cops and The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children have released pics of the snatched baby and a computer image of what she could look like now – as a 34-year-old woman, in a desperate bid for new information.

DC Police and xx released this computer image of how April would look now, aged 34

The suspect, who could also go by Rene or Rene Latoya, was described as a young black female with a slim build, about 5 ft 3 inches tall with spots on her face.

Detectives said the suspect also had her ears pierced with two holes in each ear.

April had a notable birthmark on the top of her left wrist in a straight line. On the day she was snatched – April was bundled in a pink-and-white snowsuit.

The incident – every parent’s nightmare – took place on December 2 in downtown Washington, as Eleanor ventures away from her Denver home for the first ever time.

Heartbroken Eleanor says she will never forgive herself for the decision that day.

“Of course I blame myself,” she said in her apartment. Her hands were trembling. “I blame myself every minute, right up to this minute. It’s been 34 years, and it’s not something that’s over. I deal with it every day, whether I talk about it or not. . . . It’s always on my mind. It’s always: ‘How could you be so stupid? Why? Why did you do it?’ ”

“There were times when I was younger when I wanted to commit suicide, I just felt so bad and so guilty,” she 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.”

Williams was 4 when her mother died in 1969, on Christmas night. She is the second-youngest of six siblings and was raised by her father on her paternal grandparents’ farm near Suffolk, Va.

In late 1982, when she was a senior in high school, she found out she was pregnant.

“I wasn’t happy about it,” she recalled.

“I mean, I was 17 years old! I didn’t want to have a baby. I thought about having an abortion, but I decided not to. . . . There’s something about when babies start moving and kicking. You know there’s something inside you, and it’s like a bonding. It’s just some kind of way special.”

April was born Aug. 17, 1983, two months after her mother’s high school graduation. Williams said the father was a local teenager who wanted no part of parenthood.

She saw no future with him, either, and they lost touch after the baby arrived.

Photo credit: Washington Post