Abbie Humphries, who was famously snatched as a newborn from hospital by a woman posing as a nurse, has died from a brain tumour three decades after her disappearance shocked the nation.
Despite moving to New Zealand in the hope of a gentler life, the Humphries family has been haunted by tragedy – with Abbie’s mother Karen dying from breast cancer in 2020 and Abbie succumbing to a grade 4 brain tumour on Sunday aged just 30.
‘Our beautiful Abbie peacefully passed away yesterday, surrounded by loved ones,’ her husband Karl Sundgren wrote on Facebook.
‘She fought so hard with so much strength and grace for over four years and can finally rest.’
For a brief but agonising time in July 1994, Britain was gripped by Abbie’s fate when, at just three hours old, she was taken from her cot at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham.
Her parents Roger and Karen went on TV pleading for clues but it took 16 heartbreaking days before Abbie was found.
After leaving to build a new life on the other side of the world, 27 years on the family faced an even graver tragedy.
Abbie learned the headaches plaguing her in the weeks after her mother’s death were not, as she presumed, the effects of grief but the result of a grade 4 brain tumour.
Abbie Humphries with her parents Roger and Karen on her wedding day in Auckland in 2017
Abbie was taken from her cot at just three hours old in July 1994. Pictured: Abbie after being returned to her parents
The front page of the Daily Mail on Monday July 13, 1994 with the headline ‘I thought she was my baby’
As she told the Mail in 2021, there was no point feeling angry. ‘We have just had a terrible amount of bad luck,’ she said. ‘I usually choose to look at the positive side of everything. It makes everyone feel better.’
Indeed, as her husband summed up yesterday: ‘Abbie was so strong, and her infectious smile will forever remain in our hearts.’
Life is not supposed to work out this way. After all, Abbie was the baby who was found. The one who survived when others meet awful fates or, like Madeleine McCann, are still missing.
Covering the story for the Mail in 1994, I recall a fellow reporter making the point: ‘We’re going to be covering every milestone in her life – her first step, her first day at school, her wedding.’
Abbie laughed when I told her that because her parents knew too. It’s one of the reasons they left Britain so Abbie and her siblings – Charlie, now 33, and Alice, 26 – could feel safe and happy.
It’s there she became a champion swimmer, representing New Zealand, and graduated with a degree in psychology and criminology.
She worked first as a flight attendant, then in IT, before she married her teenage sweetheart Karl in 2017.
No one there knew of her abduction. Even she wasn’t aware of the magnitude of the case until, aged ten, she found press cuttings and a message from the late Princess Diana – with whom she shared a July 1 birthday – during a house move.
Indeed, she only appreciated the full drama of that time when she watched The Secrets She Keeps, a 2020 TV drama loosely based on her abduction, starring Downton Abbey’s Laura Carmichael as the kidnapper.
As Abbie told me, her dad was hyper-protective because he had been with her when the woman posing as a nurse said she was taking the newborn for a hearing test.
‘He felt what happened was his fault because Mum was a midwife at the hospital and it wouldn’t have happened if she’d been in the room.
Abbie Sundgren, pictured with husband Karl, is now fighting brain cancer, a year after mother Karen Humphries died from breast cancer and 27 years after she was kidnapped from hospital at three hours old and reunited with her parents 16 days later
Nearly three decades have passed but the kidnapping from The Queen’s Medical Centre (pictured) in Nottingham remains one of the most audacious in British history
Pictured: Laura Carmichael in ITV drama The Secrets She Keeps
‘As I was growing up, it was like he had flashback moments and had to know where I was right then and there.’
The kidnapping remains one of the most audacious in British history.
In a case which sparked a nationwide police hunt, Karen had stepped into the corridor to make a phone call, leaving Roger with Abbie.
He thought nothing of it when the ‘nurse’ took her but upon returning Karen immediately knew something was wrong. With dawning horror, it became clear the woman had just walked out of the hospital with the baby in her arms.
Officers believed the abductor might have recently lost a child or could be childless. TV footage shows the full horror of the parents’ suffering.
‘Whoever has taken our baby, can they please give her back,’ pleaded Karen.
Abbie was found just over a fortnight later on a third police visit to a house in the Nottingham suburb of Wollaton.
They’d been tipped off that a former dental nurse called Julie Kelley, living there with her boyfriend and his mother, had been pregnant and expecting a boy.
When she came home with a girl, neighbours became suspicious. Kelley pleaded guilty to abducting Abbie and was put on probation for three years and treated for a severe personality disorder.
It was reported she faked the pregnancy to persuade her boyfriend not to leave. She went on to have a family of her own.
Sadly, that was a happiness denied to Abbie, who told me: ‘I have always been that person who was born to be a mum. I’ve looked after children my whole life and Karl and I were ready to grow our family when I was diagnosed.’
Abbie had her eggs removed before her cancer treatment but had accepted she wouldn’t be able to use them.
Pictured: A Mail on Sunday front page report about the kidnap in 1994
It was a small comfort that her mum didn’t know about her daughter’s grade 4 glioblastoma when she died aged 59 after her own seven-year battle with breast cancer.
But, as if this family hasn’t suffered enough, Abbie died knowing her sister Alice had inherited the gene for Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, which leaves carriers susceptible to developing a range of cancers.
Abbie did not have the gene but it struck her mother, aunt, grandmother and cousins.
As for Abbie, at the time of her diagnosis early in 2021, she was given a year, maybe two. In the end she had nearly four years but suffering had given her a gift many never have.
‘What’s happened has made me appreciate Karl and my family and our house which is right by the beach,’ she told me. ‘I believe in doing things when you want to do them because you never know what’s round the corner.’
