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3 Kids Missing After Mom Killed, Fetus Taken

Police Holding 26-Year-Old In Custody

POSTED: 7:40 am EDT September 22, 2006
UPDATED: 2:34 pm EDT September 22, 2006

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Illinois authorities found the body of a woman who had a fetus cut out of her womb.

And police are now trying to find her three other young children.

Dozens of searchers on Friday scoured the densely wooded Frank Holten State Park in East St. Louis looking for the three children, identified as DeMond Tunstall, 7, Ivan Tunstall, 3, and Jinela Tunstall, 2. A boat also searched the shoreline of a lake at the park.

Investigators are also holding Tiffany Hall, a 26-year-old East St. Louis woman, in the case. She was described as a person of interest and it is not clear if the woman has been arrested or charged. The Center for Missing and Exploited Children said that police are concerned because the children are missing and were last seen with "a woman now accused of killing her cousin and cutting her cousin's child from her womb."

The police chief of East St. Louis, where the victim was found Thursday afternoon in a vacant lot, said authorities were alerted to Hall after a funeral Thursday for a baby that she said was stillborn.

Police said they began looking for Hall after her boyfriend told officials that she had confessed to him during the funeral that the baby wasn't his and that she'd killed a woman and taken her baby.

Police would not identify the boyfriend, saying only that he is a sailor home on leave.

The buried corpse has been recovered and an autopsy will determine if the fetus came from the dead woman.

The Belleville News-Democrat reported that neighbors said Hall, a mother of two, had appeared to be pregnant.

Police said that Hall went to a Centreville, Ill., hospital with the deceased baby, according to the paper. East St. Louis Police Chief James Mister said that Hall told the hospital that she had gone into labor and delivered the stillborn baby after being raped.

The East St. Louis case is the area's second recent case involving babies.

A 36-year-old woman is accused of slashing a young mother's throat and kidnapping her baby on Sept. 15. The baby was found in good condition four days later.

Another woman is to stand trial next April in the abduction of an unborn girl taken from the womb of Bobbie Jo Stinnett in December 2004 in Skidmore, Mo. The baby survived.

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