Mother of kidnapped infant pleased with 12-year sentence

CHICAGO -- A woman who admitted kidnapping a 16-month-old girl from a Chicago bus station on Christmas Eve and whisking her off to West Virginia was sentenced Monday to more than 12 years in prison.

Sheila Matthews, 33, who pleaded guilty to kidnapping Jasmine Anderson of Milwaukee by offering to watch her while her mother bought bus tickets sobbed as U.S. District Judge Matthew F. Kennelly imposed the sentence.

"This is somebody who is cold and calculating, somebody who is manipulative in a selfish way," Kennelly said. He said he hoped psychiatric treatment would help but added: "I'm not wildly optimistic."

Other abductions noted

He noted that she had abducted three other children in the past and said there was a distinct possibility she might do so in the future.

Kennelly could have sentenced Matthews to as little as four years and three months, but stiffened the term at the urging of prosecutors and ended up with 150 months -- the maximum allowable under sentencing guidelines.

Marcella Anderson, mother of the kidnapped girl, had urged him to send Matthews to prison for life -- something the guidelines would not allow.

Anderson told reporters afterward that she was satisfied.

"I'm glad she will be put in jail for 12 years -- she won't get anywhere near my child," Anderson said. She shrugged off a tearful plea for understanding from Matthews before the judge imposed the sentence.

"She's a con artist -- what can you believe?" Anderson said. "She'll say anything to get off. Tears don't mean anything to her."

Matthews took the girl from the Greyhound bus station on Christmas Eve after telling her boyfriend and his parents that she had had a child by him while he was in prison. She then took Jasmine to West Virginia.

FBI agents found Jasmine on Dec. 27. The little girl had an ear ache and a fever when the agents freed her and returned her to her mother.

Prosecutors said Matthews is haunted by a perverse maternal instinct that causes her to abduct children. They cited two other instances in which individuals entrusted their children to her for brief periods. In each case, she went off with the youngsters for weeks.

In one instance, she was not charged despite taking two youngsters and in the other she was convicted of unlawful imprisonment.

Matthews told Kennelly there was no explanation for what she did.

'Nobody's perfect'

"Nobody's perfect," she sobbed. "There are some people that have sicknesses and I'm one that has one.

"I was very wrong and, yes, I deserve to do time for that," she said.

Sobbing loudly, she said: "I do need help."

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Cramer, who prosecuted the case, and FBI Special Agent Nanette Doorley, the chief investigator, said they were largely unmoved by the emotionalism that Matthews displayed in court.

Cramer reminded reporters that after she was arrested and placed in the Metropolitan Correctional Center to await trial, Matthews had claimed to be pregnant although she was not.

"On me, it had very little effect," Cramer said. "I heard those tears in a telephone conversation when she was talking to her mother saying that she did not want her child thrown into foster care. There was no child."

Doorley said that "listening to her phone calls to her family, she lies constantly. You can't separate the truth from the lies.

"And I have to agree with Mr. Cramer here that she definitely can do this again," she said.