DID A YOUNG DESPERATE MOTHER KILL HER BABY? EVEN A JURY COULDN’T DECIDE.

Santa Fe Reporter, June 28 2000, by Maya Sinha

No one will ever know exactly what took place in Apartment 101 in Building 29 of San Rafael Apartments on February 3, 1999. Not the police who the next evening removed a baby’s corpse from the blood-splattered toilet. Not the prosecutors who asserted that the eight-pound infant girl was the victim of premeditated murder. Maybe not even Michelle Bliven, the baby’s mother who lost nearly a third of her blood during the birth and subsequently, she says passed out on the bathroom floor. Whatever happened that day – whether Ann Deborah Rael Moore never lived, lived for only a few minutes or (as prosecutors suggested) was “gently smothered” in towels over a matter of hours – it was a tragedy. One rooted in ignorance and naiveté, in fear and desperation. One similar to what befalls thousands of young women in this country every year. Over the past week, Blivens and her mother, Rita Rael, sat side by side in a Santa Fe courtroom as prosecutors depicted them as scheming co-conspirators in the baby’s death. Blivens was charged with first degree murder, child abuse resulting in death and second degree murder as well as tampering with evidence and conspiracy. Rael was charged with permitting child abuse, tampering with evidence and conspiring with Blevins to cover up the death of the infant. After nine hours of deliberation, on June 27 the nine-man, three-woman jury acquitted Bliven on the first degree murder charge. As it remained divided on all other counts against the two women, Judge Steven Pfeffer declared a mistrial, leaving prosecutors the option to retry Bliven and Rael on those counts. Throughout the seven-day trial, Bliven was notable for two things: her surprising level of composure (although occasionally teary-eyed, she calmly sat through graphic, highly personal testimony) and her look of utter normalcy. A slender young woman with long reddish-brown hair tucked behind her ears and a soft-featured, girlish face, Bliven seemed younger than her 24 years – more like a sheltered teenager than a divorced mother of two. As she attentively jotted notes or chatted, smiling, with her lawyers, it seemed impossible to connect her with the gruesome and horrifying events being described. Debbie Magnusen, founder of a nationwide program to rescue babies at risk of abandonment or worse, has heard her share of horror stories – most recently, at the California trial of a young woman charged with stabbing her new-born infant to death. Yet she believes little is served by treating such women as criminals. “You find that they don’t repeat this offense, and that usually they’re good mothers to their other children.” said Magnusen. At Project Cuddle, she said, which has so far rescued 213 babies, “Our job isn’t to judge these girls, but to prevent it from happening in the future to any girl who is pregnant and frightened.” Michelle Livens grew up in Santa Fe, the youngest of five children. According Bliven’s oldest sister, Terry Larwood, who testified for the prosecution, the Rael parents were unusually strict on the subject of sex outside of wedlock. It was common knowledge among the children that their father, David Rael, Sr., would disown any daughter who gave birth to an illegitimate child – even though his wife, Rita Rael, had given her own first, illegitimate child up for adoption. Clearly, the family had troubles. The Rael’s 1997 marital separation was unusually acrimonious, involving accusations of stealing, a restraining order (later dropped) against Rita Rael by her husband, and lengthy estrangement among various family members. (At one point, testified Larwood, her mother wrote in a letter that she never wanted to speak to her again.) Yet, despite the turmoil, Liven was proud of living up to her parents’ moral standards. “Michelle would say to all of us, “I’m the only one of you guys that did it the right way. I had a ring on my finger,” Larwood told the jury. “Meaning, I got married and then had sex.” Given that Bliven married as a teenager, that’s not hard to believe. After 10th grade, she dropped out of high school and married Michael Bliven. His job with the U.S. Air Force took the couple to California, where they had two daughters, now ages 6 and 4. A psychiatrist who assessed Bliven testified that the marriage involved “severe emotional and physical abuse.” In 1996, the couple divorced and Bliven moved back to Santa Fe to live with her parents. (Her attorney says Michael Bliven has no contact with his daughters, and does not pay child support.) When Bliven’s own parents separated in 1997, she and the girls moved with Rita Rael into a two-bedroom apartment on Airport Road. Bliven made a little money babysitting the children of one of her sisters, and for a few months she worked as a secretary. But the family was financially reliant on Rael, 60, an obstetrics technician for 20 years at St. Vincent’s Hospital. (David Rael, Sr., once estranged from his wife and youngest daughter, posted a $350,000 property bond to keep Rael and Bliven out of jail before trial.) In the spring of 1998, while Bliven was briefly working at St. Vincent, she met Robert Moore, a nurse on temporary assignment in Santa Fe and 20 years her senior. Though Moore soon moved back to his home state of Idaho, the two dated intermittently for several months. Bliven last saw him in October 1998. At the time, she was five months pregnant, though in her defense against the state’s charge of premeditated murder, Bliven repeatedly claimed she didn’t know about her condition. In fact, she insisted that she didn’t even realize that she had had sex since the conception of her second daughter. In various interviews after the baby’s death, Bliven has said Moore must have raped her in May of 1998 (on an overnight trip to Albuquerque for her 22nd birthday), or in July of 1998 (on her trip to visit him in Idaho), or both. The full-term baby was conceived in May. Bliven maintains she has no memory of being raped, But Moore apparently thought she might be pregnant, as evidenced in a taped interview of Bliven conducted by Santa Fe Police Detective Stan Mascarenas on February 4, 1999: Bliven: “Before he left he said, “How would you feel about having a baby in February?” I said, “No, no. Not without being married. I wasn’t raised that way.” Mascarenas: “You never had consensual sex?” Bliven: “No. Never….I’m not a heavy drinker. One beer gets me light-headed. He’d give me a tall glass with a little orange juice and a lot of vodka. I’d fall asleep on the couch, wake up the next morning and feel sore…” “Did you ask him what had happened?” “No.” “Why not?” “I didn’t think he was that type.” Attempting to verify this story, investigators tracked Moore through three states – Idaho, Alabama, Colorado – but were unable to locate him. “He’s not using his nurse’s license or social security number,” said defense attorney Steve Aarons, “He’s taken off.” As with many of Bliven’s assertions, the credibility of her date rape story depends how much one believes in the power of denial. “Just because she didn’t seem upset, that doesn’t mean (rape) did not occur,” said Ellen Franklin, clinical manager at the Santa Fe Rape Crisis Center. “After someone has been raped and drugged the way she might have been, they could be in shock, traumatized. They could also be in denial, not wanting to believe this had happened.” Similarly, Bliven said it never occurred to her that she was pregnant, even after being asked about it by her mother and others. She continued to have what she believed were menstrual periods, her breasts didn’t swell or become sore, and she attributed her modest weight gain – as well as abdominal pain – to severe gastrointestinal problems. It’s easy to be skeptical about such claims: How could a mother of two not know she was pregnant? Prosecutors pressed the issue, as they were trying to establish both Bliven’s knowledge of the pregnancy and her premeditated intent to kill the baby. But experts say the answer rests with the impressive power of the human mind to simply block out what it doesn’t want to believe. “We do see it sometime with pregnancies that are not planned: women in complete denial of pregnancy,” said Julie Bodnar, associate director of Catholic Social Services of Santa Fe. “I know it’s hard for people to imagine or believe, but it definitely can happen.” Magnusen says she sees the phenomenon so often in women with so-called crisis pregnancies, she has developed a term for it; pregnexia. “When they’re in a situation where they can’t mentally and psychologically handle [the pregnancy], they just shut down, especially in situations involving rape or trauma.” She says. “We’ve had girls on the [hotline] in full-blown labor – you can hear the contractions, two minutes apart – and they’re saying, ‘No, that sound I’m making is just because I don’t feel good.” Still, prosecutors pressed, what about Bolivian’s mother – a woman with six children and 20 years experience around pregnant women? Rael testified that, although Bliven looked “poochy” and would never let anyone touch her stomach, she thought Bliven, like some other family members, suffered from gastrointestinal problems and abdominal bloating. When she asked if Bliven was pregnant in January 1999 and Bliven said no, Rael said she simply took her daughter at her word. Because she had “wanted to have perfect children,” Rael testified, she had been a strict parent: “sometimes too strict.” But her taped Feb. 4 1999 interview with police depicts a more forgiving attitude. “Oh my god,” she cried, upon hearing how Bliven had wrapped up the baby and hidden it in the bathroom cabinet. “Why would she do that? Why didn’t she tell me? I would never think nothing of her…I don’t care if you’re married or not! It’s none of my business! She’s still a good girl.” The events that transformed an unworldly young woman into an accused murder unfolded strangely; almost surreally; over a two-day period in February of 1999. In the early hours of February 3, Bliven woke up twice with cramps and – she says she thought – constipation. Around 8 a.m., she went into the bathroom and – quickly, explosively – delivered an eight-and-a-half pound, 21-inch long baby into the toilet. “I remember pushing…and there was a gush, and then I got really light-headed and I laid down, Bliven, exhausted-looking in a dark red sweatshirt, told Detective Stan Mascarenass on the day her daughter’s body was found. “And then I came to, and my mom was knocking on the door and asking if I was okay. I said, “I’m okay, and then I flushed the toilet. I was going to take a bath.” On the witness stand, she continued the story in tears: “And then I looked in the toilet, and I saw my daughter’s feet. She wasn’t moving.” Bliven said she tried to clean up the blood on the floor – later, a nurse would determine she had lost up to 30 percent of her blood – then wrapped up the baby in towels and put it in the bathroom cabinet. “I was gonna go tell my mother, but I couldn’t,” she told Mascarenas. When Blevin emerged from the bathroom, testified Rael, she looked pale and clammy. Her legs and feet were streaked with blood. Thinking Bliven was having a heavy menstrual period, said Rael, she lay Bliven on the couch and gave her some Sprite. In the bathroom, the toilet was filled to the rim with bloody water. Rael said she tried to flush it, couldn’t, and decided “a Kotex or something” must be clogging the pipe. She attempted to clean up some of the blood, then – in a sequence that seems strangely leisurely in retrospect – went grocery shopping, fixed the family lunch, paid the rent and asked the apartment manager to send a maintenance man to unclog the toilet. What the maintenance man saw unnerved him: blood all over the bathroom floor, the tub, the toilet…And something was wrapped around the auger he had used to unclog the toilet: a whitish, fleshy cord, a blob of tissue dangling at the end. Rael said she thought the umbilical cord and placenta on the auger were actually her daughter’s intestines. (Usually, she explained on the stand, placentas are maroon-colored; this one was unrecognizably washed out.) “I thought she was dying.” Rael said. She put some of the cord and tissue in a plastic bag and gave it to a nurse for identification when she and Bliven arrived at the St. Vincent emergency room at 3:45 p.m. At the hospital, Bliven’s physical exam indicated she had just delivered a baby – a suggestion she angrily denied, even threatening to walk out. “I didn’t remember the baby until I got home,” Bliven said on the witness stand. “That’s when it hit me.” Hard as it may be to believe, according to the testimony of psychiatrist L.D. Tashjian for the defense, Bliven actually might not have remembered that she had given birth that morning. “If there has truly been denial of the pregnancy,” he said, “then seeing a child, your own child, there in the toilet is going to bring on an extraordinary amount of fear and disbelief. Imagine you’ve gone to the bathroom, had what you thought was a bowel movement, and it wasn’t.” Combined with the loss of blood, Tashjian testified, the powerful shock would have explained a state of “absolute confusion, of random and bizarre behavior” for up to 72 hours after the birth. When Liven checked out of St. Vincent the following evening, she and Rael returned home to find police searching the premises. They had been anonymously tipped off about a possible, unacknowledged baby. While Rael showed police the bag of bloody towels she had thrown away, Bliven went to her daughters’ closet. Inside, placed there in a sequence of actions Bliven has always maintained she doesn’t remember, the baby’s body was lying on its side on a cardboard box, wrapped in towels. (Bliven, tearfully, on the witness stand: “I took her out [of the closet]. I looked at her. She was so beautiful.”) She took the baby, unwrapped it, and placed it back in the toilet – this time, feet first. Defense attorney Steve Aarons: “Why did you do that?” Bliven: “That’s where she was born.” Prosecutors argued that such irrational behavior Bliven then told police she had pulled the baby out of the toilet) was a clumsy, last-minute attempt to cover her tracks. But it could also be explained, testified Tashjian, by her being in a delirium-like state after an intense trauma. Magnusen points out that the massive hormonal fluctuations that occur after a woman gives birth add to the – in her experience, common – phenomenon of new mothers acting in ways that would ordinarily shock them. “These are typically good girls who, the last thing they want to do, is disappoint their parents.” says Magnusen. In the aftermath of an infant’s death, she said, “they are just as devastated that something has happened to the child as their families are, and the people around them. It’s not that they intentionally set out to do this.” A national study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services put the number of babies abandoned in public places in 1998 at 105, with 33 of those infants found dead. (The study culled its numbers from media reports of such incidents; Magnusen and others believe they’re actually much higher.) Those figures are dwarfed by the well-documented number of babies abandoned at hospitals: 31,000 in 1998 alone. Due to a recent rash of highly-publicized infant murders and abandonments – such as the 1996 case of Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson of New Jersey, well-to-do high school sweethearts who left their newborn to die in a hotel dumpster – over 25 states are considering legislation aimed at reducing such incidents. The idea is to give mothers who leave their unharmed babies at places like hospitals and fire departments amnesty from criminal prosecution. But well-intentioned laws and programs may not affect women like Bliven – women who may not admit, even to themselves, that they need help. “You don’t have to have a baby in isolation. We’ve come much further than that,” said Child Welfare League spokeswoman Joyce Johnson. “If you don’t have any resources, if you don’t have health care, even if you’ve been raped, there are places you can go to get help…These people are not seeking help. It make you wonder what’s going on. How did little Ann Moore actually die? Forensic pathologist Patrcia McFeeley, who conducted the baby’s autopsy, testified for the state that her findings showed the infant either drowned or was suffocated. The absence of water in the baby’s lungs prompted McFeeley to hypothesize that, as sometimes happens in adult drownings, the baby’s larynx constricted in the cold water. Alternately, prosecutors suggested, the baby could have been purposefully suffocated as it lay, wrapped in towels, in a closet for over 24 hours. With no clear evidence of either type of death, McFeeley and pediatric radiologist Madelyn Stazzone nonetheless pointed to the presence of air in the lungs as proof that the baby had taken breaths. Jonathan Wigglesworth, a world-renowned fetal pathologist who flew in from England to testify for the defense, agreed that there was air in the infant’s lungs. But he said the unusual distribution of the air – in huge, explosive pockets – coupled with a large amount of amniotic fluid in the lungs indicated the baby had taken “death gasps” in the womb, prompted by a trauma that began 24 to 48 hours before birth. The baby’s thymus gland, diminished to about half its normal size as in cases of severe stress, also indicated to Wigglesworth that the baby was struggling in utero. The problem: a lack of oxygen – possibly from a crimped umbilical cord. The bottom line, according to Wigglesworth: Whether the baby was stillborn or died shortly after birth, her death from oxygen deprivation was a natural, probably inevitable one. Faced with several theories of death – all partially based on conjecture – it’s not surprising jurors were divided in their conclusions over whether Liven killed her baby. As mother and daughter left the courtroom in their nearly identical long, blue dresses, it was understandable why some jurors couldn’t believe the pair was capable of such a crime. But as hundreds of women learn every year, fear and desperation can lead to the most unlikely of outcomes.