Woman Cuts Out Victim’s Fetus and Steals Her Placenta

On October 6, 2011, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, emergency services received an urgent call. At 1:56 p.m., police officers were dispatched to a residence on South 7th Street following a distressed report. Upon arrival, officers were met by Annette Morales-Rodriguez, who claimed she had just given birth to a stillborn baby inside her shower.

Both Morales-Rodriguez and the baby, along with the placenta, were immediately transported to Saint Francis Hospital for emergency care. While at the hospital, Morales-Rodriguez recounted her version of the afternoon’s events to investigating officers. She stated that around 12:30 p.m., she experienced sudden, severe abdominal pain while taking a shower.

She described bleeding heavily before noticing the baby’s head emerging as her body went into labor. According to her statement, she moved to the living room to deliver the child, but realized the newborn was not breathing. She then called 911, claiming to the responding fire department personnel that she had been entirely unaware of her pregnancy.

The following day, on October 7, the Milwaukee County Coroner’s Office performed a routine autopsy on the deceased infant and examined the attached placental tissue. The medical examiner made a shocking discovery: the birth was not natural. The infant had not been delivered through typical biological labor, but rather removed forcibly from a mother’s womb.

The post-mortem examination revealed that the baby’s uterus was attached directly to its body, having been cut out with significant force. Portions of ovaries were also still connected to the excised uterus and placenta. The fetus was estimated to be between 38 and 42 weeks of gestation at the time of death.

The medical examiner concluded that the infant died directly as a result of the biological mother’s death. This critical finding raised immediate, horrific questions for investigators. If the true mother of the child was dead, then who was Morales-Rodriguez, and where was the woman to whom the organs actually belonged?

A comprehensive medical evaluation was ordered for Morales-Rodriguez to verify her claims of recent labor. Doctors quickly determined that she showed no biological signs of having given birth. Following this medical examination, she used the hospital bathroom, only for staff to discover a large amount of blood pooling on the floor shortly after she stepped out.

Police immediately placed her into formal custody and transferred her to the emergency room for further evaluation. Emergency room physicians examined her and discovered that the bleeding was caused by superficial, self-inflicted scratches along her vaginal walls. With her story completely unraveling, she was taken to the police station and read her Miranda rights.

During the subsequent interrogation, Morales-Rodriguez confessed to a elaborate scheme born out of desperation. She admitted to detectives that her boyfriend desperately wanted a son, but she was biologically unable to conceive. To keep him from leaving, she had lied for months, claiming she was pregnant and approaching her due date.

As the fabricated due date arrived, panic set in, leading Morales-Rodriguez to hatch a monstrous plan. On October 5, 2011, she decided that the only way out of her lie was to find a pregnant woman and take her unborn child. She drove repeatedly down 13th Street, targeting a local medical clinic where expectant mothers regularly went for prenatal checkups.

After spending two weeks planning the abduction, she set out again on the morning of October 6. She targeted the area surrounding Chase Avenue, knowing another medical facility was located nearby. It was there that she spotted Maritza Ramirez-Cruz, a pregnant stranger, and offered her a ride.

Ramirez-Cruz accepted the ride, unaware of the trap being set for her. Morales-Rodriguez waited while Ramirez-Cruz finished her appointment, then drove her to a nearby Walgreens to purchase anti-nausea medication. Afterward, Morales-Rodriguez lured her victim to her South 7th Street home under the pretense of needing to pick up a pair of shoes.

Once inside the house, Ramirez-Cruz asked to use the restroom. As she stepped back out into the hallway, Morales-Rodriguez ambushed her, wielding a baseball bat. She struck Ramirez-Cruz forcefully in the head, sending the victim falling backward into the bathroom.

Morales-Rodriguez pursued her victim, dragging her into the living room while delivering repeated blows to her head with the bat. The violent attack shattered Ramirez-Cruz’s eyeglasses and left her severely incapacitated on the floor. Morales-Rodriguez then pinned the woman down with her knees and manually strangled her until she stopped breathing.

To secure the body, Morales-Rodriguez retrieved duct tape from her bedroom, binding the victim’s hands and feet. She covered Ramirez-Cruz’s mouth and nose with tape and placed a plastic trash bag over her head to contain the bleeding.

What followed was a horrific attempt to perform a crude, self-taught Caesarean section. Morales-Rodriguez dragged the unconscious victim to the hallway near the bathroom and retrieved a sharp kitchen knife. She made a horizontal incision along Ramirez-Cruz’s bikini line, attempting to replicate surgical procedures she had seen on television.

During the violent procedure, Morales-Rodriguez cut her own fingers, later showing the small wounds to detectives. As she cut into the abdomen, amniotic fluid spilled out, and she reached inside the abdominal cavity to pull the infant from the womb. Upon extracting the baby, she realized the child was unmoving and unresponsive.

She then cut away the victim’s uterus, ovaries, and placenta, leaving the baby attached to the organs. Morales-Rodriguez dragged Ramirez-Cruz’s body into the basement, hiding it near the hot water heater. She changed out of her blood-stained clothes, attempted to clean the crime scene, and smeared some of the victim’s blood onto her own body to feign labor.

Detectives dispatched to the South 7th Street home searched the premises and discovered Ramirez-Cruz’s body in the basement. The victim exhibited a massive, open wound across her abdomen and was pronounced dead at the scene. The body was transferred to the medical examiner for a formal post-mortem examination.

The autopsy confirmed that Ramirez-Cruz suffered severe blunt force trauma to the head, consistent with strikes from a baseball bat. The body showed clear evidence of manual strangulation, including deep hemorrhaging in the neck muscles and fingernail marks along the throat. Traces of asphyxiation were noted alongside the traumatic internal injuries.

The examination detailed that the victim’s abdominal cavity had been sliced wide open, exposing her internal organs. Her fallopian tubes, ovaries, and uterus had been crude and violently excised. The medical examiner confirmed that the fatal loss of blood and oxygen directly caused the death of both the mother and the unborn infant.

The case sent shockwaves through the local community, culminating in a highly publicized court proceeding. On December 12, 2012, Morales-Rodriguez appeared in court for her final sentencing hearing. The prosecution detailed the calculated nature of the crime, while the defense argued that the defendant suffered from severe depression and deserved a chance at future rehabilitation.

The victim’s family delivered emotional impact statements during the hearing. Ramirez-Cruz’s husband spoke through an interpreter, explaining how the murder shattered their family and left their three young children—ages seven, five, and three—asking daily for their mother. He expressed the overwhelming grief of explaining to young children that their mother was never coming home.

While the defense petitioned for parole eligibility after twenty-six years, the presiding judge rejected the plea, citing the evil nature of the premeditated attack. Morales-Rodriguez was sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison without the possibility of parole.

A similar crime occurred in Kentucky on April 14, 2011, when state police made a gruesome discovery in a wooded area. Investigators located the body of twenty-three-year-old Jamie Stice. Her throat had been deeply slashed, her wrists were cut, and her body had been disemboweled.

Stice’s unborn infant had been forcibly cut from her womb using a utility drywall knife. The crime came to light after thirty-three-year-old Kathy Coy arrived at the Bowling Green Medical Center carrying a newborn baby. The infant was still attached to an umbilical cord, a severed uterus, and two extracted ovaries.

Hospital staff immediately recognized that Coy had not given birth to the child. The presence of the excised organs raised instant alarm, prompting doctors to alert local law enforcement. Coy, a twice-divorced mother of two teenagers, was immediately detained while medical staff rushed to care for the premature infant.

Police investigations revealed that Coy had befriended Stice and another pregnant woman on Facebook months prior. Coy claimed to detectives that she had recently suffered a miscarriage, though authorities were unable to verify her medical claims. Further inquiry revealed a long history of Coy faking pregnancies and stalking expectant mothers across the region.

On April 13, Coy lured Stice into her vehicle under the pretense of taking her to buy discounted baby supplies. Once inside the car, Coy used a stun gun to incapacitate the pregnant woman before driving her to a secluded wooded area. There, Coy carried out the fatal attack, cutting the child from Stice’s body before driving directly to the hospital.

When questioned by police regarding the infant’s origins, Coy initially claimed she had purchased the newborn from an acquaintance for five hundred and fifty dollars. A search of Coy’s home computer revealed extensive browsing history focused on pregnant women, alongside saved social media profiles of local mothers-to-be.

In Coy’s residence, investigators recovered the stun gun and two bloodied knives used in the fatal assault. Astonishingly, the infant, named Isaiah Allen Stice Reynolds, survived the attack despite being born five weeks premature. He was eventually placed into the full custody of his biological father.

Court-appointed psychologists evaluated Coy prior to trial, noting significant mental health issues and personality disorders. It was revealed during the investigation that Coy had previously asked her teenage son to help her commit a murder, brushing the request off as a joke when he refused.

She had convinced neighbors and acquaintances for months that she was pregnant, even displaying a stolen sonogram photo to reinforce her lies. Friends later told investigators that Coy was obsessed with proving her pregnancy to those around her. To avoid the death penalty, Coy entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

A third case occurred in Illinois in September 2006, involving twenty-six-year-old Tiffany Hall. Hall attacked her twenty-three-year-old pregnant friend, Jimella Tunstall, inside an apartment. Hall repeatedly struck Tunstall on the head with a heavy wooden table leg until the victim fell unconscious into a bathtub.

While Tunstall lay incapacitated, Hall used a knife to cut open her abdomen and extract the fetus. Tunstall was a close friend of Hall, who had previously acted as a babysitter for Tunstall’s older children. Tunstall bled to death in the bathtub, after which Hall concealed her body.

Hours later, Hall alerted local authorities, claiming she had delivered a stillborn child at home, but she adamantly refused to undergo a medical examination at the hospital. Three days after the initial murder, Hall approached the father of Tunstall’s children, claiming Tunstall wanted her to look after them.

Hall took custody of Tunstall’s three young children: Demone, aged seven; Ivan, aged two; and Janella, aged one. She brought the children back to the same apartment where the initial murder occurred. In a horrific attempt to cover her tracks, Hall drowned all three children inside the same bathtub where their mother had died.

She concealed the children’s bodies inside the apartment’s washing machine and clothes dryer. Nearly a week after the initial attack, Hall confessed her actions to her boyfriend, admitting that she had killed her friend to steal the unborn child and subsequently killed the children.

Her boyfriend immediately contacted the police, leading to Hall’s arrest and the discovery of the bodies. During legal proceedings, psychological evaluations determined Hall was legally competent to stand trial despite having a measured IQ in the 70s. In 2008, Tiffany Hall pleaded guilty to the murders and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.