10 YEARS AFTER AN INFAMOUS FETAL ABDUCTION 'Not a Trauma Story... a Healing Story'

ELLIE WILKINS WAS LEFT FOR DEAD, HER 7-MONTH-OLD FETUS CUT OUT OF HER. SHE HELPED PUT HER ATTACKER AWAY AND IN TIME FOUND PEACE

- JILLIAN FRANKEL,REBECCA STUMPF

When 26-year-old Ellie Wilkins awoke on the floor of Dynel Lane’s home in Longmont, Colo., on March 18, 2015, she was bloody and barely able to stand. Wilkins had been seven months pregnant when she arrived earlier that day, planning to pick up some maternity clothes Lane advertised on Craigslist.

But instead Lane, then 34, ambushed her—setting off a violent scramble through the residence that left Wilkins unconscious, her fetus cut from her womb. “I could actually feel my intestines through my pants,” she recalls of waking up alone in a back bedroom. “And that’s when I had the thought, ‘Lay here and die, or stand up and live.’” She used her remaining strength to stumble to her phone, fumbling until she managed to call 911—prodded forward, despite her injuries, by the thought of the little girl she’d planned to deliver later that spring. “There was something in my brain that was saying, ‘Survive for Aurora,’” she says. “‘Survive for her.’”

Wilkins tragically lost Aurora in what a doctor later noted was Lane’s attempt at a crude cesarean section. Despite losing more than 40 percent of her blood, Wilkins miraculously survived; 11 months later she took the stand to help convict her attacker in a headline-grabbing trial. “It took everything she had,” says former Boulder County district attorney Stan Garnett, who prosecuted the case, “every bit of emotional and psychic and physical energy [for her] to get in that courtroom and testify.”

In Memoriam Keepsakes from Wilkins's pregnancy, such as a maternity journal, sit in her home alongside spiritual figurines and other tokens from her recovery