FBI: Suspect in Carlina White Kidnap Confessed

Last Updated 1:46 p.m. ET

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - Authorities say a North Carolina woman who raised a child snatched from a New York hospital more than two decades ago has confessed to taking the baby in 1987 after she had trouble having her own children.

An FBI agent said in court papers charging Ann Pettway with kidnapping that Pettway suffered several miscarriages before taking the baby from Harlem Hospital by train to her home in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Pettway's cousin, Brian Pettway, said she appeared pregnant in 1987 and disappeared. He said she returned with a baby the family assumed was hers.

Pettway was scheduled to appear Monday in federal court to face kidnapping charges.

The warrant was issued in North Carolina, where she's on probation because of a conviction for attempted embezzlement.

She turned herself in days after a widely publicized reunion between the child she raised, now an adult, and her biological mother.

Carlina White was just 19 days old when her parents took her to Harlem Hospital in the middle of the night with a high fever. Joy White and Carl Tyson said a woman who looked like a nurse had comforted them. The couple left the hospital to rest, but their baby was missing when they went back. No suspects were identified.

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Speculation has already started over the type of defense her legal team might use.

CBS News Legal Analyst Jack Ford said on "The Early Show" Monday the federal charges are serious.

He explained, "In the federal scheme of things, kidnapping is one of the top charges you can get. You know, interestingly, there was no federal kidnapping offense until after the Lindbergh kidnapping which took place back in the early '30s. At that time, actually authorities found themselves unable to handle that case the way they would have liked to. That was the genesis of kidnapping statutes. It's a significant crime in the federal scheme of things - a range of 10 years to life in prison."

What could a defense look like for Pettway?

Ford said it's "hard."

"If I'm her lawyer, the first thing I'm going to take a look at is what was her mental state at the time," Ford said. "We've seen some situations over the year, very sad stories where somebody either lost a child, there's some suggestion that she was pregnant and lost a child, or for whatever reason they were just driven to a state, a mental state that they weren't responsible for what they're doing, or as responsible. So I'm her lawyer, I want to take a good, hard look at what was going on in her mind at the time."

In an appearance on NBC's "Today" show on Monday, Carl Tyson said he was very happy to have found his daughter, now a 23-year-old adult.

"I have my whole puzzle. I have all my four kids now," he said.

Tyson said he would like to ask Pettway "why she did this to me for 23 years."

Carlina White has been living under the name Nejdra Nance in Connecticut and in the Atlanta area. She said she had long suspected Pettway wasn't her biological mother because she could never provide her with a birth certificate and because she didn't look like anyone else in Pettway's family.

She periodically checked the website of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and while looking through New York photos early this month found one that looked nearly identical to her own baby picture. She contacted Joy White through the center.

White and Nance met in New York before DNA tests were complete, confident they were mother and daughter. After the test results confirmed it Wednesday, Nance returned from Atlanta to be with White again.

Pettway remained in custody Sunday and couldn't be reached for comment. A woman who answered the phone at a Pettway relative's home in Bridgeport on Sunday refused to comment on her surrender.

Pettway received two years of probation last June after she took items from a store where she worked, which is considered embezzlement under North Carolina law, state correction spokeswoman Pamela Walker said. Under terms of her probation, she wasn't allowed to leave the state.

Department of Correction officials there tried repeatedly to contact her after finding out investigators wanted to question her in Carlina's 1987 abduction.

North Carolina officials said Friday they believed Pettway was on the run from authorities. They said Sunday they would seek her extradition.