“They took my daughter instead of my boss's daughter,” Adam Baker told the emergency department when he called to report the disappearance of his 10-year-old daughter Zahra, who is hearing impaired and has an amputated leg. According to his story, a ransom note on the windshield of his car alerted him to the events and when he wanted to check that her little girl was in her room, she had already disappeared.
However, as the days passed, all eyes focused on Elisa, Adam's wife and Zahra's stepmother, whose movements aroused suspicion. Several testimonies and reports from social services reported on the physical and psychological abuse suffered by the girl at the hands of the woman. A month later, the murderer confessed and took investigators to the places where she had disposed of the little girl's remains. She had dismembered her.
Elisa Annette Baker, whose maiden name was Elisa Fairchild, was born in 1968 in North Carolina. She was the middle of three girls and her parents worked in textile and furniture factories. Despite having all the attention of her father, from a very young age she suffered physical abuse from her mother, something that made her rebel already in adolescence.
During her school years, Elisa became one of the most popular girls at school, although she had to face those who picked on her because of her ups and downs in terms of weight. If something characterized this young girl, according to her own colleagues, it was her insecurity, although she managed to disguise it with cunning and certain manipulation skills.
In fact, her facility for deception led her to marry six times and be accused of being a bigamist. And she was married to two or three men at the same time, a completely illegal practice in the United States. During these years, Elisa exercised all kinds of abuse towards her husband, and also towards her three biological children.
She lived at 42 different addresses, robbed her husbands' houses, destroyed their vehicles, threatened to burn their homes and kill the children of those families... "There was nothing nice about that woman," declared one of her ex-husbands Andrew Harris Jr.
“She would go out, get drunk and move on. She was never at home,” said another named Darrell Putnam. And violence in each of the marriages was the order of the day. “She just couldn't take the abuse anymore,” confirmed Jeffrey Allred, who married our protagonist on October 3, 1997.
In August 1998, Elisa married her sixth husband Aaron Young, of ten years. And, while she was with him, she took to Internet dating sites where she met more men. The last was Adam Baker, whom she married on July 8, 2008 when she had not yet divorced Young.
Adam had an eight-year-old daughter called Zahra, who had been diagnosed with bone cancer in 2005 and subsequently developed lung cancer. As a result, she had had her lower leg amputated, he had to wear hearing aids and was therefore disabled. Zahra's biological mother had abandoned her and Adam had taken care of her along with her little girl's parents, with whom he lived in Giru (Australia).
Shortly after getting married, Elisa suggested that Adam emigrate to the United States because there she could give Zahra a better life. The young man accepted and they moved. However, for the next two years, the little girl's life was hell. Elisa exercised continuous physical and psychological abuse towards the minor, to the point of leaving signs and marks all over her body. On one occasion, Zahra came to class with a black eye.
The Bakers' neighbors always reported these events, even social services investigated the case, but they were unable to find conclusive evidence of these irregularities. Hence the investigations were closed. Shortly after, the girl was murdered by her stepmother.
On Saturday, October 9, 2010, firefighters went to the Bakers' home in Hickory, North Carolina, where they had just moved a little less than a month earlier. Someone had set fire to a compost pile in the backyard of their house, causing a spectacular smoke. Hours later, Adam called the emergency services again, this time to report a ransom note and a disappearance, that of his daughter.
During the investigation, the canine unit used to inspect the area alerted to the presence of human remains in the family's vehicles, but no evidence pointed to anyone in particular. As the days went by, the statements of her father and her stepmother put the latter on the spot: some of her inaccuracies and inconsistencies gave her away. One of them was the time she last saw the girl. Finally, Elisa ended up confessing the authorship of that strange ransom note: she did it to mislead.
Authorities charged the stepmother with obstruction of justice, in addition to a dozen other charges that followed. Among them, fraud, theft, threats or driving without a license, as well as bigamy. From there, the police changed the etiology of the case from a disappearance investigation to a homicide investigation.
On October 24, Elisa, who until then had not confessed to the crime, decided to take the investigators to the places where she had disposed of the little girl's remains. This coincidentally coincided with an expert telephone record report that placed her in said search areas.
Three days later, police found Zahra's prosthetic leg on Dudley Shoals Road and, in the first ten days of November, they located human remains, including bones, on the banks of Little River. In addition, a lumberjack found a suitcase with a blood-stained blanket. DNA later confirmed that these were both Zahra's bones and blood.
Although the police records carried out did not confirm how the little girl had died, it was possible to corroborate that her body had been dismembered and hidden in a bed comforter and a car cover, and then thrown at different points. Among them, a garbage container, as well as a river.
Given the evidence collected, Elisa directly pointed out her husband and father of the girl as the true author of the crime. “It scares me... he knows what happened to Zahra and yet I am the one who is here at least for now,” she wrote in a letter, in which she assured that she was going to ask for a divorce. According to her, the girl had died naturally on September 24, two weeks before she was reported missing, and Adam had dismembered her.
But, that information was flatly false. The manager of a furniture store stated that he had seen the stepmother in the company of the minor on September 25. Therefore, the woman was lying.
Added to this was the autopsy, which confirmed the homicidal nature of Zahra's death. The medical examiner certified that the girl had died from “undetermined homicidal violence,” since most of both legs, her right arm, and her skull had yet to be found. The latter was located in April 2012.
On Monday, February 21, 2011, the Catawba County jury convicted Elisa Baker of second-degree murder stating that she had “a history and pattern of physical, verbal and psychological abuse of the victim.” He also alleged that she had “hidden” Zahra from her relatives before the murder to hinder the investigation and “desecrated her body to hinder the detection, investigation and prosecution of the crime.”
The stepmother was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, while her ex-husband and father of the girl, Adam Baker, was exonerated of any charge or responsibility in this regard. He always denied any involvement in the little girl's murder.
In 2016, the inmate appealed her murder conviction, arguing that she was “a good mom.” She even went so far as to confirm that they pressured her to sign a plea agreement, but the court rejected her appeal and Elisa will remain behind bars, at least until 2026.
