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PITTSBURGH - An autopsy on a woman's body found in an apartment linked to a mystery newborn baby found that the woman's uterus was cut open, authorities said Saturday.

The body was found Friday in an apartment of another woman who showed up at a hospital with a newborn she falsely claimed was hers.

Investigators were trying to determine the dead woman's identity, how she died and whether she was the mother of the baby that Andrea Curry-Demus allegedly told police she bought for $1,000.

The victim appeared to have been dead for about two days before she was found, Allegheny County Medical Examiner Karl Williams said in a statement.

The woman's hands and feet were bound with duct tape, and her face was covered with a plastic material that had also been secured with duct tape. A placenta was recovered at the apartment.

The medical office would not elaborate on what was meant by "evidence of partial evisceration that included opening of the uterus."

Pathologist Cyril Wecht, who previously served as the county's coroner but did not participate in the autopsy, said evisceration means to cut into the abdomen and remove organs and tissues. "Obviously, they did so to get to the baby," he said.

Curry-Demus, 38, of suburban Wilkinsburg, showed up at West Penn Hospital in Pittsburgh on Thursday with a newborn whose umbilical cord was still attached, police said. Tests later proved she was not the mother, despite her claims to the contrary, police said.

Curry-Demus was charged with child endangerment and dealing in infant children. She has been jailed until she posts $10,000 bond and undergoes a psychiatric exam.

In the early 1990s, Curry-Demus pleaded guilty to charges relating to abducting a baby and stabbing a pregnant woman in a plot to steal her unborn baby, a newspaper reported.

The jail wouldn't say whether Curry-Demus had a lawyer, and a message left for a lawyer who previously represented her was not immediately returned.

The woman's body was found Friday after reporters called authorities about a foul odour coming from inside Curry-Demus' apartment. Police had been at the building Thursday night, but did not enter that apartment, Wilkinsburg police Chief Ophelia Coleman said. A relative of Curry-Demus had led them to another apartment, she said.

Curry-Demus had said she was pregnant and had a baby shower, friends and relatives said.

In 1990, Curry-Demus, then known as Andrea Curry, was accused of stabbing a Wilkinsburg woman in an alleged plot to steal the woman's infant.

A day after the stabbing, Curry-Demus snatched a three-week-old baby girl from Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, according to court records reviewed by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. The baby was in the hospital to be treated for meningitis and the girl's 16-year-old mother had gone home for the night when Curry-Demus took the child, court records say. The baby was found unharmed with Curry-Demus at her home the next day.

Curry-Demus pleaded guilty in 1991 to various charges stemming from both incidents and was sentenced to three to 10 years in prison. She was paroled in August 1998 and began serving 10 years of probation, the Tribune-Review reported.