CHICAGO, -- A 16-month- old girl who was abducted on Christmas Eve from a Greyhound bus station here was found alive and apparently in good health this afternoon in West Virginia, the authorities said.
Sheila Matthews, 33, was arrested in Williamson, W.Va., and charged with one federal count of kidnapping. The authorities said she abducted the girl, Jasmine Anderson, apparently in an effort to fool a boyfriend who had until recently been imprisoned in California.
Chicago police and F.B.I. officials, at a news conference at police headquarters, said Ms. Matthews told the boyfriend that she had given birth to his child while he was in prison, that the child lived with her mother in Chicago and that they would pick the baby up while they visited relatives here for Christmas.
“When she went to the Greyhound station that night, she was looking to abduct a baby, and unfortunately Marcella was there with Jasmine,” said Philip Cline, chief of detectives of the Chicago Police Department, referring to the child’s mother, Marcella Anderson. “It was a crime of the spur of the moment.”
“It’s definitely premeditated that she wanted to kidnap a baby. But that she wanted Jasmine Anderson is not the case,” Chief Cline said. “That just happened to be circumstance.”