Tragic ‘baby Abbie’ who was famously snatched as a newborn from hospital dies of a brain tumour aged just 30

Abbie Humphries, who was famously snatched from hospital as a newborn by a woman posing as a nurse, has died of a brain tumor 30 years after her disappearance shocked the nation.

Despite moving to New Zealand in the hope of a gentler life, the Humphries family has been haunted by tragedy: Abbie’s mother Karen died of breast cancer in 2020 and Abbie succumbed to a grade 4 brain tumor on Sunday at just 30 years old.

“Our beautiful Abbie passed away peacefully yesterday surrounded by loved ones,” her husband Karl Sundgren wrote on Facebook.

“She fought so hard and with such strength and grace for more than four years and can finally rest.”

In July 1994, Britain was gripped by Abbie’s fate for a brief but painful time when, aged just three hours, she was taken from her cot at the Queen’s Medical Center in Nottingham.

Her parents Roger and Karen pleaded on TV for clues, but it took 16 heartbreaking days before Abbie was found.

After leaving to start a new life on the other side of the world, the family faced an even more serious tragedy 27 years later.

Abbie discovered that the headaches she suffered in the weeks after her mother’s death were not, as she assumed, the result of grief, but the result of a grade 4 brain tumor.

As she told the Mail in 2021, there was no point in being angry. “We just had some really bad luck,” she said. ‘I usually choose to look at the positive side of everything. It makes everyone feel better.”

As her husband summed up yesterday, “Abbie was so strong, and her infectious smile will remain in our hearts forever.”

Life isn’t meant to go this way. After all, Abbie was the baby that was found. The one who survived when others met a terrible fate or, like Madeleine McCann, are still missing.

When I covered the story for the Mail in 1994, I remember a fellow reporter saying: ‘We’re going to cover every milestone in her life – her first step, her first day at school, her wedding.’

Abbie laughed when I told her that because her parents knew too. It’s one of the reasons they left Britain, so Abbie and her siblings – Charlie, now 33, and Alice, 26 – could feel safe and happy.

There she became a swimming champion, represented New Zealand, and graduated with a degree in psychology and criminology.

She first worked as a flight attendant and then in IT before marrying her teenage sweetheart Karl in 2017.

No one there knew about her kidnapping. Even she was unaware of the scale of the case until, at the age of 10, while moving, she found newspaper clippings and a message from the late Princess Diana – with whom she shared a birthday on July 1.

She didn’t appreciate the full drama of the time until she watched The Secrets She Keeps, a 2020 TV drama loosely based on her kidnapping, starring Downton Abbey’s Laura Carmichael as the kidnapper.

As Abbie told me, her father was hyper-protective because he had been with her when the woman posing as a nurse said she was taking the newborn for a hearing test.

‘He felt what happened was his fault because mum was a midwife at the hospital and it wouldn’t have happened if she had been in the room.

“Growing up, it was like he had flashback moments and had to know where I was at that moment.”

The kidnapping remains one of the most daring in British history.

In a case that sparked a nationwide police hunt, Karen had gone into the hallway to make a phone call, leaving Roger with Abbie.

He didn’t think anything of it when the ‘nurse’ took her away, but when she returned, Karen immediately knew something was wrong. With increasing horror it became clear that the woman had just walked out of the hospital with the baby in her arms.

Officers believed the kidnapper had recently lost a child or might be childless. Television footage shows the full horror of the parents’ suffering.

“Whoever took our baby, please give her back,” Karen begged.

Abbie was found just over a fortnight later during a third police visit to a house in Wollaton, a suburb of Nottingham.

They had been tipped off that a former dental assistant named Julie Kelley, who lived there with her boyfriend and his mother, had been pregnant and was expecting a boy.

When she came home with a girl, the neighbors became suspicious. Kelley pleaded guilty to Abbie’s kidnapping and was placed on probation for three years and treated for a major personality disorder.

It was reported that she faked the pregnancy to convince her boyfriend not to leave. She later had a family of her own.

Sadly, that was a blessing denied to Abbie, who told me, “I’ve always been that person who was born to be a mother. I have cared for children all my life and Karl and I were ready to grow our family when I was diagnosed.”

Abbie had her eggs removed before her cancer treatment, but had accepted that she would not be able to use them.

It was a small consolation that her mother knew nothing about her daughter’s Grade 4 glioblastoma when she died at age 59 after her own seven-year battle with breast cancer.

But as if this family hadn’t suffered enough, Abbie died knowing that her sister Alice had inherited the gene for Li-Fraumeni syndrome, which predisposes carriers to developing a range of cancers.

Abbie didn’t have the gene, but it affected her mother, aunt, grandmother and cousins.

As for Abbie, at the time of her diagnosis in early 2021, she was given a year, maybe two. In the end, she had almost four years, but the suffering had given her a gift that many never received.

“What happened made me appreciate Karl, my family and our house right on the beach,” she told me. “I believe in doing things when you want to do them because you never know what’s around the corner.”