Police Hunt Woman Who Raised Kidnapped Carlina White

Jan. 21, 2011 — -- The woman who raised kidnapped girl Carlina White for 23 years has dropped from sight as federal and New York law enforcement officials launch fresh probes into the girl's disappearance from a hospital in 1987.

Anne Pettway, the woman White called Mom while growing up, has several aliases as well as a criminal history that includes charges of embezzlement, forgery, theft and drugs. She's currently on parole for embezzlement charges in North Carolina, the New York Post reported.

Pettway has left her home in North Carolina and has not turned up at her mother's home in Bridgeport, Conn., where she told the Post earlier this week she was heading.

Authorities have not named Pettway as a suspect. Pettway has defended herself saying that she was a good mom.

"I just hope that the officials be able to get her in their hands, so we can just hear her side of the story now," White told the New York Post.

Carlina White has since been reunited with her biological parents, Joy White and Carl Tyson, and has described a childhood of abuse, telling the New York Post that the woman hit her and threw things like shoes at her.

At just 19 days old, Carlina White was abducted from Harlem Hospital on Aug. 4, 1987. Her worried parents, Joy White and Carl Tyson, had taken their feverish baby to the hospital.

"Way I feel when I lost my daughter, oh my God, that was like a big part of my heart just was ripped apart," Carl Tyson told the Post.

The family claims a woman disguised as a nurse took Carlina White.

"For a person to put on a nurse suit, to wander in the hospital," Carlina White told the New York Post. "You knew what you were doing."

The woman had reportedly just lost her own baby.

Brad Garrett, a former FBI profiler and special agent, said that there is a difference between somebody who steals a baby and somebody who abducts a child.

"If you look at the profile of infant abductors, they tend to be women in their late twenties or early thirties. They can't have a child or they lost a child. They may have even faked pregnancies," Garrett said. "A child abductor is somebody that just wants a narcissistic, erotic gain from stealing a child, using a child and disposing of a child. They don't want a relationship with the child."