He deposits her and the baby in the emergency room, and then goes back home because Dynel's teenage daughters were expected to be coming home from school. (Teenage daughters can't stay alone for an hour or two during a medical emergency?) I wonder what she told him on the way to the hospital, and if that was what propelled him to rush home after dropping her off. Did he want to clean up the house and his car before the kids got home? I have no idea.
While the couple were gone (and before the daughters arrived), the expectant mother managed to call the police. They arrive and find her covered with blood on a bed in the basement. They question her about why she went to the house. They notice a trail of blood leading to the utility room. They go to the utility room and find bloody towels in the washing machine, still going through the wash cycle. They notice a trail of blood from the utility room to the upstairs bathroom. They send the victim to the hospital.
The husband arrives back home to meet the daughters and police are there. Police figure out the baby he rushed to the hospital with his wife belongs to the bleeding woman they found on the bed. There's blood all over his car. They call the hospital. The doctor says the woman will be okay, and whoever did the c-section had did a pretty good job. He says the person would have had to have done some research to achieve such a high level of accuracy.
A female officer at the hospital checks out Lane and sees no blood in her v*ginal area or signs of having recently given birth. Lane refuses an internal exam by the hospital staff.
The officer notices cuts on Lane's hands, and Lane confesses she cut the pregnant woman open to take her baby. They get a search warrant for Lane's person and send her for medical tests. After that, they send her to Boulder Community Hospital (not the jail -- was this for a psych eval?)
Lane appeared in court today. Her bail was set at $2 million.
The media of course is interested in whether the unborn baby can be a person to sustain murder charges. According to police, the baby was viable at 7 months. But the law in Colorado is that in homicide cases, the victim had to have been born and be alive at the time of the homicidal act.
18-3-101
(1) "Homicide" means the killing of a person by another.
(2) "Person", when referring to the victim of a homicide, means a human being who had been born and was alive at the time of the homicidal act.
From a 2009 case, People v. Lage, 232 P.3d 138 (Colo. App. 2009).
"Person" does not include a fetus, even if the child is born following the injury which ultimately results in its death. "Born and was alive at the time of the homicidal act" is clear and unambiguous in its temporal limitation.
According to the DA, question will be whether the baby was alive when it was removed from the womb. (no link because all the sources have autoplay videos.)
"Under Colorado law, there's no way murder charges can be brought if it is not established that the fetus lived as a child outside the body of the mother for some period of time. I don't know the answer yet as to whether that could be established – what our facts are here.
My lingering question is whether Lane administered any anesthetic to the woman before cutting her open. If she didn't, can she be charged with torture? Probably not. I don't think Colorado has a specific torture statute that covers adult victims who don't die. (It has statutes criminalizing torture of animals and children. And torture can be an aggravating factor in a homicide case to justify the death penalty.
So who does something like this? In my view, someone who is psychotic and/or delusional. I don't know enough about Lane to know if she is either, but given the facts in the police affidavit, it sure seems like her mental state will be critical to any defense strategy.
