Shock as detective woman discovers her loving mother kidnapped her from her real parents 23 years ago

New York: Growing up in a strict but happy family with her younger brother, Netty Nance always looked to her mum for approval.

She learned dance steps with her cousins, collapsing into fits of giggles when they missed a move, but proudly showing off the finished routines to their families and basking in the applause.

A smile and a nod of appreciation from Ann, her strong and determined mother, meant the world to Netty, now 26.

And it’s this kind of memory – dancing, laughter, family get-togethers – that she likes to recall from her childhood. Even though it was all based on a lie and a terrible crime.

Because Ann was not her mother but her kidnapper. Posing as a hospital nurse for several weeks, she snatched a 19-day-old baby from her cot then disappeared.

She raised the child as her own for an incredible 23 years before detective work by Netty herself finally uncovered the truth.

Now she has been reunited with her birth parents and Ann is serving a 12-year prison term for the kidnap.

But Netty holds no long-term grudge against the woman who posed as her mother for so long – and even says she would not want to change what happened in her life.

“I’m not mad at Ann any more,” she says. “I was, but only because she hid something from me for so long.

"But I can appreciate what she did for me because, without her, I wouldn’t be as strong-minded and with the attitude to go out there and get what I want.”

But it was this attitude, taken to criminal extremity, that made Ann abduct someone else’s baby in 1987.

Netty’s real mum, Joy White, gave birth to her at 16. She and the father Carl Tyson, 22, were smitten with their baby and called her Carlina.

But she developed a high fever and after 19 days had to be admitted to Harlem Hospital in New York.

Joy and Carl went home to get some belongings and when Joy returned hours later the baby was nowhere to be seen.

There was a huge police investigation and suspects were named, but the crime was never solved. Carl and Joy did recall a heavy-set nurse who consoled Joy about her sick child.

This was Ann Pettway, who had spent so long on the maternity ward posing as a nurse that even the genuine staff believed she was one of them.

As the hunt began for baby Carlina, Ann took her on the train back to her home in Connecticut.

Her family thought she was pregnant but hadn’t seen her for many weeks.                        

In fact she had suffered a miscarriage, one of several, and the fear she might never have a child prompted her to steal one.

Little Carlina was renamed Nejdra Nance after her supposed father Robert Nance, a boyfriend of Ann’s. And after a move to Atlanta, Georgia, it became shortened to Netty.

She remembers her childhood as a happy time. When she was 10, Ann had a baby boy called Trevon and Netty spent her time with her cousins and beloved Aunt Cassandra writing rap lyrics and learning dances.

“I still look at them as my family,” she says. “People find that strange but when I think about my family I think about picnics and birthday parties because we did a lot of them. I have more good memories than bad from that time.”

Netty has since learned that some relatives would gossip about the lack of resemblance between Ann and her daughter. And eventually she started wondering herself.

“I got inquisitive. I started feeling like I didn’t fit in. I started asking questions and wondering why I didn’t have the same hands or feet as Ann.”

When Netty was 16 she became pregnant with her own daughter Samani, who is now nine.

“To register for free pre-natal care I had to have my birth certificate,” she recalls.

But when she presented the document that Ann had given her she was shocked to be told it was a forgery.

It was then that Ann sat Netty down to speak to her.

“She was crying and I’d never see her cry,” recalls Netty. “She told me she was not my real mum and that I’d been born to a drug addict who left me with her.”

Devastated, Netty pushed Ann for more information, but to no avail.

She hated the fact that her grandmother, cousins and Aunt Cassandra were not the blood relatives she’d thought.

“I remember going to them and thinking, ‘But we’re not related’. But then I told myself not to be silly because, related or not, they were still the same people to me.”

After having her daughter in May 2005, Netty moved into her own place as a single mother. And as her curiosity grew, she searched constantly online for reports of missing children.

It became a long search and it wasn’t until December 2010 when she found the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children’s website that everything fell into place.

She recalls: “I saw a photo that looked just like my daughter Samani as a baby with dates that matched up.

“I just went cold. I dragged the photo on to my desktop and showed it to my Aunt Cassandra. She wasn’t sure, but then the next day I looked again and I was positive.”

Carlina called the National Centre, who arranged DNA tests on her and Joy and Carl. Before the results even came back she made contact with Joy, who had split from Carl.

“Straight away there was a connection,” says Netty. “In January 2011 she paid for me and Samani to come to New York and I just knew she was my mum. Just knew.

“We’d talk for hours. It wasn’t about anything negative – we’d just focus on the positives and catch up with each other I guess. We had a lot of that to do.”

And finally, Netty could see parts of herself reflected in someone else.

“We’d compare our hands, our legs. There were so many similarities.”

Joy and Carl were overjoyed their daughter had been discovered but the reunion was not the fairytale it initially seemed. Netty struggled with the public interest in her “miracle”.

While she never cried about it – “that’s a trait from Ann” – she spent an entire year hiding in a flat with Samani.

“All I did for a year was read,” she says. “We’d go to the library every single day.”

She changed her numbers and saw no one, not even friends, until she was ready. This was a hard time for Joy and Carl, she accepts, who felt as though their daughter was once again being taken away from them.

“I just needed time to get my head figured out and that period helped me a lot. I learned a lot,” she says.

There were basic decisions, such as whether she wanted to start calling herself Carlina. In the end I decided to stick with Netty,” she says. “Because that wasn’t a name given to me by anyone else – I gave that name to myself.”

She has slowly re-established her relationship with her birth parents and sees Joy as her best friend. They speak every day.

“We love to cook with each other, we love sitting and chatting and we are incredible close.

“We finish each other’s sentences and we like the same foods and mirror each other’s gestures.”

Meanwhile, after initially running away in panic, Ann handed herself in and in February 2012 admitted the kidnapping.

“I went to the hospital. I took a child. It was wrong,” is all she said publicly before she was jailed.

Netty writes to Ann weekly but has not been to visit her in prison yet.

“Will I visit her? I will sometime, but I don’t know when. And all I know of that first meeting is that it will be emotional.

"I have a child myself and I know what Ann went through growing up and trying to have a child. I know she’s sorry for what she did, but she didn’t know how to stop it.

How can she be so forgiving?

“The thing is,” says Netty in her thick southern drawl. “If I had all that anger in me it would be me who would suffer and it would stop me from living.

“So I let it go. And now I have two mums and two dads and my life is richer now because of that.”

She works part-time on a radio show, and uses her experiences in an organisation she set up helping young people facing problems at home or school.

“I feel as though everything happens for a reason and I wouldn’t have my brother, and all these people in my life.“I wouldn’t be me, if it wasn’t for what I’ve been through, and I’m happy. I wouldn’t change what happened to me.”