Delimar Vera's Search for Answers

The six-year-old little girl whose kidnapping captured the world's attention in 2004 is now all grown up and asking her biological father some tough questions in a new docuseries

I first covered Delimar Vera’s miraculous back-from-the-dead story in March 2004 when I was a reporter at the Philadelphia Daily News.

Delimar was a six-year-old little girl who supposedly perished in a Philadelphia fire as an infant in 1997, but turned out to be alive and well and living with her kidnapper just a short distance away. Her biological mother said she spotted her at a family birthday party in January 2004, knew Delimar was her child the minute she laid eyes on her, and used a ruse to grab some hair from the little girl’s head to see if she could get DNA testing done to prove it. No wonder it made headlines across the world (and later became a Lifetime movie.)

Luz Cuevas, Delimar’s biological mother, said after that family party, she enlisted the aid of Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Angel Cruz, who helped her tell her story to the police. “It was a mother’s instinct, a mother’s intuition,” Cruz told my paper back then. DNA tests – not on those hairs but on a saliva sample from Delimar – later proved she was the biological daughter of Cuevas and Pedro Vera. Which is just about the only thing that’s indisputable in this whole sad saga.

Within days, Carolyn Correa, the woman who’d been at that family party with Delimar and had been raising her as Aaliyah Hernandez for the past six years in nearby Willingboro, N.J., was charged with arson and kidnapping, among other offenses. The police theory was that Correa went to Cuevas’ and Pedro’s house that night and set the fire to cover up the kidnapping. (You can actually see Correa in some of the TV footage from the fire.) I won’t get into more detail here because this chain of events is so convoluted – as you’ll learn if you keep reading – that it will only confuse you more.

The official version of what happened quickly started falling apart. Family members told us Cuevas had been to that birthday party in January 2003 – not January 2004 – and a Vera relative told us she was the one who pointed out Delimar’s resemblance to Cuevas. “I told Luz Aida, I sat her down and said, ‘Don’t that little girl look like you?” Pedro’s niece, Melissa Dominguez, told my newspaper. “She just started crying.”

And Correa, it turns out, lived just 15 miles away in New Jersey, was Pedro’s step-cousin, and was supposedly having an affair with him (which he denies). She was even living with Pedro’s uncle and her mom during much of the time she was raising Delimar. On top of that, other Vera family members said Cuevas had attended parties over the years when Correa and Delimar were present. Jose Vera, a cousin to both Correa and Pedro, told the (Camden, N.J. Courier-Post in March 20024 that he and other family members had repeatedly told Pedro and Cuevas they thought Hernandez, but Pedro and Cuevas did nothing. "They agreed the child looked like them and Pedro always thought it was his daughter, but nothing ever happened until now," Jose told the paper.

Furthermore, Cuevas told police she’d told firefighters the night of the fire that her 10-day-old baby was missing but then-Philadelphia Fire Commissioner Harold Hairston and retired Fire Marshal Vincent Heeney (as well as neighbors, friends, and relatives) disputed that account. Heeney, who was at the scene, told my former paper he got her to go through her story three times that night – twice with Spanish-speaking firefighters – to make sure they understood her because she spoke very little English. He insisted she told them her ten-day-old baby was in the room when the fire started. Neighbors also said Cuevas wasn’t home when the fire started (Delimar was in the care of a grandmother, supposedly) and after she got home, they said they heard her screaming, “My baby’s in the house!” (Cuevas and Pedro both filed lawsuits against Philadelphia for not investigating Delimar’s disappearance in 1997 and for not issuing a death certificate for Delimar. The cases were later consolidated and then dismissed).

My head was spinning, so I called one of my cop sources (not the ones doing the investigation) to get their take. They didn’t buy the fairy tale either. So I dug into the case with my colleagues Barbara Laker, Simone Weichselbaum, and Regina Medina for a cover story with the headline The Fairy Tale Crumbles.

Nothing really happened after our story. The rest of the media – especially the national media – stuck to the fairy tale version. But I stayed on the case, asking my own questions while hoping that some of these conflicting stories would be resolved - or at least explained – as the investigation evolved. I couldn’t stop thinking about a six-year-old little girl being yanked from the only home she’d ever known, thrown into foster care, then sent to live in a home where no one spoke the same language she did (Cuevas spoke very little English, her brothers spoke none, and Delimar spoke no Spanish at that time). Delimar deserved to know the truth once she was finally old enough to understand it. Instead, as time passed, the mystery only deepened.

The only person left who could fill in some of these holes was Correa herself. I stayed in touch with Correa’s attorneys, hoping to interview her one day. In October 2005, I finally got my chance after Correa pleaded “no contest” to kidnapping charges and was sentenced to nine to 30 years in prison. In that interview, she finally named her accomplice. She said Pedro, Delimar’s biological father, gave her his baby the night of the fire. What makes that even more believable is that Cuevas herself had said in media interviews and court filings that she thinks Pedro was Correa’s accomplice. At a press conference, Cuevas even held up Delimar’s birth certificate and showed Pedro’s name wasn’t on it. It’s because, she said, he didn’t want the child and told her he hoped the baby died in her belly.

Now it’s Delimar’s turn to ask the questions. She’s in her late-20s, happily married, with a thriving career, and is the star of the new three-part docuseries The Hand That Robbed the Cradle, airing on Fox Nation (it aired in the UK in November 2024). The camera crews followed her as she tried to get some answers about her abduction. Parts of it are truly heartbreaking. Her life after the intense media coverage faded away was every bit the nightmare I feared it would be – and far from the fairy tale we’d all been promised. Delimar says Cuevas was so emotionally distant that she felt lonely, unloved, and depressed, so she moved out at age 14 to live with Pedro.
”You don’t do that to a mother that lost a child,” she says in the docuseries. “My mom brought all of my clothes and dumped it on the sidewalk. I think that she was just really angry with me. We were just really angry at each other, so our relationship just dwindled away.” (Cuevas declined to be interviewed for the docuseries).

Delimar didn’t fare much better at Pedro’s home. “I was an angry teenager,” she says. “I didn’t have any motivation to go to school. I couldn’t relate to anybody. I didn’t know how to deal with my emotions, but I just felt very emotionally neglected by everybody in my life. My Dad wasn’t an easy person to be with. One day, we got into an argument, and that’s when he said to me, ‘That’s why your Mom doesn’t want you. Because you act like this.’ And I just lost it. I felt like it was true, and my anger just exploded. And that was the only time my Dad ever put his hands on me.’

A couple of days later, because she’d been missing school, her caseworkers got involved, she said. “When the lady saw I had a black eye and scratches on my face, they decided that it was better to remove me from the home,” she said. “I went into the foster-home system. From 14 on, I’d say I really just raised myself… My depression consumed me. I tried to commit suicide. I didn’t know what else to do. I was tired. I felt like I just couldn’t do it anymore… I missed my mom. I missed my brothers.”

Correa refused to be interviewed for the series, and Delimar wants nothing to do with her, anyway, so she traveled to Puerto Rico in February 2024 to grill Pedro. She looks nervous, but that doesn’t stop her from asking him some pointed questions in Spanish, which is still the only language her father speaks. She starts by showing him pictures of herself at age 3, and he admits he saw her at a family party when she was that age.

Delimar: And after you saw me at the age of three, what did you do to investigate?

Pedro: The thing is, a lot of people said to me you can’t jump to conclusions he said. They said they could call the police on you, and that’s why I held everything back. I’d given up hope, as the firefighters had shown me the yellow bag with your remains in it. So that’s why I held back.

Delimar: And Daddy, why did you never sign my birth certificate?

Pedro: That’s what your mother says? That I didn’t sign it?

Delimar: Well, I have it as well, and it doesn’t have your name on it… It says father. Unrecorded.

Pedro: OK. Look. You know what happened? She didn’t tell me I had to sign it. And your mother’s ex-husband started saying, “That’s my child.” And it made me have doubts.

Delimar: So you didn’t sign my birth certificate when you heard that?

Pedro: Your mum didn’t bring me the papers to sign.

Delimar: And tell me, Dad – because I’ve always had questions ... that you and Carolyn had a relationship together.

Pedro: Never in my life! Never! Never! I had nothing to do with her.

Delimar: She said that you handed me over to her.

Pedro: She’s a liar! Never in my life. In what world would I?

Delimar: So she’s a liar?

Pedro: Yes. I would never have given you away.

So who’s telling the truth? We’ll probably never know for sure. No accomplice was ever charged – and at this late stage, there’s very little chance one will ever be. And by the way, that fire that Correa supposedly started to cover up Delimar’s kidnapping? It turns out it was an accident, caused by a frayed space heater cord, so prosecutors had to drop the arson charge against Correa. I’m guessing that – as well as all of the conflicting stories – is why prosecutors agreed to let Correa plead “no contest” (which is not an admission of guilt) to kidnapping instead of taking the case to trial.

I don’t want to give anything else away, so I’ll just say, I hope you watch the docuseries for no other reason than it shows why journalists should never blindly accept the police version of events and never, ever stop asking questions. The police are human. They make mistakes. Yes, in this case, the right person was arrested, but what about her accomplice? At Correa’s sentencing, the judge even acknowledged this, saying, “It may well be [there was ] someone else involved. We don’t know. This is one of those cases where the trail is hard to follow.”

I was initially reluctant to appear in this docuseries. In fact, when Wag Entertainment, the UK production company that put this together, first approached me in late 2023, I asked them, “Are you going to tell the Hollywood version or the true version?” They promised me it was the latter. They kept their word. I am deeply grateful to them for telling the whole story, warts and all. Frustratingly, my former employer, People magazine, continues to tout the fairy tale, as does other media.

But if Delimar is satisfied with the answers she got from Pedro, then honestly, in the end, that’s all that really matters. She has a voice now, and she showed she wasn’t afraid to use it. I hope her life continues to flourish, that she has the relationship with her biological parents she wants to have, and that she can somehow put this all behind her. Somehow, I think she will. I’m also glad she finally got to take control of her own narrative. She deserves that. She truly is the hero of her own story.

Nicki Weisensee Egan is the author of the book CHASING COSBY, host and executive producer of the podcast based on the book, coauthor of VICTIM F, and an investigative journalist. You can see more of her work at https://www.nicoleweisenseeegan.com/