Twin sisters at centre of sale to Welsh couple start
AS babies, they made headlines around the world while at the centre of an international scandal.
Eighteen years later and the twin sisters are beginning university, bright, graceful and confident.
At six months old the twins were sold online to Welsh couple Judith and Alan Kilshaw. But a transatlantic battle broke out after it emerged an American couple had already adopted the sisters, who were then snatched back by their birth mother, Tranda Wecker, and sold on to the Kilshaws for £8,200.
Now, nearly 18 years on, our sister paper the Mirror has tracked down the sisters and revealed how they left behind their distressing start in life.
Speaking shortly after the twins started at university where they are studying social sciences, their adoptive mum described how “her babies” have flourished.
The proud 56-year-old said: “At times it has been tough, sure it has, but they are our babies and we cannot be more proud of them. They have grown into fine young women, each with their own dreams and ambitions. Nothing will hold them back from their goals. From the day they were brought to us they have been raised with unconditional love. God blessed them into our care and we are forever grateful.”
The twins’ life is a world away from that of their birth mother, who has yet to find any stability, moving from one home to another and unable to hold down a job.
Tranda was a 28-year-old mother of five when her four-month-old twins were adopted by a couple in San Bernardino, California, called Richard and Vickie Allen.
Eight weeks later she talked the Allens into allowing her one last visit to say a final goodbye to the girls.
However, after taking the twins out for the day she never returned.
On December 1, 2000, the Kilshaws arrived in San Diego, 100 miles south, where Wecker introduced them to her infant daughters.
Two days later Vickie Allen’s brother confronted the couple at their hotel and demanded the babies back. The Kilshaws claimed that until that moment they knew nothing of the Allens, and they quickly left the state.
Over the following week they drove with Wecker to St Louis, Missouri, to get the twins’ birth certificates, then on to Arkansas, where adoptions can be handled in as little as 10 days.
On December 22 the adoption papers were completed during a five-minute hearing. Within a week the Kilshaws had taken the twins to their home in Buckley, Flintshire.
The seven-bedroom farmhouse was shared with Judith’s younger daughter, their two sons, six dogs, more than a dozen cats, two ferrets, a horse, a pony and two pot-bellied pigs.
As the controversy over the twins’ sale erupted the FBI looked into it in the US while then-Prime Minister Tony Blair vowed to ban such sales.
On January 19, 2001, Flintshire social services and North Wales Police removed the twins from the Beaufort Park Hotel, near Mold, where they had been staying with the Kilshaws, before they were eventually returned to the US.
They were flown to their home state of Missouri, where social services had already found a family for the girls. Their adoptive father, now 72, said from the home where the twins still happily live: “It was fate. I remember seeing them on Good Morning America not long after they were handed over to the British couple.
“I remember thinking to myself what a heartbreaking situation it was. My wife was getting ready for work one morning and I was in bed, having just retired, and I said, ‘Oh man, look at those cute little girls.’
“Not long after I received a phone call from social services and they said, ‘We’ve got some twin girls and they are overseas. Would you take them? They need a stable home’.
“I felt it was my duty to take them. They brought them straight from the airport to our home and we have never looked back since.”
The twin baby girls arrived at their home in Missouri in good health.
Most people welcomed the twins into their new surroundings, but after all the controversy not everyone agreed with the move.
Their adoptive father said: “My wife lost some friends... they thought they