A dilemma beyond imagination: A newborn baby is snatched from her mother - and raised by an alleged kidnapper. 18 years on, she's been reunited with her birth parents - and the 'abductor' she loves faces jail. Now she must decide where her heart is...  

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Neighbours remember them as mother and daughter who weren’t just family but also best friends — the church-going woman and her impeccably polite teen who would even get their nails done together.

They were ‘always happy, always together’, said a family friend. After finishing high school, 18-year-old Alexis Manigo had been preparing to leave home and move away from Walterboro, a small South Carolina town, and her beloved mother Gloria Williams, to attend a technical college.

But instead, this young woman faces an extraordinary dilemma — one that has touched everyone who has heard her story since it broke at the weekend.

Kamiyah happy with Gloria Williams. Neighbours remember them as mother and daughter who weren’t just family but also best friends

In an astonishing conclusion to one of America’s most notorious missing child cases, police have discovered that Alexis was snatched from the arms of her real mother in a Florida hospital in 1998 by a woman posing as a nurse.

And that abductor is allegedly Williams, a 51-year-old social worker who has helped U.S. military veterans and was once head of youth projects at her local church, who has brought Alexis up for the past 18 years.

At the weekend, Alexis — or Kamiyah Mobley as we now know she was born — was reunited (if that is quite the right word for someone who was snatched just eight hours after her birth) — with her biological parents, Shanara Mobley and Craig Aiken, who live 200 miles away in Florida.

Mr Aiken described their hour together in a South Carolina detention centre — where her other mother is being held by police — as ‘the best day of my life’.

He said: ‘We laughed, we chatted, we didn’t allow any negative thoughts. We didn’t talk about the kidnapping. 

'It’s going to be hard for her to turn this into a positive. She’s got very mixed emotions about the woman who raised her. But we are going to be there for her, this is just the start of a wonderful future.’

To say this teenager may have ‘very mixed emotions’ is clearly no over-statement. Williams — the woman she has called ‘Mom’ ever since she could talk — awaits kidnap charges that could lead to her being given a life jail sentence.

Until what she had done was uncovered, family and friends believed Kamiyah was her real daughter.

However, in a development that is not surprising given the history of many other baby-snatchings, investigators believe that she had suffered a miscarriage a week before driving 200 miles to Florida to find a suitable replacement in a hospital maternity ward.

Williams gave birth to two subsequent children while Kamiyah’s devastated birth mother also went on to have further offspring.

The baby-snatch triggered a huge manhunt across America. After years of false leads, investigators say they finally got a breakthrough when they were sent the original FBI drawings of the suspect which had been produced at the time of the kidnapping along with a photograph of Gloria Williams.

Inevitably, a huge and heated debate has erupted over how she should be punished if convicted. But it appears that at least one person will be urging leniency — the girl she stole.

‘My mother raised me with everything I needed and most of all everything I wanted,’ the teenager wrote defiantly on Facebook. ‘My mom is not a felon.’

Allowed to see Williams at a bail hearing on Friday, in which the suspect waived her rights to resist extradition to Florida, a tearful Kamiyah touched fingers with her abductor through the mesh of the caged window of a security door.

‘I love you, Momma,’ she told her between sobs, adding that she was praying for her, as Williams blew kisses back. A reporter present described it as ‘one of the worst things I’ve ever watched — so much confusion, so much sadness’.

Whereas some child-abduction cases end in abuse or some other tragedy, this one has simply highlighted the excruciating emotional complexity that ensues when the kidnapping — though criminal and heartless — seems to have resulted in a loving family life.

Kamiyah meets her real parents Shanara Mobley and Craig Aiken

Yet, while Williams has a respectable reputation in her town, records show she was charged with disturbing the peace two months after the kidnapping. She also reportedly has convictions for writing fraudulent cheques and welfare fraud.

She bought her modest home in 2012, having been evicted at least six times from a string of local addresses. Even so, some observers have pointed out that Kamiyah’s life may have been better than if she had been left with her birth mother — whose life has been marred by other setbacks.

Those who know Kamiyah as the girl called ‘Lexi’ admit their emotions are torn.

Joseph Jenkins, a friend and neighbour, said: ‘She grew up with a lie for 18 years.’ And that lie was not the result of some momentary lapse of judgment but cunningly planned.

Let’s turn the clock back to July 1998. Kamiyah Mobley was just eight hours old when she was snatched from University Medical Centre, a hospital in Jacksonville, Florida.

The suspect, images of whom were captured in CCTV footage but which were too grainy to be of much use to police, was an African-American woman who had cleverly managed to persuade both the baby’s family and hospital staff that she had a perfect right to be there.

Over a period of 14 hours, she had roamed the busy hospital asking anxiously when mother and child were due to leave the maternity ward — convincing medical staff that she was a worried relative.

Meanwhile, to the girl’s family, she had posed as a health worker and befriended the exhausted mother over five hours, periodically visiting her bed. Witnesses recall she had intimate knowledge of the hospital’s layout and was familiar with medical terminology.

Finally, she made her move. saying the baby had a high temperature and needed to be checked, she took the 8lb infant away wrapped in a white blanket, promising to return her within 20 minutes.

Instead — dressed in a nurse’s outfit and wearing surgical gloves and with fake hospital ID — she walked out of the hospital with the baby in her arms.

The baby’s paternal grandmother, Velma Aiken, later said she had been suspicious of the woman as she had a leather handbag slung over her shoulder but — to her eternal regret — didn’t intervene. 

Vital clue: An original drawing of the abduction suspect and a police mugshot of Williams

After police launched their hunt for the missing baby, Mrs Aiken’s son, 19 at the time, was arrested on under-age sex charges after he admitted Kamiyah’s mother was only 15 when he got her pregnant.

In the meantime, police had few clues. In the first year, they investigated fruitless leads from as far away as Nova Scotia, Canada.

A $250,000 (£208,000) reward was offered for information and the case featured on CNN and the TV series America’s Most Wanted.

‘Please bring my baby back,’ a distraught Ms Mobley pleaded during a TV interview. ‘If you were faking a pregnancy or you just can’t have no kids, how do you think I feel. That’s my first child.’

Tip-offs — 2,500 in total — continued to come in over the years but led nowhere. As for Ms Mobley, she was given $1.5 million (£1.25 million in compensation from the hospital over the security lapse. She bought a house but later lost it when suffering financial problems. She also claimed she gave much of the money to friends and family who abused her generosity.

Investigators never gave up looking for her daughter but complained that she and the girl’s father were not very cooperative. 

Neither side of the family was actively involved in looking for the baby, it was said, and the parents would not allow police to create photos of what Kamiyah might look like as a young girl to help inquiries.

Close: Kamiyah touches fingers with Williams through a jail security screen

However, the couple — who are reportedly still close — may genuinely have felt too upset rather than too apathetic.

Friends say that every year, Ms Mobley held a birthday party for her missing daughter, putting aside a slice of cake in the freezer just in case Kamiyah should return.

‘Wherever you are, you are truly missed and very much loved,’ she wrote in purple icing on top of the cake — a picture of which was post on Facebook — that was made for her 16th birthday.

Then, in December, two more tip-offs were given to the national Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. They prompted Florida police to switch their hunt to Walterboro, a 5,000 strong community 200 miles up the Atlantic coast.

One of these leads proved crucial — providing pictures that suggested Williams was the kidnapper.

Police have also revealed that Kamiyah herself suddenly had her own ‘inclination’ she might have been kidnapped. It is possible that she might have discovered discrepancies in her personal records after she came of age.

Investigators who went to Walterboro found she had the same birthday as the missing child. Crucially, they then discovered that the documents used to establish her identity were fraudulent.

Police said that parallel interviews with local people also led them to believe the teenager could be Kamiyah. Now, DNA tests were needed. Happy to co-operate, Kamiyah gave a sample from a swab of her cheek last week. A team at Florida’s police crime lab matched it with a tissue sample taken when she was born.

The next step was to arrest Williams last Friday — her daughter wasn’t at home at the time.

Mike Williams, sheriff of Jacksonville, said the girl took the bombshell news ‘as well as you can imagine’. He said: ‘This young woman was abducted as a newborn and she is going to need time and assistance to process all of this.’

For its part, the hospital from which the girl vanished said it ‘shared in the joy’ of her discovery.

It stressed that ‘like most hospitals, we have specialised, state-of-the-art security measures in place, both personnel-based and electronic, to protect newborns and their mothers’.

After 18 years with almost no developments in this haunting story, events are now moving at dizzying speed. Her birth family are hopeful she will move to Florida to be close to them.

They concede it won’t be the sort of instant, joyous reunion beloved of Hollywood happy endings.

‘She’s got questions to answers I don’t even know,’ said her father Craig Aiken.

‘I just need to put my arms around her and never let her go,’ said his mother, now 66. ‘I don’t want to scare her away. I want to go slowly.’

Velma Aiken, who said she had always prayed she wouldn’t die before seeing her granddaughter again, said she had heard that the only mother Kamiyah had ever known had, at least, raised her well.

‘All I know are tears of joy and happiness and a good feeling, knowing that she’s all right and looking good,’ she added.

Facing an upheaval in her life that few of us can contemplate, it remains to be seen whether Kamiyah will ever quite be able to share the unalloyed joy of her new-found family.