Alex Griffiths
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Alexandra Griffiths was born in January 1990 to Geoff and Dawn Griffiths at St Thomas’s Hospital, South London, UK. She was abducted from the hospital, aged thirty-six hours old, when her father unknowingly handed her to Janet Griffiths (no relation), who was posing as a social worker.
Although Dawn and Geoff made numerous appeals for the return of their newborn daughter and there was widespread media coverage, it took seventeen days before Janet Griffiths was found, by police, living in a cottage in the village of Burford, Cotswolds where she was keeping Alex. Griffiths intended to pass the child off as her own as a means of preventing her married lover from leaving her. In 1992, she was tried for abduction and committed to a psychiatric hospital where she subsequently died of cancer.
Despite the delight of being reunited with her child, Dawn Griffiths struggled to come to terms with what happened. Suffering depression, she divorced Geoff, remarried with a man whom she had a son Charlie with before divorcing again. She now lives with Alex and Charlie in Middlesbrough. At the age of ten, Alex described in a school essay how the abduction still had ramifications on her life and how her mother was fiercely over-protective of her, stating 'The police kept telling my mum I would certainly be returned. It was just a matter of eliminating all the calls. This ... didn’t help my mum who must have gone through hell and back. I wasn’t allowed anywhere like my brother is. I wasn’t allowed to play out in the road. I know why mum is like this. That’s why I hate Janet Griffiths. But I blame the hospital, too. She shouldn’t have been able to take me out." [1]
Alex's kidnapping marked an overhauling of security measures in British hospitals and CCTV and twenty-four hour security posts were set up in an attempt to prevent a repeat incident.[2]
