Marie Williams was sitting with her 3-month-old baby girl on Dec. 2, 1983, in the District’s Trailways bus terminal waiting out a three-hour layover on her way from Suffolk to Kansas when a young woman struck up a conversation.
The woman, described as being in her early 20s, asked the 18-year-old mother if she could hold her baby. Marie Williams handed over April Nicole Williams. A few minutes later, the other woman said she was going to get a soda and took April Williams with her. She walked into a nearby Hardee’s and never returned.
The manhunt that followed was one of the largest the District had ever seen. Police scoured the region for months and searched for leads. They chased down tips from hundreds of phone calls.
At one point, Marie Williams was hypnotized and brought back to the bus station where police re-enacted the scene, hoping she might have missed something. She was only able to tell police that the woman had said she shared a middle name with the baby, and that, like the child, her astrological sign also was Leo.
District robbery Detective Robert Groat, who was assigned to the case early on, told The Washington Post that in cases like Williams’, the kidnapper is typically “somebody who loves children and can’t have any.”
One year later, Marie Williams held a rally at the Trailways station, hoping to keep attention on the case. By then, she had already had another baby, and a police task force searching for the missing child that had numbered eight officers had dwindled to one, Sgt. Peter Mulligan.
“There will probably come a point somewhere down the line where we’ll just have to face the reality that there’s nothing more we can do,” Mulligan told The Post at the time. “But the book on this case won’t be closed until I’m absolutely positive that nothing else can be done.”
