We all have to make a living, and these days, with expenses soaring and income being tapped twelve ways to Sunday, very few moms and dads can afford the luxury of staying home with their kids and not working.
So after a three-month leave, a daycare situation has to be sorted out for many a newborn baby. The task can be daunting, especially for first-time parents. But for Desiree LaBlanc, a professional child protective services (CPS) investigator, her familiarity with every kind of horrific child abuse made her think she could never, ever make the mistake of putting her own baby in the wrong hands.
How far off that was from the truth would come back to haunt the Des Moines, Iowa woman soon enough.
As reported on Crime Watch Daily, LaBlanc made sure she researched her choice very carefully. She went by a family recommendation and did background checks on the woman she thought would be ideal to watch her infant.
That woman was Christina Williamson, 28, and LaBlanc checked out her facility with what she assumed was impeccable attention to detail. The home was clean, well-stocked with many toys, and had safe access to a secure yard for the children to play in.
Not only that, Williamson was in touch with parents all day long, sending photos over the internet and keeping them abreast of the inevitable scrapes and bruises of childhood.
But as Desiree was soon to learn, in this instance, those injuries were far from inevitable. And remember that LaBlanc worked for the agency entrusted with overseeing the safe care of children in her area.
So imagine the young mother’s shock when her supervisor called her at work, and told her to go get her daughter immediately. The boss said she was not to speak to Williamson at all, or ask her anything, and LaBlanc knew enough from her own experience in the field to know something was very, very wrong.
It turned out to be worse than Desiree could have ever imagined. Williamson was herself divorced, and among those she watched in her daycare was her own eight-year-old son. One day the son had mentioned to his father that strange happenings were going on in the house, and the ex-husband decided to set up cameras everywhere – unbeknownst to Christina, of course – so that he could see for himself.
It was every parent’s worst scenario. Williamson grabbed and pushed infants as young as three months old (including LaBlanc’s baby girl), grabbing some by their limbs and roughly holding them down. In one scene on camera, she is seen stuffing a cloth into a baby’s mouth.
While the family dog, who appeared, at least, to be unharmed, followed her around, Williamson abused child after child, completely unprovoked (not that anything would have merited her behavior).
Once her ex had the footage, he went straight to the police, who wasted little time in arresting Christina.
She ultimately took a plea deal, and as part of that, was forced to retell what she had done to various parents’ defenseless children. The parents also had a chance to tell the monstrous daycare worker how her actions had impacted them forever.
It’s a good lesson to all of us that people are not always what they seem, and a reminder that con artists usually know every trick to inspire “confidence,” from whence comes their tag.
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