This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Bruske, Stacey Cole and Todd Michaels.

Let's talk about another case. The Lankin-Snelling case. This one showed up in a college apartment, a young woman, a cheerleader, giving birth alone in the night, then hiding her newborn baby's body in a closet.

Another tragedy in a different way than the David one. Two different tragedies, some same kind

of psychological thread. Both show what happens when fear and denial overpower reason, when the young brain, not yet wired for long-term

thinking, clings to one irrational belief. If no one sees it, it isn't real. Shavon Scott is with us

digging into the psychology of the concealment, how fear, shame, and underdeveloped impulse control can lead young

people to make decisions that destroy their lives in an instant. When you look at a case like

Lincoln-Snellings, a 21-year-old college student giving birth alone and then hiding the baby,

what psychological forces do you see colliding in this moment?

The first thing that came to mind when I read about Lake and Snelling's case was the idea of

very likely what we call a cryptic pregnancy.

And this is a very, it sounds very strange, particularly to most of us who have ever been

pregnant.

But, and I do have data on this one, one in 500 women get to their fifth month of pregnancy,

so about 20-some weeks, without any awareness that they're pregnant.

Now, one in 2,500 get all the way to birth without being aware that they're pregnant.

And this feels so hard to believe that you could be walking around eight or nine months

pregnant and not know that you're pregnant.

And there are some psychological things going along with that.

There's denial, you know, again,

going back to magical thinking, if I don't want it to be true, it's just not going to be true.

And then people carry, depending on their body type and where the placenta is located and,

...