Kidnapping Her Own Kids

On a frigid December night in Canada in 2006, authorities discovered twin American toddlers who had been taken illegally across the border. The boy, Tyler, and girl, Holly, were staying with a woman in her late 40s at a rented townhouse in Ottawa. Kidnapping charges were filed against the woman, Allison Quets, and she was thrown into jail. But this woman was no stranger to the children. She had given birth to them.

Quets had won visitation rights to the children and had been fighting to win them back for good. A divorced woman who had gone through fertility treatments for years, Quets had worried about losing out on her dream to be a mother. Using a donated egg and sperm, she became pregnant and gave birth to the twins on July 6, 2005. But a tough pregnancy and the premature birth left her weakened and depressed. When the children were just five weeks old, Quets, a single parent, signed the papers giving them up for adoption. She changed her mind almost immediately.

"I should never have had papers put in front of me," said Quets, who says she was relying, in part, on the advice of a former boyfriend. She says he urged her to give the children to Kevin and Denise Needham, a couple who lived in North Carolina. The former boyfriend was distantly related to Kevin. "I was so sick and the postpartum depression was so bad that you can't attribute any meaningful thought process to me."

Quets went to court repeatedly in an effort to get the adoption nullified. As the case wound its way through the appellate system, she exercised visitation rights to see the children every three weekends, traveling to Durham, N.C., the home of the Needhams. The Needhams were sympathetic to Quets's plight, according to Deborah Sandlin, the couple's domestic attorney. They "would have let her have visitation whether it was enforceable or not," Sandlin said.

But in November 2006, according to Quets, the Needhams abruptly reneged on giving her her scheduled time with the children. "I flew up to North Carolina and waited and waited at the determined spot," says Quets. "They never showed up." Her efforts to schedule a makeup visit were rebuffed, she said, and she began to grow desperate. "I just wanted to be a mom with my kids," she said.

Before her next scheduled visit she obtained passports for the children. A few days before Christmas she picked up the children—she had agreed to return them on Dec. 24—and then scurried to Canada. In Ottawa she signed a six-month lease on a townhouse, apparently intending to stay for a long time. She also researched extradition proceedings. Prosecutors say the trip was scarcely some spur-of-the-moment adventure.