Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
I still have their stroller, their dresses..if only we could meet
Mum on having baby twins taken away
before the Kilshaws agreed to pay a higher price. Judith says: “I’ve spent these years wondering what happened to those people, and now I’ve got the answers, which is a great help. Life today is very different.”
The saga began when Judith, who already had two sons with husband Alan, and two daughters from a previous marriage, came across the website of an American adoption agency called A Caring Heart.
“I wanted to give a chance to someone who probably had no chance,” she explains. “I actually wanted to go to Brazil and adopt someone off the street who absolutely had no one. But it ended up being America, and that’s the way it was.”
The couple then paid £8,200 to a “baby broker” for Kiara and Keyara, who had been put up for adoption by Tranda, a 28-year-old mother of five.
The couple flew 2,000 miles to San Diego, where they met the babies and took them back to their hotel. But the twins had already been placed with Vickie and Richard, from California.
They paid £4,000 and had already looked after the girls for two months. They claimed they were tricked into handing the girls back to their mother, who turned up at their home asking to take them out one last time.
Vickie’s brother reportedly tracked the Kilshaws down to their San Diego hotel and demanded they give the girls back. The Kilshaws fled to Arkansas, where the adoption was completed in a five-minute hearing.
The couple renamed the twins Kymberley and Belinda and took them back to their home in Flintshire, north-east Wales. And that’s where they may have grown up if Alan, a former solicitor, hadn’t decided to take their story to the press, claiming he wanted to warn others about the pitfalls of international adoptions.
But his actions backfired after the “cash-for-babies” story quickly made headlines all over the world, engulfing the couple in controversy.
To make matters worse, the couple appeared on primetime TV shows such as This Morning and via transatlantic link-up on the Oprah Winfrey Show in the US, where they traded insults with the Allens.
The Kilshaws’ credibility took another knock when it was reported that they were exploring the possibility of turning their story into a movie.
When Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Prime Minister Tony Blair publicly expressed their distaste for the way the couple had gone about the adoption, social services tried to make contact to check on the twins. The Kilshaws were found in a hotel doing rounds of media interviews and social services turned up with an emergency protection order and took the girls away.
The couple took their battle to the courts but a judge ordered the babies be returned to the US, saying it was for an American court to decide what was in their best interests.
Six months later a judge annulled the adoption, saying he believed the Kilshaws had caused the babies harm by exposing them to the media. The babies were placed with an entirely new family.
Judith now describes losing the girls as a bereavement. “They were adopted in a court of law, then taken from me in such horrendous circumstances, we didn’t get the chance to grieve or anything. As time goes on you do start to grieve though, don’t you?
“I’ve still got bits and pieces from back then, a couple of their dresses, their stroller, which I used to get out. I don’t any more though.”
And she says that being made a national hate figure still affects her today. “People would see us in the street, say things and leg it.
“Once there was a crowd round us, and someone was walking past shouting and bawling, then she hit my daughter on the head with a five-pound bag of potatoes.
I still get it today from time to time. People give you hassle, and you always think, ‘is it because of that?’”
Judith divorced Alan in 2006, and he died in 2019. She has since split from her second husband. Despite all she went through, she says she has no regrets: “If I’d have known the full truth, I might have turned round and said, ‘I’m not doing this’.
“But I can’t regret it, because if none of this had happened the girls would never have come into my life, I would never have met them. I hope that one day I can meet them again.”
■ Three Mothers, Two Babies and a Scandal launches tomorrow on Prime Video.