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, the Florida Times-Union reports. Williams, who raised the girl as her own in Walterboro, SC, was arrested early last year after a tip to authorities, and Manigo was matched to her birth parents through DNA analysis. Under a plea deal, Williams will not be covered by the four- to seven-year sentencing range in place at the time of the July 1998 kidnapping, but by the zero-to-life range introduced a few months afterward.
Under the deal, Williams, who disguised herself in a nurse's smock to snatch Kamiyah when the baby was just eight hours old, will get between zero and 22 years in prison at a May sentencing hearing. Reuters reports that Manigo—who learned the truth a few years before Williams' arrest and has remained close to her—has said she hopes the woman who raised her gets less than 10 years in prison. Manigo and the birth parents she was reunited with last year weren't present at Monday's hearing, but they're expected to take part in the sentencing phase, which begins May 3. Soon after the arrest, Manigo said Williams, who reportedly kidnapped her after having a stillborn baby, had given her "the best life." (More child abduction stories.)
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