Imagine adopting a little girl, and it turns out that the child is actually a psychopathic, murderous adult who disguises herself as a child to lower her victim’s guards. If that sounds familiar, it’s because that was the plot of the 2009 psychological horror movie Orphan, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra.
Orphan tells the story of the Coleman family and their newly adopted Russian daughter, Esther, who tries to kill the family. In the film, Esther is a 33-year-old Estonian woman named Leena Klammer, a violent serial killer who was born with a hormonal disorder that stunted her growth and caused what is described as “proportional dwarfism”.
The film is, of course, a work of fiction, which is why it stunned the country when it suddenly crossed into reality with the case of an Eastern European child with dwarfism, Natalia Grace, who it was claimed was an adult who was trying to kill her family. Natalia claims she is a child, but who is telling the truth?
Natalia Grace Barnett
The individual at the center of this case is Natalia Grace Barnett. Natalia was born (according to her birth certificate, orphanage entry records, and her mother) on September 4, 2003, in the southern Ukrainian town of Mykolaiv to Anna Volodymyrivna and Vadim Gava.
Natalia Grace was born with a rare kind of dwarfism known as spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita. On October 3, 2003, Natalia was surrendered to an orphanage in Ukraine by her parents due to their inability to provide her with the extensive medical care and surgeries she would need throughout her life.
In 2008, at age four and a half, Natalia Grace was adopted and brought to the US by Gary and Dyan Ciccone in New Hampshire. For unknown reasons, the Ciccones surrendered Natalia Grace back to a US orphanage in April of 2010. At this point, six-year-old Natalia is adopted by Kristine and Michael Barnett from Indiana, and her life is changed forever.
Natalia Grace was adopted by the Barnett family, who wanted to adopt someone “who would never have received love without them.” At the time of her adoption, the Barnetts were well known in the autism community due to their son Jacob, who was a child prodigy in physics.
Kristine Barnett wrote a book about how she raised her genius son and established a foundation in Indiana providing sports programs for autistic children. Jacob was enrolled in graduate school at the age of 10 and had been recognized for his role in the advancement of theoretical physics.
Michael Barnett was a businessman and involved in real estate. The family seemed like a wonderful place for Natalia to grow up and be supported by parents who understood the unique challenges of having a disabled child.
The Barnetts adopted Natalia in May 2010. Michael Barnett claims that the family received a call from an adoption agency in Florida that told them they had 24 hours to decide if they wanted Natalia or she would be given up to state care.
The couple chose to move forward with the adoption, and 24 hours after receiving a call, Natalia Grace was now Natalia Grace Barnett. Excited about the new family member, the Barnetts went to Disney World, but that evening, they claimed they discovered something suspicious about their new daughter.
The Barnetts allege that Kristine noticed that Natalia Grace had “full pubic hair” at only six and a half years old. Instead of calling the adoption agency to ask about the discovery of secondary sex features in a child, they took the girl home with the rest of the family.
Accusations
From 2010 to 2012, Kristine and Michael Barnett became convinced Natalia was mentally ill, dangerous, and was trying to kill them. The little girl was accused of many extreme actions, such as having her period and hiding it from them, putting cleaning chemicals into Kristine’s coffee, jumping out of moving cars, hoarding knives and hiding them in her bed, and even standing at the foot of/over the Barnetts in bed with a butcher knife, threatening to kill them.
The parents also claimed that Natalia deliberately threw the Barnett son’s toys and homework out of the car on the highway to make them run out and be hit by a car. It is worth noting that none of Barnett’s three sons were ever hit by a car, and no incidents of this type were ever reported.
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Buty the list of accusations kept growing. Natalia was accused of telling Kristine and Michael that she was trying to kill them, and that she had been diagnosed as “a psychopath, sociopath, and a schizophrenic”. After they claimed Natalia tried to shove/drag Kristine into an electric fence, she had to be sent to several mental health inpatient centers due to her being violent and homicidal.
While at the centers it was claimed she told people she was not a child, and would try to solicit sex from adult male patients at the mental health centers. Finally, they concluded, she was unable to understand or speak Ukrainian, and was in fact an adult pretending to be a child. Just like in the movie.
Does that striking similarity just seem a little too coincidental? It is important to note that during the two years in which all of these allegations were said to occur, the Barnetts never reported to authorities that their daughter was an adult pretending to be a child, never pressed charges against Natalia Grace for these multiple murder attempts, never contacted the adoption agency or tried to pursue litigation against them for fraud, never sought to have Natalia Grace, who they claim was a legal adult, deported back to Ukraine for falsifying her identity as a minor, or sought medical testing such as having an estradiol test or a progesterone hormonal profile/assessment done to confirm their daughter did have a menstrual cycle.
Michael and Kristine Barnett did however take Natalia Grace to be assessed by multiple doctors to try to determine the girl’s age. There is also a possibility that the adoption agency lied about Natalia’s age to make her more appealing to adopting couples.
Sadly, infants and young children are more likely to be adopted than older children and teens, so some adoption agencies will age a child a few years younger than their actual age to increase the chances of them being adopted. However, doctors who examined Natalia in 2010, 2011, and 2012 claimed that the girl was between 8 and 11 years old. But what happened next sounded like it was ripped from the pages of an even darker Hollywood movie script.
Change of Age and Abandonment
In 2012, the Barnetts petitioned the Marion County Superior Court to legally change Natalia Grace’s birth year from 2003 to 1989. The petition was filed as an “ex-parte” petition, which means a petition in which one of the parties to the legal action is omitted from participating in the due process of the law.
This meant eight-year-old Natalia Grace was excluded from the legal decision to change her age from eight to twenty-two. The Barnetts claimed that by having Natalia Grace’s age changed, she would be eligible for state-provided services that she would have otherwise been unable to access (such as low-cost health insurance, food stamps, and disability checks). The Barnetts rented Natalia an apartment, paid three months of rent in advance, and then left their child, who until recently had been considered an eight-year-old, to live alone.
While Natalia Grace was signed up for social security and disability checks as now she was considered a legal adult, she couldn’t go pick up any checks. She couldn’t drive a car to get groceries or household supplies, was a little person living in an apartment that was entirely unsuitable to her size and reportedly had to have people help her wash her laundry because she couldn’t reach the washer and dryer at the apartment complex.
As a “legal adult,” child services could no longer be called to investigate Natalia Grace’s well-being, help with providing medical care, or rescue the child from her current situation. Natalia had come to the Barnetts with a detailed list and timeline of surgeries she would need during her life, and now that she was an adult, the Barnetts had no legal requirement to proceed with medical treatments that would improve Natalia’s quality of life.
Investigation Discovery (ID) produced a documentary about Natalia Grace called The Curious Case of Natalia Grace. The documentary interviewed Natalia’s neighbors about their interactions with the child.
Neighbors reported that Natalia would introduce herself as being 22/23 years old – after all, everyone had told her she was this age. Many made statements that Natalia Grace also looked unkempt, would wear the same clothes for days to weeks at a time, smelled bad, and showed signs of a lack of personal hygiene.
She also would go to the neighbors’ houses uninvited, enter people’s homes without their knowledge, and call neighbors nonstop. Anyone who would have interacted with Natalia would have realized that if she were 22 or 23 years old, like she claimed, she lacked basic social skills, had no understanding of boundaries, and could not perform basic hygienic practices.
Even if she was an adult, she was obviously unable to care for herself or live independently as a disabled person. Michael would occasionally bring groceries to Natalian, but neighbors reported that Natalia would always come looking for food or would enter their homes and eat their food uninvited.
In the documentary, there is cell phone footage provided by Michael Barnett of him talking to Natalia about not speaking to a child services agent who had previously investigated the Barnetts before Natalia was re-aged. In the footage, Michael tells Natalia Grace that he deleted the woman’s phone number so Natalia couldn’t text or call her, was told to stop talking to the agent and that the agent couldn’t do anything because Natalia was an adult.
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It is worth mentioning that photos taken of Natalia Grace before and after her age were legally changed, the way the child dressed drastically changed. In pictures of Natalia before the re-aging, she was dressed in appropriate children’s clothes, but afterward, photos show her dressing in basics like an adult would dress. Some felt it looked like an attempt by the Barnetts to make Natalia Grace look older.
After an entire year of living at the apartment alone, Natalia’s landlord informed the Barnetts that she was not permitted to rent or live there again, which forced the Barnetts to relocate Natalia to a second apartment to continue to live alone. Rather than finding an apartment in the same county the Barnetts lived in before moving to Canada, they set her up in Tippecanoe County in Lafayette, Indiana, which was an hour away from Hamilton County in Westfield, Indiana.
It is believed that the Barnetts moved Natalia an hour away from where they lived because nobody would know Natalia or her family. After being set up in another apartment, the Barnetts relocated to Canada in order for Jacob to pursue his Ph.D. at the Perimeter Institute for Advanced Studies in Ontario, Canada. Following their move to Canada in 2013, the Barnetts cut off all contact with Natalia Grace.
Shortly after being abandoned in Lafayette, Indiana, Natalia met Antwon and Cynthia Man, who initially met the girl because they noticed she appeared to need help living alone. The Mans invited Natalia Grace to live with them and their multiple adopted children, and since 2013, they have been raising Natalia.
The Mans reported Michael and Kristine Barnett (who divorced shortly after relocating to Canada) for child abandonment, but due to Natalia Grace being listed legally as an adult, the Barnetts were arrested and charged with the neglect of a dependent. After their arrest, the Barnetts began making public interviews with the press, were featured on TV shows, and continued to claim that they did nothing wrong and Natalia was a crazy, murderous adult trying to gain the sympathy of others by pretending to be a child.
Even though it seemed clear that Natalia had been the victim of neglect by her legal guardians (either as a child or as a disabled adult), Michael Barnett was found not guilty, and Katherine’s charges were dropped before she stood trial.
What is the Truth?
What makes the wild story of Natalia Grace so complicated is that her age is the subject of debate. Natalia’s mother in Ukraine, Anna Gava, was located in 2022, and she provided birth records for her daughter, a DNA test, and her own birth records, which list Anna Gava’s year of birth as 1979.
If Natalia had been born in 1989, as the Barnetts claimed, Anna Gava would have had to give birth to her daughter at ten years of age. While there are news reports now and then about young children being parents, the suggestion that Anna Gava gave birth that young is as insane as it sounds.
With Natalia’s birth records confirming her year of birth was 2003, the Barnetts abandoned her to live alone as a minor and have not faced any consequences for their actions. In the ID documentary, while neighbors and staff from a mental health facility Natalia was sent to for nine weeks (and admitted into the adult unit rather than the pediatric unit where she belonged) spoke out (and violating HIPAA) to paint Natalia in a negative light, others in the documentary have a very different view of events that had occurred in this case.
Natalia was accused of pushing and trying to drag Kristine Barnett into an electric fence at a dairy farm (which is what led to her being placed in a psychiatric facility). Staff from the dairy farm shared that the fence was not electrified and Natalia was not acting upset or aggressive when staff met with first responders at the farm.
Instead, it was allegedly Kristine who was upset, aggressive, and dramatic. This incident alone is rather ridiculous considering Natalia was much smaller and lighter than Kristine, is disabled, has two clubbed feet which make walking difficult for the girl, and has dwarfism; the idea that Natalia dragged or pushed Kristine Barnett into an electric fence in an attempt to murder her seems almost physically impossible.
All proof that the Barnetts have provided to the media of their claims is one report from one doctor saying that Natalia was an adult because her bones stopped growing, which only happens in adults. Natalia certainly has a rare form of dwarfism, no matter what her age: her bones and growth patterns differ from those of children her age or adults.
The Barnetts provided home videos of Natalia admitting to trying to harm the Barnett family, which was taken by Kristine, who has been accused of physically abusing Natalia. Watching the videos, Natalia comes across almost as if she is being coached and not understanding exactly what she was saying.
Now that Natalia is a legal adult, at 20 years old (or 31 years old like the Barnetts claim), she will be participating in a second ID documentary about her called The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks which will air on January 1, 2024. Natalia has only spoken once publicly about her story in an episode of Dr. Phil when she was 19 years old, and she claimed she was not an adult masquerading as a young child and only wanted to have a family who loved her.
Hopefully, the truth will come out, and Natalia Grace can receive the justice she deserves.
Top Image: The Barnetts, adoptive parents of Natalia Grace, claimed she was fourteen years older than they had thought. Source: Rijksmuseum / Public Domain.
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