Remember the bone-chilling film Orphan? The movie, where a couple adopts an adorable little girl from Russia after their third child is stillborn? In the movie, the new 9-year-old addition in the family is more evil than cute as she tries to kill her new siblings and parents.
That was surely a story, but the reality of a couple based in the United States was not far from it.
Kristine Barnett, 45 and her ex-husband Michael Barnett, 43 were charged with abandoning their 9-year-old adopted daughter, Natalia Grace in Indiana, USA and fleeing to Canada.
The couple later discovered that the child that they had adopted was an adult woman with dwarfism who was acting like a child and was also a sociopath.
The couple adopted the Ukraine born, Natalia Grace in the year 2010 when they were told that she is 6 years old and her birth certificate showed the same.
According to the reports by Police, the girl who has a rare form of dwarfism, is 3 feet tall and was left to fend for herself for three years. She also has problem walking.
In an interview to Daily Mail, Kristine says that her family were victims of the fraud done by the imposter. The girl was not 9 years old but a 22-year-old woman who would threaten to stab them in their sleep and poured bleach in her coffee.
She said, "She would make statements and draw pictures saying she wanted to kill family members, roll them up in a blanket and put them in the backyard." Kristine also said, "She was standing over people in the middle of the night. You couldn't go to sleep. We had to hide all the sharp objects. I saw her putting chemicals, bleach, Windex something like that, in my coffee and I asked her, what are you doing? She said, 'I am trying to poison you.'"
She added, "The media is painting me to be a child abuser but there is no child here, Natalia was a woman. She had periods. She had adult teeth. She never grew a single inch, which would happen even with a child with dwarfism."
She added, "The doctors all confirmed she was suffering a severe psychological illness only diagnosed in adults. She was jumping out of moving cars. She was smearing blood on mirrors. She was doing things you could never imagine a little child doing."
There were a lot of things that the couple started noticing about their new daughter that did not add up. Barnett shared her experience, she said, "I was giving her a bath and I noticed that she had full pubic hair. I was so shocked. I had just been told she was a six-year-old and it was very apparent she wasn't."
She even used vocabulary that was too sophisticated for her age.
Before the couple was leaving for Canada, they came up with a plan for Natalia, the child who they loved as their own to enroll in college, get ger high school diploma and study cosmetology. They were communicating on a daily basis, she said, "I said I've been taking care of you here as an adult, I will do one more year of financial aid, the exact same thing I am doing for all of my children."
She even took care of the rent of the house where they left Natalia, "I co-signed the lease and paid for the rent upfront for a year. I did everything you would do when you send your child off to college, I helped her with groceries and bought furniture at Target for her."
'I was optimistic, she had a concrete plan for her life. She had food stamps. She had social security income for the rest of her things. She had demonstrated she was able to live.'
By 2013, Natalia had vanished and stopped returning their calls.
The couple who have three other kids were hailed as exemplary parents for raising a child prodigy, Jake Barnett, their son. He was diagnosed with autism at the age of two, however, he published a paper at the age of 12. By the time he turned 15, he started studying at a prestigious physics institute.
The Barnetts are due to appear in court later this month.