Facebook brought together two young women – one pregnant with her first child, a son, the other already a mother and pretending to be pregnant with her third child.

If Jamie Stice of Bowling Green hadn’t been expecting, she might have never crossed paths with Kathy Coy, a twice-divorced mother of two teens living in Morgantown and trying to make another go of a relationship with her latest ex-husband, Shannon Coy.

But the social networking site made it easy for Coy to befriend Stice, who proudly displayed her baby bump as her Facebook profile picture. Coy was also Facebook friends with another pregnant woman in the same stage of pregnancy as Stice.

Coy and Stice had known each other for only a couple of weeks before the relationship came to a tragic end. Kathy Coy, 33, is charged with kidnapping a minor and with murder in Stice’s death. Stice was 21.

Kentucky State Police found Stice’s body April 14 in a wooded area off U.S. 68-Ky. 80 near Oakland. Stice’s throat had been cut and her wrists bound and slit. Stice had been disemboweled, and her baby boy had been cut from her body with a drywall knife. The infant still had the umbilical cord, a uterus and two ovaries attached to him when Coy showed up at a friend’s Butler County house claiming to have just given birth, according to police court testimony and court records.

The way Stice died and the way her baby boy was brought into the world are shocking, but her murder and the subsequent fetal kidnapping is not the first crime of its kind. It was the 14th fetal abduction in the United States since July 1987.

Of the 14 fetal abductions, 10 babies survived the ordeal, including Stice’s son, Isaiah Allen Stice Reynolds, who was listed late last week in good condition at The Medical Center at Bowling Green.

“They are all eerily similar,” said Cathy Nahirny, senior analyst, infant abductions, for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, in reference to the case against Coy and the 13 other fetal abductions.

Infant kidnappers are usually women of child-bearing age in a fragile relationship with a male partner. Typically the woman abductor will tell her male partner that she is pregnant with his child, Nahirny said.

“What happens is this bonds him to her, and so he stays,” she said. “Now she has to perpetuate a ruse of being pregnant.”

Infant abductors might gain weight, wear maternity clothes and tell everyone around them they are pregnant. They are usually manipulative and carefully plan an abduction.

“They’ll use different means to obtain their target, which is the victim mom,” Nahirny said. “How they go about it, it’s not as if there’s a handbook out there. They all put their personal twist on things. They are all good at the con. That is how they get through their lives, through lying, manipulation and deceit.

“It’s very disturbing.”

Infant abductors also like to show off “their” new baby, Nahirny said. The women have been telling people for months that they are pregnant when in some cases they never were.

Coy wasn’t wearing pants when she arrived in Shelly Lindsey’s driveway April 13, according to police court testimony. She was sitting on the placenta and other female organs inside her car while holding the baby in her arms.

Coy was honking the horn. Lindsey came out and called for an ambulance when Coy announced she had just given birth. Coy got out of the car holding the baby boy. His mother’s reproductive organs were still attached.

Coy asked her friend to snap a picture of the baby and send it to her “husband” Shannon Coy, who was working out of town. He received the text message with the picture, according to court testimony and records.

Fetal abductors follow nearly the same pattern as the typical infant abductor, Nahirny said, with one major difference: These crimes are taken to the next level in terms of brutality.

When fetal abductors are caught, their legal defense teams usually try to prove that their clients are mentally unstable.

“But when you look at it from a clinical eye, there is usually so much planning that goes into these incidents,” Nahirny said.

Coy told detectives that she had suffered a miscarriage a few months ago but withheld that information from her family while pretending to still be pregnant, according to court testimony.

In recent weeks, Coy disclosed the miscarriage to her daughter and asked for the 13-year-old girl’s help in kidnapping a baby. Coy also asked her 14-year-old son if he would help her commit a murder, according to court testimony. Both children refused.

Coy stands accused of luring Stice into her car on the premise that the two women were going to obtain baby items. She is also accused of using a stun gun on Stice. Coy bought the stun gun at a local flea market on April 3. Her daughter was with her when she made the purchase.

Nahirny surmises that the women who commit fetal abductions see the expectant mom not as a person, but as a vessel that contains something inside that they want for themselves.

“It’s that calculated, and it’s that cold,” said Ann W. Burgess, a doctor of nursing science at Boston College who teaches courses in victimology, forensic science and forensic mental health. “Any person who commits a crime has to justify it in their mind, and that would be one way to do it.”

Burgess and Nahirny plan to study the issue of fetal abductions.

Because hospitals have intensified infant safety measures and taken steps to prevent infant abductions, some women are going to the extreme by taking babies directly from the womb, Nahirny said.

In some of the early cases of fetal abductions, the kidnapper would pick a vulnerable woman in need of help, meeting the expectant mother in a public place such as outside of a doctor’s office or in a shopping center. Some kidnappers study how to extract a baby.

“You’ve seen over time some changes in the style of attack and some access of the mother victim,” Burgess said.

“This last case, I found it quite horrendous,” Burgess said about Stice’s murder and the way her baby boy was removed from his mother’s body.

“Every (kidnapping) is horrible,” Nahirny said. “But these are particularly gruesome. There is a general perception in our society that women are not capable of committing violent crime when in fact, women do commit violent crimes.”

Coy remains lodged in the Warren County Regional Jail, where she is being held without bond. If convicted, she could face the death penalty.