Murder on the Mississippi
'This Was Cold-Blooded Murder,' Sheriff Says
By CHRIS FRANCESCANI
ABC News Law & Justice Unit
July 6, 2007 —
Three times in the last eight years, investigators have fished the body of a newborn from a lonely stretch of the Mississippi River in Minnesota, haunting detectives and residents in the area.
This week authorities announced a horrifying development: Two of the three children likely came from the same mother.
"To do it once, I think, society can understand," Goodhue County Sheriff Dean Albers told ABC News' Law & Justice Unit. "They won't condone it, but they can understand a desperate act by a young girl. To [kill] two children … we're just in a whole different situation."
Albers said authorities believed the first two children were thrown into the water alive within a day of their births. The scenario in the third child's death was harder to determine because the body remained in the water for several months after death. The third child — discovered in March — is believed to be of American-Indian descent, while the first two are Caucasian. A newborn girl was discovered in the river in 1999. What appears now to have been her brother was located in a nearby harbor in 2003.
'Cold Blooded Murder'
The case has pained even veteran investigators.
"What we have here with these first two children is cold-blooded murder," Albers said at a news conference this week. "If it was one child, you might see it as the act of a desperate mother, but what I think we have here is premeditated murder."
Police have tried unsuccessfully to match the DNA of the infants to nearly two dozen local women over the years. Now they are asking for the public's help.
In the first two cases, the babies' bodies were discovered with the umbilical cords still attached. While police theorize it was the mother who killed them, they cannot say for sure. They say DNA testing shows a more than 80 percent chance that one woman gave birth to the first two children, but they can't say for certain until they compare the results to a blood relative.
"We need your eyes and ears to help us find the person or people responsible for these deaths,'' Albers said at the news conference.
Multiple Neonaticide 'Rare'
Criminal forensic and psychiatric experts who spoke to ABC News said that they rarely saw cases where one mother killed two newborns.
"This is relatively rare and doesn't fit a pattern whatsoever," said Martin Williams, a veteran trial consultant with a doctoral degree in psychology from the University of California. Williams said that if it was, in fact, the mother that had killed the two children, it's possible that she suffered from either extreme postpartum psychosis, or that she had long-term mental problems.
"Postpartum psychosis can be a one-shot episode, and in that case the behavior can be completely out of character," Williams said, "but there are some people who have chronic psychotic problems that are exacerbated by postpartum [psychosis]. If there's a chronic mental illness, you could see how the circumstances could reoccur with another baby. The horrible thing [about postpartum psychosis] is that if the person is not psychotic later, they have full awareness of what they've done, the very same awareness that you and I have."
Phillip Resnick, a professor of psychiatry at Case Medical Center in Ohio, coined the term "neonaticide" in 1969 to differentiate between the killing of children in the first 24 hours of their life and filicide, the more general act of a parent killing a child. He provided expert psychiatric testimony for the defense in the Andrea Yates trial and for the government in the trials of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and "Unabomber" Theodore Kaczynski.
Resnick said the typical profile of a mother who commits neonaticide was a 19-year-old young woman, often unmarried, who may still live with her parents, and may not be able to face her parents' disappointment — both that she's had premarital sex and that she's become pregnant.
"Some may feel that they will literally be rejected from the house," he said.
Resnick, who treated a woman who killed two of her newborn children, said that such fears can become so overwhelming that the mother completely loses sight of what she is doing. He points to the remarkably difficult circumstances under which neonaticides often take place.
"These women deliver alone, without pain relief, and without crying out, for fear of discovery. Oftentimes the parents are in a different room in the house. Then [the mothers] manage to wipe up all the blood, dispose of the baby and do all of this unaided. In that sense, you can see how the women are so much more terrified of discovery than they are of actually taking a human life."
Resnick also points out how one undetected neonaticide could potentially lead to a second.
"The second [would] obviously be easier than the first, if they had successfully avoided detection the first time, and knew what to expect."
Resnick said that follow-up studies of women who commit neonaticide and are punished for it have an "extremely low" recidivism rate.
"I haven't seen any report where someone was convicted of neonaticide and then went and did it again," he said.
He said that some psychiatric problems could lead women to deny their pregnancies up until it was impossible to do so.
"Often these women don't prepare for the care of the infant — or the killing of the infant. When the reality is thrust upon them, they silence the intruder."
"These are not normally evil people," he said. "These are usually situational crises as opposed to the bad character of the mother."
Cory, Jamie & Abby: Laid to Rest
The mystery of the babies' identities continues to cast a pall over the river town of Red Wing, Minn.
Resident Jeanne Madtson gave birth to a stillborn daughter there 18 years ago.
After the body of the first baby was discovered in 1999, Madtson and her husband, Don, decided to name the child and bury her in their family plot. As each child has been discovered, the Madtson have held funerals for the babies and buried them.
"I didn't want them to be alone," Jeanne Madtson told ABC News. "I would have traded everything I have to have had a chance to have a child and here we have somebody for some reason, who gets to have two and throws them away. They didn't realize that a child is a gift from God."
Madtson named the children before they were buried: Cory for the baby girl discovered in 1999; Jamie, her apparent brother, found in 2003. Last month, they buried Abby, the child discovered in the river in March.
Anyone with information about the deaths of the three infants should contact the Goodhue County Sheriff's Department at (651) 385-3155 or through an anonymous tip line at 1-866-887-4357.