An Arizona couple who tried to adopt an 8-month-old baby who’s been missing since Christmas say they now feel the mother of the baby duped and used them.
Elizabeth Johnson, the 23-year-old mother of the missing child known as baby Gabriel, is being held by Tempe, Ariz., police on a $1 million cash bail. Meanwhile, Jack and Tammi Smith, who hoped to adopt Gabriel, have been named persons of interest in the case by Tempe police. However, the Smiths say that polygraph tests they took last week will show they have cooperated fully with the police investigation.
‘Lying to us’
In an interview Monday from their Scottsdale, Ariz., home with TODAY’s Matt Lauer, the Smiths said they once thought Johnson was a good woman who was overwhelmed by being a single mother. That opinion has since changed dramatically.
“I feel like a fool, because knowing what’s up now that all the facts have been laid out in front of me, I see that she was lying to us and playing us,” Tammi Smith told Lauer. “Now, I’m not sure if anything she said to me was true.”
Her husband characterized Johnson as “deceptive.”
The Smiths originally befriended Johnson last year when they ran into her and Gabriel during a long layover at the Indianapolis airport. Gabriel was an infant at the time, and the Smiths said Johnson seemed emotionally distressed and indicated she needed help with her baby.
The couple say they did not hear from Johnson again until Dec. 8, when she called to offer the baby for adoption because she didn’t want her ex-boyfriend and the baby’s father, Logan McQueary, to get custody of the child.
The Smiths had temporary custody of Gabriel for eight days in December and are the last people to have seen the boy in Arizona. Johnson took the baby back, purportedly to give him to McQueary in accordance with a court order.
But Johnson never delivered the baby, instead taking him to San Antonio. She text messaged McQueary on Dec. 26, saying she killed the baby.
Johnson was tracked to Miami, where she was arrested. At the time, she recanted her story about killing Gabriel, saying instead that she gave the baby to a couple she met in Texas. Tempe police have said they have unspecified reasons to believe that Gabriel is alive.
Persons of interest
The Smiths were named persons of interest last Thursday. A Tempe Police representative explained, “There are some indications that they may have more information than they have shared with investigators up to this point.”
They repeated their assertion of innocence to Lauer. “We know the answer to the test. We know that everything is fine,” Jack Smith said.
“There’s nothing that she said that we have not shared with the police since day one,” Tammi Smith added.
‘Very secretive’
Tammi said that Johnson never gave any details about what kind of support group she had while she was on the run with Gabriel, making vague references in her communications with them to women’s shelters and “the underground.”