Love Found a Way

If anyone had known what the plump, jittery Negro girl was after as she made her search through New York, it would have been easy enough to spot her and stop her. She was only 4 ft. 10 in. tall, wore a long, bright green coat, a firehouse red skirt, flat-heeled loafers and white bobby-sox. But she moved along in street crowds for days, as unnoticed as a chip borne on a flood, and pushed into hospital after hospital without a challenge.

Her hunt ended one cold evening in The Bronx. She walked up to the second floor of the city's big, red brick Lincoln Hospital, and let herself into the incubator room. There was no nurse in sight. She opened an incubator's glass cover, lifted out a tiny, naked Negro baby, and slipped it under her coat. She was back out on the dark streets long before a horrified nurse discovered the loss.

Inside a Blanket. The hospital asked for police help immediately--the baby, a prematurely born girl named Cheneta Holden, weighed only 2 Ibs. n oz., was almost certain to die if deprived of heat and oxygen for more than a few hours. A hundred policemen and detectives fanned out in a blind but desperate search.

As days passed, the case seemed more & more hopeless; the hospital assumed that the baby must be dead. Then, last week, after 26 days, the police got a tip. It led them to a cheap Manhattan hotel; there they found their quarry, a wild-eyed, 25-year-old domestic named Evelyn Jane Jordan. Police believed the worst: there was no baby in her littered room. Taken away for questioning, the kidnaper stubbornly denied ever seeing it.

Then the cops revisited her room, heard a muffled cry across a narrow hall. They tore open a locked closet door. A baby carriage stood behind it. Inside, tenderly swathed in an electric heating pad lay the baby--alive and well.

In the next hour, the authorities' amazement grew. Evelyn Jane Jordan was suffering from hysteria and epilepsy. She said she had recently given birth to premature twins who had died, and confessed, almost incoherently, to an unreasoning desire to have a baby of her own. She described going from hospital to hospital until she had a chance to steal one. But for all her irrationality she had treated the baby, with love and kindness.

Out of Books. She had bought books on baby care; by using the heating pad and a hot-water bottle she had kept the temperature in the carriage at 96DEG--a few degrees warmer than the temperature of an incubator. She had boiled chemicals on an electric plate to provide extra oxygen in the room. She had fed the tiny infant correct formulas from well-sterilized bottles. At the hospital astounded physicians found that the baby had gained six ounces.

Arrested, Evelyn Jane Jordan asked to have one more look at "my baby." The request was granted. Then, alternately screaming and smiling, she was charged with kidnaping, and taken off to the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital.

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