The call came in the middle of the afternoon. Yan Shubin was at the bank when his phone buzzed. It was Karina, his girlfriend of five years. She was in pain.
She said, “I need you. ”
He drove home to the house on Northwest Mill Creek Drive in Beaverton, Oregon. Nothing in the neighborhood looked wrong. But when he walked inside, he found blood on the floor.
He followed the sound of running water to the bathroom. Karina was sitting in the bathtub in only a bra, sobbing. In her arms, she held a newborn baby boy. The water was running.
The baby wasn’t breathing. Yan started CPR immediately. Paramedics arrived at 2:42 that afternoon and found him still working on the infant. They rushed both Karina and the baby to Providence St.
Vincent Medical Center. The doctors tried everything to revive the boy, but he was gone. While treating Karina, the doctors noticed something strange. She had told them she had just given birth.
But there was no medical evidence she had delivered a child at all. Hospital staff contacted the police. Deputies arrived at the hospital around 4:37 that afternoon. By then, investigators had reason to believe someone else might still be hurt at the house on Mill Creek Drive.
They went there and searched the property. In the crawl space beneath the home, hidden under the floor, they found the body of a young woman. Her name was Heather Snively. She was twenty-one years old, eight months pregnant, and she had been savagely attacked.
Investigators determined she had been struck between fifteen and thirty times with a collapsible metal baton, mostly to the back of her head. She had fought back, biting Karina hard enough to leave a mark and scratching a nearly five-inch wound on her neck. A strand of Karina’s hair was still clutched in Heather’s hand. The head wounds had probably knocked her unconscious.
But what had actually killed her was an incision to her abdomen and the blood loss that followed. Someone had cut Heather open and removed the baby from her womb with a blade. The baby boy, John Steven, never took a breath outside his mother’s body. Under Oregon law at the time, that single finding meant prosecutors could not file a separate homicide charge for his death.
The weapon was never conclusively identified, though detectives noted that Yan’s job required him to buy razor blades for work, and a missing pack had gone missing two days before the murder. Karina Elaine Roberts had been telling everyone she was pregnant. She had set up a crib on her front lawn and bought a stroller at a neighbor’s garage sale. When the neighbor, Wendy Persinger, asked why she needed a stroller since her own children had outgrown one, Karina simply smiled and said, “Of course I’m pregnant.
” She posted an ad on Craigslist looking for baby clothes. Heather had answered that ad. She and her fiancé, Christopher Popp, had moved to Oregon from Maryland for the birth of their son. Christopher had found work out west and gone ahead of her, and Heather had sold off their shared belongings on Craigslist to make ends meet.
When she found out Karina had baby clothes to give away, she drove over to the house on Mill Creek Drive. Investigators believed the two women had known each other for about a week. While in the hospital, Karina told medics she had just given birth. When her boyfriend questioned how she had the baby so fast, she told him the delivery had happened quickly in the bathroom.
But at 5:45 that evening, police arrested her at the hospital. In a brief moment alone with a detective, she admitted she had done a horrible thing. At 11:00 that night, Christopher reported Heather missing. He had been calling her phone all evening with no answer.
A short time later, he learned she was already dead. The next morning, a small memorial appeared outside Karina’s house. A teddy bear, a bouquet of flowers, and a handwritten note: “May God be with you. ”
Karina was held without bail at the Washington County Jail in Hillsboro, under twenty-four-hour watch.
Investigators publicly stated she may have reached out to other pregnant women in the Portland area before she settled on Heather, and they asked anyone who had contact with her to come forward. A week after the murder, a grand jury indicted her on four counts of aggravated murder, charges that carried a potential death sentence. Prosecutors said the charges reflected that Karina had attempted to kidnap and rob Heather, then tried to conceal what she had done. She was also charged with an additional count of murder and two counts of first-degree robbery.
She pled not guilty. At a bail hearing in November, Karina’s attorney revealed the story behind her obsession. In 2007, Karina had suffered a stillbirth. After that loss, she became fixated on having another baby.
For close to a year, she watched videos of births on YouTube, sewed baby clothes, and told people off and on that she was pregnant. By the spring of 2009, she had upgraded the story to twins. She told Yan she was pregnant, told neighbors she had ultrasound appointments, and even said she was taking midwife classes at a local community college. None of that was true.
A psychological evaluation found no psychosis and no other diagnosable mental disorder. But her history painted a darker picture. The father of one of her children had described her as childish and difficult, saying, “She’s just not normal. So absolutely insane.
It’s like she had a broken wire or something. ”
On October 6th, 2010, the day her trial was set to begin, Karina pled guilty to one count of aggravated murder in exchange for a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. District Attorney Bob Herman told reporters the deal came together only after negotiation. An earlier defense proposal would have left open the possibility of parole someday, which prosecutors wouldn’t accept.
“I wasn’t going to go to the family with anything less than life without parole,” Herman said. Taking the case to a jury and seeking the death penalty, he explained, would have introduced uncertainty and put Heather’s family through the added toll of a trial. In court, Karina appeared smaller than she had in her arrest photo, wearing green-and-white striped jail pants and an orange jail-issued shirt. She sobbed through most of the hearing, answering the judge’s questions mostly in single words.
When Judge Don Letourneau asked whether she was pleading guilty because she believed she was guilty, she answered, “I am taking responsibility because I am guilty. ”
Christopher addressed her directly. “You’ve taken away my fiancé, my son. I don’t know what to say to you.
You’ve got a long sentence ahead of you. ”
Heather’s father, Kevin, spoke next. A slideshow of his daughter’s photos played behind him in the courtroom. “You took my daughter.
My life is never going to be the same. You’ve messed up our family. My mom and dad have one less grandchild. I hope you never forget that.
”
A written statement from Heather’s mother and stepfather was read aloud. They remembered Heather as a happy, generous woman with a smile that would light up a room. Their statement ended with, “There is no punishment severe enough for what you did. We hope you’re haunted every day for the rest of your life by what you did.
”
Heather’s case also prompted action in the Oregon legislature. On the same day Karina was indicted, Republican State Senator Bruce Starr introduced a bill that would add knowingly killing a pregnant woman to the list of aggravated murder factors, a classification he called maternal homicide. At the time, Oregon was not among the thirty-six states with fetal homicide laws that allow separate prosecution for the death of a fetus. In the days after the murder, the family began planning how to say goodbye.
Heather’s mother planned a memorial service in St. Albans, West Virginia, the town where Heather grew up. Christopher and Kevin arranged a separate celebration of her life at her grandparents’ home in Maryland. There was one final heartbreaking detail.
On the day Heather met Karina, she had mailed a card to her grandmother. It read, “Can you believe Mom and Dave are going to be grandparents? ” The card was postmarked June 5th, 2009. The same day she was murdered.
It arrived three days later, after the family already knew what had been done to her and her unborn child. Heather was cremated. Her ashes were combined with her son John Steven’s and divided between her two parents. Her memorial page read simply, “Heather and her baby were murdered by someone wanting her baby as their own.
”
Years later, Kevin took a film crew to Quiet Waters Park on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, one of Heather’s favorite spots growing up. He said of Karina, “I hope I’ve forgiven her. It’s almost impossible, really. ” Even now, he still thinks of himself as a grandfather.
“I’m still a grandfather. I just have to wait until I get to heaven for that. ”
Karina Elaine Roberts is currently held at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, Oregon.
She will die in prison for what she did.
