and had intended to allow a Walnut Creek couple to
adopt the infant upon birth.
"I just decided to tell them whatever they wanted to
hear,'' said Mays, 33, who took the stand in her own
defense for about three hours Tuesday. The case is
expected to go to the Superior Court jury in Martinez
today.
Mays, who is charged with three counts of grand
theft, repeatedly dabbed her eyes with tissue during her
testimony, and her voiced cracked several times.
Mays testified that she had suffered an epileptic
seizure March 10 and regained consciousness to discover
she had given birth to a stillborn baby girl. She took a
subway to a hospital, where she left the infant outside,
her attorney said.
She felt bad about losing the baby, she said, but
just never found the right time to tell the prospective
parents, Robert Temple and his wife, Alette
Coble-Temple, about the miscarriage.
Contra Costa County prosecutors say the Oregon woman
offered false promises of an adoption to the Walnut
Creek couple and to two others who, like them, agreed to
pay her rent and other expenses after she said they
could adopt her unborn child.
The Temple family spent $12,000 on such things as
Mays' rent and utility bills. The scheme unraveled in
mid-March after the Temples became suspicious and a
pregnancy test in Contra Costa County came up negative.
Investigators testified that Mays had given several
conflicting stories but ultimately confessed to the
hoax. An officer testified Tuesday that Mays also had
admitted that in January while at a clinic in Utah she
had taken a used pregnancy test strip -- with positive
reading -- out of a trash can and told medical officials
it was hers.
She denied that in her testimony, insisting several
times she was pregnant. She testified that she had been
impregnated in June 2003 by a solider from Oregon who
was later killed in Iraq. She said she understood his
name to be Danny "D.J." Clark. Even though "Clark" was
already married to more than one other woman, Mays
testified they were "bonded" in a Mormon ceremony. She
said she had learned of his death when "two
official-looking men showed up at her door" in a
Portland suburb.
Mays testified that she had later received a
mysterious phone call from a woman named Kim who said
the father of Mays' unborn child was Army Chief Warrant
Officer Erik Kesterson, 29, an Oregon native who died in
a Nov. 15 helicopter crash near Mosul, Iraq.
Kesterson's father has publicly denounced the claim.
On cross-examination, prosecutor Matt O'Connor
ridiculed Mays' entire account and said she had
fabricated the story of the miscarriage during her trial
after it was too late for investigators to attempt to
verify it.
But May insisted that investigators just hadn't asked
her about her miscarriage during any of five interviews
with her.
"They didn't believe me anyway,'' she said.
