The CCTV footage may have been grainy, but it captured a woman walking confidently through the hospital carrying a large gift bag.
Wearing a white top and cream maternity trousers, she passed two security guards and headed out into the sunshine.
What the cameras didn’t catch was what was inside the bag: a healthy, newborn baby snatched from the maternity ward.
The woman – Eleonor Alejandra Marín Mendoza – would later become a household name, as TV and newspapers reported on her shocking story, which ended with her being caught and convicted of child abduction.
Now, a new film examines what drove her to such lengths.
Pregnant ‘and full of hope’ when she married Arturo at the age of 17 in 2000, Eleonor, known as Alejandra, couldn’t wait to fill their home with tiny feet. So when the health admin worker from Mexico suffered successive miscarriages, she was left heartbroken – and following a sinister and disturbing path.
‘When I got married, the biggest pressure I felt was to make my husband’s family happy,’ Alejandra explains in the Netflix documentary, A Child of My Own.
But they were not happy. One in-law told her the miscarriage was her own fault, and Alejandra blamed herself. With each pregnancy that failed to reach term, the pressure continued to mount.
So after her third miscarriage in 2009, a desperate Alejandra had convinced her family for months that she was expecting, took a newborn from the Hospital General de México and smuggled her out in a gift bag.
Within hours,she had been arrested, the baby safely returned, and Alejandra was sent to prison for 13 years.
But how had she managed to conceal a fake pregnancy from her husband and wider family?
Oscar-nominated filmmaker Maite Alberdi was working on a project about women in jail when she bumped into Alejandra in prison. When Maite learned about what she was in for, the pair worked together for four years to unpick the troubling story.
‘I couldn’t believe how and why someone needed to fake a pregnancy, and that opened many questions about social pressure on women and the desire to become a mum,’ Maite tells Metro.
‘She told me she kept expecting that someone would pop that bubble of lies and take her out from that place. Because the lie that she was pregnant was just increasing and she didn’t know how to leave. It was very painful for her.’
The deception began when, following IVF in 2009, Alejandra suffered her third miscarriage. Instead of telling her family, Alejandra made the decision to live as if she were still pregnant.
She read up on pregnancy symptoms and gorged on cookies, doughnuts and ice cream to pile on weight. She pretended to feel nauseous, attended prenatal yoga classes and took an ultrasound photo from a file at work to show her family.
She told colleagues and dressed in maternity wear, while her friends threw her a baby shower. Whenever her husband Arturo stroked Alejandra’s belly, she tightened her muscles so it felt firmer.
‘Her husband didn’t see what was going on. There were so many possibilities to stop that lie that didn’t happen. So I really connected with her in that sense,’ Maite says.
A few months into her fake pregnancy, Alejandra started to feel unwell, possibly due to her terrible diet and quick weight-gain, Arturo insisted on taking her to the doctor.
He failed to find a heartbeat with a Doppler fetal monitor and the documentary – which is part re-enactment in the style of a Mexican telenovela and part documentary – depicts the moment she will at last be free of the deception.
But the doctor told the couple that it must be broken and reached for an old-fashioned Pinard stethoscope. He told her he could hear the heartbeat and authorised 90 days of maternity leave.
‘At that point I wasn’t Alejandra any more. I was not well,’ she explains in the documentary.
‘In my head I was saying, what if I was pregnant? What if I didn’t have a miscarriage? There was a lot going on in my head that wasn’t right.’
It is not uncommon to hear a false heartbeat using the stethoscope, Maite tells Metro.
‘I spoke with many doctors who explained that when the mother’s heart is beating so fast and hard, it can be be confused with the baby’s heartbeat,’ she says.
‘The thing that really shocked me the most was that the doctor gave her maternity leave. I think she was really expecting to stop her lie there.’
One of the documentary’s psychologists also explains: ‘Her psychological pregnancy was a way to mitigate the reality of not having children. It was her reaction to all the social demands from her family.
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web
browser that
supports HTML5
video
‘The diagnosis we made of Alejandra was that she tends to dissociate, and in that dissociation, she convinces herself something is true, and is able to confuse fantasy with reality. And if you add to the pressure of wanting to be a mum, it’s what makes her misinterpret facts.’
Alejandra herself tells the film: ‘There were so many times I just wanted to say this isn’t real, this isn’t happening, but I couldn’t. I was really suffering on the inside. It hurt to see how happy my parents were, my family, my grandmother. I wish someone had burst that bubble of lies.’
As she prepared the next steps of her plan, Alejandra told Arturo she was going to hospital for a caesarean, that it would be a long wait and that he shouldn’t come in yet.
There she met Mayra, whom she claimed to have befriended months before at the hospital.
Suffering from a fever and infection after giving birth, Mayra had left her newborn baby to go to the bathroom, asking her roommates to keep an eye on her.
However, Alejandra snatched the baby, nestled in blankets, put her in the large paper gift bag and took her home. The security footage would later be broadcast across Mexican media.
Alejandra claimed that she and Mayra had agreed months before to let her take her baby – something the new mum denied ever taking place. She says Alejandra got onto the ward pretending to be a social worker.
‘I came back and my daughter was gone. The first thing I thought was maybe they are bathing her or they took her to feed her. I thought a nurse would have her. Never, never did I think my baby was kidnapped,’ Mayra tells the documentary.
The newborn’s father later made a tearful appeal on television, begging for help to find their baby. Six hours later, police stormed into her bedroom in the night and Alejandra was arrested and charged with kidnap.
Although the baby girl is now 16, happy and healthy, and unaffected by the kidnap, her mother remains traumatised. She still doesn’t allow her daughter to go to parties for fear of her not coming back.
‘I don’t think I can ever forgive her,’ Mayra says.
At the age of 26, Alejandra was sentenced to 13 years and four months in prison. Arturo, who was initially charged with abduction and put behind bars, was acquitted.
For Maite, Alejandra was suffering from psychosis, and while the story of the Mexico City baby snatcher had been all over the national press, her own part in the story had never been properly understood. Maite says Alejandra, now released, is contrite and reflective after her many years in jail.
‘The exercise of this film is to show that humanity is complex. Cinema and television make us think you have good people and bad people. But life is not like that. Good people make mistakes. It happens all the time.
‘I felt real empathy and sadness for Alejandra.
‘She didn’t receive any psychological help until she was in jail. I completely understand that she committed a crime, and she made a mistake. I am not justifying that. I am just trying to understand her. For me, this is a film about two women who suffered a lot.’
Alejandra tells the documentary: ‘Life changes in the blink of an eye. When I got out of prison Arturo told me again that he still wanted to be a father. I told him that was valid and he should go and find his happiness, that I wasn’t going to undergo any treatment and that he wasn’t going to be a father with me.’
Arturo’s dream did come true. Following a short relationship, he had a baby boy, before returning to Alejandra.
‘He told me that he missed me, that he loved me and he wanted me to be in his life, that we should try again. So I decided to give it a try. It makes me very happy to see him smile and fulfilled as a father. It makes me even happier that he sees me in his life as a mother to his son.’
A Child of My Own will be available on Netflix from August 13, 2026.