Imagine growing up happy and loved in a family where you are the apple of your father's eye and the center of your mother's world. Now imagine finding out that the woman you have loved all your life had stolen you.
This is the reality facing 18-year-old Zephany.
She was born at Cape Town's Groote Schuur Hospital, South Africa, on April 27, 1997, to Celeste and Morne Nurse. When she was 3 days old, she was abducted and despite a years long search by the Nurses and the police, was never found. The pressure of looking for her over the years contributed to the break-up of the Nurse family, and the couple divorced in February, 2015.
One of the Nurse family's other daughters started going to a new secondary school, and met a girl who looked similar to her. When she told her parents, they asked their daughter to invite the girl out for a meal with them so they could see her themselves. Convinced that the 17 year old was their missing daughter, they went to police. A DNA test was taken which proved it. The mother who stole the child was put on trial.
In court she recounted how she had suffered a number of miscarriages, which she said had made her desperate to have a child of her own to love. But she denied stealing the baby. She said she was handed a new-born baby at a busy railway station by a woman called Sylvia, who cannot be found. She also said that she had signed adoption papers, but they were lost.
Her husband supports her as a “wonderful mother.”
At the defendant’s sentencing, Judge John Hlophe described her account as a fairy tale and said the “court rejects it with the contempt it deserves”.
He added that the Nurse family had organized a media campaign to raise awareness about the case and it had gripped the whole country at the time. There was also annual media coverage of the parents' birthday celebrations for their missing baby. The judge told the accused she had had “all the time in the world” to return the child and there was no way the defendant could not have known that the parents were still looking for her.
Because of her previously clean record and other mitigating circumstances, he gave her 10 years in prison.
During the course of the trial Zephany was barred from seeing the defendant and was reunited with her biological parents. But she felt little connection to them.
The Nurses are prepared to give her the time she needs and will work hard to gain her trust and affection, but they say they feel cheated out of a life with her.
“I don't have a relationship with my daughter and it hurts,” her father told the court.
How has Zephany coped in this highly publicized trial?
Those close to the case say it has destroyed her sense of who she is.
Cape Town-based clinical psychologist Oliver Fuchs explains, “Her frame of meaning, sense of identity, how she locates herself in the world – all that has been shattered.”
Zephany issued a statement through the Centre for Child Law in March: “Don't you think for once that [the defendant] is my mother? Whether it is true or not is not for you to toy with.”
She says she wants to stay with the woman who kidnapped her and her husband, rather than her biological parents.
Zephany is currently living with the man who helped raise her. He says she is distraught about “losing her mother” to jail.
There are no winners here. The Nurses lost their child and their marriage. The abductor is now in jail for 10 years, her husband lost his wife for 10 years, and Zephany was thrown into a crisis that may never be resolved.
