Abbie Humphries, who was kidnapped as a newborn from a hospital by a woman posing as a nurse, died of a brain tumor three decades after her disappearance shocked the nation.
Despite moving to New Zealand in hopes of a kinder life, the Humphries family has been haunted by tragedy: Abbie’s mother Karen died of breast cancer in 2020 and Abbie succumbed to a grade-brain tumor. 4 on Sunday at only 30 years old.
“Our beautiful Abbie passed away peacefully yesterday, surrounded by her loved ones,” her husband Karl Sundgren wrote on Facebook.
“She fought so hard with such strength and grace for over four years and can finally rest.”
For a brief but agonizing moment in July 1994, Britain was gripped by Abbie’s fate when, just three hours old, she was pulled from her cot at Queen’s Medical Center in Nottingham.
Her parents, Roger and Karen, appeared on television asking for clues, but it took a heartbreaking 16 days before Abbie was found.
After leaving to build a new life on the other side of the world, 27 years later the family faced an even graver tragedy.
Abbie discovered that the headaches that plagued her in the weeks after her mother’s death were not, as she assumed, effects of grief but the result of a grade 4 brain tumor.
Abbie Humphries with her parents Roger and Karen on her wedding day in Auckland in 2017
Abbie’s husband, Karl Sundgren, wrote on Facebook: “Our beautiful Abbie passed away peacefully yesterday, surrounded by her loved ones.”
Abbie was taken from her crib when she was just three hours old in July 1994. Pictured: Abbie after being returned to her parents.
The front page of the Daily Mail for Monday 13 July 1994 with the headline ‘I thought she was my baby’.
As she told the Mail in 2021, there was no point in feeling angry. “We just had terrible bad luck,” he said. ‘I usually choose to look at the positive side of everything. It makes everyone feel better.”
In fact, as her husband summarized yesterday: “Abbie was very strong and her infectious smile will forever remain in our hearts.”
Life isn’t supposed to work this way. After all, Abbie was the baby found. The one who survived when others met terrible fates or, like Madeleine McCann, are still missing.
Covering the story for the Mail in 1994, I remember a fellow reporter remarking: ‘We’re going to cover every milestone in his life: his first step, his first day at school, his wedding.’
Abbie laughed when I told her that because her parents knew it too. It’s one of the reasons they left Britain so that Abbie and her siblings (Charlie, now 33, and Alice, 26) could feel safe and happy.
There she became a swimming champion, representing New Zealand, and graduated in psychology and criminology.
She first worked as a flight attendant, then in IT, before marrying her teenage boyfriend Karl in 2017.
No one there knew about his kidnapping. Not even she was aware of the magnitude of the case until, at the age of ten, she found press clippings and a message from the late Princess Diana, with whom she shared her birthday on July 1, during a move.
Karen Humphries with newborn Abbie. For 17 days, her parents, Karen and Roger Humphries, did not know if their daughter was alive or dead.
Almost three decades have passed, but the kidnapping at Queen’s Medical Center (pictured) in Nottingham remains one of the most audacious in British history.
In fact, she only appreciated the full drama of that era when she watched The Secrets She Keeps, a 2020 TV drama loosely based on her kidnapping, starring Downton Abbey’s Laura Carmichael as the kidnapper.
As Abbie told me, her father was very protective because he had been with her when the woman posing as a nurse said she was taking the newborn for a hearing test.
“He felt what happened was his fault because mum was a midwife at the hospital and it wouldn’t have happened if she had been in the room.
“As he got older, it was like he had flashback moments and had to know where he was at that very moment.”
The kidnapping remains one of the most audacious in British history.
In a case that sparked a nationwide police search, Karen went out into the hallway to make a phone call, leaving Roger with Abbie.
She didn’t think anything of it when the ‘nurse’ took her away, but upon returning, Karen immediately knew something was wrong. With growing horror, it became clear that the woman had just left the hospital with the baby in her arms.
Officers believed the kidnapper may have recently lost a child or may not have children. Television images show the full horror of the parents’ suffering.
The Secrets She Keeps is a 2020 television drama loosely based on her kidnapping, starring Downton Abbey’s Laura Carmichael as the kidnapper.
“Whoever took our baby, could you please give her back to me?” Karen pleaded.
Abbie was found just over a fortnight later on a third police visit to a house in Wollaton, a suburb of Nottingham.
They had been tipped off that a former dental nurse named Julie Kelley, who lived there with her boyfriend and mother, was pregnant and expecting a boy.
When he came home with a girl, the neighbors became suspicious. Kelley pleaded guilty to kidnapping Abbie and was placed on probation for three years and treated for a severe personality disorder.
It was reported that she faked the pregnancy to persuade her boyfriend not to leave. She went on to have her own family.
Sadly, that was a happiness that was denied to Abbie, who told me: ‘I’ve always been that person who was born to be a mother. I’ve cared for children my whole life and Karl and I were ready to grow our family when I was diagnosed.’
Abbie had her eggs removed before her cancer treatment, but accepted she would not be able to use them.
Pictured: A Mail on Sunday front-page report on the kidnapping in 1994.
It was little consolation that her mother didn’t know about her daughter’s grade 4 glioblastoma when she died at age 59 after her own seven-year battle with breast cancer.
But, as if this family hadn’t suffered enough, Abbie died knowing that her sister Alice had inherited the gene for Li-Fraumeni syndrome, which leaves carriers susceptible to developing a variety of cancers.
Abbie didn’t have the gene, but it affected her mother, aunt, grandmother and cousins.
As for Abbie, at the time of her diagnosis in early 2021, she was given a year, maybe two. In the end he had almost four years left, but suffering had given him a gift that many have never had.
“What happened made me appreciate Karl, my family and our house which is right next to the beach,” she told me. “I believe in doing things when you want to do them because you never know what’s around the corner.”