In what has become Maine's most intensive investigation of the decade, police announced Monday there's "not one piece of evidence" supporting the theory Ayla Reynolds was abducted, ABC reported. Ayla's father, Justin DiPietro, reported her missing from his Waterville home Dec. 16, saying someone must have snatched her from her bed overnight.
Now that claim is crumbling, with police saying there's no forensic support for a kidnapping.
The Reynolds case mirrors another reported baby kidnapping, that of Kansas City, Mo., baby Lisa Irwin. In both cases, parents claimed their babies were taken from their beds by strangers in the night. In both cases, police were immediately suspicious that no kidnapping had taken place. Here are some of the common threads:
* There were no credible signs of forced entry in either case. Police met with difficulty in attempting to reenact a kidnapping at the Irwin home, as described by Huffington Post. In the DiPietro case police noted Monday that the window of the bedroom in which Ayla slept had not been tampered with and could not be opened from the outside. The DiPietro home is so small that an intruder stealing a baby undetected is not credible, according to police.
* In both cases, there's been a confusing succession of stories about who was in the home the night of the reported kidnapping. In the Irwin case, claims of a brother and a neighbor visiting during the evening before the missing persons report surfaced late in the game.
* Phoebe DiPietro, Justin's mother, gave a CNN interview in which she answered questions about what happened in the home the night Ayla disappeared, only to reveal the next day she wasn't there at the time. Now police are saying there might have been more people in the home than the three adults and three children previously disclosed. The three adults are Justin DiPietro, his girlfriend Courtney Roberts and sister Elisha DiPietro.
* The family sleeping arrangements underwent revision as the stories of what happened were described in both cases. Val Hall addressed the changing story of who slept where at the Irwin house the night Lisa disappeared on her Hinky Meter blog, concluding sarcastically, "There's literally kids wandering all over this house." What was reported to be a bedroom Ayla shared with her cousin turned out to be a bedroom Ayla never slept in, except, perhaps, the night she was reported missing.
* Forensic evidence indicating that harm befell the child in the house is present in both cases. With baby Lisa, it was a cadaver dog hit; with Ayla, her blood was spattered in the basement, ABC said.
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