Where Do They Belong?

It would take the law firm of Solomon, Solomon & Solomon to sort out this tug of war. Courtesy of a fly-by-night baby-brokerage service on the Internet, two sets of would-be adoptive parents, plus the birth mother and a variety of government officials, are fighting over two tiny twins whose fate is now subject to the conflicting laws of Britain, California and Arkansas. To whom do they legally belong? Who would be the best parents? Who knows?

Tranda Wecker, 28, has trouble making up her mind. She is a hotel receptionist from St. Louis, Mo., who gave birth last June to twins, to whom she gave the names Kiara and Keyara, after a character in Disney's Lion King II. At first she planned to raise them along with her three other children but faltered under the pressure of her job and divorce from the twins' father. She also had a new boyfriend. "Who was going to want a woman with five kids?" she said to the British tabloid the Sun, which broke the story. So Wecker decided to put the girls up for adoption. "Please don't hate your mom," she wrote in an emotional goodbye letter.

She says she found the Angel Heart adoption agency, run by Tina Johnson in San Diego, through the Yellow Pages. As a so-called adoption facilitator, Johnson makes money by matching parents who crave a child with mothers who can provide one. States regulate adoption differently, but 47 of them permit "private" adoptions, in which intermediaries, often specialist lawyers, put children needing homes together with prospective parents, who must still undergo a thorough government investigation.

The cost of adopting from a public agency (from no money to $2,500) is less than the usual expense of a private channel ($4,000 to more than $30,000). Still, private adoptions account for about half the roughly 60,000 U.S. adoptions each year, and demand is robust partly because of the growing demands of infertile couples. Many children available through agencies have spent years in foster homes and can have developmental or health problems that dismay would-be parents. Many countries, including Britain, ban privately arranged adoptions to ensure no one profits from trading babies. But in the U.S., private adoptions are so widely accepted that companies often reimburse fees as a benefit to employees.

Johnson needed no license or qualifications to be a facilitator in California--only clients with money. Several couples replied to her Internet ad featuring the Wecker twins, but it was Vickie and Richard Allen of San Bernardino, Calif., who won the human lottery. They have an adopted son and wanted to complete their family. Vickie, a bookkeeper, sold the diamond from her engagement ring to help raise the $6,000 Johnson demanded. In October the couple signed a "placement agreement" with Wecker and filed it with the state to start the six-month check of the Allens' suitability. None of the Allens' $6,000 was supposed to go to Wecker as a direct payment, since baby selling is illegal. But the law does permit reimbursement for expenses, like medical costs for childbirth and airfares. Wecker says she didn't get any money beyond expenses. Johnson, now being pursued by the FBI for possible fraud, isn't talking.

As the babies settled in with the Allens, the couple took pains not to alienate Wecker, entitled by California law to rescind the placement for any reason within 90 days. Still, the Allens became uneasy when Wecker hinted she wanted money from them to finance her divorce. Wecker says she was developing doubts about the Allens because Johnson told her that they had bounced a $4,000 check.

Whatever the motivation, Johnson proceeded to sell the twins a second time. Without telling the Allens, Johnson posted the babies on the Web again and hit pay dirt with a British couple. Alan Kilshaw, a lawyer, and his wife Judith have two sons together, and she has two daughters from a previous marriage. But the Kilshaws wanted another baby, had failed to conceive and feared they would be rejected as adoptive parents in Britain because Judith is 47. They paid Johnson $12,500 to find a baby. When they expressed interest in Kiara and Keyara, Wecker flew to San Bernardino and arranged with the Allens to take the girls for what she described as a two-day holiday "to say goodbye." Instead, she took them 100 miles south to her hotel in San Diego, where she met the Kilshaws, who had flown in from Britain. Afterward, Johnson phoned the Allens and said Wecker no longer wanted them to parent her kids.

The next day, Vickie Allen's brother reached the hotel and, encountering the Kilshaws in the lobby, shouted that the babies belonged to the Allens--the first the British couple claimed to have heard of the parents they were about to replace. The couples spoke on the phone. "We had sympathy," says Alan Kilshaw, "but it wasn't our fault the birth mother had changed her mind, and it wasn't our fault that California law allowed her 90 days in which to do so."

Then began a weird, seven-day, 1,500-mile car trip to Arkansas, which grants adoptions in as few as 10 days if all the birth and adoptive parents agree. When motel rooms were full, the Kilshaws, Wecker, her daughter Nolle and her twins all slept in a green Dodge Caravan. The babies developed coughs, and one ended up in the hospital, dehydrated. But the adoption was approved in Arkansas. Just after Christmas the Kilshaws brought the babies, renamed Kimberly and Belinda, to their seven-bedroom farmhouse in northern Wales--and decided to tell their tale of Tina Johnson's double dealing to the Sun.