173: The Kidnapping of Zephany Nurse & the Dionne Quintuplets

Let's Go To Court!

Celeste lay in her hospital bed, drifting in and out of sleep. Her newborn baby, Zephany, lay sleeping in a cot next to her. At some point, Celeste remembers a woman in a nurse’s uniform coming in to comfort her baby. Celeste didn’t think much of it. She fell back asleep. But when she woke up, the hospital staff was alarmed. Baby Zephany was missing.

Then Kristin tells us about five little girls who became a tourist attraction. In 1934, news of the Dionne Quintuplets spread worldwide. People couldn’t believe it. Five beautiful, identical little girls had been born to surprised parents in Ontario. Thousands of people showed up outside the Dionne’s farmhouse to get a look at the girls. But the girls’ parents, Elzire and Oliva, were torn. They weren’t sure how they could afford to care for their premature newborns, but they didn’t want to exploit them, either.

And now for a note about our process. For each episode, Kristin reads a bunch of articles, then spits them back out in her very limited vocabulary. Brandi copies and pastes from the best sources on the web. And sometimes Wikipedia. (No shade, Wikipedia. We love you.) We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the real experts who covered these cases.

In this episode, Kristin pulled from:

“The Dionne quintuplets: The exploitation of five girls raised in a baby zoo,” by Gillian Brockwell for the Washington Post

“BBC1 Miracle Babies - The Story of the Dionne Quintuplets” on YouTube

“The story of the Dionne Quintuplets is a cautionary tale for the age of ‘kidfluencers,’” by Shelley Wood for Time Magazine

“The dark side of the famous five,” by Ian Parker for the Independent

“The babies of Quintland now: Broke, and bitter,” by Anthony Depalma for the New York Times

“Dionne Quintuplets” entry on Wikipedia

In this episode, Brandi pulled from:

“'The selfie that revealed I was a stolen baby’” by Sarah Mcdermott, BBC News

“Search for daughter never-ending” by Bianca Capazorio and Leila Samodien, IOL

“How a Teen Girl Learned She Was Abducted As a Baby” by Catie L’Heureux, The Cut

“I’m broken, says man who raised Zephany Nurse” by Catherine Rice, IOL

“In 2015, Miché met a girl who looked just like her. She had been abducted 17 years earlier.” by Billi Fitzsimmons, MamaMia

“Celeste and Morné Nurse back together five years after finding long-lost daughter” by Daily Voice, IOL

“My biological dad is a 'lost cause', Zephany Nurse reveals in new book” by Dave Chambers, Times Live

“Zephany Nurse kidnapper jailed for 10 years in South Africa” by Jason Burke, The Guardian

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