SO. “She Tried to Take My Baby”: Ellie Wilkins’ Chilling Testimony Stuns the Courtroom

Her voice shook not as much as it could have — though tears occasionally leaked from her eyes — as Ellie Wilkins took the stand in February 2016 and faced the woman who had tried to murder her and killed her 7-month-old fetus a year earlier.

It was a pivotal moment in the trial of 35-year-old Dynel Lane, who was convicted of assault, attempted murder and unlawful termination of a pregnancy and sentenced to 100 years in prison.

“I think it took everything she had, every bit of emotional and psychic energy and physical energy, to get in that courtroom and testify,” says former Boulder County District Attorney Stan Garnett, who prosecuted the case. 

In March 2015, Lane had lured Wilkins, then 26, to her home in Longmont, Colo., with the promise of maternity clothes. 

Instead, Lane attacked Wilkins, choking her into unconsciousness and cutting open her womb. 

The daughter Wilkins would have delivered late that spring, named Aurora, did not survive. Authorities determined she never took a breath once she was removed from Wilkins’s uterus.

The case made headlines around the country.

In the decade since, Wilkins has healed both emotionally and physically, opening up to PEOPLE in this week’s issue about her life now and her plans for the future. She is working on a memoir and hopes to be a mom again.

Her 2016 testimony against Lane, and what she survived, remain stunning, those connected to the case say.

“I’ve tried serial killers,” says Garnett, the prosecutor. “This fact pattern is about just as awful a fact pattern as you’re ever going to get.”

He says he met with Wilkins, who was then going by the name Michelle, “pretty regularly” in preparation for her to testify.

“She trusted us, and she trusted me, and she knew that I would get her through the testimony as smoothly as I could,” he says. “And I think that was very important to her.”

Wilkins, now 36, remembers how her focus was to “tell the story of what happened and tell it truthfully, as truthfully and as detailed as I could, to the best of my ability.”

“I felt like, in that sense, having that clarity and an objective made it so simple,” she says.

“The storytelling was not the difficult part, because I felt like I did a good job. I did it justice,” she continues. 

What was “really challenging” was how “emotionally raw” she felt afterward. 

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In her testimony, Wilkins described being brought to the back of Lane’s home after responding to her Craigslist ad. (Prosecutors later said Lane was perpetuating a fake pregnancy scheme in her personal life, though her defense attorney reportedly argued at trial that Lane acted without premeditation.)

“I just remember I kept asking her why she was doing that, I just kept saying why, ‘Why?’ ” Wilkins testified.

She said that Lane had tried to smother her with a pillow and then smashed her on the crown of her head with a bottle, which authorities said was a lava lamp.

“She said, ‘If you love me, you’ll let me do this,’ and then she stabbed it [the broken bottle] into my neck,” Wilkins testified.

“Everything was wet and slippery and I remember when she stabbed me and she removed it and then she continued to try to choke me after that,” Wilkins said.

At some point, “everything,” Wilkins said, “went black.”

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When she regained consciousness, she was able to call 911 despite her severe injuries — which a doctor likened to a crude cesarean section.

“She cut me,” Wilkins told the emergency dispatcher. 

“I’m afraid,” she said, adding, “I’m bleeding out.”

Lane’s defense rested at trial without presenting any witnesses. Garnett, the former district attorney, says it remains unclear exactly what was going through her mind.

Had officials been able to give Lane a psychiatric evaluation, they’d have “a better understanding of who she was and what had happened, etc.,” Garnett says, “which I was curious about as a human being and as a prosecutor. How does somebody end up committing a crime so heinous and so violent?”

After Lane was convicted, Wilkins said, “I do not hate Dynel, but I am angry for all the pain she has caused.”

That remains true today.

“I don’t bear any ill will toward her,” she says

In the ensuing years, as part of her own therapeutic journey toward peace (and even love again), Wilkins says she’s learned an important lesson. She lives in Boulder. Colo., and works with a first responders’ counseling group and a substance abuse prevention nonprofit.

“I’m so much softer,” she says. “I think before this happened, I had some idea in my mind that strength and resilience were about being tough.”

“And I think that in healing, there’s such an opening to so many things,” she says, “so many avenues of resilience that include tenderness, that include being soft, that include receiving help — you know?”