Courtesy of Lisa Stephenson Courtesy of Lisa Stephenson 
 
 By Beth Brogan , BDN Staff • November 9, 2015 1:58 pm 
 
 Updated: November 9, 2015 5:07 pm 
 
 BRUNSWICK, Maine — Lisa Stephenson knew something wasn’t quite right when two young girls walked into the Blue Crab Grill late last month and filled out job applications. 
 
 “They said they were traveling and their phones and wallets were stolen in New York,” Stephenson told the Bangor Daily News. “I guess that was their story — they were trying to get money.” 
 
 The manager of the Newark, Delaware, restaurant wouldn’t give them cash, but took their applications and told them to return the next day. 
 
 Throughout the day, though, as Stephenson waited tables, she thought about the girls, who looked so young and showed up at the restaurant alone during the school day. 
 
 “Of course, it didn’t add up,” said Stephenson, who lives just over the state line in Elkton, Maryland. So she glanced at the applications and discovered neither teen had listed an address or a phone number, and neither had completed high school. 
 
 Concerned that the two girls were alone in an area just down the road from a truck stop that is “not a really good place to be around,” Stephenson wrote down their names. 
 
 A quick search of Facebook when she got home that night confirmed her instincts: A Brunswick woman was frantically searching for her 16-year-old Brunswick daughter, who, along with a 14-year-old Bath girl, had disappeared in the early morning hours of Oct. 25. 
 
 The girls were supposed to babysit together early Sunday morning, the older girl’s mom told the Bangor Daily News, but they never showed up. Before long, the younger girl’s mom realized her Toyota Camry was missing. 
 
 Both mothers spent Sunday in a fog, mystified at their daughters’ disappearance and terrified for their safety. They posted “Missing” notices on Facebook, and contacted the Bath teen’s family in South Carolina, where she was born and previously lived, thinking the girls might be headed to see a friend there. 
 
 After Bath police had listed the girls with the National Crime Information Center, alerting police across the country to stop them, police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called later Sunday morning to report the car had been involved in a minor crash before driving away from the scene, Bath Police Lt. Robert Savary said at the time. Neither teen has a license to drive, according to the older girl’s mom. 
 
 Then there was no news until the next night, when the older teen’s mother opened Facebook to find a message from Stephenson. The 26-year-old woman had searched Facebook as soon as she got home from work that night and discovered one of the notices about the missing teens. She messaged the girl’s mother “and then sat by my computer waiting for her to [respond],” Stephenson said. “The minute she did, she was like, ‘Oh my gosh, are you serious?’” 
 
 The two continued talking by phone, and Stephenson notified local police, as well as her cousins, who are deputies in nearby Cecil County. But the police found no sign of the girls that night, and they didn’t return to the restaurant Tuesday morning. 
 
 Then on Tuesday afternoon, the Charles County Sheriff’s Office received several calls about two young girls panhandling in front of a strip mall on Crain Highway in Waldorf, according to sheriff’s spokeswoman Diane Richardson. 
 
 “They appeared to be young and were asking for money,” Richardson told the Bangor Daily News. “It was odd that there would be two young girls outside this clothing store holding up signs asking for money. A lot of people were actually concerned.” 
 
 An officer picked up the two girls and took them to a district station, where he stayed with them until a social worker picked them up at about 10 p.m. 
 
 The younger girl’s mother flew to Maryland to drive her car home, and the older girl’s mom rented a car and left at 2 a.m. Wednesday to retrieve the girls. 
 
 What she discovered, the older girl’s mother said, was the girls’ “Thelma and Louise” plan. She learned that the girls had traveled south, without their phones, “straight through Boston, New York and some of the most scary places they could have been.” 
 
 They told sheriff’s deputies that they stopped in Washington, D.C., looking for a gas station, but someone told them to “get out of the city” and they decided Waldorf “looked like a nice place to stop and ask for money.” 
 
 “One of the scariest parts for me was that the social worker who found them a place to stay for the night said they were just south of Washington, D.C., and in that area [human] trafficking is huge,” the older girl’s mother said. 
 
 The drive back to Maine was quiet at first, she said. Their first stop was the Blue Crab Grill, to see the waitress who may have saved their lives. She worried, at first, that the girls would be angry. 
 
 Stephenson, who is six months pregnant with her first daughter, said she told the girls, “All I could think about was that in the future, if something were to happen with my daughter, I would want someone to get in contact with me to tell me she was all right, that she was alive and OK.” 
 
 Both girls eventually thanked her, Stephenson said. 
 
 “I said, ‘Do you understand why that was putting a target on you? At your age?’ I told them how serious it was and it seemed to dawn on them the things that could have gone wrong in that scenario.” 
 
 When they arrived back in Maine, the girls were grounded and the older girl, at least, is prohibited from using social media, including Facebook. 
 
 But her mom, and the rest of the family, spent much of the next few days on Facebook, praising and “friending” the Delaware woman who found their girl. 
 
 “This is a hero,” the mom wrote on Facebook. “A person who trusted her gut when she saw two young girls all alone and helped. A person who spent her own time calling authorities in multiple states to let them know the girls could be headed their way and a person who let a scared mom message her for hours trying to make sense of a terrifying situation. This is a hero.” 
 
 Because no charges were filed against the girls, the Bangor Daily News agreed not to identify them or their families. ||||| A pregnant woman in Delaware became a hero to two Maine families after her Facebook search helped find their missing teenage girls. 
 
 Lisa Stephenson, a server at the Blue Crab Grill in Newark, Del., became suspicious on Nov. 2 when two teenaged girls walked in and applied for jobs. Both seemed too young to be looking for work, they weren’t in school, and neither included home addresses or cellphone numbers on their job applications. 
 
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 “It seemed odd for teen girls not to have cellphones, nowadays,” Stephenson, 26, who is six months pregnant, tells Yahoo Parenting. 
 
 STORY: Man Reunites With Siblings After 40 Years, Discovers They’d Met Before 
 
 The girls claimed that their phones and money had been stolen in New York, and they had somehow ended up in Delaware. 
 
 Stephenson worried what could happen to the girls at the two truck stops or no-questions-asked motels only minutes from the restaurant. “They were in sweats and it looked like they hadn’t touched their hair in a while,” said Stephenson. “I immediately had a feeling they were runaways.” 
 
 If her daughter-to-be were ever missing, she thought, she would want someone to help. 
 
 That evening after work, Stephenson did a Facebook search for the girls’ names and landed on the page of a 16-year-old girl from Brunswick, Maine. Her mother had posted a missing persons notice about her daughter and a 14-year-old friend from Bath, Maine, who had vanished together on October 25 after failing to show up for a babysitting job. 
 
 Stephenson sent the mom a friend request and shared that she had met the girls and then enlisted the help of her cousins — police deputies in a nearby county — who tracked them down after they were seen panhandling in front of a clothing store on Nov. 3. The girls had stolen one of their mother’s cars and had driven “straight through Boston, New York, and some of the most scary places they could have been,” the mom of the older girl told the Bangor Daily News. 
 
 On the way home, the trio stopped at the Blue Crab Grill to thank Stephenson, who explained to the girls how close they came to real danger. The teens are now safe at home in Maine (although both are grounded and the older girl is banned from using social media) and Stephenson has been dubbed a hero by the older girl’s mom. 
 
 “I don’t feel like a hero,” insists Stephenson. “I just feel like a normal person who needed to speak up and did. Hopefully more people will speak up when something seems off.” 
 
 Photo: Courtesy of Lisa Stephenson 
 
 Please follow @YahooParenting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Have an interesting story to share about your family? Email us at YParenting (at) Yahoo.com. ||||| Celeste and Morné Nurse describe reuniting with their daughter who was stolen from them at birth 18 years ago. The kidnapper was arrested and has pleaded not guilty. (ENCA) 
 
 Celeste Nurse simply thought the woman was trying to help. 
 
 Nurse lay in a Cape Town, South Africa, hospital bed, groggy from the morphine masking the pain from her cesarean section three days earlier. In a cot next to her lay her newborn, a bushy haired girl. In her medicated haze, Celeste spotted a woman sitting near the maternity ward door. 
 
 “Your baby is crying,” said the woman, who was dressed like a nurse in a beige top and maroon pants. “Can I pick up the child?” 
 
 Celeste assented, watching the woman scoop up the child, Zephany, before she fell back asleep. 
 
 When Celeste awoke again, it was because another nurse — a real nurse — was frantically shaking her. 
 
 “Where is your child?” the nurse asked urgently. 
 
 “What do you mean?” Celeste answered in confusion. “The nurse was just here with the baby.” 
 
 Horror suddenly sharpened Celeste’s cloudy mind. She tore the IV from her arm and, despite her fresh surgical wound, began running around the hospital’s halls, desperately searching for her missing baby. 
 
 But Zephany, which means “the Lord has hidden” in Hebrew, was nowhere to be found. 
 
 She would remain lost for almost 18 years. 
 
 “I thought that someone needed to wake me up because this was not happening to me,” Celeste said Tuesday, nearly 19 years after her nightmare began. “I thought that it cannot be true.” 
 
 But it was true. And on Tuesday, Nurse came face to face with the person who prosecutors say is responsible. The woman who allegedly stole Celeste’s baby and raised Zephany as her own is now on trial. 
 
 It is an incredible crime, made even more remarkable by its unbelievable climax. 
 
 For almost two decades, the bizarre story of the vanishing baby with the biblical name has made headlines in South Africa. Although the country has been plagued by similar crimes, Zephany’s disappearance was special. 
 
 Her fate seemed written into her very name. 
 
 A biblical name, a bewitching case 
 
 Celeste and Morné Nurse both grew up in the predominantly nonwhite township of Mitchells Plain, outside the scenic city of Cape Town. He was powerfully built. She was pretty and whisper thin. They met as teenagers, and within a year, they were married and expecting their first child, a daughter they decided to name Zephany. Soon, the young parents-to-be got over their shock. 
 
 “It was all very exciting,” Celeste Nurse told the Cape Argus newspaper three years ago. “We always wondered what she’d be like.” 
 
 Zephany was born healthy and with a full head of hair on April 27, 1997. 
 
 Three days later, Celeste was shaken awake to find that her daughter was gone — taken by a woman posing as a nurse. All that was left were a few traces of the child: Zephany’s clothes, a handbag with no hint about its owner and a pillow — allegedly used by the thief to fake a pregnancy — abandoned in a disused tunnel leading from the maternity ward to the outside world, according to the Cape Argus. 
 
 “We ran everywhere in the hospital,” Celeste said on the witness stand Tuesday. “The baby was nowhere to be found. Missing. Gone.” 
 
 The young couple was distraught. 
 
 “I was crying my heart out in the fetal position,” Morne testified Tuesday. 
 
 The hospital called the police, but they didn’t turn up any more clues. When the parents learned that there was no security at the hospital and no leads on their daughter’s whereabouts, their terror turned into anger. 
 
 “I went ballistic,” Morne told the Cape Argus in 2010. “I even knocked over a medicine cabinet and all the bottles broke on the floor.” 
 
 “We came home to nothing,” Celeste said in the same interview. 
 
 For days, the couple clung to the hope that the nightmare would somehow end and their baby girl would be returned to them. Their grief was amplified by the baby gear in their house. Everything reminded them of their Zephany. 
 
 
 
 Celeste Nurse, right, reports to a Cape Town court to testify about the day her newborn daughter was stolen. (Schalk van Zuydam/AP) 
 
 “At night I lay in bed and heard the cats crying,” Celeste said. “Sometimes they sounded just like a baby.” 
 
 Several leads emerged, only to unravel. Shortly before Zephany disappeared, another mother had caught a woman holding her baby and walking toward the hospital exit. When the mother confronted the woman, she handed the baby back and said she was just trying to “soothe” the child. But the mother couldn’t identify the woman. 
 
 When one of the Nurses’ neighbors suddenly showed up with a newborn, despite having never appeared pregnant, police investigated. But the baby turned out to be a boy. 
 
 It would be the last lead for more than a decade. 
 
 The Nurses had three more kids — including a daughter named Cassidy — but never forgot their missing firstborn. They celebrated Zephany’s birthday every year, often making public appeals in newspapers or on television begging the kidnapper to return the girl. 
 
 Then, at 3 a.m. on July 17, 2009, the Nurses received a phone call that revived their hopes. 
 
 “I know about your daughter,” the female caller said in a hushed tone, according to the Cape Argus. Then she demanded 500,000 rand (about $33,000) for information on the girl’s location. She told the family to bring the cash to a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Mitchells Plain. 
 
 The Nurses called the police, and seven hours later, Morné showed up at the fast-food joint wearing a wire. But the caller never showed. Instead, police traced the calls to a woman who lived near Celeste’s mother and arrested her for attempted extortion. 
 
 “I’ll never ever give up hope,” Morné told the newspaper in 2010. “I can feel it in my gut — my daughter is out there and she is going to come home.” 
 
 Zephany was still being hidden. But the girl didn’t even know it. 
 
 An unbelievable breakthrough 
 
 Everyone kept telling Cassidy Nurse about her doppelganger. Cassidy was a first-year student at her Mitchell Plains high school, but one student after another told her she bore an uncanny resemblance to a senior. They had the same light-brown skin, almond-shaped eyes, broad nose and ample lips. 
 
 Cassidy felt strangely drawn to the older girl, and they became friends. When she told her parents about the supposed similarity, her father became intrigued. Morné arranged to meet the older girl at a local McDonald’s. 
 
 “We went to McDonald’s and I started questioning her,” Morné told the court Tuesday, according to the Daily Mail. “I asked what her date of birth was — her birthday was the date my daughter was abducted. 
 
 “She said she didn’t look like her own folks, and she told me that she had thought about that over and over,” he continued. “I asked her why she thought she looked like me and Cassidy. She laughed and said she didn’t know, she said she felt confused. I didn’t want to scare her. I wanted to protect her at all costs. I left with the information I was looking for. I went onto Facebook and got more information on this girl, I scrutinised her account. I saw pictures of her and she resembled my kids completely.” 
 
 Then he pulled a photo of the girl’s supposed mother from Facebook and sent it to someone. 
 
 The person, Shireen Piet, said she recognized the woman. She said it was the same woman who she had caught “soothing” her baby shortly before Zephany was stolen in April 1997. 
 
 Morné didn’t tell Celeste at first. He didn’t want to break her heart for a second time. 
 
 Also, the pair had split up a year before. Celeste had battled cancer and won. She also had also met another man to whom she would soon get engaged. But she and Morné remained united in their passion to find their firstborn. 
 
 Eventually, Morné sent Celeste a photo of the girl. 
 
 “I just — I got that feeling inside, I just grabbed my heart and said this is my daughter,” Celeste told CBS. “This is my daughter.” 
 
 Once Morné felt he had the evidence he needed, he took it to the authorities. Police took DNA samples from the girl. And after six excruciating weeks of testing, the results came back in late February of 2015. 
 
 Finally, Zephany had been found. 
 
 She had a different name, but she had grown up barely a mile from her biological family. 
 
 Celeste finally met her daughter on Feb. 26, 2015. 
 
 “I burst out into tears when I saw her,” Celeste told CBS. “And she kept me like this, in her arms the first time when she saw her dad, and when she came to me I just — I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t stop crying. I said, finally, I found you. For 17 years I’ve been looking for you. 
 
 “I found you finally. You’re mine again.” 
 
 One mother’s relief, another’s arrest 
 
 A day after Celeste was reunited with her daughter, the woman allegedly responsible for the 18-year rift was arrested. The woman, a 51-year-old seamstress, has not been named because of South African law. She has been charged with kidnapping and fraud for filing false paperwork regarding her daughter’s birth and identity. 
 
 Zephany’s adopted name also as been protected by court order. 
 
 The trial began Monday in Western Cape High Court. 
 
 The woman has pleaded not guilty. In a 35-page document explaining her plea, she painted herself as an unwitting victim of a shady middle-woman. 
 
 The accused said she had been abused and raped as a child, and beaten by boyfriends so severely that she suffered a series of miscarriages. She had even lost a six-week-old daughter, she claimed. When she suffered another miscarriage in 1997, she hid the news from her husband. Instead of telling him, she secretly arranged to adopt a newborn, she wrote. 
 
 She met the middle-woman at a bus station in Cape Town and was handed an infant wrapped in a blanket, she wrote. She then told her husband, family and friends that the dark-haired girl was her own. 
 
 “I had on occasions thought about telling Michael and Zephany about the adoption but they had a very close relationship and did not want to destroy it,” she wrote in an apparent reference to her husband. 
 
 She said she had trouble loving the child. 
 
 “I initially struggled to be close to her,” she wrote, according to the Daily Mail. “It took me years to accept her as my own daughter. 
 
 “Although I was not her biological mother, I raised her as my own child. I recall sitting with her, brushing her hair, bathing her and always wondering where her parents were and why they did not want her as I found her to be pretty and cute,” she continued. “I thought I was helping a child who was not wanted and would not be cared for sufficiently by her biological parents.” 
 
 In fact, the child was very much on the minds of her biological parents. And it’s unclear if there really was a middle-woman. 
 
 “She [the middle-woman] told me that the baby’s mother is a young girl who wanted to give her child up for adoption. … I was told that the baby was mine and the documentation will be sorted out later,” the accused wrote in her plea. “I had a bad feeling that something was wrong.” 
 
 Incredibly, Celeste has said she is prepared to forgive the woman — even if the legal system cannot. 
 
 “When I see the woman that took her, I would like to give her a hug,” she said last March, after the woman had been released on bail. “When I see her I want to say thank you for what you’ve done. You’ve done a good job, look at my daughter, she’s beautiful inside out.” 
 
 On Tuesday, the two mothers — one accused of kidnapping the other’s child — shared a strange but tender moment during the trial. 
 
 Celeste told the court how she had given Zephany her first bath in the hospital, marveling at her tuft of dark hair. 
 
 “She looked like Simba the lion from ‘The Lion King,'” Celeste said, drawing a smile from the woman accused of kidnapping her child. “She was so cute.”
– A waitress is being called a hero after helping point parents and police to two girls who vanished in Maine last month. Lisa Stephenson was waiting tables at the Blue Crab Grill in Newark, Del., when two young girls came in asking for jobs. "They said they were traveling and their phones and wallets were stolen in New York," she tells the Bangor Daily News. They left job applications noting neither had finished high school, but no address or phone number. "It didn't add up," says Stephenson, 26. “It seemed odd for teen girls not to have cellphones, nowadays,” she tells Yahoo. When Stephenson got home, she searched their names on Facebook and found the girls, 14 and 16, had disappeared in Maine a day earlier on Oct. 25, along with a car belonging to the younger girl's mother, and may have been heading for South Carolina. Stephenson reached out to the older girl's mother and then to local police. The next day, after receiving other concerned calls, authorities found the girls panhandling in front of a strip mall about 100 miles away in Waldorf, Md. An officer took them to a district station where a social worker picked them up. They were reunited with their mothers on Oct. 28. While the younger's girl's mother drove her car back home, the other woman took the girls to the Blue Crab Grill, where they thanked Stephenson in person. On Facebook, the mother praised Stephenson as "a hero—a person who trusted her gut when she saw two young girls all alone and helped." But Stephenson is rejecting the title. “I don’t feel like a hero,” she tells Yahoo. “I just feel like a normal person who needed to speak up and did." (This teen just discovered that he'd been "missing" for 13 years.)