Laura had given Dinah the spare set of keys to her husband’s expensive car which Dinah would drive from Louder’s parking lot and leave in an unsavory part of town with the keys left in the ignition. Laura would follow her and pick her up to drive her home afterwards. Dinah had agreed to help Laura with the tacit understanding that Laura would sign a four year contract to enroll her “baby” in Dinah’s Daycare. When that period elapsed, he’d be enrolled again and again as each contract came to its termination date. The car would be stolen within hours and vanish to some unknown “chop shop” where its pieces would be used to repair other cars. Laura had instructed Dinah to dress up as if she was going out to dinner to give her an excuse to wear gloves. The only fingerprints on the car would be her ex-husband’s and the thief who would unknowingly assist them with their plans.
After twenty-four hours had elapsed, Laura would call the police and report that her husband was missing. Before that, of course, she would make a frantic sounding call to his company asking if he had been sent out on a business trip and had forgotten to tell her. A day or so later, she would call the police and tell them that the household safe had been riffled. She would ask the private investigator to begin a search for her husband after telling him that he had mysteriously vanished and the household safe had been robbed. The private investigator would tip the police that the thief was probably the husband and reveal that he had discovered that the fugitive had a known history of womanizing. The investigator would inform them that the man’s wife had told him that she intended to confront him with the evidence and threaten to divorce him if he didn’t mend his ways. The police would shake their collective heads at the unfaithfulness of some men and mark the case of the missing husband and the burgled house safe closed. Since he was the owner of the missing goods, no crime had been committed.
If the auto thief was inadvertently caught or the “chop shop” was raided, the police would think that either the car was deliberately abandoned by her husband as he fled with a probable female companion or that he and the cash had met a just end in the bad area of the city. Either way, they wouldn’t waste their time looking for the poor woman’s husband. They had more pressing crimes to solve rather than looking for a wayward husband. Her husband would disappear without a trace and no one would waste their time looking for him. “If what I’m doing is criminal, then I’ve just pulled off the perfect crime!”, Laura reflected, “No one will ever find out that my ‘adopted’ baby Ron-Ron is actually my husband Ronald. If they ask about the similarity in names, I’ll say that I named him after my husband. No one will think twice about that. It’s natural for a woman to hope that the man who abandoned her come home after his mid-life fling at freedom.”
After a few weeks, Laura would tell the private investigator to abandon his search for her husband and pay the investigator’s bill. Dinah had given Laura the name of the person who worked in the clerical section of a hospital in Texas who had provided a falsified birth certificate and private adoption records for three thousand dollars to the woman whose baby had been enrolled in her Daycare. Two thousand dollars more had induced the counterfeiter to produce medical records that indicated that the infant suffered from a rare disease which would keep the baby from maturing like a normal infant. The records indicated that the condition would caused the infant to have the mind and body of a nine month old baby for the rest of its life. Laura would tell her friends sorrowfully that he had riffled the family safe for all the cash they had on hand for emergencies and had taken their collection of gold coins after he had discovered that she had arranged for the adoption of a baby boy from a private adoption agency in Texas. She would tell them she wasn’t surprised at being abandoned by her faithless husband and reveal what the private investigator had turned up about his sexual activities. She would hold her baby tightly to her bosom as she would reveal that she had been struck by tragedy with her baby as well; her little baby suffered from an untreatable condition that would make him an infant forever!