Lillian "Lila" Morris, age 19, of Elkins, New Mexico, died on January 19, 1930 in the Ruidoso summer home of Roswell, New Mexico dentist Milton A. Grissom.
Grissom, age 71, had been convicted of second degree murder the previous year for the abortion death of Mary Parsell. He was awaiting appeal of is 39 to 47-year sentence. He was charged with second-degree murder in Lila's death, along with Dr. J. J. Walker, also of Roswell. Walker was arrested upon his return from an extended trip to Mississippi.
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Like the deaths of Jacqueline Smith and Barbara Lofrumento, the story of Angela Sanchez involves illegal abortion and attempts to hide the body. The difference is that Alicia Hannah's abortion clinic was operating openly and apparently legally.
On January 19, 1993, Angela Sanchez, age 27, went to Clinica Feminina de la Comunidad with two of her four children: 12-year-old Maria, and 2-year-old Victor. Maria and Victor waited for their mother in the lobby. A clinic staffer approached Maria and suggested that she take the car and drive Victor home. Maria protested that she was too young to drive. The children continued to wait for their mother. At around noon, a staffer took the children to lunch. When they returned to the clinic, Angela's car was gone, and Maria was told that her mother had gone to another clinic. Maria finally called her uncle, who took them home with him.
By 10:00, Angela's family was frantic, and Celia took Maria to the clinic to look for the missing woman. When they arrived, they saw Angela's car. Maria jumped out of her aunt's pickup truck and ran to the car. There she saw her mother lying on the ground.
Maria asked two women from the clinic, who were standing nearby, what had happened to her mother, and they told her, "She's dead." Sobbing, Maria clung to and kissed her mother while the two women from the clinic told Celia that a man had shoved Angela from a car and they were picking her up. One of the women, 33-year-old Alicia Ruiz Hanna, who operated the facility, told Maria that her mother had just come knocking on the door, then collapsed.
Celia put her sister's stiffened body in the back of her truck and flagged down a policeman, who led her and Maria to a hospital. There, Celia was told that her sister had been dead for several hours.
After a prolonged investigation, and Hanna's jailhouse conversion to Christianity, the full story finally emerged. Hanna, who had been passing herself off as a doctor and performing abortions at the facility, had given Angela an injection to induce abortion. Angela stopped breathing, and staffers attempted to revive her. One of them even tried to call 911, but Hanna told her employee, "No, I'll save her -- we'll get in trouble" and hung up the phone because she feared that she would go to jail and lose her children if it was discovered that she was running the clinic illegally. She and the other woman had planned to put Angela's stiffening body into the trunk of her own car and abandon the vehicle in Tijuana.
Hanna's clinic was tied up with abortionist Nicholas George Braemer. Hanna had originally used doctors to perform the abortions but eventually started doing them herself as a cost-cutting measure.
In December 1994, Hanna was convicted of second-degree murder for Angela's death. She was sentenced to 16 years to life.
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Dr. Reginald Sharpe has a history of malpractice, including the death of a 26-year-old patient on January 19, 2008. After poking around online I learned her name and will refer to her as "Carla Colbert." Life Site News reported that Sharpe had perforated Carla's uterus, and once the instruments were inside her pelvic cavity had managed to cut a uterine blood vessel and lacerate her intestines and her liver. According to her death certificate, the fatal abortion was performed on January 11. She died at St. John Hospital in Detroit.
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