Photo: Getty Images
When Benita and Mark Cutter found a woman to carry their surrogate baby, they thought their dreams of parenthood were finally coming true.
They had been married for four years and knew that Benita, who was already a mum to two teens adopted during a previous marriage, was unable to fall pregnant herself.
Samantha Brown will be sentenced in February.
The couple travelled 730km from their home in Humberside to meet Samantha Brown, who they met over the internet after placing an ad for a surrogate.
They stayed with Brown and her partner, Karen Galashan, in the Scottish Highlands for four days. Mark Cutter provided a daily sperm sample for Brown, and weeks later, she told them she was pregnant.
In the months following the happy news, Benita, 49, and her husband, 32, paid Brown $17,000 for expenses including maternity clothes and travel.
That amount increased even further when Brown said she had lost her job due to "complications" in the pregnancy.
The excited parents-to-be eagerly awaited Brown's updates on hospital visits, pored over the scan images she sent them, and listened to stories about her antenatal classes.
But some things started to ring not quite true - and when Mark Cutter checked the scans, he realised they matched those on stock photo site Getty Images.
Then tragedy seemed to strike: days before the baby's due date, Brown was apparently in a car accident. The couple received texts sent from Brown's phone, supposedly from her partner, saying she was in an induced coma and had lost the baby.
They were then sent a photo of the apparently stillborn baby boy.
Already suspicious, the Cutters thought that the baby seemed to be sleeping, not stillborn. They also noted that the blanket was not a type used in hospitals.
When they called the hospital where Brown was supposedly a patient, they were told there was no record of her visit. That's when they called the police.
Last week the case was heard in Inverness Sheriff Court, where Brown admitted she had defrauded the couple. Her partner was also accused, but those charges were later dropped.
"Everything else had been tried by the couple and surrogacy was their last option," said Prosecutor Roderick Urquhart.
"It appears they were desperate for a child and perhaps consequently were a little gullible."
All the stories had been false: there had never been a baby, Brown hadn't been in a crash, and she had not lost her job.
"It would appear that the financial loss incurred by the Cutters paled almost into insignificance compared with the heartbreak, anguish and despair they suffered when they realised not only that they were not to become parents, but that they had been the victims of a calculated and callous fraud," said Urquhart.
"They had also told Mrs Cutter's other children about the surrogate pregnancy and they also had been looking forward to having a sibling."
Brown will be sentenced when the case returns to court in February. She is already in jail after an incident last year, in which she drunkenly shot her neighbour in the head with an air rifle while arguing about seagulls.
