Parker-Broderick surrogate takes stand in Ohio

ST. CLAIRSVILLE, Ohio - The woman who bore twin girls for Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick said Thursday that she was living in a West Virginia motel around the time a police chief is accused of breaking into her eastern Ohio home.

Michelle Ross, 26, testified that ultrasound photos, surrogacy files and tax information were gone when she returned, that someone had riffled through photos; and that a plaster cast of her abdomen from when she was pregnant with her own son was misplaced.

Ross' testimony came in the trial in Belmont County Common Pleas Court of suspended Police Chief Barry Carpenter of Martins Ferry, where Ross lived. He is accused of breaking into her home in May and then trying to sell items related to the pregnancy to paparazzi, with the help of Police Chief Chad Dojack of neighboring Bridgeport.

Ross said the surrogacy agency moved her to the motel in May, when she was eight to nine months pregnant and uncomfortable. She said she had been a surrogate once before and had moved to Ohio from Florida.

Ross said she was not living in the home when a celebrity photographer contacted her to tell her the chiefs and others were trying to sell her personal items.

When asked by a defense attorney why she wrote about her surrogacy on MySpace.com, Ross said she was allowed to discuss it but couldn't say for whom she was carrying.

Ross said the surrogacy agency moved her to a series of cabins after it became known that she was Parker's surrogate. She said she lived in a hotel in Wheeling, W.Va., with her dog, cats and a python just before giving birth, while her son stayed with relatives.

She said she later delivered the twins in an emergency cesarean section.

Earlier Thursday, prosecutors played audio tapes of an investigator's interview with Carpenter in which the chief said he entered the woman's home because he saw the basement door wide open.