In recent years, improvements in genetic genealogy have allowed investigators to find the women who gave birth to “Baby Does” – babies who have been abandoned.
This has led to solving cold cases and sometimes, decades later, significant jail time for the mothers, which some say is controversial.
Isabelle Taft wrote about the technology for The New York Times and centers on a case in Medina County, Texas.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Your reporting centers on this case in Medina County, Texas. Tell us what happened.
Isabelle Taft: After the baby was discovered in 2004, the Medina County Sheriff’s Office invested a lot of time and resources into trying to identify the baby’s mother, trying to solve the crime.
They were, from the beginning, convinced that the baby had been born alive, that they were investigating a homicide. The basis for that was a pretty controversial technique called the lung flow test, which is widely regarded as not accurate.
So today there are some questions about whether the baby actually was born alive.
But, you know, police knocked doors all up and down the road. They talked to everybody they could think of. They collected DNA samples from county fair workers who had been in town at the time. They even staked out the cemetery where the baby was born on the anniversary of her death thinking maybe someone would come by and they could question that person.
But the case went totally cold, until a few years ago, some of the investigators decided to try to use this new technique, forensic investigative genetic genealogy. And that was ultimately what enabled them to identify the baby’s mother and eventually charge her with murder.
Tell us how the DNA testing works and how common it is.
[With] traditional DNA testing, you need to get a direct match in the federal database of DNA, which is called CODIS. You need to have a direct map from the suspect. They have to already be in that database.With forensic genetic genealogy, you can start with any sort of sample, and you plug it into commercial DNA databases and you might identify, say, a second or third cousin of the victim.
The police in these cases may start with a distant array of cousins, and then they use genetic genealogy techniques – or really just genealogy techniques, including public records, census data, newspaper clips, that kind of thing – to trace out the family tree. And then they can use that process to eventually zero in on who is the baby’s mother.
And since it first became prominent after 2018, it had been used to solve more than 700 cold case homicides and sexual assault cases. So that’s not just Baby Doe cases.
I found that it had been used to solve roughly 40 Baby Doe cases. It’s not terribly common, but it is increasingly used.
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Do we know what happened to the women, and why did they abandon the babies? I’m sure there are different reasons, but why didn’t they look for other options to surrender the babies?
So in terms of the legal outcomes there is a really wide range. Some women have been charged with murder, convicted, sentenced to decades in prison.
Other women, after law enforcement identify them, law enforcement concludes that they do not have enough evidence to charge the woman with murder and the statute of limitations has passed for other charges, and so the woman is not charged at all.
And in terms of why women did not take other avenues to surrender them, I think we really tend to overestimate, first of all, how well-known things like the Safe Haven boxes are. The Washington Post did some great reporting out of Texas about how in Texas, the state has really not funded any kind of public awareness campaign. So people don’t know that this is an option.
But another factor is that many of these women told police that they did not know that they were pregnant. And so, by the time they go into labor, they had not gone through any kind of mental preparation to think about what they would do in that moment. And then many of them said the baby was not born alive, that they believed the baby had been stillborn.
And there are a lot of questions, of course, around what actually happened, but the forensic science that we have generally is not very reliable at determining whether a baby was born alive or was not born alive.
You report there’s some controversy around these methods. Why?
One of the big factors is that in other countries, the way the legal system treats cases where women kill or abandon their babies is very different. And they have separate laws for infanticide that are based on the idea that these cases often involve a specific mental health issue; they may involve stigma [or] lack of social supports.
And so in the United States there’s some people who feel that charging these women with murder is not right, first of all, because it can be difficult to determine what actually happened – was the baby born alive?
But second, because there’s an argument that these cases are not homicides where someone decided willfully to murder another person – that’s the argument – but rather, were moments of total desperation and panic on the part of these women.
