KINGSTON, JAMAICA—On Clifton Rd., in the impoverished inner-city of Jamaica’s capital, Stephanie and Alphanso Warren’s home was a physical expression of their reclusiveness.

Alphanso built walls within walls inside their small yard, creating a maze of rusted, corrugated zinc. They kept their front gate locked at all times and entered their home by climbing through a hidden opening in the back.

They were “like a nation to themselves,” said neighbour Courtney Boothe.

The barricades increased in late October — walls grew higher and reinforced with planks of wood — around the same time the Warrens’ 2-year-old son, Joshua, seemed to disappear. He no longer hung from Alphanso’s shoulders on walks to the store; his familiar crying was not heard.

In these densely packed streets, the popular toddler’s absence was conspicuous, and neighbours grew concerned.

Calls to the police proved fruitless. Frustration boiled over.

On Jan. 15, a mob tore through the barricades and stormed the Warren house.

But as soon as they found what they were looking for, the crowd scrambled out, sick and panicked.

“Organs are liquefied, blackened and dissolved,” a preliminary post-mortem report would read. “Dead maggots present ... Age: around 2yrs.”

Namishay Clarke, the neighbour who first called police, shook her head. “We tried,” she said. “We tried.”

Concern for that child, whose body was discovered so hideously mummified and stuffed inside a suitcase began long before neighbours grew suspicious, long before they found out the Warrens once had an 8-month-old daughter who was abandoned in a Toronto stairwell and had three other children taken from them by the courts.

But a gap in communication between child welfare agencies meant the Jamaican authorities were never made aware of the couple’s past troubles with the law.

Stephanie Warren, the Toronto-born mother with a bachelor of science degree from the University of Toronto, and Alphanso Warren, the immigrant father who came to Canada to start a new life, insist they have raised their children the way God intended.

“I have done nothing wrong,” Stephanie told the Star Thursday in an exclusive interview from inside the Fort Augusta women’s prison in Jamaica.

But as they tried to secure their place in heaven, Stephanie and Alphanso Warren may have become the parents from hell.

“That unborn child is in danger.”

Crown prosecutor Kathleen MacDonald made the foreboding statement before the beginning of the Warrens’ Toronto trial for the abandonment of the child who became known as “Baby Angelica.” While both faced charges, Stephanie had become pregnant with the couple’s fifth child.

That child is now dead, though the cause is undetermined and Jamaican police have yet to lay any blame.

The Warrens have been charged with concealing the death and failing to bury the body, so they are once again behind a fortified barrier, though separate from each other in the jail.

Baby Angelica, who was discovered face down, bruised and with blood dripping from her mouth in a frigid North York stairwell, was the youngest of the Warrens’ children believed to have suffered abuse.

Three other children — two daughters and one son, all under 5 — were taken out of their care following the couple’s arrest.

Alphanso was charged with three counts of failing to provide the necessities of life to those children, deemed “extremely, extremely thin” after physical examinations. They were so malnourished doctors were concerned for their brain development. All three were described as “emotionally flat.”

Stephanie had her own history with Children’s Aid. By the time she married Alphanso, she’d already had two children, both of whom were apprehended by Children’s Aid.

“(Alphanso) said the government in Canada took the other babies, so he didn’t want this baby to be taken away, so he came back to Jamaica,” said Patricia Smith-Bell, a neighbour, recalling a conversation with Alphanso soon after he arrived in Kingston in 2009.

From its beginning, the Warrens’ union has revolved around religion.

It was Leslieville’s Church of the God of Prophecy that brought them together. Stephanie’s parents met Alphanso at the Orthodox Christian church, which was then located at Queen St. E. and Pape Ave. They invited Alphanso to Sunday dinner at their home to meet their daughter, Stephanie told the Star.

“He knew my parents, my brothers, my whole family before me,” she said.

Born and raised in a poor neighbourhood in Kingston, Alphanso Washington Warren (whose name is spelled Alphonso by Jamaican police) arrived in Canada in October 1994, just after his 17th birthday. He and his older brother left their four other siblings to join their father in Canada.

Once in Toronto, Alphanso worked odd jobs: shipping and receiving, maintenance work for a Caribbean store and as a baker, a skill he brought from Jamaica.

His soon-to-be wife, then called Stephanie Thompson, was studying at the University of Toronto. She earned a psychology degree, and in 2003 worked full-time as a collections officer. Residents of her family’s upper middle class east Scarborough neighbourhood say Stephanie lived off and on at her parents’ large red-brick home while she was a student.

After dating for several years, Stephanie and Alphanso married in 2002.

But something changed in the Thompson family’s opinion of Alphanso between the time they first brought him home to dinner and when he and Stephanie became engaged. Stephanie’s parents did not approve of the relationship and broke ties with their daughter, a decision Stephanie calls “hypocritical.”

“After she get married, everything fell apart,” said Margaret Lindo, one of Stephanie’s Jamaican cousins.

Members of Stephanie’s family refused to comment for this story.

The exclusion from family only bolstered their attachment to each other, and as their bond hardened, so did their isolation.

“I found the couple to be very tight-knit,” said Gina Da Fonte, the Toronto defence lawyer for Alphanso in 2009. “Theirs is a bond that’s very strong. More so than I’ve seen in other relationships.”

In Jamaica, Stephanie would tell neighbours that she, Alphanso and Joshua “are one.”

Some media reports have suggested Alphanso dominated Stephanie, forcing her to mistreat her children and sequestering her from the outside world, but Da Fonte and others say that’s not the case. “Stephanie has a very strong personality. She’s not someone you can bully.”

Once together, the Warrens closed themselves off to the outside world, focusing on their immediate family and their religion, which Stephanie told the Star was based in Christianity, but not governed by a particular denomination. “I believe in Jesus Christ,” she said. “I believe in the Bible.”

By the time they were implicated in the Baby Angelica case, the Warrens had shut out most family and had few, if any, friends.

“They weren’t about the secular world,” said Da Fonte. “They weren’t the social type, it was (about) their immediate family and being at home with their children. TV, music, being out with friends, they weren’t like that.”

Andy Manoli, the superintendent at the building where the Warrens lived prior to their arrest in Toronto, called them recluses, and said neither one was employed. The only interaction they had with others was to proselytize, he said.

“They would try to preach to us about Christianity, and that you have to be healthy and clean to go to heaven and all that kind of stuff,” he said. “They’d never open the curtains, they would just have a little slit in the curtain and peep outside and then close it again.”

This continued when they moved to Jamaica.

“They were very secretive,” said one of Alphanso’s older sisters, who asked not to be named. The woman lived next door to him in Kingston, and looks after their mentally ill mother; but she admitted even she knew very little about her brother. “They kept to themselves.”

The couple’s isolation and paranoia was fervent. They refused conventional medicine and evaded authorities of all kinds.

Alphanso delivered at least two of the couple’s children by himself, and claimed to have delivered them all.

OHIP records from 2009 show none of the kids, all under 5 at the time, had received medical attention since April 2006.

In Jamaica, police had to be called to enforce Baby Joshua’s mandatory first inoculations, according to neighbours who said the boy did not receive any subsequent medical attention or vaccines.

“Once you talked to them about anything legal, you weren’t welcome at their house,” Clarke said.

The Warrens’ extreme religious practices are also the cause of the children’s malnourishment, according to court records.

“The Warrens are of very strict religious beliefs that limit their dietary requirements,” reads the agreed facts entered into evidence on April 16, 2009. There are “a number of foods that they do not eat for a number of reasons, and that has obviously been factored into (the necessities of life) charges.”

The exact details of their diet are not given, but Da Fonte told the Star they consumed no dairy, and all junk food was prohibited.

According to Toronto police officers who entered their apartment, the Warrens’ refrigerator and cupboards were stocked with beans, sugar, flour and juice.

They were also obsessed with their children’s cleanliness.

Keith Moxley, lead investigator in the Baby Angelica case, testified at the preliminary inquiry that their apartment was pristine when he entered to arrest Alphanso in May 2008, following a DNA sample proving he was the baby’s father.

“The floors were spotless,” Moxley said. Alphanso asked the officers to remove their shoes. When they refused, he brought out a carpet for the officers to stand on.

“He had explained to me that he wanted us to stand on the carpet because ... his children played on the floor, and he wanted to keep the floor clean.”

This description stands in marked contrast to the decrepit home in which the couple were living in Jamaica.

A Jamaican prosecutor told a Kingston court on Tuesday that when the Warrens were arrested earlier this month, their home was entirely empty. “No furniture, no food.”

It currently sits abandoned and derelict.

Poverty certainly played a role in the Warrens’ living conditions. As in Canada, the family had no steady income in Jamaica.

Clarke, the neighbour who called police, said although the child’s body was gruesome, she was not surprised it was in a suitcase.

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“The baby was already living in the suitcase before it was dead. That was the baby’s crib.”

Clarke and others say they tried to give charity to the family, but were refused.

“They wanted to live like that,” Clarke said.

In Toronto, the children were afraid of their parents, said Manoli. “They were being disciplined more than normal.”

After she was discovered in the stairwell, Baby Angelica was found to have suffered cuts and bruises on several parts of her body “consistent with the child being struck,” according to court transcripts.

When apprehended by Children’s Aid shortly after their arrest in Toronto in 2008, the Warrens’ two eldest children also had marks on their torsos.

Stephanie Warren admitted to the Star that her husband used a belt to discipline her children, but they were not beaten or malnourished.

“Anyone who knows me knows that I love my children.”

Indeed, perhaps the strangest thing about the Warrens is the impression they have left on many people.

“They seemed nice. Very nice,” said Manoli.

“I found them very easygoing, very friendly — not the way that they are generally portrayed,” said Da Fonte.

And while they failed to provide their children with proper nutrition, they met other basic needs. When they were pulled over for suspicious driving in Guelph — the incident that ultimately led to their arrest — the children were tucked safely into three child safety seats. Their last apartment was equipped with two high chairs.

“He’s not a violent person,” said Andrew Duffus, who said he was a friend of Alphanso’s since childhood.

“He love his son.”

The Warrens, it seems, believe in the word of God, in each other, and little else.

In 2008, when confronted with DNA proof that he was Baby Angelica’s father, Alphanso scoffed at the evidence. “I don’t believe in science.”

Two days after Joshua’s body was discovered, Patricia Smith-Bell, the boy’s godmother, placed a Bible in the room where the suitcase was found and opened it to Psalm 91:

“You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the plague that destroys at midday. A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you. You will only observe with your eyes and see the punishment of the wicked.”

She said she did this to protect the child’s spirit from “wicked things.”

Given their shocking parenting record — six kids taken into child custody, children so thin their lives were in danger, and a conviction for abandoning their infant daughter in a frigid Toronto stairwell — there has been an international chorus of outrage since the Warrens’ arrest.

How was this allowed to happen? How was a child allowed to die?

Claudette Crawford-Brown, a child advocate, radio host and professor of social work in Jamaica, said social service providers from different countries need to collaborate and share information as migration increases and “the world becomes smaller.”

“These problems go beyond borders,” she said. “In the same way that you have a war on crime that goes across borders ... we have to do the same thing at the level of social services.”

Had Canadian authorities alerted their Jamaican counterparts, she said, perhaps interventions could have been made to protect Joshua.

But Children’s Aid Societies do not properly communicate within Canada, let alone internationally.

International communication of child-abuse history is “largely non-existent,” says Nicholas Bala, a Queen’s University law professor recently in Jamaica to lecture about child protection. Canadian authorities are quick to keep track of Canadian residents who commit criminal offences in the country before leaving, he points out, adding that the same should happen in this case.

“If someone stole from a Canadian bank, we’d follow up in Jamaica.”

There is a mandatory system of communication within Ontario societies, said Caroline Newton, spokeswoman for the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies.

There is also a system that allows provinces to communicate child abuser history if that person moves out of the province, though that is not mandatory.

The Ministry of Children and Youth Services confirmed there is no legislation requiring Children’s Aid Societies to share information with foreign governments.

Rob Thompson, spokesman for the Toronto CAS, where Baby Angelica was cared for after she was abandoned, said logistics make the task of alerting other countries of prior child abuse difficult.

“It’s hard to understand how one jurisdiction would alert another if they had no idea who was moving where and when,” he said.

But something must change, said Bala, since parents who lose their children tend to have other children.

“It’s like, ‘We lost that child but this time we’re going to succeed.’ When in reality, they haven’t learned anything.”

Now the Warrens are locked up in separate Jamaican prisons, awaiting their next court appearance on Feb. 21.

While articulate and coherent throughout Thursday’s interview in the prison courtyard, Stephanie Warren seemed entirely unaffected by her current situation. She showed no signs of remorse, regret or fear.

She and her husband have been ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation before the case proceeds.

On Clifton Rd., neighbours are left feeling a combination of shock, grief and anger. Despite the Warrens’ reclusiveness, residents say they still became attached to baby Joshua.

“He looked like the Gerber baby, a poster baby,” said Sean Williams.

Smith-Bell describes Joshua’s features as resembling those which earned Baby Angelica her nickname.

“His cheeks, dem fat; his eyes full. Pretty, pretty.”