Becca Beushausen, seen here as she appeared on MySpace, admitted to lying to thousands of readers of... 
(/ABC News)"People now are going to look at people who are really in need with skepticism," she said. "It's not fair to people with real tragedies who need help and prayers."
That outrage spread as readers pieced together more elements of the deception, eventually outing "April's Mom" as Becca Beushausen, a 26-year-old from Mokena, Ill., a town outside Chicago.
"I think it's sick, what she did," said Briane Gibson, a 24-year-old blogger who quickly became suspicious and helped identify Beushausen, when her real name -- as the site's creator -- briefly flashed on screen when the blog would load.
"She was feeding off people's sympathy. She was making money of people," Gibson said. "She wasted the time of so many people who could have been helping real families in need," she said.
When she realized she had been exposed, Beushausen quickly took down the blog, and apparently tried to erase her digital identity from Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
Calls to Beushausen and her parents initially were not returned to ABCNews.com. But later, she sent the written apology to ABC News as "Good Morning America" prepared to cover the story.
In it, she claimed that though her account of Baby April was a lie, she made another claim of thwarted motherhood -- that she was "no stranger to losing a baby."
"The pain is very constant," she wrote. "Is what I have explained above and the other pains that are unseen and only in my heart an excuse for all of this? -- No. Absoltely [sic] not. But I will be the first to say I don't even understand all of my actions."
Beushausen also admitted to the deception and apologized for the hoax in an interview Friday with the Chicago Tribune.
"I know what I did was wrong," she told the Tribune. "I've been getting hate mail. I'm sorry because people were so emotionally involved."
"I've always liked writing. It was addictive to find out I had a voice that people wanted to hear," Beushausen said. "Soon, I was getting 100,000 hits a week, and it just got out of hand."
"I didn't know how to stop," she added. "One lie led to another."
That apology is little solace to thousands of bloggers who followed her posts nightly, sending in prayers and mailing gifts.
"I'm still feeling a lot of hate towards her," said Jacki Gallagher, a 30-year-old blogger from British Columbia who followed the site from early on.
"Reading her site was part of my life. I hand make toys and was ready to send something, because she had moved me so much. She wrote beautifully and that was really the seller. She didn't just make short posts, she put a lot of time an effort into this," Gallagher said.
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