WEST MELBOURNE, Fla. — A woman in Florida is facing murder charges for allegedly killing her newborn twins and dumping one of them in a trash can.
Rachel Thomas, 30, told investigators that she didn’t know she was pregnant, but rather thought she was feeling sick on Sunday when she went left work early. She says she later gave birth on the toilet at home, and called 911 as the babies weren’t responsive.
However, when police arrived, Thomas reportedly only showed them one of the babies, and the other, a girl, was found in a trash can inside of a carport. The umbilical cord was wrapped around the child’s neck and an object was in the back of her throat.
Thomas told investigators that she panicked because both of the babies were deceased, but they didn’t believe her story and arrested her on Monday. She was initially charged with child neglect and tampering with evidence, but the charges were upgraded to child abuse and murder following an autopsy of the twins.
“Preliminary autopsy results reveal the manner of death of the twins is homicide. Detectives that Baby Jane and Baby John suffered severe blunt force trauma to their heads, not consistent with Thomas’ story of giving birth in a toilet,” West Melbourne Police Capt. Richard Cordeau said in a statement.
“In addition, the umbilical cord was wrapped around Baby Jane’s throat and a foreign object was lodged in her throat to block her airway. After discarding her in the trash can, Thomas threw additional trash on top of Baby Jane in an attempt to conceal her,” he explained. “Both babies are believed to have been carried a full 39 week term.”
Thomas is now being held without bond in the Brevard County Jail, and her two other children, ages one and eight, have been placed in the care of a relative through the Department of Children and Families.
As previously reported, in an introductory lecture to his course on obstetrics in 1854, Philadelphia doctor Hugh Lennox Hodge lamented that even the mothers of his day were lacking of natural affection toward their own children and sought out means to kill them.
“They seem not to realize that the being within them is indeed animate, that is, in verity, a human being—body and spirit—that it is of importance, that its value is inestimable, having reference to this world and the next,” he said. “They act with as much indifference as if the living, intelligent, immortal existence lodged within their organs were of no more value than the bread eaten, or the common excretions of the system.”
“[S]he recklessly and boldly adopts measures, however severe and dangerous, for the accomplishment of her unnatural, her guilty purpose … that she may be delivered of [a child] for which she has no desire, and whose birth and appearance she dreads.”
The late British preacher Charles Spurgeon also once exhorted Christians, “I have no confidence at all in polished speech or brilliant literary effort to bring about a revival, but I have all the confidence in the world in the poor saint who would weep her eyes out because people are living in sin. I would choose, if I might, under God, to be a soul winner.”
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