The Knock

0:00You ever see a town just quietly do something unthinkable? Bloomington, Indiana did. We were hiking the hills, sipping coffee, strong enough to make you think you could move them, debating the absurdity of greatness. Then one day, greatness raised its cream and crimson flag. A town known for hoops. We make history. You'll want to do the same next time you visit. Bloomington. Not what you expected. Still, absurdly great. Support for this show comes from BetterHelp. Summer can feel like a sprint. Kids home, trips to plan, routines flipped upside down. It's easy to slip into survival mode just trying to get through it.

0:42Then suddenly it's over and you're wishing you enjoyed the days just a little bit more. Therapy can help you slow down and actually be present for the moments that matter. With BetterHelp, you can connect with a licensed therapist from anywhere on your schedule. Don't just survive this summer, thrive. Visit BetterHelp.com slash Vox Pods.

1:04He could have been born on Christmas. I'd been terrified that was going to happen.

1:09Phoebe Judge:In 2017, Lauren Alain and her husband were expecting their first child. The baby was due on December 13th. Why were you terrified he was going to come on Christmas? Oh, just, you know, people always, well, my mother was born December 30th. And so she'd always, you know, lamented that. And I knew someone else who'd been born on the 26th and just that whole thing. It's kind of a bummer, isn't it, to have your birthday on Christmas? Or even the day after is almost worse because what are people going to get to? Two presents? You kind of get robbed. Yeah, yeah. And my mom had always felt that way. And I worked at the county library at the time.

1:54And so whenever I'd come across somebody who had a birthday close to Christmas, I'd say, I'm due December 13th. You know, I'm in the two-week window where it could be Christmas. Like, what did your family do? Mostly it was about, they'd say, wrapping paper. Have happy birthday wrapping paper instead of Christmas. I was just trying to arm myself with details about how to make a Christmas birthday special. And then surprise, it was very early.

2:21Phoebe Judge:On November 8th, five weeks before her due date, Laura had a bad headache that wouldn't go away. She eventually went to the hospital and ended up having an emergency C-section. She had a son. He did great. He was only in the NICU for a few days, but it was a very intense introduction to motherhood. About seven weeks later, on Christmas morning, they were at home in St. Louis, preparing to go to Laura's mother's house. My mother had wanted us to arrive by 10 a.m., and I'd put my foot down and said, I can do 11. She was just so excited about her first grandchild, and my sister was bringing the man she was eventually going to marry.

3:09And so it was just a very important Christmas, and Mom was, you know, all a flutter about it. And she'd wanted us to be there super early, and I'd said, it's got to be at least 11.

3:19Phoebe Judge:And had Christmas always been a big thing in your family? Oh, my mom loves Christmas. It's a very big deal for her. Every year it's a big deal, but this year was particularly a big deal. And my dad's an Episcopal priest, so there's also a religious element for my family. There were also going to be, one of my friends from college had strangely gotten a job working with my mom, and they'd become friends, and his family was going to be out of town that year, and so she'd invited him. So there was a lot of good things, you know, waiting for us that we were excited about. Laura's parents' house was a 30-minute drive away.

4:04Phoebe Judge:Before getting in the car that morning, Laura was in her living room, feeding her son, Percy. And tell me a little bit about Percy. That's not a name you hear every day. I always note unusual names, and if I hear one I've never heard before, I look it up. So when I was pregnant, I had a list. I think I probably had about 100 names that we had to narrow down to. Percy is short for Percival, which means pierce the veil. And we decided on that because with the emergency C-section, piercing the veil is kind of an old English idea of, like, moving from this world to the next. And so that's how he'd come into our world.

4:49So then, yeah, we liked that it had lots of nickname options. And for now, we've landed on Percy. But sometimes I joke about him going to law school and going by civil. He was very sweet. He had just a very sweet, quiet, obliging temperament. So I mostly just remember that morning before everything that happened, just sitting with him and him just being very sweet and quiet and cuddly. and it had been super icy, like one of those winters where it would snow a ton and then the sun would come out and melt it just enough so that when the sun went back down, it froze. So there was ice everywhere. I think the temperature was in the teens and, you know, we get freezing weather here pretty regularly, but like in the low teens, that's maybe like once or twice a year that that would happen.

5:46We rarely have white Christmases, and so it was a little romantic, like, oh, Percy's first Christmas.

5:52Phoebe Judge:So tell me what happened that morning. I had just finished feeding Percy, and we had these stairs in front of our apartment. Our building was on a steep hill, and there was a flight of stairs, and then a bit of a landing and then another flight of stairs just to get to our porch. And I heard someone running up the stairs and the stairs were incredibly icy. The whole city had been shut down because of the ice. And so when I heard the running, I thought, that's crazy. And then just a frantic knocking on the door. And I thought, oh, it must be a package. You know, this person must be running so late.

6:39Everyone's packages had been running late. And they're working for extra hours on Christmas, and they're just trying to get through the route, and they're just in a panic. So I called through my husband to go get whatever had just been delivered.

6:56Phoebe Judge:Laura's husband, Rob, went to open the door. And he came back and he said, there's a kid outside. And I said, like, a teenager playing a prank? Laura says her husband looks stunned. And he said, no, like, a baby. The baby was in its car seat on their porch. There was no one else around. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

7:34Phoebe Judge:Laura says her first thought was, this is some kind of a mix-up. They lived on the first floor of a two-unit brick house. And I said, well, it's got to be somebody's. Maybe the guy who lives above us has a kid we didn't know about, and, you know, his ex-girlfriend just dropped it off. Rob went outside and started walking around to see if he could find anyone. And he was gone for a few minutes, and he came back and he said, there is nobody out there. And I knocked on the neighbor's door and nobody answered. So I'm bringing the baby inside because it's freezing.

8:15And I don't know what I thought in that moment. I trusted my husband's judgment, but it was hard to believe like, really, there's no one out there. and so I came into the front room and I saw the carrier with the baby in it and

8:40it was really just so surreal he looked at me and he started crying and I rushed to him and you know I knew how to do the snaps from my own baby and so I was able to get him out but you know, he was securely in there. So he was completely strapped into his car seat. Yeah. Buttoned up. Buttoned up. He had, it wasn't, you know, you can't put babies in car seats with really puffy coats anymore. You got to have like a thick sweater or something so that they can't like slide out and the seatbelt can grip on them. So it was, it was the appropriate kind of jacket. like he had been dressed really warmly it was obvious um you know the thing that helped me um cope in the first few weeks of parenthood was to kind of um break it down to a to-do list of you got to make sure the baby is clean fed and loved and that's really everything will fall under that umbrella and just this baby was clearly clean fed and loved and so I picked him up and I was trying to um comfort him and I just said the first thing I was thinking was somebody loves you somebody dressed you up all warm and put you in this car seat and I don't know why you're here or what's happened but you're safe and and he stopped crying

10:16Phoebe Judge:We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus.

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11:33Like if Fatween won the lottery. I've invested most of my winnings in chicken tenders because they're bomb. But bro, I bought a house and it's sick, bro. I'm thinking the floor is going to be all trampoline, bro. With the helipad on the roof. The contractor said it's structurally unsound. They're just being babies. But switching to Geico saved me hundreds. So my bank account is safe. It feels good to save some hard-earned cash. It feels good to Geico. I mean, what did you think had gone on here? I had no idea. Like I said, my first thought had been maybe someone had been doing a custody exchange with a parent and there had been a mix-up.

12:17Phoebe Judge:So in those minutes, you're thinking this is a custody battle. I mean, I'm just trying to think of what I would think. Like, what I kept saying to the baby is, I think there's been some kind of mistake. As I was just bouncing him on my hip, I'd say, I think there was a mistake, but we're going to get you back to the people who love you. I mean, but a mistake like an Amazon package got delivered? I mean, it's a big mistake. Yeah, no, and I thought, like, I got hugely angry because I was like, If you thought you were dropping this baby off somewhere with people who were expecting a baby to be there, you should have made sure that they were there.

12:59And I became furious with whoever this mystery person was. It's freezing cold outside. It's absolutely freezing cold outside. It was dangerous to have left a baby like this.

13:14Phoebe Judge:Laura says she kept thinking, what if they had already left for her mother's house, and there had been no one home to open the door that morning? But then as I was, you know, holding the baby and thinking somebody loves this baby, I can tell by how they're cared for, I became afraid that something had happened to that person. and I did say to the baby you know I think there's somebody who loves you and we're going to try to find that person and get them back to you and if something's happened to that person I bet they have somebody who loves them who will take care of you and it'll be okay and I don't know it felt like he understood I know that sounds silly Laura's husband called 911 He said, someone left a baby on our porch?

14:10The whole thing had question marks behind it. And he said that the woman on the other line shouted, we got a baby. So they'd obviously been waiting for some kind of call. And so when he told me that kind of sent a kind of a clue that they were aware that something had happened,

14:34Phoebe Judge:Rob and Laura were told that the police were on their way to their house. Laura says she was surprised by how fast they got there. Just a few minutes. I heard the knock on the door, and my husband went to answer the door, and for some reason he picked up our baby, and I was thinking, oh no. And I said, hold on, and I stepped forward with the baby who'd been dropped off, and I'd said, this is the baby, that's my baby. and pointed to my baby. There were several officers from the St. Louis police in front of their house, and a couple of police cars were parked in the street. And I saw there was a woman standing down at the bottom in the street.

15:20And again, we had a short flight of stairs from the sidewalk, a bit of landing, and then another flight of stairs to get up to our apartment.

15:30Phoebe Judge:A police officer standing at Laura's front door showed it down to the woman. And she said, ma 'am, is this your baby? Laura says she remembers the woman, shouting yes. I have no memory at all of her coming to me. And then she's just there. And she couldn't have levitated or just appeared. She had to have run up those icy steps. And as I handed it to her, I said, he's okay. and she only had eyes for him.

16:06And she took him from me and she just crumpled over him.

16:16And I don't remember her leaving. Someone must have escorted her down the icy steps again and into the car, and then they were just gone. and they were gone.

16:37I was on the day shift, so I would have started around 7 a.m.

16:41Phoebe Judge:Police officer Austin King was in his patrol car with his partner on Christmas morning. He had just graduated from the police academy in January that year and was still pretty new on the job. When you're a young police officer, Does it mean that you work Christmas because you don't have any seniority? Right, yeah, that's usually how it goes. The officers with seniority usually gobble up the vacation days for Christmas earlier that year. That's definitely something you can expect. He says it's a pretty quiet day of patrolling. Christmas Day usually is. A few traffic accidents here and there. It's a very, a lot of vehicles, a lot of people driving in that area.

17:27But just a few here and there, minor calls, a couple different sundry calls. It was relatively quiet.

17:33Phoebe Judge:But then, a few hours into their shift, a call came in over their police radio. It sounded very different from the other calls they'd received that morning. A woman had called 911. Her car had just been stolen. So dispatch told us that the caller's infant son was in the backseat when the car was stolen. And so we knew we had something very serious going on.

18:03Phoebe Judge:Austin King and his partner were about a mile north of where the woman was calling from. We went lights and sirens down there, talked with the victim, the mom who told us what happened. She was, of course, very distraught. We were relatively, I think, the same age, if I recall. Obviously, we tried to be as empathetic as we could. There's only so much you can say to a person or a parent in that moment. And she was obviously understandably very distraught. The baby's mother lived just a few blocks from Laura's house. She had left her house with her six-month-old son when she realized that she'd forgotten to lock the front door.

18:46Phoebe Judge:She went back up the stairs to her house to lock it. She left her son in his car seat. The car was still running. Then, with her back turned, she said she heard a car door slam and turned around and saw someone in the front seat of her car driving off. She ran after the car, then called the police. She told the news reporter, it replays in my head over and over. All I can hear is the tires screeching and seeing the back of my car. We need to locate this car as quickly as possible. We need to recover this child before too much time because as time progresses, the lesser likelihood of being successful as law enforcement goes down, right?

19:34The woman knew her license plate number, which was incredibly useful. Most people don't know their license plate number. They usually don't have that memorized. But she did, which was very helpful. So we put out the make, model, color license plate over the radio. A lot of officers from the 2nd District and the 3rd District nearby, it was a neighboring district, came because they heard the call come out. And even though it wasn't their district, they came over to help because they knew it was serious.

20:00Phoebe Judge:After driving just a couple of blocks, the person who had stolen the car stopped at Laura's house, where he ran up the stairs, put down the baby, and knocked on the door, then got back in the car and drove away. Just shortly after we put out the description of the vehicle, dispatch told us that they had just received a call that someone had left a baby in a car seat on their front porch. And we obviously immediately knew, hey, this is probably going to be our baby, right? They told the baby's mother they might have found her son. to relax her nerves a little bit and say, hey, there was someone just called.

20:40It sounds like your kid might be okay. They've got just a few blocks down. We're going to take you over to him. She got into the back of our car. We took her over there.

20:50Phoebe Judge:Meanwhile, another police officer happened to spot the stolen car. The license plate and description matched. The officer did a U-turn and chased the car. Other police officers joined. The suspect got out on foot, stopped the car somewhere, got out on foot, ran on foot. And we had some officers catching the suspect after jumping a few fences through some backyards. Laura and her husband learned about what had happened and about how the suspect had already been arrested from a police officer who stayed behind when everyone else left. And I was still so furious at the person, whoever had done this.

21:31And I had to ask, I was like, what kind of monster did this?