The Nation - News from Sept. 22, 1988

The FBI said it has begun a kidnaping investigation based on a couple’s allegation that their healthy baby was swapped in a Florida hospital nursery nearly a decade ago for a fatally ill child. Ernest and Regina Twigg of Langhorne, Pa., contend that someone at the hospital deliberately switched the children, allegedly to provide for someone willing to pay to adopt a well baby. “After consultation with the U.S. attorney’s office, we have opened a preliminary investigation to gather facts,” said Russ Wood, FBI spokesman. He refused to discuss specifics. Arlena Twigg, the child reared by the Pennsylvania couple, died last month of a lifelong heart problem. A month earlier, sophisticated blood and tissue testing at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore concluded that the girl was not related to the Twiggs.