Toddler stolen in Chicago is safe; suspect had abducted Seattle girl in 1987
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Jasmine Anderson was found at a home in Williamson, W.Va., FBI Special Agent Thomas Kneir said. The toddler was being examined but appeared to be healthy, he said.
Authorities said Sheila Annalee Matthews, 33, was charged with one count of federal kidnapping.
Fourteen years ago, Matthews took off with a Seattle toddler, Maria Weeks, whom she had been baby-sitting. She was found with the child a month later in a Moses Lake apartment. She had told others the girl's name was Mikka.
In the Jasmine Anderson abduction, Matthews told her boyfriend she'd had a baby while he was in prison, according to Chicago police. When he was released, she told him that her mother was caring for the child in Chicago.
"When she went to the Greyhound station that night, she was looking to abduct a baby," said Philip Cline, Chicago's chief detective. Police said Matthews and her boyfriend took the toddler to his relatives' house in Chicago on Christmas Day and posed for a photo with the girl. They left for West Virginia the next day.
Meanwhile, their hosts spotted a photograph of Jasmine on television and called police.
Matthews is scheduled to appear in U.S. Magistrate Court in Charleston, W.Va., today, according to Joe Ciccarelli, spokesman for the FBI's Charleston office.
Her boyfriend was questioned and released.
"We're really grateful to everyone who helped," said Marcella Anderson, the child's mother. "Especially the family members who were brave enough to come forward and had really good hearts, and God bless everyone."
Fourteen years ago, Matthews was arrested in Moses Lake in connection with the abduction of a 3-year-old girl she had been baby-sitting in Seattle.
The preschooler, Maria Weeks, and her parents had been living at a motel on Aurora Avenue North when the father, Todd Weeks, let the girl visit Matthews, who was also living at the motel.
On Nov. 18, 1987, Matthews said she would like to care for the girl overnight. She telephoned the next day, saying she would keep the girl a few more days. Then she vanished with the child.
Todd Weeks didn't report his daughter's disappearance for more than two weeks, saying he and his wife weren't worried at first.
"I trusted Sheila Matthews. I figured I could run her down myself," he said at the time.
Maria Weeks was found unharmed with Matthews in a Moses Lake apartment Dec. 18, 1987, after police received tips in Seattle and Moses Lake.
Matthews was arrested on two felony warrants — a second-degree kidnapping warrant and an older forgery warrant from King County Superior Court.
King County prosecutors charged Matthews in December 1987 with one count of second-degree kidnapping.
While awaiting trial in the kidnapping case, she pleaded guilty to the forgery charge and served a 40-day sentence.
In February 1988, she accepted a deal to plead guilty to one count of unlawful imprisonment, a less-serious crime than kidnapping, in exchange for 5½ months in King County Jail and a year of probation. In 1992, she served 90 days in jail for violating that probation.
In June 1989, not long after her release from the jail, Grant County police arrested Matthews and charged her with another forgery. Details of that crime were unavailable last night.
But after bailing out of Grant County Jail, she skipped town and wasn't caught until last February.
She was held in Grant County long enough to plead guilty to a reduced misdemeanor charge of attempted forgery and was sentenced to a week in jail and 56 hours of community service. Instead of serving the time, though, she vanished last June.
Maria Weeks, who will turn 17 next month, doesn't remember anything of the month she spent with Matthews, said her mother, Priscilla.
Though her child was returned unharmed, Priscilla Weeks said those days without her daughter "were absolutely devastating."
"I think she deserves to be locked up longer than she was last time," she said.
Because Matthews pleaded guilty to the reduced charge, Weeks said, "We were never able to see her in court, so we never knew why" she took Maria.
Weeks said she felt for the mother of the little girl taken from a Chicago bus station.
"I'm glad the child is safe and back with her parents," Weeks said. "And I hope she (Matthews) is never able to do it again, 12 years down the road. But who knows — maybe she's done it in the intervening years and now they've just linked (cases) to the same person."
Seattle Times staff reporters Ian Ith and Sara Jean Green contributed to this report.