The Daily Item, Sunbury, PA

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July 20, 2009

Police hope to solve cold case with new testing

By Rick Dandes

STONINGTON — The identity of a murdered newborn, found in 1983 wrapped in a trash bag and dumped alongside Route 61 between Stonington and Snydertown, has baffled police investigators for 26 years, but new and highly accurate DNA matching techniques are giving authorities some hope that the mystery of the girl’s identity and that of the person who killed her might be solved.

State troopers and Northumberland County Coroner James F. Kelley last week exhumed the remains of the unnamed baby, believing they could extract enough usable samples for use in mitochondrial DNA testing. The relatively new procedure can analyze DNA to find a maternal family history. Tests also can be performed to identify ethnicity and living relatives.

With a good sample, Kelley explained, police might be able to match the mitochondrial DNA to DNA in a national mitochondrial data base and find the baby’s mother, grandmother or other female relatives.

“We made the case for exhumation to President Judge Robert B. Sacavage, with the purpose of extracting better DNA samples,” Kelley said.

“After all these years, I finally want to see this mystery solved,” he said. “I wasn’t the county coroner in 1983, but any case like this involving children haunts me. A baby should have a name, and the name shouldn’t be Jane Doe.”

Twenty-six years ago, the original autopsy, the ensuing investigation and all attempts to identify the murdered infant went nowhere.

It is known that the baby’s umbilical cord and placenta were attached to her body. The newborn had been placed in a brown paper bag, which then was put in a cloth bag and probably thrown out of a moving car, police surmised.

An autopsy determined that the baby was born alive, but died of suffocation.

The case was ruled a homicide.

The mother of the child was never found, and the baby eventually was buried in a pauper’s grave on county land near the Odd Fellows Cemetery, Shamokin.

Cpl. Curtis Cooke, of state police at Stonington, said: “We obviously want to solve this case. Eleven years ago, we exhumed the body for DNA testing but weren’t able to find out anything conclusively, given the state of the science.”

Those DNA tests failed because the samples had degraded, Kelley said. But the coroner held onto the samples anyway. The thinking likely was that testing techniques are getting better and more precise all the time.

Another reason DNA failed to identify the baby was that mitochondrial DNA testing was simply not a commonly used technique in police investigation back then, said internationally known forensic profiler Dean A. Wideman, of San Antonio, Texas.

“It wasn’t well known at the local level. The FBI used it, I know. But it wasn’t until after year 2000 that it became a more common police identifying technique,” he said.

Wideman, who often acts as a private consultant for the FBI and the U.S. Defense Department, explained that 10 years ago, police scientists “probably took the baby’s DNA and did nuclear DNA testing. Nuclear DNA is the most common DNA used in forensic examinations. But nuclear DNA is also susceptible to degradation over time. I’m not surprised they didn’t get positive results.”

“Mitochondrial DNA testing is less susceptible to degrading,” he said. “It’s less commonly found in cells, but it’s very precise. After 26 years, the newborn’s remains will consist of bones, but bones are a good source of mitochondrial DNA.

“Another problem for many smaller, local police forces is the cost of this kind of testing. Nuclear DNA testing might cost $100 to $150 per sample; mitochondrial DNA testing can cost up to $2,000 per sample.

“I’m guessing that the police have a lead they want to follow up on,” Wideman said. “If they’ve gone through the expense of exhumation and this kind of DNA testing, it’s usually not a fishing expedition.”

Cooke declined to comment on the investigation.

“I give all the credit to two of my officers, troopers Kevin Kearney and Richard Barnhall, for finding a forensic lab that would do mitochondrial testing,” the corporal said.

“This case is very active. It’s a priority case,” he said. “At the moment, the remains are where they should be, but I can’t tell you if, for example, the box has been opened and they are examining and testing right now. I’ve worked on cold cases before, but not ones 25 years old. And yet, we hope to solve the mystery.”

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