Episode 70:
"I Want Light-Skinned Baby" The Sick Reason They Cut Open a Mother to Steal Her Fetus

Most thieves take money or valuables. What disappeared from this home was an unborn baby, cut out of its mother's womb before it ever saw daylight.

When the husband walked past the entrance into the living room, he found his wife, Debra, dead, her stomach torn open. Someone had stolen the baby from inside her.

On November 17, 1995, in a quiet Addison, Illinois neighborhood, James Edwards came home at 2:30 a.m. after an overnight shift. His family should have been asleep — instead, he heard his youngest, 19-month-old Jordan, crying.

A Trail of Blood

He found the back door wide open and Jordan alone on the cold kitchen floor. Then he felt something wet underfoot — blood, trailing into the living room, where his wife Debra Evans lay under a red blanket. She was three days from her due date. When James pulled back the blanket, her stomach had been ripped open, and their unborn son Elijah was gone.

James was a devoted stepfather to Debra's children — 10-year-old Samantha, 8-year-old Joshua, toddler Jordan — and father to the baby still inside her. Racing upstairs calling for the older kids, he found Samantha under a blanket like her mother, her throat slit. Joshua was nowhere in the house. His wife and stepdaughter were dead; his unborn son and 8-year-old stepson had vanished.

A Friend Shows Up With a Stranger's Son

The killers left no fingerprints, no hair — the investigation stalled under thousands of dead-end tips until a woman named Patrice Scott called police with a strange story. Around midnight that same night, her friend Jacqueline Williams had shown up at her door in Schaumburg, blood on her sweater, with a shivering boy in a coat and no pants despite the November cold. "His mom was in an accident, just take him for one night," Jacqueline said, adding she'd just given birth herself — then vanished before Patrice could respond.

The boy was Joshua. He cried for seven hours before telling Patrice his mother and sister were dead, robbers had broken in, and his baby brother was still there — naming three attackers by nickname: Annette, Fedell, and Vern. Patrice froze — Annette was Jacqueline's old nickname, Fedell was her 22-year-old boyfriend Fedell Caffey, and Vern was her 24-year-old cousin Levern Ward.

The Basement

Before Patrice could call police, Jacqueline returned, produced medicine claiming Joshua suffered from paranoia, and forced Patrice to bring him along to see her "newborn." At Jacqueline's house, Patrice was handed a baby with a crudely taped umbilical stump, then led to a basement laundry room where Fedell asked why Jacqueline had brought them both. "Joshua was talking too much," she said — and Fedell strangled the boy with a cord on the spot.

Patrice fought Fedell off Joshua and ran, but the door was locked. Jacqueline calmly walked her to a car and threatened her family into silence while Fedell threw Joshua in the back seat and stabbed him. Ten miles later, the couple got out with Joshua and returned without him, blood on their clothes. Patrice, dropped home and finally free, went straight to police, who found Joshua's body covered in stab wounds and ligature marks.

Three People, One Target

Jacqueline and Fedell were arrested for murder and kidnapping; Elijah was found alive and safe. The third accomplice, Levern Ward, turned out to be Debra's abusive ex — and the biological father of Jordan and Elijah, the two children he'd made sure were spared. Levern had lived off Debra for years during a relationship marked by constant abuse; when she finally left and got a restraining order, he lost his income and tried extorting her over the pregnancy, demanding $3,000 to let the baby be born safely. She refused.

Desperate, he called his cousin Jacqueline, who wanted a baby badly enough to keep her boyfriend that her own abortion history had made difficult, and Fedell, who wanted a "light-skinned, doll-like" child to show off rather than one to love. Levern needed money, Jacqueline needed a baby, Fedell wanted the right baby — and Elijah, still in Debra's womb, became the answer to all three. The plan was simple: break in, take the kids hostage for ransom, let Jacqueline and Fedell take the unborn child. The couple even told people Jacqueline was pregnant and shopped for baby supplies in advance, while Levern used a fake pretext to learn James's work schedule.

Final Thoughts

On the night of November 16th, the three broke in through a window and confronted Debra with Jordan beside her. When she refused Levern's ransom demand, Fedell — who never needed her alive, only the baby — struck her down and cut her open while she was still breathing. Jacqueline calmly cut the cord and washed the blood off in the sink. The noise woke Samantha and Joshua, who ran downstairs into the scene; Fedell dragged Samantha upstairs and killed her, while Joshua, left alive only long enough to be silenced elsewhere, was ultimately murdered too, after they'd tried poisoning him with concentrated iodine disguised as medicine.

All three were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death — until January 2003, when outgoing Illinois Governor George Ryan commuted every death sentence in the state, all 167 of them, to life without parole as part of a sweeping reform. Three killers who murdered three people and cut a living woman open to steal her unborn child now live out their sentences with three meals a day. Jordan and Elijah were raised by their grandparents and are believed to be living ordinary lives in their thirties today — the only mercy this case ever produced.