A woman was branded the most hated woman in Britain after spending more than £8,000 so that she could purchase twin babies from the US on the internet.
After adopting the six-month-old daughters who had previously been sold to a childless couple in America, Judith Kilshaw became the focus of a global scandal.
More than 20 years on, Judith admits her life had been ‘plagued’ by the global controversy which ended with her losing the children – along with her home and her marriage.
But defiant Judith, 71, insists she has ‘no regrets’ and told how she has not given up hope of being reunited with the twins.
Speaking exclusively to MailOnline from her home in Wrexham, Judith told MailOnline: ‘I have thought a lot about the case over the years and asked myself if I regretted doing it.
‘To a certain extent it has plagued my life – it never goes away.
‘It was a nightmare to start with but time heals things. There’s bigger things to think about.
‘But I have no regrets. I thought I could give the girls a better life and give them opportunities in life.
‘I would still love to talk to the girls to make sure they are OK and answer any questions they might have.
‘I am open to speaking to them but I have never spoken to them. But if they wanted to, I would love to get in touch.’
Judith and her solicitor husband Alan sparked a ‘cash-for-babies’ outcry in 2001 after they spent £8,200 to adopt Kiara and Keyara Wecker.
They brought the twins, who they renamed Belinda and Kimberley, to Britain hoping to start a new life as a family at their seven-bedroom farmhouse in Buckley, north Wales.
However, things did not proceed as planned.
Then-prime minister Tony Blair called the adoption deal ‘disgusting’ and the twins were taken by social services and taken into emergency protection.
A judge in the High Court revoked the adoption, and they were sent back to the United States.
Since then, Judith has settled back into relative obscurity, but much has happened in the intervening years, which Mailonline can reveal for the first time.
In the aftermath of the scandal, things were never quite the same for the couple and, burdened with debts over the experience, they were evicted from their farmhouse months later.
They moved into a bungalow in Chester but their 14-year marriage concluded after Judith met a man 13 years her junior in a nightclub.
Despite the split, she remained close to Alan and was at his bedside when he passed away aged 63 in January 2019.
At the time she told of her sadness that he had never fulfilled his dream of meeting the girls again.
She said: ‘He told me he had always regarded the twins as ours and his last wish was for me to go to America and try to make contact with them.
‘I don’t know if this will be possible but I will do everything I can to honour his dying request.’
The couple had led an inconspicuous if slightly quirky, middle-class existence in rural North Wales prior to the baby storm.
They already had two sons and Judith had two grown-up children from her first marriage.
Judith was too old to conceive, but the couple still desired a daughter.
They had spent £4,000 on unsuccessful IVF treatment and had looked into surrogacy before they shifted to an online adoption agency in despair.
The US-based agency called A Caring Heart was run by Tina Johnson who was acting on behalf of the mother of the mixed-race twins, Tranda Wecker, who was aged 28 at the time.
Tranda, a hotel receptionist from Missouri, had fallen pregnant as her second marriage was coming to an end and had chosen to part with her children.
Judith and Alan were unaware that the broker had already made arrangements for Richard and Vickie Allen, a couple from California, to adopt the twins.
They had paid £4,000 for the adoption and had cared for them for two months.
Tranda reportedly had a change of heart and, while the couple were in the process of finalising legal paperwork, she was given permission to say a last goodbye to her daughters.
The American couple were told that Tranda wanted to spend two days with the twins – but instead, they were given to Judith and Alan.
They set off with the twins to get their birth certificates before making a gruelling 1,500-mile car journey to Little Rock Arkansas, where adoption is fairly straightforward, with the Allens in hot pursuit.
After a five-minute hearing, the couple returned to Britain with the twins and their adoption papers.
But the FBI was called in to investigate the case amid a painful transatlantic war of words and a legal battle over the girls’ fate.
The children were returned to the US in April 2001 where they were put in foster care before a third set of parents eventually raised them.
Judith has consistently maintained that the adoption would benefit the twins and that she did nothing improper or unlawful.
But, in the aftermath of the affair, the couple racked up deficits of £70,000.
Along with three of Judith’s children, six dogs, over a dozen cats, two ferrets, a horse, a pony, and two pot-bellied pigs, they were forced to leave the farmhouse where they resided.
In the wake of her fight, Judith attempted to get elected as an MP in 2005 after standing as an independent candidate in her local Alyn and Deeside constituency insisting she wanted to ‘stand up for the little people’.
She split with Alan in 2006 and three years later she married Stephen Sillett, who was described at the time as a busker.
Following the breakup, Judith’s living circumstances became the subject of an investigation into possible benefits fraud.
In a strange twist, Alan gave his ex-wife away when she married Stephen at Wrexham Register Office in 2009.
She had a volatile relationship with her third husband and in 2012, Judith pleaded guilty at Wrexham Magistrates Court to attacking Stephen after striking him over the head with a Christmas bauble following a row.
Stephen had accused Judith, who now goes by her married name Sillett, of having an affair, she says.
Judith told MailOnline: ‘It was hardly the crime of the century. He probably deserved it.
‘However, we stayed together. We are still legally married but have split up.
‘We’re still friends and speak all the time.’
Alan, meantime, had been hospitalised for months before his death due to pulmonary fibrosis, a severe lung condition.
Judith told how Stephen became jealous as she nursed her ex-husband through his illness which led to her giving up her job as a cleaner in the Co-op.
She told MailOnline: ‘There were three of us in the relationship and men can’t really handle that can they?
‘I think he didn’t like the attention I was giving Alan.’
Of her life now she added: ‘I now live with my son. I don’t work as I have retired but I’m a bit of an agony aunt to all my friends.’
Speaking from his terraced home in a village near Wrexham, Stephen, now 58, said: ‘We’re still legally married but are not together anymore.
‘I don’t think we can afford to get divorced.’
Judith heard nothing more about the fate of the twins until 2018 when it was revealed they were starting university after being brought up by a caring churchgoing family in Missouri.
Their adoptive mother said at the time: ‘They have grown into fine young women, each with their own dreams and ambitions.’
Since then two TV documentaries have been made about the case – one called Three Mothers, two Babies and a Scandal, which was shown on Amazon Prime in 2022 while a second named The Baby Scandal That Shocked The World was screened on Channel 5 last year.
Judith told MailOnline: ‘The case and furore of it all, never really goes away.
‘In fact, I was recognised by a woman in the supermarket the other day.
‘She kept on staring at me, trying to work out who I was. Then she spoke to me asking if I was the woman from the babies case.
‘She recognised me from being on telly a few years ago, but it was positive. She said I came across really well.’
What makes this woman the most despised of all women? Did she murder the infants or cause them any harm? Nope!
Most hated woman in Britain – I think there have been a few contenders for that crown.
Whatever people think of this mother, I’m sure there have been some biological mothers who are seen in family court, and I wouldn’t let them look after my dog. Why so much abuse for this couple? What about the woman who sold her twins for money? What about the first couple? While this appears extremely Dickensian, how is this morally worse than surrogacy?
It might not seem moral to purchase a child, but some children that go into the care system lead extremely poor lives, and adoption is the only answer for providing children in care with the love, stability and support they need, and the objective should be that they are with a loving family that wants them – that should be the outcome!
Of course, babies are not a commodity, and it should all be done through legal channels.
This couple was given a hard time by the press – a couple that were well-meaning and kind, but the public love to hate eccentrics and there was a ton of unnecessary viciousness aimed at them. The true wrongdoer is the children’s mother who sold her children, twice!
They believed that everything was done appropriately since they utilised an agency, and they felt that everything would be done in an ethical manner. The loss of these infants, which was not their fault, must have devastated these parents.
But what about the first couple who wanted these twins? They would have been destroyed as well, but nobody mentions them.
Paying for a child to love and care for is no different to adoption. What does it matter if they paid, it’s not like they kidnapped them.
People appear to be enraged by this, yet finding baby’s corpses in Ireland in a sewage tank doesn’t even raise an eyebrow – perhaps we should give our heads a little wobble from time to time.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 