Seattle woman arrested 23 years after baby found dead in gas station trash can
SEATTLE (TCD) –
Seattle police arrested a 50-year-old woman whose baby was found in a trash can 23 years ago.
According to the Seattle Police Department, on November 20, 1997, a staff member at a gas station on the 8700 block of Lake City Way Northeast called the police after discovering the deceased baby in a trash can in the bathroom.
The Seattle Police Department opened a homicide investigation after the King County Medical Examiner found the child was born alive.
The baby was buried as a “Baby Boy Doe,” reports the Seattle Times.
Detectives arrest suspects 23 years after the death of a deceased newborn at the Lake City gas station: https://t.co/rmEWNSUZTn
– Seattle Police Dept. (@SeattlePD) March 11, 2021 @SeattlePD
At the time, the police were unable to identify the woman. They used a placental clot found at the crime scene as DNA evidence. They submitted the information to a government database, but no matches came back.
In 2018, Seattle Police Department detectives began investigating the case again. They obtained information from a genealogy website that matched the woman’s description and DNA from the gas station surveillance footage. The police performed an undercover operation and received a DNA sample that matched the sample in the state database.
According to the Seattle Times, California genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter was working on the case (she also helped crack the infamous Golden State Killer case). She made a list of possible names and the police used this to compare photos from the surveillance footage.
Investigators interviewed the 50-year-old woman, whom she did not publicly identify, and arrested her on March 11 and, according to Seattle police, booked her to King County Jail to investigate murder.
A spokesman for King County Attorney Dan Satterberg told the Times that the statute of limitations for manslaughter – three years – had expired. However, criminal murder does not have a statute of limitations.
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