No Murder Charge, Inevitably, the path toward unraveling the tragic mystery of Dynel Lane leads to Babyland.
That's the name of a special section at Pueblo's Imperial Memorial Gardens reserved for the littlest of the dead. There, beneath a simple brass plaque, graced with bright flowers sagging from a recent spring storm, lies the body of Michael Alexander Cruz, 2000-2002.
"Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," the marker reads.
Michael, known as "Little Mac," was Lane's third child. A newspaper account of the boy's death reported that Michael and his sisters were eating and playing a game while their mother was occupied in another part of the house.
Michael was found motionless in a decorative backyard fish pond. His death was ruled an accidental drowning.
This week, the Pueblo County Sheriff's Office decided to review that incident in light of the fact that Lane, now a Longmont resident, is accused of carving open the abdomen of Michelle Wilkins, 26, and removing her unborn child from her womb. Wilkins' female fetus, at 34 weeks' gestation, did not survive.
On Friday, however, the Sheriff's Office announced that the review of Michael's death indicated no "red flags" or missed details that would necessitate a fresh investigation into the drowning incident.
His mother's life in the intervening years featured a fair share of the more mundane ups and downs that life can dish out — a couple of divorces, a minor scrape with the law, the common disappointments that can come with a journey through adulthood.
But the Pueblo investigators were not alone in now feeling the need to look back and question everything they thought they knew about the woman who shocked the nation with her March 18 arrest and pending prosecution in the first fetal abduction case in Colorado history.The horrific nature of Lane's alleged actions earlier this month has had the effect of silencing many of those who knew the 34-year-old Longmont woman. A neighbor where Lane and the man believed to be her common-law husband were living declined an interview concerning what he termed "an unbelievably traumatic event." The neighbor added that he had never seen one trace of aberrant behavior on Lane's part.
Beyond that, he didn't care to discuss it.
Still, not all people in Lane's past are holding their tongues. And in the complex weave of public records, comments of roommates, friends and neighbors, a portrait emerges of a woman who, while her alleged crime is incomprehensible, had not always traveled an easy road.'I have no idea what goes on in people's minds'
"All i have done today is cry and now its the end of the day and still cant stop! Things are so messed up dont think i can fix it this time and dont know if i want to!"
That unedited Oct. 16, 2010, Facebook post by Lane — from an account under the name Dynel C. Ridley deleted days ago — is representative of several updates in recent years that showed a woman in conflict.
But like anyone who negotiates life's peaks and valleys and jumps on social media to broadcast each emotional benchmark, she also offered glimpses of frequent upticks in mood, with offerings such as this one Feb. 8, 2011:
"Ok so im in my new place in Denver and loving it, im with my girls and my best friend who by the way is amazing and all i can say is thank you thank you thank you!"
And like many whose lives might appear laced with drama if glimpsed only through the lens of social media, the day-to-day realities of Lane's life, as remembered by those who know her, are recalled in more prosaic terms.
Pueblo resident Anna May Langdon, 80, has lived in the same house on West 21st Street in Pueblo for 50 years. For a spell several years back when she was still Dynel Cruz, Lane lived next door to Langdon along with her first husband, Jason Cruz, and his parents.
"She always seemed all right to me," Langdon said. "I used to visit with her out in the yard.She seemed nice to me. I never heard any anger or fighting. They were all a nice bunch of people."
Langdon remembers with fondness Lane's two daughters, now 18 and 16. "They were the neatest and cutest little girls," she said.
Lane — she now carries the last name of another man whom she divorced in 2012 — had married Jason Cruz on June 2, 1996, in Pueblo West. It was July 2, 2002, when their third child, Michael, drowned at the family's rural Pueblo County home on County Farm Road.
Langdon recalls taking food to that home in an act of consolation. She also attended the child's burial. In the present day, it's hard for Langdon to assign significance to any possible link between that tragedy and what would come nearly 13 years later.
"I'm not a psychologist," Langdon simply said, with a shrug. "I have no idea what goes on in people's minds."
Lane filed for divorce from Cruz in Pueblo County in December 2007, indicating in her petition that the couple separated Nov. 15, 2007. The dissolution, noting that the union was "irretrievably" broken, was recorded in June 2008. The divorce records also reveal that Jason Cruz, then 31, was charged with third-degree misdemeanor domestic violence after Lane's head was banged into a car door as the two struggled over their children during a pickup at their school in November 2007.
The charge against Jason Cruz was dismissed, however, in May 2008, with a deputy district attorney's notation that Lane didn't wish to participate in any prosecution of her estranged husband.
About a year after Lane moved from the West 21st Street home in Pueblo, Langdon ran into her former neighbor while shopping at a local Lowe's store.
"She hollered at me and asked what I was doing," Langdon said. "And she told me, "I'm moving up to Denver.' She wanted to go into nursing school."
A lost job, short on rent and brief stay in jail
Robert Walsh drives a truck hauling hazardous materials and was sitting in a Santa Fe., N.M., motel breakfast room when an alarming news crawl across the bottom of a nearby TV caught his eye.
"It said, 'Woman cuts baby from womb,' and I was eating and just thinking, 'This world is just going to crap. People are crazy these days,'" said Walsh, 35.
Walsh went on with his day. But north of Pueblo, he turned on his truck's radio and heard the identity of the suspect in the case. He knew the name. He had rented rooms in his townhouse to Lane and her older daughter for the better part of a year on the north side of Golden, ending in 2012.
"I was floored. I was flabbergasted. I couldn't believe it," said Walsh, who has since moved to Brighton.
Walsh, who has a daughter of his own, said Lane had responded to a Craigslist ad and that he liked the idea of a female roommate, believing that a woman with children might be an easier housemate to "manage" than another man. All in all, it worked out pretty well when she moved into his place on North Columbine Street, he said.
He professes to be bad with dates, and he can't place their time together precisely, but Walsh recalls it included the Christmas holidays, probably in 2011.
"I remember the Christmas tree being up and walking in to see them, having them there around that time and feeling blessed that I actually had some people in my life at that time that gave a (expletive) about me," Walsh said. He said Lane's older daughter lived with them, while the younger of the two typically stayed with her father.
"The Dynel that I know, I never would have guessed in a hundred million years she would do this," Walsh said. "She was really soft-spoken and friendly. She would joke and was nice to have around. A normal woman."
Lane would join Walsh for morning jogs. A friend and neighbor of Walsh, Matt Voss, who has since moved to Houston, also befriended Lane. He has matching memories.
"She was the sweetest person I knew at that time," Voss said. "She was one of the better people in my life. She was a positive influence."
Both men agree they never saw Lane indulge in drugs at all, and that she drank only lightly. Where they differ is that Walsh can't recall her ever talking about losing her young son a decade earlier. Voss, however, does.
"We told each other about stuff, and that was something that had happened to her in her life," Voss said. "She decided to talk about it, but she wasn't completely distraught about it. She thought about it a lot, but it never seemed like anything that overwhelmed her. It just seemed like she needed to get it out."
Walsh, however, said, "We weren't super-duper friends, but we talked every day, and I don't recall her ever telling me about the 18-month-old son that drowned.
"I thought that was pretty peculiar. Of course, it's anybody's personal issue if they don't want to disclose that. If she didn't tell me that, then that's her prerogative. But that was news to me."
Lane's arrangement in Golden came to an end after she lost a job, her car broke down and she found herself briefly in jail. She had been working as a nurse's aide in the north metro area, Walsh said; occasionally, he would give her rides to or from work when there were car problems.
"She came home one day and told me she was suspended," Walsh said, "and I was like, 'All right,' but a couple of more days went by of her not going to work, and I was, 'OK, you didn't just get suspended; you don't have a job.' That was pretty much the only thing that ever happened that created animosity."
Lane was arrested April 9, 2012, by Golden police. Officers had come to their address to speak with Walsh concerning an issue involving Walsh's ex-wife. When Lane sought to intervene on behalf of Walsh, a routine check showed that she was wanted on an outstanding failure-to-appear warrant stemming from an unresolved Lakewood traffic charge.
Lane spent a night or two in the Jefferson County Jail. And after Walsh bailed her out, he figured he was about $1,300 lighter in the wallet in bail money and Lane's back rent. Still, they parted friends.
Walsh shared a disturbing memory from the last time he saw Lane, in a chance meeting at a Conoco station at Iowa Street and Colo. 93. He believes it occurred about the fall of 2013.
"She was getting gas, and she was like eight months pregnant," Walsh said. "She was definitely big, pregnant, and she was happy and smiling. She moved like a pregnant woman does. If she was faking it, she wouldn't have the movement of a pregnant woman. She was definitely pregnant."
There is no known record of Walsh giving birth in 2013 — although prior to the attack on Wilkins, Lane had claimed to be pregnant. Lane joined a baby registry listing a due date of Nov. 14, 2014. Her indicated wish items suggested she expected a boy. One of her daughters also told police of seeing an ultrasound photo.
When confronted at her home March 18 by David Ridley, her common-law husband, Lane — covered in blood — claimed she had just miscarried, according to the police report. Ridley then found the fetus, which belonged to Wilkins, lying in an upstairs bathtub, police said.
Wilkins had arrived at Lane's home in response to a Craigslist ad offering baby clothes that police say Lane had posted. Wilkins knew the person she was meeting only as "D."
Meanwhile, Lane's former housemate is left confused about the apparent signs of pregnancy he observed in the second half of 2013.
"I gave her a hug that day, and she went her way and I went mine. And now there hasn't been any mention of this child that she was pregnant with," Walsh said. "It makes me wonder if maybe something happened to that baby, and maybe that's what caused this incident."
'I just want things to work'
Lane's deleted Facebook account offered few clues in recent months of her specific activities or her claimed recent pregnancy.
An acquaintance who knew her from studying nursing in 2010 at the Academy of Medical & Health Science in Pueblo commented in one post on her own Facebook page that Lane had just recently lost her grandmother. But that acquaintance declined an interview.
Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies records show Lane was certified as a nurse's aide July 1, 2010. Her certification expired in 2012.
The Longmont United Hospital emergency room doctor who treated Wilkins noted that the person who made the incision to remove Wilkins' child — who was to have been named Aurora — "would have to have researched the subject of Caesarean births in books or online" to achieve the level of accuracy shown by the perpetrator.
Jenny Doyle, a neonatal nurse practitioner for Children's Hospital Colorado who lives in Erie, said: "A C-section is a surgical procedure, but you can see one graphically done on the Internet on YouTube.
"You can learn how to fly a plane or do a C-section or a craniotomy (on the Internet) — not that you'd want that person doing it on you," Doyle said.
As for the cause of the actions police attribute to Lane, there is ongoing research around delayed-onset post-traumatic stress disorder, a phenomenon that could be relevant in the context of the death of her son in 2002.
Some experts said it is possible that the death of Lane's son could have triggered a long, slow plunge toward a form of mental illness or mood disorder.
"Never having met the person, it's not ethical for me to lend a diagnostic impression," said Janine D'Anniballe, director of community services and trauma-informed care at Mental Health Partners, serving Boulder, Longmont and Broomfield.
"However, just speaking totally in hypotheticals, there could be a post-trauma response that could have gotten triggered by something ... that made it all come back for her. That is certainly possible. There are all kinds of things that could trigger a previous trauma, even if it happened years and years ago."
Her recent employment history is unclear. On her Facebook page, Lane claimed to be working at Longmont's Once Upon A Child, which buys and sells "gently used" baby clothes. An employee there this past week insisted she had never done so.
Those who knew Lane — or thought they did — are left with an abundance of questions and precious few answers.
"I just want things to work thats all, its not really to much to ask!!!!" Lane posted on her Facebook account March 18, 2012.
Eventually, in either a fateful and explosive moment or perhaps more gradually, things stopped working — in a catastrophic way, according to police.
On Friday, Lane was charged with attempted first-degree murder, unlawful termination of a pregnancy, two counts of first-degree assault, two counts of second-degree assault and two crime-of-violence sentence enhancers.
Walsh said that if he could talk to his former housemate, he'd ask, "Is it true? Did you really do that? What's going on? What's happened in the last couple of years to make you ... ."
He momentarily ran out of words. Then Walsh said, "There's obviously mental illness. But, like I said, I didn't see any sign of anything like that."
And Voss, who knew Lane in the same time frame, said, "I think that this might be a direct effect of what had happened in the past, and accumulating throughout her life.
"I just feel like she is crazy now. To do that, you would have to be pretty crazy."
Langdon, Lane's former neighbor, and now into her ninth decade of observing the human drama, is simply "dumbfounded" by what she has heard about the case.
Shaking her head sadly, Langdon said, "I guess it takes all kinds to make up a world, you know?"