Member-only story
The strange abduction of Kamiyah Mobley
And how she was reunited with her family
A woman dressed as a nurse entered a hospital on July 10th, 1998. The woman walked through the halls, searching for a child of her own to take home.
Earlier that day, sixteen-year-old Shanara Mobly had given birth to her first daughter, Kamiyah Mobley. Shanara was terrified that day but excited to meet her new daughter. Eight hours after Shanara had given birth, the woman dressed as a nurse walked into the room and struck up a conversation with her. The woman asked to take Kamiyah to have her checked for a fever and then walked out of the room with the newborn baby in her arms.
What police knew
Police initially believed the woman who kidnapped Kamiyah was a family member, but this was not the case. They thought she was somewhere between the age of 25–35. The woman had been seen leaving the hospital with Kamiyah wearing a floral set of blue and green scrubs. She had on glasses and possibly a wig.
We now know that the woman was Gloria Williams. She was 33 at the time of the kidnapping. She was in an abusive marriage and had recently miscarried her own child. While Gloria never said this herself, it is believed that the motive for the abduction was rooted in desperation and grief after her miscarriage.
The recovery of Kamiyah Mobley
There had been no pictures taken of Kamiyah before she was abducted from the University Medical Center in Jacksonville, making it difficult for police to describe what she looked like to the press. They were able to create a computer-generated image of what they believed she looked like and sent it to the media for publication. Police gave any distinctive feature they could to the media like Mongolian sports and an umbilical hernia, but it wasn't much to go off of.
Kamiyah was missing for eighteen years before she was finally found.
The case went cold until 2016 when two tips came in from The Center For Missing and Exploited Children. These tips sent investigators to Walterboro in Colleton County 200 miles away from Jacksonville. They discovered an eight-year-old woman in the small town…
