I've always been a little wary of those DNA test kits that you can get from various companies. While I'd love to verify my own ancestry — supposedly mostly Scottish, French, and Native American — the idea of some company having my DNA on file just doesn't sit right with me. And this story that I'm about to share kind of reinforces my hesitation. While it's great that a cold case was solved and a murderer was brought to justice, the way that it happened is a little spooky to me. But I'll let you be the judge.
If you live in Michigan, you may be familiar with the "Baby Garnet" case. In the summer of 1997, the remains of a newborn were found inside a campground toilet at the Garnet Lake Campground in the Upper Peninsula’s Hudson Township. According to the Michigan attorney general, the baby was of a gestational age of 36-42 weeks, meaning it was at "term or near-term." An autopsy revealed that the baby died due to asphyxiation, but an investigation by the Mackinac County Sheriff’s Office and Michigan State Police led nowhere. The community rallied to pay for the child's burial in a local cemetery, and about 40 people attended the funeral.
Twenty-three-year-old Jenna Gerwatowski is one such Michigan resident who was familiar with the "Baby Garnet" case, but for her, it was just one of those local mysteries you hear about, something that becomes part of the backdrop of where you live — she never suspected she'd be part of its resolution.
In the spring of 2022, Jenna was working in a local flower shop when she received a call from an unknown number. In an interview with CNN, she said she doesn't typically answer unknown numbers, but, for some reason, she did in this case, and it happened to be a Michigan State Police detective. He asked if she'd ever heard of Baby Garnet and told her that her DNA matched the infant's. Naturally, Jenna was in shock and wondered how the detective even had access to her DNA.
And that brings me back to those DNA kits. Just for fun, Jenna had submitted one through the company FamilyTreeDNA a few months earlier. Police had reopened the cold case in 2017 and extracted DNA from the baby's femur and provided it to Identifinders International, which describes itself as "worldwide cold case experts" and "collaborative investigative partners for law enforcement" with expertise in "genetic genealogy, Y-STR profiling, degraded DNA, and cold case training solutions." The company was able to match Jenna's DNA to Baby Garnet's.
Later that night, an investigator from Identifinders International called Jenna to explain the situation, but the young woman said she refused to cooperate. She'd talked it over with her mother, Kara, and decided that it was all some kind of scam and she wanted no part of it. But a month later, she learned it wasn't a scam at all.
Kara called Jenna at work, in tears, telling her she needed to come home immediately. Jenna rushed home and found her cousin, who works for the county prosecutor’s office, sitting in her kitchen. Her cousin explained that the situation was real. Jenna decided at that point that she had to cooperate with police or they'd think she was hiding something.
As it turns out, Jenna's DNA revealed that she was the half-niece of Baby Garnet, and Kara, who also agreed to provide her DNA, was the murdered baby's half-sister. That meant, of course, that Jenna's grandmother — Kara's mother — was also Baby Garnet's mother.
"I had grown up knowing about the case my whole life and then come to find out it was my grandma that did it?" Jenna told CNN. Jenna has no relationship with her grandmother, and Kara hadn't spoken to her own mother since she was 18 years old.
Nancy Gerwatowski was living in Pinedale, Wyoming when police issued a search warrant to test her DNA, and, while there was probably not much doubt, it confirmed that she was the baby's mother. Nancy also confirmed that she had given birth to the baby. She was arrested and has since been charged with open murder, involuntary manslaughter, and concealing the death of an individual, according to the Michigan attorney general.
Police believe that Nancy gave birth to the baby at her home and refused to seek medical attention that would have saved the infant's life. She then hid the body at the campground. Nancy argues that the prosecution can't prove that the baby was born alive. She claims she unexpectedly gave birth in a bathtub, but the baby became trapped in her birth canal. She lost consciousness and when she woke up, the baby was dead. While she does admit she hid the body, her lawyers say she was too traumatized at the time to understand what she was doing. She also told police that she was going through a divorce at the time, and she wasn't sure who the father of the baby was.
Nancy has not yet been convicted and has "asked a judge to toss statements she made to police from evidence," according to Court TV.
If you're interested in hearing more about the story, Jenna shares her version here on TikTok, but be aware that the video contains graphic and adult language:
