Almost 20 years after she kidnapped a newborn baby girl from a hospital room in Florida, Gloria Williams has confessed to her crime. The 52-year-old pleaded guilty in a Jacksonville courtroom Monday to abducting baby Kamiyah Mobley, now known as Alexis Manigo. Mobley was born on July 10, 1998, to sixteen-year-old Shanara Mobley. She was abducted hours after birth by a woman impersonating a nurse, reportedly dressed in hospital attire, who entered the room, assisted and conversed with the mother, and later walked out of the room with Kamiyah in her arms. Manigo grew up in Walterboro thinking Williams was her biological mother, but Manigo knew that she had been kidnapped as a baby more than a year before Williams’ arrest. When she was a junior in high school, she applied for a job, and a manager at a South Carolina Shoney’s restaurant hired her, instructing her to bring her Social Security card the next day. It was then that Williams informed Manigo that she didn’t have her Social Security number because she had taken her from a hospital when she was a baby. Manigo didn’t take the job, and the two didn’t speak of the subject again.
Last year the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office received a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Jacksonville authorities arrived in Walterboro and determined that the birth certificate and Social Security card Manigo had been using were fraudulent. The Social Security number listed with Manigo’s name was issued to a male in Virginia who died in 1982. DNA testing showed that Manigo is not Williams’ biological daughter, and oral swabs that were submitted by Manigo earlier this year matched samples that were collected and preserved at the time of the child’s abduction.
“I understand what she did was wrong, but just don’t lock her up and throw away the key,” Manigo said of Williams. “I still think of her as Mom. She will always be Mom.” The plea agreement 52-year-old Gloria Williams accepted calls for a prison sentence of up to 22 years when she’s sentenced in May.
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