Ellie Wilkins: Expectant mum who had foetus cut from her body in horrific attack speaks 10 years on

WARNING: Graphic details

An expectant mum who had her foetus cut from her body in an horrific attack has spoken about the painful process of rebuilding her life.

Ellie Wilkins was seven months pregnant when she was lured to Dynel Lane’s home in 2015 after responding to what turned out to be a fake ad on Craigslist offering maternity clothes.

What ensued was straight out of a horror film. Lane violently ambushed Ms Wilkins, striking her from behind, choking her unconscious and using two kitchen knives to cut into her pregnant belly in a crude attempt at a caesarean to steal the unborn baby.

Describing the moment she woke up alone in the back room of Lane’s Colorado house, Ms Wilkins told People, “I could actually feel my intestines through my pants. And that’s when I had the thought, ‘Lay here and die, or stand up and live.”

Driven by the thought of saving her unborn daughter, Aurora, she found the strength to call 911.

Ms Wilkins spent five days in intensive care at Longmont United hospital after losing 40 per cent of her blood. It was the same hospital Lane took Aurora, claiming she had a miscarriage.

Lane’s lies were quickly exposed and she was taken into custody. Medical examiners later determined Aurora had never taken a breath after being removed from Ms Wilkins’ uterus.

In court, Lane’s boyfriend at the time David Ridley said he arrived home to find Lane covered in blood with the baby’s body in a bathtub.

He also revealed Lane had pretended to be pregnant for months, even downloading ultrasound images to trick him.

During the trial, the court was told Lane had previously lost a baby in a drowning incident and was obsessed with pregnancy.

Ms Wilkins also testified, retelling the harrowing details of the attack and helping send Lane to prison for 100 years for assault, attempted murder and unlawful termination of a pregnancy.

A decade on from those nightmarish events, Ms Wilkins, now 37, has spoken of her long road to recovery.

She is in love again, having amicably split from her then boyfriend Dan Ascik in the wake of the attack, and is now contemplating parenthood.

She is also in the process of a writing a memoir, she revealed to People.

“I didn’t want to share a trauma story,” Ms Wilkins said.

“I want to share a healing story.“

In the first years after the attack, Ms Wilkins changed her first name from Michelle, which she used during her first trial, to Ellie.

Ms Wilkins struggles with post traumatic stress disorder and spent years seeking out numerous professionals to help her deal with her trauma.

“You’re in a world of flashbacks, of living with a dysregulated nervous system,” she said.

She went on, “In the end that whole period was a real education in how to be with myself when other people can’t.”

The kindness of strangers, thousands of whom reached out in letters and made donations towards her medical care, gave her strength and hope.

“It felt like Dynel (Lane) was an anomaly and that the thousands of people who reached out to me were the litmus test for: Are people good?”

Ms Wilkins also joined the Colorado First Response Coalition, which supports emergency responders, and often goes back to see those police officers who helped rescue her.

Speaking of her new boyfriend Antonio Bartalesi, a software developer she met in Italy, Ms Wilkins said they wanted to move in together and have children, something she hadn’t felt ready for for many years.

“I feel so grateful for the gift of my life and the beauty that is my life now,” she said.

“Being grateful. . .means that it was shaped really directly by that experience — and all of the work that I’ve done from between then and now.”