Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 22, 1991 TAG: 9102220704
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON and RON BROWN/ STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Carolyn Ann Smallwood Snyder, 19, said she had a partial hysterectomy when she was 16 because of a venereal disease that had resulted from a gang rape.
"They can take 10 tubes of blood. They can take lie detectors, she said Thursday. "They can do whatever they want, because that's not my baby."
Roanoke police had said Wednesday that Snyder told them she had given birth to the baby. "I need help," police quoted her as saying. "Things are bothering me."
Police have charged Snyder with felony neglect in the death of the baby boy, who was found Dec. 19 by an out-of-work construction laborer looking for aluminum cans in a dumpster off Mountain Avenue Southwest. The child - dubbed Baby Isaiah by nurses at Roanoke Memorial Hospital - lived for five days before dying from the effects of exposure during his first hours of life.
Thursday, in a telephone interview from a Kentucky jail where she is awaiting extradition, Snyder claimed she had made up the story about having a baby so police would bring her back home to her husband. She said she had smoked crack cocaine about an hour before calling Roanoke police from Louisville.
She said she first denied being the mother, but when a police detective pressed her, "I just thought off the top of my head and made up something. . . . I was high. I was real upset."
Roanoke police declined to comment.
Investigators had been searching for the baby's mother by using a composite sketch of a woman who they said had been "obviously pregnant" in December, when she had been frequenting Roanoke's shelters for the homeless.
A police news release Wednesday said: "Managers and others who have reason to know the people who frequent such shelters easily identified Carolyn Snyder as the pregnant woman who stayed around for a while after the baby was found but was no longer pregnant herself."
The release said Snyder, whose nickname is "Angel," told police she had given birth in December in a vacant house in Southwest Roanoke. She told police that she had not been alone and she had not looked at the baby during delivery.
Investigators plan to use DNA testing to determine whether she is the baby's mother. Police are also awaiting DNA test results on another Roanoke woman, who died of natural causes earlier this year and also was suspected of being Baby Isaiah's mother.
Snyder, who said she has worked in Roanoke and California as a prostitute, said she lied to police about being Isaiah's mother after a Roanoke police detective told her by telephone, "You're not gonna get home if you can't tell me the truth."
Snyder's aunt, Judy Ann Wright, also said Thursday that she does not believe her niece is the mother of the child.
Her husband, Robert Lee "Ray Ray" Snyder, 31, also maintained that she was unable to have a baby.
Robert Snyder said he believes his wife did not know what she was saying when she told police she was the mother. "When she gets nervous, she'll say anything," he said.
"She wouldn't harm a kid - she treasures them," Snyder said. "She's got a habit of going around saying she's pregnant." But when he pressed her about it, he said, she would say: "Naw, baby, I'm lying to you."
Robert Snyder conceded that he might not be believed because of his long criminal record, which he said includes car theft and assault. "I've been in the penitentiary. They ain't gonna believe somebody who's been in the can. . . . I've got a bad rep in Roanoke."
Snyder came to the newspaper office Thursday and said heatedly that his wife is not the mother. Later he called her in Louisville from the newspaper. She talked with him and two reporters during a conference call.
During the call, Carolyn Snyder said she often lied about being pregnant because "I wanted a baby so bad."
Snyder said she grew up in Sharps Chapel, Tenn., and was raped by a family member when she was 12. After that, she was taken away and put in a foster home. She kept running away and was later gang-raped, she said.
The gang rape left her with gonorrhea that became so bad she almost died. As a result, she said, she had her Fallopian tubes removed.
She said she spent time in mental institutions, and, after moving in and out of group homes, she came to Roanoke to live with her aunt just before her 18th birthday.
She met a man and became engaged to him, but he was killed a few months later in an automobile accident, Wright said. After that, she met Robert Snyder. He said they met soon after his release from prison in December 1989. He was at a downtown club playing pool.
"We've been together ever since," he said. "When I was down and out, she didn't turn her back on me. That's why I stuck to her."
They sold their blood to make money and lived under bridges and in abandoned houses, "anywhere we could," Carolyn Snyder said. "When I made money, we stayed in motels."
They lived for a while in a cheap motel near downtown, where Carolyn Snyder did cleaning work to pay for the room. Robert Snyder said she smoked crack and often would "get on one of her wild spells and take off." Sometimes she would walk from one room of a house to another and completely forget what she was doing, he said.
She was afraid he would leave her because she couldn't bear a child for him, Robert Snyder said, but he told her it didn't matter to him.
Snyder said his wife continued to work as a prostitute after they were married. "I ain't scared to admit it," he said. "How else were we gonna survive?"
Carolyn Snyder was convicted of prostitution in Roanoke three times in the past two years. With each conviction, she was sentenced to more jail time - first five days, then 10 and then 30.
Court records also show that Robert Snyder was charged with assaulting her in May 1990. The charge was dropped at her request. He denies assaulting her.
Last summer, they headed west and were married July 5 in Las Vegas, Nev. He said they worked in a McDonald's in Las Vegas for a few weeks but returned to Roanoke after they got their first paycheck.
Last fall, the couple headed back west. Robert Snyder said she was arrested for prostitution in Santa Monica, Calif., and he returned to Roanoke after they argued. "Last time I seen her, she was still selling her stuff."
Later, he went back to California after learning she had been jailed on a second prostitution arrest. She got out of jail at the end of November, and they waited long enough to pick up a welfare check and then hitchhiked back to Roanoke. They arrived here in mid-December.
Robert Snyder said that on the day Baby Isaiah was born, Dec. 19, they learned of the baby's plight from a television news show. "She said, `That's a damn shame. Anybody that would do that to a baby ought to be killed.' And I agreed with her."
Lois Johnson Bettis, executive director of the Roanoke Rescue Mission, said the Snyders stayed at the shelter from Dec. 26 to Dec. 29. During that time, Bettis said, Carolyn Snyder did not say or do anything to indicate that she had just had a baby.
During their stay at the shelter, the Snyders spent most of their time job-hunting, Bettis said. They left at the end of the month, headed to Florida, then to California.
The Snyders said they were separated at a truck stop in Ontario, Calif., when she was kidnapped by two truckers who drove off with her. Police confirmed her husband filed a missing-person report Jan. 29.
Carolyn Snyder said that after the truckers dumped her off in Louisville, she saw her picture on a "missing" poster at a McDonald's. She called her aunt, who told her that police wanted to talk to her.
When she called, Robert Snyder was at the police station, being questioned about his wife. She talked to Lt. J.E. Dean, chief of the Police Department's youth bureau. She said Dean told her, "You know you're the mother of this baby," and she eventually told him that she was.
"I know it was wrong on my part to say anything like that, because I know how much trouble I'm in," she said Thursday night. "I swear to my goodness that I didn't have any baby. I'm not no mother. I wished I was."
Staff writers Laurence Hammack and David Poole contributed to this story.
by CNB