MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: The grim details of that case of the stolen baby and her strangled mother have shocked the nation. What might lead a person to commit such a monstrous crime? Dr. Michael Welner is a leading expert in forensic psychiatry. He joins us now from New York.
Dr. Welner, good to have you with us.
In a way, it's an unanswerable question. Nevertheless, there are some clues which we can sort of cipher out here. For one thing, there's been a lot of talk about whether she might have been a pregnant woman who miscarried and, thus, was in some way deranged or depressed. How would that factor into this if you're trying to measure what sort of a crime this would be?
DR. MICHAEL WELNER, FORENSIC PSYCHIATRIST: I think it's important for us to avoid jumping to conclusions that she was necessarily ill. This is a crime that was carried out with a great amount of orchestration and calm. I doubt that she would have been able to convince her husband or her family of the unusual circumstances of her giving birth and suddenly appearing with a child, and not only that, carrying on a social dialogue with a stranger, to be able to get into her home and kill her were she to not be intact, to present herself as social and amiable.
So could she have been suffering from some emotional turmoil? Quite possibly. It's a very unusual crime. But this is a crime of desperation. And what it tells us is more that she was invested in carrying off the notion that she bore this child. She may have been doing it to save a marriage, to bolster a sense of herself. But the idea of a psychiatric condition, I'd be very cautious given how organized this crime was, and how organized it had to be in order for her to essentially get away with it, but for the grace of good forensics and an Amber Alert.
O'BRIEN: Well, and when you say organized, the fact that she was able to take the baby out of the womb, there is no gentle way to say this -- and harm the mother greatly, obviously, leading ultimately to her murder, although she had been strangled as well. But the baby is in good shape. Is this something that you learn somewhere? Could you find this in the book?
WELNER: Well, you can learn anything over the Internet, and you can learn anything through study in the library. But what you're touching on here is a very important point with respect to the eventual prosecution of the case, and I'm telling you this based on my professional experience in working for prosecution and defense. If something is impulsive, then it speaks more to the idea of a person's illness. If someone goes about thinking about how to save the baby, even while killing the mother, or targeting someone who is pregnant who's a victim that one could vanquish, that a woman could overcome, could actually kill, take a baby and get away with it, that takes planning, it takes orchestration, and that speaks more to the calculation and study, rather than the illness.
O'BRIEN: If the motive was to get a child, surely there are other ways, just outright kidnapping, to do that.
WELNER: Well, again, if she considered what it would take to kidnap a child and then successfully be able to represent that this child was her own that she bore, that's different from adoption. There is an issue that relates to what it meant to her to be able to represent not only to herself, but to her husband that she bore him a child. And we'll learn more as we inquire more about the marriage, and her life and where she was at emotionally.
O'BRIEN: All right, final thought here. I know you're working on a little project. We want to help you out with it. It's called the Depravity Scale. You're trying to help courts all throughout the nation kind of get a handle on depravity. We think when we see this, this has to peg the scale, if you will, as far as depravity goes. But you're inviting the public to go to this site at depravityscale.org, and sort of weigh in on their sensibilities to help judges make decisions.
WELNER: That's exactly right. The public is needed in order to come up with a consensus across our nation, across ethnic groups and our backgrounds, at www.depravityscale.org. What we're trying to do is to establish a way where courts can see that we all agree on what intent, actions and attitudes about a crime distinguish them as depraved, and possibly more representative, or more worthy of more significant punishment.
O'BRIEN: All right, you may not need a scale on this particular crime. Dr. Michael Welner, thank you for your time. We appreciate it.
WELNER: Appreciate your interest.
