A Seattle Post-Intelligencer special report on how police here and around the nation fumble missing-person reports, originally published in 10 parts.
Tuesday, February 25, 2003
Part 8: Whatever happened to Baby Jane Doe?
By
LISE OLSEN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
KELSO -- She remains a little girl lost.
Fishermen in search of steelhead in the blue-gray Cowlitz River discovered the tiny body, caught in a snarl of driftwood. They first mistook it for a waterlogged, abandoned toy.
How she came to be there on that fall day in 1987 is a mystery.
Forensic artist Dave Wood made this sketch of baby Jane Doe based on photographs supplied by investigators.
The toddler, with short, dark hair and dusky skin, had been dressed in a bright pink T-shirt with a narrow white stripe. Someone had changed her very last cotton diaper, fastening it with pink safety pins.
Then someone broke her skull, and threw her into the river just downstream from the spot where four noisy lanes of state Route 432 cross the water on two steel spans.
The killer took her identity as well as her life. The blue Magic Marker scrawl on a clean-erase board in the detectives' room at the Kelso Police Department reads only "Baby Jane Doe 1987."
Baby Jane is the only toddler among the state's approximately 100 victims of untimely death whose names are unknown. Some, like Baby Jane, still haunt investigators. Others are simply forgotten -- victims of a system unable to match the identities of missing people to the bodies found months or years later.
Even in clear-cut murder cases, authorities in Washington often misplace or inadvertently destroy records that could help identify the dead, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer found in a yearlong investigation. Anonymity in death cuts across all boundaries, the P-I found. From the smallest police agencies in the state to the largest, authorities routinely fail to keep track of missing people and records of bodies found.
Though Baby Jane is a rarity -- one of only 25 unidentified toddlers nationwide -- interest in her case has waned over the years
. Cowlitz County Coroner Mike Nichols initially could find no record of the girl when the P-I asked about her. Later, he was able to dig her file out of a box left behind by a past coroner -- a veterinarian who died while in office.
Gilbert W. Arias / P-I The shadow of Longview Memorial Park Cemetery sales manager John Miller flanks the unmarked grave of a Baby Jane Doe and the grave of a Jane Doe who is believed to be the baby's mother. Both were homicide victims and were found in two different rivers near Longview.
Kelso police had never tried to publicize how Baby Jane looked in life. After the P-I's inquiry, the department contacted "EDAN" -- Everyone Deserves a Name, volunteer forensic artists who used a morgue photo to create a likeness of the child.
Baby Jane's description has appeared on the state's official roster of unidentified dead bodies for 15 years, but no state or national agency has ever found a missing-person report to match a child described as Hispanic or American Indian, 33 inches tall, 20 to 30 pounds, thought to be 18 to 24 months old, but possibly 15 months to 3 years of age.
For 15 years, she has been a tragic illustration of the holes in the missing-person system
.
Someone has to be reported missing to be found again. Baby Jane might not ever have been reported missing.
But if she was, the information was apparently never entered into the Justice Department's national database. All missing children are supposed to be listed there, but some cases -- particularly old ones -- are overlooked or purged by mistake, the P-I found.
Nor do all reports cross borders. Indian reservation police, who consider themselves officials of sovereign nations, often fail to share their records. And Mexico lacks a central computer system.
There are other holes in the system that could be keeping her identity a secret.
Grant M. Haller / P-I Kelso police Chief Wayne Nelson visits the site on the Cowlitz River where he helped gather the remains of an unidentified baby in 1987. Neither the baby nor the woman thought to be her mother have been identified.
The FBI computer system that is used to match missing persons with dead bodies is seriously flawed. Designed in the 1980s, it often does not produce all of the matches that it should -- or comes up with so many erroneous matches that it overwhelms investigators.
Even if leads were to emerge, confirming Baby Jane's identity could be difficult. It's unknown whether any forensic evidence taken from the baby before her death has been preserved. The respected Oregon pathologist who conducted her autopsy has no records and does not recall her case. Baby Jane may have to be exhumed if authorities one day need DNA to match her to a relative.
Detectives believe they do know who Baby Jane's mother was, but that's no help at all.
When Baby Jane was found on Sept. 24, 1987, in a bend of the Cowlitz River, Kelso police Sgt. Wayne Nelson and a firefighter in a flat-bottomed boat lowered a sheet into the water to make a cradle, carefully plucking her from the tangle of logs. Nelson, whose own children were small at the time, has since become chief of his department. Though he has investigated other deaths and child abuse cases, he said he has never experienced anything like that day.
Gilbert W. Arias / P-I Joanne Chess of the Dahl McVicker Funeral Home in Longview looks at records of Baby Jane Doe and the woman thought to be her mother.
"No one can imagine doing violence to a child like that," he said.
Exactly 13 days earlier, on Sept. 11, a fisherman in the Lewis River, about 17 miles away, near Woodland, made the horrifying find of a woman's torso with only the arms attached.
Her legs were found a few days later in the Willamette River in downtown Portland.
Dressed for bed, the woman was wearing a nylon two-piece pink teddy and blue-green Hanes underwear. She had red fingernails, and wore two thin silver bangles on her wrist. She was about two months pregnant and had been pregnant at least once before.
Police believe she was Baby Jane's mother, but local officials have been unwilling to pay for exhumation and about $1,000 for the DNA tests that could confirm their theory.
Cowlitz County Undersheriff Duane Engler was a rookie cop when he begin investigating the torso case. What sticks in his mind, 15 years later, is that the woman had painted her toenails red to match her fingernails.
A rangy man who wears a buzz cut, Engler has arms so long that he has to buy his shirts at big-and-tall shops. He cracks self-deprecating jokes and chain-smokes when he escapes from his office. He speaks at length of the frustration of working a case for a decade and a half with only a laundry list of dead-ends to show.
Grant M. Haller / P-I Cowlitz County Undersheriff Duane Engler walks along the edge of the Lewis River, where he helped recover the remains of an unidentified woman in 1987. Her legs and head had been severed.
He and other officers canvassed door to door in the area where the woman was found, a fertile river bottom where flowers, grapes and corn grow late in summer. No leads were found.
Fingerprints from the body were entered in the national crime information computer.
Local doctors were asked whether any pregnant patients had disappeared.
Catholic churches up and down the Interstate 5 corridor were contacted. Shelters for battered women were checked.
Fliers were distributed across the West, with particular care to reach all Indian reservations.
Press releases were sent to a migrant workers' newsletter, to Mexican consulates, to Mexican police, to the legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Nothing came of it.
"No one was ever able to find a missing person -- let alone a missing woman and child, which around here should have stood out pretty well," Engler says.
Engler also asked the FBI for a list of all missing women and children -- thousands of pages of printouts. None matched.
It would have been a miracle if it had.
The National Crime Information Center's database of missing people has a big limitation that is little known among local law enforcement. It is designed to search for precise matches -- something impossible to get when there's no way to accurately peg the height, weight and hair color when only part of a body is found. And there is no reliable way to search for relationships between missing people such as a mother and child.
Engler now has only theories:
Perhaps the woman and child were getting ready for bed and Baby Jane was crying.
Perhaps a husband or boyfriend lost his temper and killed her, then murdered her mother to cover up his crime. Maybe he dismembered the woman to fit her into a garbage bag, then cruised I-5 and Highway 432, making three or more stops to get rid of the remains.
If that was the case, it's possible they were never reported missing.
What Engler and Nelson need to close the Baby Jane case is a name. With a name, they could find a family -- and perhaps a killer.
In the meantime, Baby Jane and the woman who may be her mother wait together.
The two were buried in a corner of the Longview Memorial Park.
Their unmarked graves are side by side.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/108881_missingday25.shtml
I used those fancy cloth diapers sold by small businesses with my 1st & 2nd children (5-7 years ago) and I'm as far from being hippie-ish as one can get. Really made me chuckle to think I could be considered hippie-ish (I'm not offended, just tickled that boring ol' me could be a hippy). I do know the type of people you're referring to though - around here we call them 'granola crunchers' 
