It’s stories such as this freakish tale of crime and gender-bending that inspired me to create a WTF?!! category.
A woman accused of abducting her two young children from their father, then dressing like a man so she could assume his identity, agreed yesterday to return to Arizona where she faces kidnapping charges, authorities said.
Shellie White, 30, was taken into custody Friday in Roanoke Rapids, where police said she and a woman lived together as the children’s father and mother.
The arrest came more than two years after White was charged with custodial interference in the children’s disappearance, the U.S. Marshals Service said. Her ex-husband, Ernest Karnes, had custody of the children at the time and learned Friday that they had been found.
That’s a pretty bare-boned version. Here’s a far more fleshed-out account under the delightful headline of “That’s not our mum, that’s dad.”
She is the mother of two children – a boy and a girl.
But her kids call her ‘Daddy’.
That’s because when they were younger, she cut her hair and dressed like a man. She also told them that she was her father.
But the truth was that Shellie White, 30, had kidnapped her two children from their father, Mr Ernest Karnes, who won custody of them when the couple divorced.
She had also dressed up like a man so that she could assume her ex-husband’s identity as she moved her kids from city to city to avoid the authorities.
Last week, she was finally tracked down by the police in Raonoke Rapids, North Carolina, and will be made to face kidnapping charges in Arizona, where her children were taken from Mr Karnes.
The arrest comes more than two years after she was charged over the children’s disappearance, the US Marshals Service said.
It added that White ‘radically changed her appearance to that of a man and assumed many aliases,’ including her ex-husband’s.
‘She even went so far as to tell her children, aged 3 and 5 at the time, that she was their father,’ the Marshals Service said in a statement.
‘When she was arrested, the children, now aged 6 and 8, asked why they were arresting their Daddy.’
White told the AP news agency that she had told her son to say she was his father only to fend off other children who had made fun of her appearance.
But Deputy US Marshal Dennis Harkins said White had posed as her ex-husband and other men.
‘She was playing it off for all the world to see that she was a man,’ Mr Harkins said.
[…]
Mr Holmes said that after charging White in January 2004, authorities were able to trace the children to various schools, but always came up empty.
‘It kept going in a circle, so she was aware of it,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t keep them in a school no more than maybe six months.’
When White was arrested, she and a woman had been living together as the children’s father and mother.
Feel free to follow that last link for a picture that makes much of this bizarre story believable.