Zürcher Nachrichten - Trail goes cold in UK abandoned babies mystery

Hospital staff named the little girl Elsa, after the character in the Disney film "Frozen".

She is believed to have been less than an hour old when she was discovered in a shopping bag on a bleak pathway near a busy east London road on January 18, 2024.

Her siblings were abandoned nearby in similar circumstances in 2017 and 2019.

The tragic mystery, combined with the fear that the mother may be being held captive somewhere, has shaken locals and cast a shadow over the areas of Plaistow and East Ham where the babies were discovered.

"It was so cold. I remember that night so vividly because my son was lying in the cot next to me and I saw it coming up on the news," said mother-of-two Charlotte Mallett, referring to the discovery of the second child, a baby girl named Roman, soon after her own son was born.

"Being a mother, how could you abandon that child?" she told AFP, adding she could only imagine the mother had been in a "coercive situation" and saw no "way out".

In a shocking development last June, police revealed that DNA testing had shown that all three children have the same parents.

They warned that they could not "discount" the possibility of a fourth child in the future who "may not be so fortunate as Elsa and her siblings".

- DNA samples -

The case has baffled police who began investigating after the first newborn baby, Harry, was found wrapped in a blanket in a park in Plaistow early on September 17, 2017.

Less than two years later on the evening of January 31, 2019, the second, Roman, was discovered wrapped in a blanket and placed in a shopping bag in another park two kilometres away (just over a mile).

The little girl was found shortly before snow fell by local residents walking their dog after they heard crying coming from the bag.

The third baby was found less than half a kilometre away from the second.

But despite extensive inquiries police now say all current leads have been "exhausted".

Officers have consulted profilers and reviewed hundreds of hours of surveillance footage.

Door-to-door inquiries were narrowed to just 400 homes and residents who were black -- the same ethnicity as the babies -- were even asked to provide a DNA sample.

A £20,000 (around $26,900) reward for information has gone unclaimed.

Forensic psychology and child health expert Kevin Browne at Nottingham University, who has conducted research on infant abandonment, told AFP one possibility was that the mother was a migrant who wanted to "stay off the radar" of the authorities.

The fact that she had risked both her own and the babies' lives by giving birth in secret raised the likelihood that she was "really terrified", he said.

- 'Abandoned mother' -

Police will formally decide this month whether to pause the inquiry.

Senior investigating officer Jamie Humm said he initially felt the mother was not willing to come forward, but now had the "strong feeling" she was unable to.

Lorraine Sherr, an expert in clinical and health psychology at University College London, told AFP the case was "strange" and "complex".

The mother is "not able to reach out, so you have to try and map out what circumstances would leave a mother in that position and that's when you feel that there might be risk (to her)".

The abandonment of babies is so unusual in modern-day Britain that the UK government no longer keeps national statistics.

According to the only recent data available, eight children were registered as abandoned in England and Wales in the decade between 2008 and 2018, the judge in baby Elsa's case said.

- 'Bundle of laughter' -

Harry and Roman, now aged eight and six, have been adopted, while Elsa is doing well with a temporary family.

"Elsa is a beautiful little girl, a raucous bundle of excitement and laughter," family court judge Carol Atkinson said this month, giving her foster family the green light to begin the process to adopt her.

The names of all three children have been changed, but authorities hope they will be able to maintain contact as they grow up.

With no paper trail from a hospital birth, none of the trio will ever be able to trace their mother.

"That's going to live with them as emotional pain," Browne said.

D.Smith--NZN